One thing about the streaming revolution in pop is that it gives us a pretty accurate tracker of the UK’s changing tastes in Christmas songs. Now, by “tastes in Christmas songs” it’s probably fairer to say “what goes on Christmas playlists”: this is the one time of year where you are likely to encounter very specific songs “in the wild”, and it’s hard to say how many of the plays of Christmas songs are people sitting and listening to them. It’s also hard to say how many Christmas playlists are hand-built rather than ‘off-the-shelf’.
But! Whether we choose to hear Bobby Helms and Sia or have them thrust upon us, hear them we do. And what we hear at Christmas is shifting. While trying to get my head around how it’s shifted I came up with this rough model: there are four distinct phases of Christmas music which wax and wane in strength in the UK Christmas charts. Something old, something new, something glam and something Wham.
What are these four Christmases and how is the picture shifting?
OLD CHRISTMAS: This might also be called “American Christmas” – the US christmas canon, spearheaded by Brenda Lee and Bobby Helms, has made huge inroads into the UK Christmas charts. This is purely a cultural import: as Paul O’Brien points out in his excellent chart posts, “Jingle Bell Rock” was never a UK hit at all before 2019. American Christmas movies are probably a driver here – the Home Alone effect.
It’s not that American Christmas hits were unknown in the UK pre-streaming, of course – you’d find Bing, Brenda, Andy Williams and a few Spector tracks (or knock-offs) on most 2CD BEST CHRISTMAS EVER compilations 30 years ago, bulking out Disc 2 alongside some forlorn carols. But they weren’t top billing. The US Christmas canon is very much still on the rise here – I was surprised (and happy!) to hear “Feliz Navidad” in a petrol station the other day, unthinkable even a decade ago.
GLAM CHRISTMAS: The American Christmas classics are pushing the Christmas music of my childhood out of the way. It used to be that Britain and America had two quite different Christmas traditions, and ours involved the men of rock larging it up on TOTP or gurning at frightened schoolkids. This phase of Christmas music broadly runs from John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” up to roughly Jona Lewie’s “Stop The Cavalry” and includes Wizzard, Slade, Elton John, Mud, Greg Lake (Greg Lake!!) and “Wonderful Christmastime”.
If you were a British kid in a certain era this stuff IS Christmas music. But its stock has very much fallen – it’s now the least salient of the four Christmases I’m talking about. Proper Binman Christmas Music no longer makes much of a chart dent – “Wonderful Christmastime” held on for a bit and will feature in the charts as we get closer to X-Day, so might a couple of the others, but at the moment of writing nothing from the 1970s is in the Top 40.
WHAM CHRISTMAS: Compare the fortunes of the Slade era Christmas music to their 80s and 90s successors. This actually was what prompted this post – Andrew Hickey on Bluesky wrapped up the 70s and 80s stuff into a bundle, and when he and I were younger they very much were packaged together. But in terms of public fortune there’s a dramatic disjunction between two eras of Christmas – the glam era is dying, the Wham era rules supreme.
This phase runs roughly from Wham!’s “Last Christmas” to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You”, two Christmas songs which have nothing in common barring the fact they went to No.1 last year and will probably do so again. Also up there is “Fairytale Of New York”, the late Shane MacGowan the holy spirit in the Christmas Trinity. But “Stay Another Day” and Shakey are both performing a lot better than anything from the earlier phase of Christmas songs. (The big loser is Sir Cliff).
Will the era of Wham! and Mariah end like that of Noddy and Roy Wood? Unlikely, or not for a long time – both these tracks were huge US hits too which probably inoculates them against changing fortune. The Pogues’ song may well be a perennial too; Shakey is probably doomed in the longer term.
NEW CHRISTMAS: And finally the most intriguing Christmas – the modern stuff. The signal with modern Christmas songs is confused by things like Amazon exclusives which turn up for a year because they’re front-loaded on Amazon playlists (this got “River” to No.1 a while back). But even so the shape of a modern playlist era canon is becoming clear – the recent songs are performing strongly in the charts so far this Christmas.
You can count Buble in with the oldies if you want, but Ariana Grande’s “Santa Tell Me”, Kelly Clarkson’s “Underneath The Tree”, and potentially Sia look to be here for the long haul. (I am a bit surprised Taylor Swift’s “Christmas Tree Farm” hasn’t caught on more, considering, but give it time). All these are 2010s numbers – there’s a need for fresher material on playlists which didn’t seem to be there in the sales era, and so there does seem to be a real void in Christmas pop between Mariah and the last 10-15 years. Maybe it will be backfilled.
