Snow joke: why the Christmas No 1 single is still big business
For a nation so obsessed with the Christmas No 1 – as much part of the festive season as overboiled sprouts and Lynx Africa – Britons are awfully sanguine about what they put at the top of the charts each year. Since the chart began in 1952, only 12 Christmas No 1s have had some clear and unambiguous connection to the season: two of them have been versions of Mary’s Boy Child and three have been Do They Know It’s Christmas?
While we have our platonic ideals of what a Christmas No 1 should sound like – somewhere between Mariah Carey and Slade and slathered in sleigh bells – the history of UK Christmas No 1s tells a different story. The Britain reflected in our seasonal chart toppers is one that is nostalgic, silly and generous. And it is inconstant: at Christmas, Britain wants only something to make it feel good, and is happy to cast its December favourites aside the minute it’s New Year’s Eve.
There was nothing terribly remarkable about the first 16 years of Christmas singles in Britain. Although Dickie Valentine (Christmas Alphabet, 1955) and Harry Belafonte (Mary’s Boy Child, 1957) took actual Christmas songs to No 1, the top spot usually looked as it might have at any other time of the year. Between 1962 and 1967, Elvis, the Beatles and Tom Jones kept the No 1 position to themselves: no one thinks of Return to Sender, I Want to Hold Your Hand, I Feel Fine, Day Tripper, Green, Green Grass of Home or Hello, Goodbye as Christmas records. The first inkling that the role of the Christmas charts would change came in 1968, when another member of the McCartney family took Paul’s place at the top of the charts. Mike McCartney’s group the Scaffold may have had unimpeachable artistic credentials – the poet Roger McGough was a member – but Lily the Pink was clearly and indisputably a novelty song, and it set a trend for novelty songs to overperform at Christmas. The next year, Two Little Boys by Rolf Harris was No 1; in 1971 it was Benny Hill’s Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West); in 1972, the nine-year-old Jimmy Osmond reached No 1, and any record by a child is, de facto, a novelty record.
There was a novelty revival again in the early 80s, with St Winifred’s School Choir; Renée and Renato – not a novelty song, so much as a turgid ballad, but watch the video and you’ll see why how in the heyday of Duran Duran this has to be called a novelty record – and the Flying Pickets (again, a cappella covers have to be counted as novelties). Only two novelty acts have taken No 1 since then – Mr Blobby, in 1993, was the first – but the most recent, LadBaby, has colonised Christmas, topping the charts for the past three years and looking set to do so again this year.
LadBaby – singing cover versions of old hits, retooled to be about sausage rolls – is not some complete underdog championed by an indulgent public. It is a finely honed machine, with the specific purpose of reaching No 1 at Christmas. The LadBaby singles have been released through a company called Instrumental, which scrapes social media and streaming information to analyse and predict musical success. Each year really is a campaign: fans are encouraged to
download, not stream (each download is equivalent to 100 streams on a premium account, or 600 on a free account); there are team-ups with other artists and their fanbases (last year it was Ronan Keating) to promote the songs; and there is an unrelenting focus on timing. If all you want is to be the Christmas No 1, only Christmas week matters, so LadBaby’s single is released one week before Christmas, hammered to death and then forgotten. Last year, Don’t Stop Me Eatin’ (Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’, rewritten to be about baked savouries) was straight in at No 1 for Christmas Day, then fell to No 78 the week after, then disappeared entirely. But in the meantime, it will have raised money for the Trussell Trust, to help alleviate hunger.
The true heyday of the Christmas No 1 lasted from 1973 to 1990. It is not that every No 1 over that period was brilliant, because many of them really weren’t. It is more that this was the era of the tinsel arms race, when the bauble-industrial complex really went to work: eight of the 12 Christmasthemed festive No 1s come from this span of year, beginning with the song that, more than any other, embodies the British Christmas – Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody – and ending with Cliff Richard’s Saviour’s Day, a song that no one bar his fanbase wanted to hear a second time.
The 90s were an inchoate decade for Christmas hits – the Spice Girls had three seasonal chart-toppers in a row, and the nearest we got to a Christmasthemed No 1 was East 17’s Stay Another Day, which was Christmassy only because it had bells on it, and the group dressed in snowy white for the video. But a new order was imposed in 2002, when reality TV first tightened its fingers round the Christmas charts, and the winners of the show Popstars: The Rivals had their first No 1. Girls Aloud’s Sound of the Underground suggested a manufactured future might not be too bad, but the stream of X Factor winners who followed rarely looked designed for careers that would last beyond the tree coming down; we remember Alexandra Burke and Leona Lewis, but who mourns the disappearance of Shayne Ward, Leon Jackson, Matt Cardle, Sam Bailey and Ben Haenow? All of them have had a Christmas No 1 thanks to the efficiency of Simon Cowell’s Syco machine.
The effect of the Syco hegemony was to provoke another change. People evidently wanted Christmas to be about something more than Simon Cowell being able to buy another supercar or house. The first stirrings came in 2009, when an organised campaign sent Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name to No 1, but that was just rage. It took others to harness the rage and turn it into something benevolent, and so came the rise of the Christmas charity single.
Of the last 10 Christmas No 1s, six have raised money for charity. You might never wish to listen to the Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Choir or Military Wives With Gareth Malone ever again. You might crave Mull of Kintyre (Christmas 1977) by comparison, but at least no one need feel nauseous about where the money goes to from so many of the last decade’s Christmas No 1s.
Like Christmas itself, the Christmas
No 1 is almost always a disappointment. But that’s perhaps as it should be: a Christmas hit is a last-minute stocking filler, something to be played with and dispensed with. It is not a work of art. It’s just that sometimes, somehow, it strikes a nerve (even if that’s songs that didn’t reach No 1 – by Mariah Carey or the Pogues or Wizzard – that seem more Christmassy). If Christmas No 1s seemed better in the past, that’s just a function of ageing, and it was ever thus. “Does your granny always tell you that the old songs are the best?” sang Noddy Holder on Merry Xmas Everybody. And, really, is I Love Sausage Rolls actually any worse than Mr Blobby or There’s No One Quite Like Grandma? Of course it’s not. Christmas is as Christmas was and Christmas will ever be.