There’s set to be a gaping, sausage roll-sized gap in the festive season this year: LadBaby have announced that they’re hanging up their santa hats for good, and will be bowing out of their usual Christmas charity single duties.
Roxanne and Mark Hoyle have bagged five successive Christmas number ones with their infuriatingly memorable odes to baked pastry goods. Originally starting out as YouTubers, and building up a platform by documenting life as new parents, the duo first came up with the idea of releasing a charity single in 2018. That Christmas, their seasonal takeover began with We Built This City on Sausage Rolls (to the tune of Starship's We Built This City, obviously) and all profits from the parody cover went to the food bank charity The Trussell Trust.
Since, LadBaby have dominated the Christmas charts in a manner that we haven’t seen since the heyday of The X Factor; 2019’s I Love Sausage Rolls beat Stormzy, Dua Lipa and Lewis Capaldi to the top spot. Two years later they recruited Elton John and Ed Sheeran for a chart battle against Wham’s Last Christmas, and Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You - which they won, by the way.
As any loyal customer of Greggs will tell you, the key to securing the perfect baked good comes down to a mixture of luck and timing; rock up too early, and the contents of your festive bake will spurt out of its pastry cladding creating a molton-hot, flesh-scalding volcano housed in a flimsy paper bag. Leave things too late, however, and you risk getting brainfreeze from a sausage roll, which would be a terrible way to go.
Accordingly, LadBaby seem to have opted to quit before things cool off - they’re going out on a pie, if you will.
As we bid farewell to piping hot pair, we look back at their contributions to the Christmas canon
We Built This City on Sausage Rolls (2018)
Oh, so you like LadBaby, do you? Eh! Eh! Bet you can't name their debut single! The proper hipsters' choice, this is for the day one OG stans who supported LadBaby back when they were still a scrappy, DIY two piece, worlds away from the star-studded land of Ed Sheeran and Elton collabs.
As someone who is still is a state of mourning following the death of the East End bakery chain and London institution Percy Ingles in 2020 (RIP u will live on forever. Cant believe it. I wanna run to u, etc etc) listening to We Built This City on Sausage Rolls feels like it speaks to a far more innocent time, and makes me feel nostalgic for an age when this city really was built on sausage rolls. Now, all we have is soggy meal deals for a fiver a pop.
I Love Sausage Rolls (2019)
Look, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Some of the greatest musicians in history occupy genius status because you can immediately recognise their signature sound; the subtle, almost unspoken language that flows through their music, not to mention their uniquely poetic take on the world.
I Love Sausage Rolls raises several concerns, not least about how easily the pesky pair manage to break into one of Abbey Road's iconic studios in the music video; unlike Arrows' 1975 original, this equally urgent parody takes on slightly menacing undertones.
Don't Stop Me Eatin' (2020)
Just a pizza swirl, living in a lonely world...
Lockdown restrictions came for us all, even LadBaby, who ended up filming this music video inside a Christmas market shed mounted on top of what appears to be Reliant Robin. I'll be honest, the amount of pandemic-related lyrics here make me want to dive headfirst into Greggs' pizza oven. It comes complete with obligatory jokes about hand sanitiser, nan hugging, and a sausage roll microphone. The pastry keytar is a class touch, though. Carpool Karaoke, eat your heart out?
Sausage Rolls for Everyone (2021)
Unlike previous efforts, this is a cover of a relatively recent, perhaps less well known song - Ed Sheeran and Elton John's festive single Merry Christmas. LadBaby enlisted both musicians for a comedy remix, in an incredibly display of clout, and remarkably this is the track that gave John his first ever Christmas number one above everything else from his back catalogue of bangers,
Food Aid (2022)
Money Supermarket's Martin Lewis pops up in this music video alongside a fleet of shoddy celebrity lookalikes, including a brawling fake Elton John. In the cases of several people I can't actually identify who they're supposed to be impersonating. It sounds like a fever-induced nightmare, but to be fair, our Martin has serious pipes. Not just a thrifty face!