So what’s the broad picture? An Americanisation of Christmas, certainly – there’s an Ed Sheeran song doing OK this year but all the modern big guns are US singers, and the gradual retconning of Christmas Past shows no signs of stopping. And hand in hand with that a decline of the specific UK Christmas canon. Like a lot of peculiar-to-Britain popular culture of my childhood – British home computers, British comics, British TV and films – the British Christmas hits are fading from view, squeezed out of a global market.
I’m in two minds about that – on the one hand I think making strange and silly little bits of sometimes-commercial art was something we, as a country, did well for a long time, even if they pleased nobody but ourselves. And there’s a genuine sadness when something that people did well, and enjoyed doing well goes away. On the other hand I feel that nostalgia is our national curse, that the present holds a world of joys (British or otherwise), and that the same people who are most nostalgic keep electing governments for whom the idea of leisure, or hobbies, or unprofitable art are anathema. Like the big man says, the Christmas we get we deserve.
The Darkness’ Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End) fits chronologically into the gap, but, obviously?, spiritually, is Glam Christmas…
I’d put that era-wise as the last vestige of the Wham era really. It was definitely the last canonised Christmas hit before the Cowell-drought of the 2000’s.
Definitely spiritually and sonically glam though.
A commenter on Bluesky made the point that the glam Christmas tradition found its endpoint with LADBABY and I had to admit there’s a ghastly truth in that.
That’s going to be a fun narrative to pick out if and when Popular gets there. (I’ll say this for LadBaby; I don’t think any of his bunnies are the worst filk songs to get to #1 in December. This says more about “The Millennium Prayer,” mind!)
Who is paying Noddy’s pension these days?
THE BRITISH TAXPAYER
(hi, Rosie!)
Hi Marcello. What fettle?
On that last paragraph, I keep thinking about the observation I saw somewhere that the children’s choir on “Merry Xmas (War Is Over)” are, statistically speaking, likely to have voted for Brexit based on their age.
Despite being a millennial, I’m an older one and the 70s Christmas Canon felt absolutely entrenched to the point I keep forgetting it hasn’t held that – the fact I’m also Still Coviding* has greatly reduced my exposure (no pun intended!) to any 2020s shifts even if the retreat of the British canon was already happening. My grandad’s traditions included his Christmas Tape which was mostly from the American canon (though it did also include “Mistletoe and Wine”) and at that point it genuinely seemed like an aberration. To Gen Z it probably seems hipper than the British one!
It might be that my sense of the British canon as unshakeable was reinforced by the lack of 2000s entries into it (The Darkness, of course, a classic example of an exception that proved the rule); could this be what created the gap into which the American canon stepped in the streaming era? And if that’s the case, how come the catalyst for that wasn’t a very deliberate Cowellian play, given his known love of big band music? I’m now imagining an alternate universe where Will Young does a Christmas big band album in the mid-2000s as a festive variant on a theme established by “Swing When You’re Winning” and “Allow Us To Be Frank” and it ends up accelerating the emergence of the American canon in the UK…
*This is for disability reasons, but the disability in question isn’t an immune system one; rather, it is my autism and its attendant mix of sensory issues, uncertainty intolerance (that has increasingly started manifesting itself as health anxiety and possible OCD), and disregard for social norms if there is a data-driven reason to ignore them).
Well I’m 69 and I voted remain in both 1975 and 2016, and I still think Brexit was the stupidest thing my country has done in my lifetime. Even more stupid than Section 28 and going to war in Iraq. I won’t be held responsible by being lumped in with the gammons!
I’m still enjoying the Phil Spector Christmas album even though Spector was a complete toerag.
It is very, very easy to treat generations as more monolithic than they are! But even when there are yawning generational gaps – and 2010s British politics certainly had yawning generational gaps – it’s easy to forget about those who defy them, whether that’s boomer Remainers like yourself or internet-radicalised right-wing millennials (which I genuinely think I could have become if I was even five years younger than the 37 I am). There is a reason I couched my comment in the language of statistical likelihood ;)
I have a theory, and I am being statistically conscious here, that in the 1975 referendum the great majority of those voting were people who had lived through the war and many of them, like my parents, vividly recalled not a glorious victory but a skin-of-the-teeth survival ground out over six years of shabby tedium with there never being quite enough to eat. Many of my fellow Boomers voting in 2016 (the male ones anyway) had grown up with the Dambusters, the Great Escape and Commando comics creating a myth of a stoical nation gallantly standing alone and heroic conquest of the dastatdly Kraut until the next time. Sadly I am aware of many of my generation and older who seriously believe that German people are intrinsically evil, militaristic and humourless, as evidenced by online references to the EU as the “Fourth Reich”.
