Last weekend, LadBaby, a Nottingham-based YouTuber couple, announced they were aiming for the Christmas number one slot. If successful, it would see them overtake the Beatles’ record of four Christmas number ones. The song, a version of Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas, features an appearance by money-saving expert Martin Lewis and, as usual, is expected to feature puns about sausage rolls.
This is not high art, but then the Christmas number one rarely is. In the 70 years since the charts started, the songs that record-buyers – and latterly streamers – have sent to the top of the festive chart have ranged from seasonal bangers to charity ballads to bonkers novelty hits. There seems to be little rhyme or reason behind why pink jelly baby Mr Blobby might top the chart one year and boyband bad boys East 17 the next.
The first bona fide Christmas hit was Dickie Valentine’s Christmas Alphabet (“C is for the candy trimmed around the Christmas tree”) in 1955. Warming, winsome and hugely popular, Valentine appeared to have alighted on a winning, if obvious, formula: release a song about Christmas at Christmastime and chart dominance will follow. If only the British record-buying public were that predictable. Although festive-themed songs would become chart-topping mainstays decades later, there would only be one Christmas-referencing number one in the subsequent 18 years. It’s sad to note that Valentine, now a largely forgotten figure, never lived to see how prescient he’d become – he was killed in a road accident in 1971.
While the eclecticism of the number one slot reveals a fickle record-buying public, dig a little deeper into the sonic snowdrift and eccentric patterns do emerge. The evolution of the Christmas number one provides something of a window into the British psyche, albeit a frosted window that’s perhaps best squinted through after an evening on the mulled wine.
Paul Gambaccini, the presenter of BBC Radio 2’s Pick of the Pops, says a “pivotal” record in the early evolution of Christmas number ones was The Scaffold’s Lily The Pink in 1968, released just after The Beatles had four Christmas number ones over a five-year period, though none of them was a festive song. Lily The Pink began a sequence of chart-topping novelty records that included Ernie by Benny Hill. “Then the groups who were in the pop charts start to notice, ‘Wait a minute, these are huge records’. And so Slade does Merry Xmas Everybody [1973] and Mud does Lonely This Christmas [1974],” says Gambaccini.
