BELL

Listening notes: think about songs revived and repurposed. Play any version of The Bells of St Mary’s (written 1917 by A. Emmett Adams and Douglas Furber). This was resurrected by Bing Crosby in 1945 (in a film with the same title) and many artists since. It had acquired an association with Christmas, snow falling on snow, ever since. There isn’t a yuletide meaning in the lyrics themselves.

Here Gillian Finks gives it rather a sinister twist as she imagines a threatened shipwreck just off Douglas, capital of the Isle of Man.