It’s a Christmas anthem – but not as we know it. In previous years, the John Lewis Christmas campaign has ushered in the festive season with super-tasteful, slowed-down takes on everything from Elton John’s “Your Song” to Philip Oakey and Giorgio Moroder’s “Together In Electric Dreams”.
This year, though, John Lewis has stuffed an unlikely slo-mo fire-cracker into the nation’s fur-trimmed sock. It has just unveiled a version of Blink-182’s 1999 hit “All The Small Things” by Mike Geier, who performs as an alter-ego clown named Puddles Pity Party. And who was previously best known for receiving a loud red “X” from Simon Cowell for his take on Lorde’s “Royals” on America’s Got Talent.
His strain of vulnerable melancholy is the gift that keeps on giving. It has been affixed to a deeply moving advert in which a middle-aged man learns how to skate-board – receiving a broken wrist for his troubles – to make his new foster daughter, Ellie, feel welcome. It serves as a powerful reminder of the plight of children in care. Along with being ruthlessly engineered to bring many, many tears to the eye.
But enough melancholic clowning around – what is it about “All The Small Things” that makes it perfect Christmas fodder? On the face of it, after all, Blink-182 are the last band you would associate with jingling bells and merry carolers.
The punk trio from sunny San Diego might even be thought of as the anti-Christmas band, with their puerile humour and short, sharp melodies. Look closer, though, and there is a sensitive side to “All The Small Things”. It’s a tender love song disguised as mosh-pit hokum.
Blink-182 may have recently announced they were reuniting for a sell-out world tour, but they are very much a product of their time. That time being the late 1990s when popular culture had collectively regressed to the mental state of a hormonal 14-year-old boy.
This was the era of sex farces such as American Pie (in which Blink-182 had a cameo), Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst sparking a riot at Woodstock 1999, of MTV’s Jackass, where performative stupidity was paraded around like an art form.
The late 90s were also a rejection of everything the earlier part of the decade had stood for, especially in America. Grunge represented the triumph of the underdog when sensitive, troubled artists such as Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder called out misogyny and homophobia in music. And when the “riot grrrl” movement, as embodied by groups such as Bikini Kill and Huggy Bear, showed women could conquer the industry – on their own terms.
Blink-182 were a reaction to all of that. The album for which “All the Small Things” was recorded was called Enema of the State – the sort of single entendre at which Beavis and Butthead might have ironically laughed. Yet by 1999 irony was dead – as Blink-182 declared via an album sleeve featuring porn star Janine Lindemulder dressed as a nurse, and with lyrics such as “I need a girl that I can train” (“Dumptrain”) and “your mom’s a whore” (“Dysentery Gary”).
That Blink-182 represented everything that indie rock stood against was underscored in their interviews. They criticised Fugazi, the ultimate independent punk group, for charging just $5 for their shows, when they could have asked for “15 bucks minimum”. In concert, they encouraged female fans to disrobe by leading chants of “get them off, get them off”. It was as if Nirvana and the mainstreaming of the indie aesthetic had never happened.
Great pop anthems are often built on contradictions and that is true of “All The Small Things”. It was the last song recorded for Enema of the State, and frontman Tom De Longe had written it explicitly to please their record label – which he knew would want another potential single.
It is springy and zingy, as you would expect of a tune produced by Jerry Finn, who had previously worked with Green Day on equally childish blockbuster Dookie. Still, under its shiny exterior, it’s a heartfelt valentine by DeLonge to his future wife Jennifer Jenkins.
“Late night, come home, Work sucks, I know,” he sings towards the middle. “She left me roses by the stairs/ Surprises let me know she cares.”
The image feels a little too neat. In fact, it was inspired by a real-life incident in which DeLonge arrived home late from the recording studio only to find Jenkins had left flowers out for him.
What drives the tune, though, is its “na-na-na” chorus. This was in part a homage to DeLonge’s icons, original bubblegum punks The Ramones (never adverse to a na-na-na refrain). There was also the fact that DeLonge had run out of lyrics. “I put ‘na na’s’ in it, because I couldn’t think of any words,” he said.
“All The Small Things” was an enormous hit and propelled Enema of the State to sales of 15 million. DeLonge, though, soon burnt out on its success and later confessed to an ambivalent relationship with the tune.
“It’s still played everywhere, but I don’t know why,” the singer revealed to NME in 2014. “Blink has some really great songs that I think have legs to stand around for a long period of time. But that’s not one of them and it haunts me!”
He and Jenkins would tie the knot in 2001, with the success of “All The Small Things” ringing in their ears. The unhappy twist is that they divorced in 2019. Yet while their love did not endure, the song it inspired has. With some clowning around from John Lewis, it is now set to become the far-fetched soundtrack to Christmas 2022.
