The Twelve videos of Christmas #2: SUGAR LOUISE – Santa Baby

SUGAR LOUISE – SANTA BABY

Norwegian pop-punks Sugar Louise have had a couple of slow years recently, with 4 out of 5 members becoming parents and expanding their families, and are finally back with a new charity single, Santa Baby. The moving song and video is perhaps the first almost serious track the band have released, and it packs a powerful punch to remind us of those less fortunate this holiday season.

Frontman Billy McBarbie tells how Santa Baby came about and what it means to the band.

“In 2015 we had a small breakthrough in our local region, due to the still increasingly popular football anthem Ikke Engang Robin Hood (Kan Ta Gull Fra RBK), which basically translates to ‘not even Robin Hood could steal the gold from RBK,’ who are the local team Rosenborg. (Not that we take any credit of that, but the team HAS won the series three years in a row since the song was released!)

“I have had the new song Santa Baby laying around in my drawer for about three years, but last winter we got together and made a full-on Sugar Louise version of it.

“The lyrics basically reflects the topic of lonely and lost humans; widows, addicts; families connected to drug and alcohol abuse; refugees; all kinds of people not really fitting into society standards for living and holiday expectations. Santa might not be the jolly fellow turning up with a pile of gifts on Christmas eve or Christmas morning, but he is still a figure from your childhood that you´ll hope to live to see again; meaning you´ve lived another year.

“Musically it´s a mellow end of the Ramones type of song, and I´m really happy with how it turned out.

“Starting to write the song I wasn´t going for a Christmas carol at all, but it just turned that direction once I got to the chorus. The whole Robin Hood-thing and the charity is also just coincidents linked together; which also pretty much sums up life itself. We´re just really lucky to be five guys with great, stable lives and family relations; but we could all very easily have been representatives for whom the song is about. Drugs or no drugs, there will most likely come a day where either we or our spouses are sitting alone at the kitchen table, drinking our coffee alone, struggling with a round of Solitaire, not really looking that much forward to the holidays as we did before.”

Sugar Louise are using Santa Baby to raise money for a local (Trondheim) street magazine called Sorgenfri, which serves as a local version of The Big Issue magazine, sold on the street by addicts, recovering addicts and other people not in the right shape or state of mind to have a regular job.

Click here to donate to Sugar Louise’s Santa Baby appeal and help the less fortunate this year – https://www.spleis.no/project/24451

Sugar Louise will return in 2018 with new music, which McBarbie assures us will have “no football or Santas involved.”

 

 

 

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