Our look at the Christmas music of 2023 continues with an exhaustingly dreadful vanity project that beggars belief.
After the vaguely sublime Christmas sounds of Clouds Taste Satanic and The Krackpots, we come crashing back to reality with the ridiculous, in the form of Trickster – a gentleman who we are told is an “Austrian singer and entrepreneur”… uh-huh. Trickster’s life story is presented on the press release and YouTube description as some epic tale of overcoming adversity though it doesn’t seem that remarkable. A ‘broken family’ (in other words, his parents divorced), a prison sentence for ‘financial missteps’ – hmm – and joining the army is not quite the epic tale that he seems to believe. But still.
The ‘entrepreneur’ bit suggests someone with a lot of money to throw around, and indeed this seems to be just that. A video shot at Pinewood with a cast and crew that presumably cost a small fortune, big names dotted around the project – all of whom are presumably happy to polish a turd for suitable recompense – and the recording released by Trickster Recordings with a video posted by The Trickster Group all suggests a madly overly-ambitious vanity project. I’ve seen this before – in fact, we used to get a lot of press releases about such acts, people willing to spend their (or their other half’s) money on an effort to buy musical stardom despite age or talent. At best, these have been mad outsider artists like Lady Geraldine, who at least offer some bizarre sense of deluded entertainment. At worst though, they were like Trickster, throwing money away on terrible music that didn’t even have enough character to qualify as eccentric.
Let’s not beat around the bush: his medley of Silent Night and Santa Claus is Coming to Town is breathtakingly awful, a numbingly over-enthusiastic bit of swing music that has had every bit of genuine musical enthusiasm surgically removed from it, leaving a clinically professional musical husk. It’s not that Trickster is a bad singer – oh, if only he were, this might have some level of personality at least. But this feels like the sort of desperate big band performance that you would find on a TV special or belted out with rictus-smiled determination at Butlins. Only a sense of duty made me stay for the second half of this bolted-together pairing that takes both songs outside for a good kicking (and really: just what did Silent Night, as plaintive and minimalist a ballad as you’ll ever hear, ever do to deserve all these bombastic reinterpretations?). You have no such obligation. The record is raising funds for charity – the Trussell Trust, which is a worthy cause but one that you can probably support in more productive ways than encouraging this sort of catastrophe.
This feels like one of those big-budget TV commercials for major supermarkets where the dead-eyed greed of the stars participating in the ‘excitement’ has an almost apocalyptic sense of desperation. Trickster, we are told in a press release that reaches the level of parody, is “a fluid talent, creating across Rock, Pop, Swing and Electro, he works in the best spaces, with the best people, to bring his work to life in the optimum way.” We’re also informed that he wants to bring joy to everyone’s home. Might it be too much to suggest that his best Christmas gift to everyone would be to give up on his ridiculous lust for glory and go back to whatever business deals have enabled him to engage in this mad folly?
DAVID FLINT
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