The changing of the guard chartwise happened around 2016 when there was a streaming-driven explosion of Christmas songs hitting the top 40: prior to 2016, most years had 5-7 Christmas songs charting, from 2017 onwards there have been at least 20 every year, peaking at 33 last year.
With that shift, the eras have shifted: in 2015 Wizzard, Elton & Slade were still among the top 10 charting Xmas songs while only Andy Williams & Michael Buble had broken through as representatives of Old and New Christmas.
Musically, I don’t mind the Americanisation of British Christmas – generally happier to hear Brenda Lee than Wizzard – but what I don’t like (as discussed on here probably many years ago now about Journey) is the reconning that inserts things that weren’t famous over here into British pop cultural history as if they were always there.
The way people seem to suddenly think Sweet Caroline has always been a Football Singalong Song now, when I’m pretty sure as recently as ten years ago this was unthinkable!
(Having said that, I do remember Aggers on the radio commentary of the 2019 World Cup final hearing the crowd singing Sweet Caroline before the super over and suggesting this may never have happened at Lord’s before. I can confirm that it had, having been there for at a T20 Blast – that happened to feature Jofra Archer! – a couple of years earlier…)
The other ongoing cultural Americanization of the UK that the streaming charts have begun to illustrate is the advent of the (one or two weeks max) “Halloween hit”: no number ones have come that way yet, but it may just be a matter of time.
As in essense this has replaced (at a different time of year) the “football club singalong” this may not musically be an entirely bad thing
Something I’ve noticed in the last few years on the music channels has been new, animated videos for the songs that fall under the “Old/American Christmas” category, songs like “Santa Baby” by Eartha Kit or “Run Run Rudolph” by Chuck Berry. These were all songs recorded long before the era of MTV so videos weren’t even a consideration at the time. Fast forward 60 years, and these songs were missing out because they couldn’t appear on any of the music channels. With the original artist (in nearly every case) deceased, animation provided the answer, and I’m sure that the record companies or rights holders are now delighted these songs can appear on MTV. This is one of the reasons why these older American Christmas songs have start appearing in the charts, along with “the Home Alone effect.”
This year, I see there’s a video for the original “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”, which had pushed the Kim WIlde/Mel Smith version from 1987 off the playlists to some degree. Happily, Brenda Lee is still with us, so there was no need for animation.
Regarding the “new” Christmas songs, Ariana Grande and Kelly Clarkson are staying the course, and I’d add “One More Sleep” from Leona Lewis to that list. Not so sure about Sia, I think she took a big reputation hit from that awful movie she made and her Christmas song seems to have faded away a bit.
As someone for whom Sia’s cancellation was deeply personal (I’m autistic myself), I’m probably not the best positioned to comment on how sticky it was, but I’ve heard little enough from her since to suggest the answer is “quite a lot” – and if there’s a vacancy in the 2010s part of the Christmas canon this creates, “One More Sleep” is probably the one to fill it.
(If that is the case, It’s perhaps telling that the three biggest post-Mariah Christmas songs are by very much post-Mariah artists – Ariana is pretty much a Zennial Mariah up to and including the trademark whistle register, Kelly and Leona are products of the Cowell pop game shows over which Mariah’s box-of-tricks approach loomed large.)
I’m not convinced Sia’s cancellation to me scanned as a proper “cancellation”. She got called out for being tone deaf, which is fair, but then she’s also been diagnosed with ASD in the years since, and while there’s a large difference between “high functioning” (for lack of a better term) autism and nonverbal, she was a fair bit more qualified to write that movie than people thought at the time. I’ve not personally seen it cos I don’t have much interest despite being autistic myself so I can’t comment on the actual film, but I personally don’t bear any ill will towards her.
This seems as good a place as any to observe that John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s Christmas singles embody their worst tendencies as songwriters: lacrimose trad grandiosity and unfiltered whimsy respectively. Humbug!
As an American who tries to keep an eye on things happening both sides of the Atlantic, there’s one point I want to raise in how this happens (albeit to a lesser extent) in reverse as well.
Obviously Wham were huge in the US and UK, but Last Christmas itself was absolutely not a major hit in the US until the streaming era. It wasn’t even released as a single here in the 80s. I’ve heard people around me in the last few years start going “Augh, I’ve lost the Wham game” in the weeks running up to Christmas as if that was ever something that needed to be dodged over here. If anything, through the 90s, the “oh no it’s crimmis” song in the states was probably neither Mariah nor Wham, but “Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses.
Per the Billboard charts, Last Christmas didn’t appear in the Hot 100 until 2017 (https://www.billboard.com/artist/wham/) and there’s a similar sort of mental rewiring going on with American listeners, the idea that because GM & AR put the song out in the 80s, we’ve been hearing it since the 80s.