DifferentSongs presents

Christmas in Cape Town 2008

A journey through 20 imagined Christmas hits from the Southern Hemisphere, curated to give you a great listening experience through to the end. Bonus track drops on Xmas Day!

Christmas in Cape Town 2008 is a seasonal intervention addressing a rarely acknowledged but deeply entrenched cultural bias. For decades, Christmas music has assumed that festive legitimacy requires frost, fireplaces, and the urgent deployment of comedy knitwear. This album challenges that assumption by relocating Christmas — politely but firmly — to the southern hemisphere.

Drawing on a wide range of familiar styles, from Eurovision excess and West End sincerity, to boyband romance, disco joy, punk rebellion and wholesome Christmas TV specials, these songs explore what happens when traditional Christmas tropes encounter sunshine, beaches, fireworks and mild seasonal disorientation. Santa’s wardrobe is adjusted accordingly.

Each track recreates the emotional architecture of classic Christmas songs while subtly revealing how geographically specific their assumptions have always been. The arrangements are often wonderfully subtle, sometimes spectacularly unsubtle, but always consistently enthusiastic about celebrating Christmas in a climate that does not require snow as supporting evidence.

Christmas in Cape Town 2008 does not argue against winter. It simply suggests that Christmas might also work perfectly well in shorts.

Producer’s note: This album critiques structural hemispherism while relying almost entirely on musical styles from the northern hemisphere. Any cultural tone-deafness is therefore a logical outcome of the method.