The secret formula for writing a Christmas No1

Slade, Mariah Carey, Wizzard – as old favourites fill the airwaves, Cameron Henderson finds out what it takes to write a yuletide winner

It’s a question most songwriters have mused on while contemplating their bank balances. After all, Slade’s Noddy Holder reportedly takes in a cool £500,000 every year from

while Mariah Carey is thought to make around £400,000 annually from

So, just how do you compose a smash-hit Christmas record?

The field is littered with failures (few will be hitting the dance floor at this year’s Christmas party to Lady Gaga and Space Cowboy’s

But love them or hate them, everyone knows a good Christmas song when they hear one. From children’s choirs to ho-ho-hos, there are hallmarks of the genre that we all recognise. But how much sleigh bell is too much?

Here are the rules from three men who should know: Roy Wood of Wizzard, the man behind

songwriter Joe Kearns, who has worked on Christmas songs with Lily Allen and Ellie Goulding; and, of course, Holder himself.

“What I wanted to do was write something that would strike a chord with normal families at Christmas time,” says Holder, whose famed hit celebrated its 50th anniversary this year and is one of the most popular Christmas songs of all time, spending five weeks at No 1 after its initial release and regularly making it into the Top 30 in recent years thanks to the number of people who stream the track as December 25 approaches. “That’s why I wrote the line about your granny saying all the old songs are the best, then when she’s had a few sherries she’s up and dancing and showing her knickers off.”

It’s a sentiment that Carey’s song echoes – if an octave or two higher – listing as it does all the magical, festive things that Carey doesn’t want for Christmas: “I won’t make a list and send it to the North Pole for Saint Nick/I won’t even stay awake to hear those magic reindeer click.” Slade’s hit supposedly came about when the band’s bassist Jim Lea was challenged to write a Christmas song by his mother-in-law. After Lea had put together the melody for the verse, he showed it to Holder, who claims that he returned home from the pub after a few whiskies and wrote the lyrics in one sitting.

Written amid the oil crisis, the three-day week, industrial action from coal miners and rail workers and 10.30pm TV blackouts, Holder hoped the song would “lift the spirits up and provide a light at the end of the tunnel – hence the line: ‘Look to the future.’”

Needless to say, the song was an instant hit, rocketing to No 1 in the charts on the day it was released. “It’s very uplifting,” he says.

All I Want For Christmas Is

You Mariah Carey have to be selective, otherwise the public are going to be a bit annoyed with it after a few plays on the radio.”

Kearns explains that sounds like sleigh bells work as an audible “identifier”, using the intro to Kelly Clarkson’s as an example. “It’s a pop-rock song, but because of those bells at the beginning, as a listener you immediately think ‘Ah, it’s Christmas,’” he says. “We’ve made a palate in our heads of what Christmas sounds like.”

“There are two kinds of Christmas songs,” says Kearns, “the bright ones and the dark ones.” While

by Bing Crosby is dark, owing to its use of minor chords, Clarkson’s feels brighter because it uses major chords. “Maybe there’s something in that, about the two sides of Christmas: the excitement and celebration but also the sadness and reflection,” Kearns suggests.

He adds that there are certain musical tricks songwriters can deploy to capture the festive mood, notably 2013 Underneath the Tree

Kelly Clarkson 1973 Merry Xmas Everybody

Slade 1942 White Christmas

Bing Crosby 1973 I Wish It could Be Christmas

Everyday Wizzard

using a chord progression from minor to major in the chorus to create suspense. “The penultimate chord will have a minor 7th to give you a feeling of nostalgia or sadness and then it will almost always resolve back to the major root,” he says, citing

as an example.

Anything too complex, though, runs the risk of breaking Rule 2.

“It was a catchy melody on the ear that people could remember and sing along to,” says Wood of his hit. “It had to be in a key that the general public could sing easily.”

Our experts say tempo and rhythm can be the difference between a Christmas song that’s remembered for the ages and one that’s thrown out with that year’s wrapping paper. Holder insists that having a “rhythm you can dance to” was crucial to Slade’s success. “The drumming is what we used to call shuffle beat – it’s a beat that drives,” he says. “We used it on a lot of our records and it’s based on 40s and 50s jazz and rock’n’roll records.”

Wood opted for a swing rhythm which he says is “a bit more jolly than a straight rock’n’roll beat”. Meanwhile, Kearns says that a lot of hit Christmas songs have an “explosion moment”, such as in the intro to

and

“Often the song might announce itself in a pretty gentle way before the drum rhythm picks up and it explodes into a Christmas party feeling,” he says.

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I Wish It Could Be Christmas

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