“The Greedies” – Thin Lizzy plus uber-ligger Sex Pistol Steve Jones – doing a series of Christmas chestnuts a la The Pistols’ Silly Thing. Fascinatingly bad.

God’s own Ramones do Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want To Fight Tonight). A guy dressed up as Father Christmas pukes at the end. Of course.

And to finish, the absolute best: Run DMC’s peerless 1987 hit Christmas In Hollis. “It’s Christmas time, in Hollis, Queens/Mom’s cookin’ chicken and collard greens.” It also mentions eggnog. Ree-speck!

P.S Once again: Remember to tune into BBC 6 Music at 1pm on Boxing Day for the HHRR Christmas spesh.

1. Yeah Yeahs Yeahs, It’s Blitz
2. Micachu & The Shapes, Jewellery
3. Florence & The Machine, Lungs
4. The Horrors, Primary Colours
5. Regina Spektor, Far
6. Alasdair Roberts, Spoils
7.  Bat For Lashes, 2 Suns
8. Doves, Kingdom Of Rust

There was no showing in the final list for Micachu, which suggests I was the only one who voted for her. So, some kind of explanation may be in order. Her real name is Mica Levi: she’s 22, signed to Rough Trade, and she and her band make an artsy-fartsy, somewhat discordant row that’s borderline unlistenable, but somehow addictive – the musical equivalent of that thing where you touch an electric fence for a laugh, and then do it again and again, despite yourself (kind of thing). There are tinges of The Slits – and maybe Elastica – in there somewhere, but have a listen yourself: the bizarrely-titled Turn Me Weller is perhaps best avoided, but the single Lips is great.

Oh, and she’s at the opposite end of any imaginable musical spectrum from Doves, but I like all kinds of stuff, me. By way of further enlightenment, there’s a Spotify playlist of some of the best tracks from seven of them, minus Alasdair Roberts. So, in honour of the bostin re-re-reissue of The Who Sell Out, there’s also the BRILLIANT out-take Early Morning Cold Taxi.

There’s a nice review of  HHRR from Record Collector here, which like a lot of the stuff about the book, mentions the two pages that can teach you to play bass in half an hour. By way of a reminder/taster, some the choicest bass quotes from Blur’s Alex James include: “It’s like a child’s toy really”, “You can pick it up quite quickly… ten minutes will do it”, and “You don’t have to think about lessons at all – you can worry about your hair.”

Anyway, that’s the cool end of bassism, but we should also have a look at the not-so-cool side of the instrument. So check out this fella, and his ’slap’ skills. Go, beardman!

No post strike today, so the man arrives with the new (and first) album by Dave Rawlings, partner of the ‘Americana’ monarch Gillian Welch, often also lazily shorthanded as a ‘bluegrass’ artist – though it’s probably more helpful to think of DR & GW as specialists in an old-time version of what Gram Parsons called ‘Cosmic American music’.

Anyway, the Rawlings album is pretty good, all sparkling acoustic arrangments and harmonies pitched somewhere between Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (there’s a cover of Young’s Cortez The Killer) and an Appalachian front porch. It’s good to hear him and Welch doing their brilliant thing on the final track, Bells Of Harlem. But while we’re about it, here’s footage of the two of them doing the so-far-unreleased song Throw Me A Rope, which I think may be the best single compositional marvel of the last decade; like something from The White Album (Long Long Long/Cry Baby Cry), only even deeper. There are some embedding issues, so you’ll have to click ‘Watch it on YouTube’ and do so in another window, but please: have a listen.

Radio 4’s Front Row have just aired a follow-up to the HHRR item they did a couple of weeks back, in which JH talked through readers’ suggested additions to the book’s 20-strong list of Rock Follies (i.e albums that should never, ever have been made). They included: David Bowie’s career nadir Never Let Me Down, Freddie Mercury’s solo abomination Mr Bad Guy and Lou Reed’s peerless Metal Machine Music. Anyway, the chat was presaged with another airing of Duran Duran’s version of Public Enemy’s 911 Is A Joke, and we just found this. Jesus wept.