The absolute very first time I remember hearing the Xmas No.1 in the singles chart and actually caring about who had made it to the top spot was in 1971 when my own purchase of Benny Hill’s Ernie the Fastest Milkman had helped propel it to the No.1 position. The single sat proudly in my nascent record collection alongside the Sweet, Mud and Gary Glitter. I still have all these singles in my possession to this day (although I keep the Gary Glitter ones in a separate record box under lock and key for obvious reasons).
After this purchase and for a couple of golden decades to come, the name of every Xmas No.1 is as indelibly etched in my memory as each winner of the FA Cup over the same time period. After around 1990 though, along with most of the country, I stopped paying much attention to either.
The Xmas No.1s in the 60s were predictably dominated by the Beatles but the 70s opened up an incredibly eclectic run of seasonal chart-toppers right through to the 90s when the influx of girl/boy bands (Spice Girls, Westlife, Girls Aloud) and Simon Cowell’s X-Factor PR juggernaut sucked the joy out of Xmas and redesigned it on the basis of corporate greed and self-interest (much like football’s brief flirtation with the European Super League but not as ineptly masterminded).
Over the 70s and 80s, we got an unbelievable mix of all-time classics, Xmas anthems and novelty pap. And Cliff Richard. Here are all of them in order from Ernie in 1971:
· Ernie – Benny Hill (vs Two Ton Ted from Teddington who drove the baker’s van and also implored us to tell mummy about the hunny in the Sugar Puffs TV ads)
· Long Haired Lover – Little Jimmy Osmond (another flipping Osmond?? They’ll discover a girl in the family next. What? Oh, apparently they managed to rustle one up the following year)
· Merry Xmas Everybody – Slade (this one has rounded off every Xmas office party ever since to provide Noddy and the boys with a reliably large annuity)
· Lonely This Xmas – Mud (and, much to their annoyance, this one hasn’t)
· Bohemian Rhapsody – Queen (classic No.1)
· When a Child is Born – Johnny Mathis (carrying Cliff's torch while he was on sabbatical - and you'll notice that phrase symbolically includes the letters 'ffs')
· Mull of Kintyre – Wings (classic No.2)
· Mary’s Boy Child - Boney M (a hastily-released cover to cash in on the group’s popularity - they could do no wrong in the 70s…..partly because half of the band weren’t allowed to take part in the recordings since they couldn’t actually sing)
· Another Brick in the Wall – Pink Floyd (classic No.3)
That’s probably the perfect cross-section of Xmas hits – 3 absolute classics, a few seasonal sing-a-longs/tear-jerkers and a couple of novelty numbers.
The 80s were much the same:
· There’s No One Quite Like Grandma – St Winifred’s School Choir (my granny had dementia by then so let's hope, for other people’s sake, that the kids at St Winifred’s had got it right)
· Don’t You Want Me – Human League (has anyone seen this version – here - which simply repeats the line ‘working as a waitress in a cocktail bar’ throughout the whole song? It’s weirdly addictive)
· Save Your Love – Renée and Renato (tell me this never happened and it wasn’t written by the bloke who voiced Metal Mickey. Nope, it did and it was)
· Only You – Flying Pickets (a Yazoo cover but I have to admit to loving this version, especially the scary bald bloke who you assume would belt out the bass notes before beating you up but instead sings falsetto and probably loves Eurovision)
· Do They Know its Xmas – Band Aid (one hit wonders)
· Merry Xmas Everybody – Shakin Stevens (the spirit of Slade channelled through the Welsh Elvis…if Elvis had shot to fame on the US equivalent of Cheggers Plays Pop and chosen to sing about property development - ole houses & green doors - rather than whatever colour of suede shoes he happened to be wearing)
· Reet Petite – Jackie Wilson (great song - do you remember the BBC’s plasticene animation film which propelled it back into the charts?)
· Always on My Mind – Pet Shop Boys (good song but it’s just a cover and it kept the Pogues' Fairytale of New York off the top)
· Mistletoe & Wine – Cliff Richard (there’s the bastard – I knew he’d be in here somewhere)
· Do They Know its Xmas – Band Aid II (beating Last Xmas by Wham but with a second-rate line-up compared to the original….chiefly because of Cliff's involvement - and spot the 'ffs' again)
Cliff hit the top again in 1990 with the lamentable Saviour’s Day but, despite my memories of countless seasonal chart-toppers, he never actually achieved another Xmas No.1 (although Millennium Prayer was top of the charts in 1999 leading up to Xmas Day itself but lost out on a technicality….and that technicality being that normal recording-buying people eventually decided they didn’t actually like it very much).
After that, the Xmas charts lost all their pizzazz with only Mr Blobby and Bob The Builder, in 1993 and 2000, reminding us that Brits are prone to losing all critical music faculties at that time of year and wasting their money on the stupidest of stuff.
The real problem for me is the X-Factor years of the mid/late noughties. I loved it when you genuinely didn’t know which single would get to No.1 but you had confidence (possibly misplaced, I know) that whichever song made it to the top spot would secure it on merit. Simon Cowell’s run of Xmas No.1s just felt so cynical and calculated – the result of a business strategic plan rather than a wacky races-style starting line-up of classic/silly/Xmassy tunes, one of which would happen to tug on the collective heartstrings of the British public sufficiently to come out on top. Five No.1s in six years for Cowell I think – I don’t know for certain because these 5 are the only names I've failed to recognise on the list so I assume they’re the one-hit wonders which the X-Factor PR machine pumped to the top of the charts and then dumped back to instant obscurity again.
I like and fully support the Rage Against the Machine fightback as the fly in that 6 year ointment but it’s really just another example of manipulation (much like Ladbaby). Don’t get me wrong, I far prefer it to whatever the media juggernauts were pushing at the time but it still seems to deny the record-buying/streaming public a No.1 chosen simply on the basis of whether they liked the tune or not. Not everything needs to be a protest or a signal of undoubted virtue. Sometimes it can be spontaneous and uncalculated. Sometimes it can just be Mr Blobby. Sorry, forget I ever said that.
Next: ABSOLUTE VERY FIRST TIME...NOT THE NINE O'CLOCK NEWS
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