Before we fully enter the festive season, succumbing to the sweet rustling embrace of mistletoe and Quality Street, please could we consider the good health, or otherwise, of the UK Christmas No 1 single?
While 2023’s victor will be announced within days, LadBaby (Mark Hoyle) has counted himself out. Usually in collaboration with his wife, Roxanne, he’s dominated the Christmas charts for five years. He’s raised huge amounts of money for the food bank charity the Trussell Trust with spoofs of classic rock songs (including I Love Sausage Rolls), along the way beating the Beatles record for the most Christmas No 1s.
Now LadBaby has decided to “pass the baton to the Great British public”. He also said: “The legacy for us is we want charity songs to dominate every Christmas.” A laudable thought (can’t one chart-topping week be given over to fundraising?). But there’s still space to note there was once another way.
What happened to the Christmas No 1? Why is it in such a tatty, pathetic, outdated state? It used to be an event. A crowning end-of-year achievement. A cultural moment. But, with various factors (not least the inexorable rise of streaming coupled with the splintering of the music industry), the downward slide of the Christmas No 1, the diminishment of kudos, the dearth of public excitement and anticipation, has become cruelly obvious.
At the time of writing, Wham!’s Last Christmas (for me, a fan, their naffest track) is at No1, followed by the Pogues with the dark, powerful yuletide hymn to the dispossessed, Fairytale of New York, with Shane MacGowan’s death making the song feel especially poignant.
Elsewhere, there’s Creator Universe, a TikTok collective, covering Wizzard’s I Wish it Could Be Christmas Every Day (also for the Trussell Trust). Taylor Swift and co are milling around, as are the Beatles with the “last Beatles song” Now and Then. There’s also the official camp-queen of tinsel, Mariah Carey, with 1994’s All I Want for Christmas Is You.
It’s worth noting that, of the yuletide perennials (the Pogues, Carey, Wham!), not one ever hit the top spot. Fairytale, featuring MacGowan and the late Kirsty MacColl, has long been hailed as the finest Christmas chart-topper there never was. In 1987, it was beaten by the Pet Shop Boys’ (sublime) cover of Always on My Mind.
There have been other Christmas No 1 skirmishes. After years of the TV talent show juggernaut The X Factor dominating festive charts, the 2009 winner, Joe McElderry, was beaten by Rage Against the Machine’s Killing In the Name, after a social media campaign. While some (myself included) felt it a little preachy, others considered it a sock in the eye to “the Man” (here, represented by Simon Cowell). More recently, Christmas-themed pop uprisings have included the social media “survival” game, Whamageddon (in which participants try to avoid hearing Last Christmas throughout December). But does any of it do any good?
Just look around – what a retro-sludge of contenders. The seasonal turbo-downloading of classics (Brenda Lee’s Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree; Jingle Bell Rock by Bobby Helms) merely suggest people preparing their Spotify lists for Christmas morning. Other choices are not so explicable or forgivable, such as the return of 2021’s Merry Christmas, by Ed Sheeran and Elton John. The video (a visual coughing fit of snow, sleighs, and Sheeran undulating in red Santa shorts) is dismal enough, but the song (saccharine, smug) is next-level synthetic. It’s also for charity, but, at which point does the festive well of public goodwill run dry? Did I miss the meeting where the British public decided en masse to turn the Christmas No 1 into an Eternal Cheese vortex? And to endure a grinding time-loop of regurgitated tunes?
The Christmas No 1 spot has been dominated by novelty songs, dreary ear-churn (what used to be termed “muzak”) and charity singles (you’re implicitly not allowed to criticise) for so long, it feels amazing to think that, once, it wasn’t like this (not always, anyway). Nor am I just referring to the exuberant swagger and near-Proustian trigger of Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody (which beat Wizzard in 1973), or Band Aid’s 1985 charity mammoth, Do They Know It’s Christmas?
In past times, Christmas No 1s could be pretty varied for sure, featuring Cliff Richard and Benny Hill (Ernie, the Fastest Milkman In the West). But also Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Jackie Wilson and Tom Jones. Elsewhere, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, Wings with Mull of Kintyre and Human League’s Don’t You Want Me?
While this list is a tad cherry-picked (I’ve missed off the sonic transcendence of Mr Blobby in 1993), the fact remains that, sometimes, in some years, there was at least the possibility of real songs from real artists in the race to Christmas No 1.
Regardless of what happens this year (perchance a long-overdue victory for MacGowan and the rest of the Pogues?), this suggests that the festive top spot doesn’t always have to be a dumping ground for reheated classics and nostalgic offcuts.
Maybe it’s time for the traditional importance of bagging the Christmas No 1 (that uniquely British collision of sentiment, commercialism and culture) to resurface as the gift that keeps on giving.
