Double Cream 'Christmas On The Moon' single

Double Cream: Christmas On The Moon / Steal Away (On Christmas Day)
(Electrosaurus Records, ELEC17, The Netherlands, 2023)

In 2017, Pablo van de Poel, guitarist and singer for the Dutch psychedelic blues-rock band DeWolff, produced the debut album of the Southern rock-influenced Dawn Brothers, another Dutch band from the city of Rotterdam. Van de Poel and Dawn Brothers singer and guitarist Bas Holt discovered a mutual love for 1960s soul. They agreed that one day they would write and record some songs in the style of Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Ray Charles and The Coasters, just for fun. In 2021 they met for the first time and in five sessions wrote and recorded an album which they released under the name Double Cream. Each session consisted of one day of writing, one day of recording (live to analog tape), and one day of mixing. Band members of DeWolff and the Dawn Brothers helped record the songs. A horn section gave it an even more 1960s soul feel. 'Double Cream' was released in late 2022 and was well received. The major Dutch music magazine OOR described the album as "a record bursting with joy of playing and excellent songs. Recorded analog with horns and all, they betray a flawless feel for the go-to melodies, vocal lines and song themes of the time".

For a long time, Dawn Brothers had been toying with the idea to write and record a Christmas song, and Double Cream seemed like the perfect opportunity to finally put this idea into practice. Dawn Brothers keyboard player Rowan De Vos and bassist Tammo Deuling wrote the song, ‘Christmas On The Moon’, inspired by the Space Age. Not only for its lyrical inspiration, but also for the music, 'Christmas On The Moon' went back further in time than the 1960s, adding swing and jump blues to the mix. Helped by a 4-man strong horn section of baritone saxophone (Nick Feenstra), tenor saxophone (Paul Van De Calseijde), trombone (Isaac McCluskey) and trumpet (Lauran Neerincx). Van de Poel and Van Holt wrote the song for the B-side of the single, 'Steal Away (On Christmas Day)', and they stayed closer to the 1960s soul that inspired Double Cream in the first place, both musically (with adding a glockenspiel, bells, a Wurlitzer and a small horn section of just tenor saxophone and flugelhorn to the basic guitar-bass-drum line-up) but also lyrically. ‘Steal Away (On Christmas Day)’ was a song about being alone at Christmas ('my baby left me all alone / my best friend won't pick up the phone'), as many Christmas soul songs were. Just like the album had been, both songs were recorded live to analog tape in Van de Poel’s Electrosaurus Southern Sound Studio in Maastricht, in the south of The Netherlands and just like the album, the two songs on the single are “bursting with joy of playing”.

‘Christmas On The Moon’ on Youtube:
‘Steal Away (On Christmas Day)’ on Youtube:

You can buy the record at Suburban Records.