An Old Fart Writes
I feel sorry for the current young generation of music fans in so many ways. At the risk of this starting with severe "when I were a lad" vibes, growing up the festive charts were always something of a special moment in time. The parade of songs that coincided with festivities and the party season. They were the charts that meant the most, at least to me.
But these days of course the Christmas period charts don't contain any new or current hits. Just an endless parade of mostly golden oldies, mostly in the same order as every year. How on earth does one season become distinct from the next in memories if the music is always the same? And music that your mum and dad (and older generations) appreciated too to boot. But perhaps I'm overthinking. Perhaps this is indeed the way a new generation will remember Christmases with nostalgia. When Last Christmas topped the charts over and over again in style.
In Style
Welcome then to the most batshit crazy chart of the year. The one that bears little to no resemblance to anything that has gone before. And indeed which will leave far too few traces behind next week. Covering sales and streams from December 20th to December 26th, it represents the nationwide tally of peak Christmas listening season. Inevitably dominated in almost totality by seasonally appropriate songs it is both the high point of the season and almost by definition the last we shall see of them all for another year.
Every single one of this week's Top 20 singles is a Christmas song along with 37 of the Top 40 singles and 66 of the Top 75. The Yule Log peaks with 80 festive songs in the Top 100, matching the record set exactly one year ago. [Edit: let's call it 81 and a new record. The Pentatonix rendition of Hallelujah isn't technically a Christmas song, but then neither is Kesha's Holiday Road and I've been counting that for the past few weeks. They are Christmas recordings, so we count them].
At the top of the pile once more is Last Christmas by Wham, the single now joining the elite band of No.1 hits to have spent at least 10 weeks at the top of the charts - in total anyway. The third in a row of the current run. This is indeed the point where we can bemoan the fact that it happens every year to the point of tedium. Last Christmas was No.1 on the final chart of the year in 2020, 2022, 2023 and now 2024 - only Ed and Elton's Merry Christmas interrupted the run when it returned to the top for the final chart of 2021. What, you might ask, is even the bloody point of anyone else bothering to compete.
The rest of the Top 3 consists of All I Want For Christmas Is You at No.2 (as it always is) with Tom Grennan's newly recorded It Can't Be Christmas peaking at No.3 to consolidate its position as his highest charting single ever. Nos 4 and 5 though are fascinating. The comments on last week's piece noted the sometimes overbearing American influence over Christmas streams. It isn't that the streaming services don't employ British curators (my old friend and colleague Talia is one of the lead music programmers for Spotify and very good she is at her job too) but it is true to say that they mostly work out of New York. And so inevitably there is a prominence for some elderly transatlantic faves, often at the expense of more British favourites. And that is why No.4 this week is Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree by Brenda Lee and No.5 is Jingle Bell Rock by Bobby Helms. American seasonal songs from the 50s and 60s, never really part of the British musical soundtrack before the streaming era but now thrust to the fore as the favourite plays of the people who write the playlists.
That is also why distinctly British favourites such as One More Sleep by Leona Lewis (No.34), Stop The Cavalry by Jona Lewie (No.48) and the 30 year old this year Stay Another Day by East 17 (No.53) are relegated so far down the list. A Christmas Spotify or Amazon playlist made by British curators would surely place them far higher up the table and so more likely to hoover up streams. It is all very telling.
Ice Ice(land) Baby
The big revelation of this Christmas season surely has to be Laufey. Still devoid of any proper hits with her usual output she enjoys no fewer than three singles in the Top 40 alone this week. No.13 with Christmas Magic, No.27 with Winter Wonderland and No.35 with her take on Santa Baby - a song which also pops up at No.59 in its original version by Eartha Kitt and at No.83 by the sadly increasingly overlooked Kylie Minogue take.
Taken Into Consideration
I don't do fantasy charts, but this is the one week of the year when we get to play a little "what if" game and figure out what the singles chart might look like without the Christmas songs (of any kind) involved. If only to yield clues as to what things might look like next week when we are all but guaranteed 80 new entries. With a Christmas filter applied, the singles chart this week would read:
1) That's So True (Gracie Abrams)
2) APT (Rose and Bruno Mars)
3) Messy (Lola Young)
4) The Days (Chrystal)
5) Defying Gravity (Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande)
6) Die With A Smile (Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars)
7) Bed Chem (Sabrina Carpenter)
8) Sailor Song (Gigi Perez)
9) Nice To Meet You (Myles Smith)
10) Birds Of A Feather (Billie Eilish)
Make of that what you will. But I still say Lola Young is going to be No.1 next week for sure.
On The Bubble
The final albums chart of the year also has a predictable ring to it. Michael Buble's greatest career move was surely to release his Christmas album back in 2011. Its gentle re-rendering of just about every holiday favourite you can name has meant it has now become a core part of the streaming lexicon, and so is all but guaranteed a journey back to the upper reaches year in year out. It is No.1 for the sixth time and the seventh week in total, having topped the Official UK Albums chart in 2011 (twice), 2020, 2022, 2023 and now in 2024. And yes, that final sequence does indeed mirror the seasonal pattern of Last Christmas. December 2021 was the only year so far this decade when neither record was No.1 at the end of the month - that time around Rod Stewart's You're In My Heart took the album chart crown.
The raw numbers have inevitably gone through the roof. Having edged above 31 million a couple of times in 2024 weekly singles sales utterly smash that record by topping 33 million for the first time ever - although it may be some time before regular streams approach that kind of level. Albums sales, which would routinely peak at over 10 million in the run up to Christmas in the early 2000s are at a mere 2.7m this week - with only 506,000 of those paid for sales. Nobody even gifts music any more in large numbers which is perhaps the saddest sight of them all.
And so that was 2024. I hope you had fun. See you in 2025 for all the fun. THIS isn't the most batshit chart of the year, in truth. It is the one we will talk about next week.
