Here’s a ‘Merry Christmas’ message from perhaps the most under-rated band on the planet. Only folk of a certain age will be able to recall their glory days in 1976, when they broke down the musical barriers in a way that Aqua, Black Lace and Radiohead could only dream about.

I’ve long considered it to be a travesty of lazy criticism to have pigeonholed The Wurzels as a mere novelty act. Their number one single from June 1976 'I've got a brand new combine harvester' celebrated the arrival of new technologies at a time when the industry was trying to arrest the decline precipitated by the Devon strawberry famine of 1973, while the follow-up 'I am a cider drinker' was a serious study of the effects of alcohol abuse on workers in the Cornish agricultural industry.

Even today, rock historians are split on the topic of The Wurzels. Their music is multi-layered and full of delicious lyrical ambiguities, but they have also suffered for this cleverness. Some of you may recall the late-seventies controversy when their albums were banned in the southern states of America after lead singer Tommy Banner claimed that God was over-rated. He later retracted the statement by claiming that he had merely said that ‘cod’ was over-rated, but by then it was too late. Who will ever forget those frightening images of hundreds of bible-bashers burning piles of Wurzels albums outside Walmart? They were strange days indeed and you can’t help but wonder whether the young John Lydon would have been influenced by those anarchic events.

It’s probably fair to say that the band never really recovered from that setback. In his seminal work on the band 'Adventures in Cider Space', Charles Shaar Murray traced the start of their decline to the ill-advised decision to re-launch themselves by jumping on the short-lived 'Scrumpy and Western' bandwagon in the mid-eighties.

The release of this Christmas album gives at least a glimmer of hope that the glory days may yet return. The blogosphere is currently in meltdown with tantalising rumours of a forthcoming collaboration with Lady Gaga. We can only live in hope.