As oddball collaborations go, it takes some beating: veteran crooner with a penchant for cardigans and golf throws his lot in with one of the edgiest and most innovative artists of the age. Neither cared little for each other’s work and the latter reportedly hadn’t even heard of the former. Yet four decades on from its inception, Bing Crosby and David Bowie’s duet on Peace On Earth / Little Drummer Boy remains a curiously affecting recording and one of the most enduring Christmas songs released.
Perhaps not surprisingly, these two iconic singers had absolutely nothing to do with the idea. It was all engineered by Ian Fraser and Larry Grossman, the two music supervisors on Crosby’s A Merrie Olde Christmas special, which aired on CBS in the US, and ITV in the UK.
It was September 1977 and Bowie was still smarting from the mixed critical reception to his eleventh album Low and on a fierce promotional drive for his new album, Heroes.
Bowie had chosen not to promote Low, a decision which seemed to have backfired, so for the follow-up album Heroes, set for an October 1977 release date, he decided to “normalise” his career, targeting the mainstream via appearances on multiple television programmes to expand his reach to the wider public once again.
Bowie was at the height of his Berlin era, and hipper than ever, one of the few older artists still namechecked and revered by the nascent UK punk scene. So when Fraser and Grossman approached his management with the idea of appearing on Crosby’s festive special to perform a sentimental duet, it seemed the very antithesis of everything Bowie represented, the kind of thing that could kill his credibility in an instant.
In an interview with The Sun in December 2019, Crosby’s daughter Mary is quoted as saying that it was Bowie’s mother Peggy Jones who finally convinced her son to do the Crosby Christmas special. “David wasn’t going to do the show,” said Mary, “and his mum said, ‘No, you have to work with Bing Crosby!’. She was a fan. She was like, ‘You have do this’.”
Yet on the day of the recording of the show on 11 September 1977, Mary and her older brother Harry also had doubts over whether this format was a good move for either Bowie or their father. “When David walked into the studio with his wife [Angie], they were both wearing full-length mink coats, full make-up and had short, bright-red hair. Harry and I looked at each other and we were like, ‘Oh wow! How is this going to work?’”