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The Fab Four - A Fab Four Christmas (Delta 2002), Have yourself a FAB-ulous Little Christmas (Delta, 2002).

To call The Fab Four a bizarre phenomenon is to undersell their strangeness considerably. Hailing from Los Angeles, the group boasts two Pauls, two Georges, three Johns and three Ringos and alongside world tours and a Las Vegas residency sustains a number of side projects including collaboration with Eric Idle "Rutlemania" (a parody band tribute band - I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more).

Double album Christmas with The Fab Four: The Ultimate Tribute is a suitably odd concoction from 2002, in which The Fab Four bring Beatles stylings to Christmas favourites ancient and modern. Prices quoted online indicate that it's become something of a collectors' item, which is saying something in a year where remasters of the entire Beatles catalogue are jostling for position on Christmas lists with the Beatles edition of the Rock Band console game. That the Fab Four have also brought enormous craft, attention, imagination and humour to the enterprise does nothing to redeem its fundamental wrongness.

Album number one of the pair, A Fab Four Christmas, features the Beatles c.1965, complete with somewhat toe-curling cheeky studio banter and close harmony vocals. Vocal timbres, production and instrumentation are creepily note-perfect imitations of the original, even if accents occasionally suffer slippage. (The McCartney soundalike in opener Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer brings a weirdly Scandinavian twinge to the otherwise flawless Liverpudlian, and Winter Wonderland's Ringo has a central European shading to his long 'A's despite well-observed trademark flat intonation and growly tone.) But these are tiny quibbles, because what's going on here is not simply a band singing Christmas songs in the style of the Beatles, but singing individual tunes in the style of specific Beatles tracks, sometimes creating mash-ups of a complexity and ingenuity that prefigure George Martin's 2006 remix masterpiece Love. You can't help admiring the inventiveness of grafting Help! to the tune of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, or Away In The Manger to the backing of You've Got To Hide Your Love Away ("the little lord Jesus asleep in the - Hey! [you've got to hide....]").

I did find myself wondering what might happen if the band ventured into the territory of the Beatles' later discography (Adam Lay Ybounden in the style of Revolution 9, perhaps?). Cue album two, Have Yourself a FAB-ulous Little Christmas, which mines the rich seams of Revolver, the White Album, Abbey Road and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Spot the song goes into overdrive: Little Drummer Boy to the backing of Sun King, with Jingle Bells set to the mock-esperanto middle eight, anyone? Silent Night re-imagined as Norwegian Wood? Santa Claus Is Coming To Town as When I'm 64, complete with quotes from Honey Pie? It's all there.

But this is where the problems really begin - what started out as a bit of fun starts to feel really pretty questionable. Whether your sympathies lie with the cheeky chappies of the early sixties or the psychedelic travellers they became, there's little dispute that the later Beatles transformed into something rich and strange. Sure, they never lost their spirit of play, but for my money, Jingle Bells as Tomorrow Never Knows is pushing it a bit. Good for a laugh, but would you want to listen to it more than once?