Noddy Holder said that his 1973 Christmas hit, Merry Christmas Everbody, is his pension money and as it makes approximately £512,000 annually, the best way for musicians to fund their twilight years is to follow the Slade singers route and write a successful Christmas song or hop on a plane and perform for the world's most corrupt regimes which plenty of our best loved singers have done.
Sting's bank account swelled £1 million in 2009 by playing a show organised for the daughter of Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan's dictatorial leader and justified it by saying that: 'cultural boycotts are pointless gestures and counter-productive', also not very lucrative he could have added but never.
Jennifer Lopez serenaded Turkmenistan's dictator and leader, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, in 2013 but said afterwards that if she had known that Berdimuhamedow's regime was among the most repressive in the world, she would not have performed there so it was lucky she only found out afterwards and not before she got paid.
Libya's Colonel Gaddafi, last seen being dragged from a sewer pipe and shot, has hosted concerts by Lionel Richie, Beyonce, 50 Cent, Mariah Carey, Usher and Nelly Furtado but admittedly they were all before we remembered that he was an evil dictator and removed him from power.
In 2013, Kanye West accepted £3 million to play at the wedding of the grandson of Kazakhstan's leader and resident dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev and in 2015 Nicki Minaj celebrated Christmas by playing a concert in human right avoiding Angola for the countries president, José Eduardo dos Santos, and called it 'No Big Deal' although Mariah Carey had the shame to never mention it when she received a cool $1 million in 2013 for performing at a similar event.
Racism may have been rife in apartheid South Africa but Dolly Parton, Queen, Elton John and Liza Minnelli never let a trifling thing like that stop them as they all played gigs at the Sun City resort in Bophuthatswana, as did Frank Sinatra who walked away trying not to trip over the bodies of dead black men, women and children as he took his £2 million for a weekend of shows to the bank.
When soul singer Erykah Badu sang for the bad boy King of Swaziland, Mswati III, she came up with the zinger that she did it: 'to shine a spotlight on this situation using me as a tool' which all goes to show that if only Noddy had gone and done a show in the home of some unspeakable evil dictator in the 1970's, we may have been spared hearing him bellowing 'Its Christmas' from every department stall speaker at this time of year.
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