The Fall might not be the most obvious band to convey the festive spirit. But Mark E Smith and chums do a decent job of tackling this old carol.

The curmudgeonly contrarian always enjoyed doing what was not expected so in that sense it makes perfect sense. There’s also a certain historical symmetry in covering Hark The Herald Angels Sing.

The music was written by German composer Mendelssohn in 1840, not for Christmas but for a cantata commemorating Gutenberg’s printing press, and the words were written a century earlier by English cleric Charles Wesley.

It was not a natural marriage when William Cummings put them together in 1855 to create one of the best loved hymns to this day.

Mendelssohn had stipulated that his “soldier-like” tune would never be suited to a sacred text, and Wesley had stated that his own hymn text – originally “Hark, how all the welkin rings” – should be sung to a slow and solemn melody.

None of them, surely, would have anticipated that the hymn would end up in the hands of an irascible postpunk iconoclast like Mark E Smith, noted more for his stream-of-consciousness ranting and fondness for fags and booze than his devotion to the church.

Not a natural reveller, he once referred to Christmas as “a family time where families can beat each other up” and complained that the shops were shut for too long.

Perhaps that’s why he sounds so characteristically fed up and angry on this, recorded this for a John Peel session in 1994. Which doesn’t seem all that long ago until you realise it’s 30 years ago.