Children of the world unite!

Here you all are, desperately scouring pages and pages of the internet in an effort to find possible gift ideas for your folks and just like that, you’ve stumbled on a surefire idea.

The only flaw in buying them Soup, which is a strange cocktail of hits from Paul Heaton and Dave Rotheray’s bands the Beautiful South and the Housemartins, is they may already have all these songs buried away on a CD somewhere.

Indeed, this writer is pretty sure a statistic was being banded around a few years back that their first compilation was owned by something like one in three UK households.

All of this means that the release of another greatest hits package (the band’s fourth) seems incredibly like a cynical ploy to cash in on the season of Santa.

However, if we leave the cynicism behind for a second, there are certainly worse records on the market at the moment. Songs like A Song for Whoever, Happy Hour, A Little Time and Rotterdam are some the UK’s great forgotten pop singles of the 80s and 90s. In a supreme seasonal twist, the famously a cappella Caravan of Love was only denied a Christmas number one by a re-released Jackie Wilson song.

Granted they are shamelessly MOR, but the dry lyrical wit often carries these two acts above being just shameless radio fodder.

No one will find anything startlingly original or life changing within the confines of this record, possibly apart from many uneducated people who may not realise that superstar DJ Norman Cook was in the Housemartins.

However as was mentioned earlier, splashing your cash on this record for a mum is probably a better choice than on Leona bleedin’ Lewis (see what I did there?) or Westlife.