From Wham! to Mariah Carey: How to win Christmas number one race

This year’s Christmas number one single will be unwrapped on Friday, with a mixture of old favourites, new efforts and wild cards all in the running.

Last year, Wham! classic Last Christmas topped the yuletide singles chart, remarkably for the first time since its release in 1984, when the original Band Aid release kept it off the number one spot.

As is tradition, the festive number one will be announced on BBC Radio 1’s chart show from 16:00 GMT on the Friday before Christmas.

At the time of writing, a stocking full of artists – naughty and nice – are hoping to top the list.

Wham!‘s hit is the frontrunner after reclaiming the top spot in the last chart before Christmas, as people streamed it to get into the festive spirit. It has also been reissued on CD and 12-inch vinyl for its 40th anniversary for the final week of the chart race, giving it a further boost.

Another seasonal staple, Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas, is not far behind.

Also in this year’s mix are Brenda Lee‘s golden oldie Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree and the latest incarnation of Band Aid.

They’re joined by a new festive tune by Tom Grennan, while songs by Ariana Grande and Kelly Clarkson have established themselves as returning Christmas classics.

Or the chart crown could go to something non-Christmassy – like recent hits by Gracie Abrams, Rose and Bruno Mars, or the fast-rising Lola Young.

There was a long period when the Christmas number one was reserved for the latest X Factor winner – seven times between 2005-14 – or novelty charity-fundraising sausage-roll enthusiast LadBaby, a five-time victor between 2018-22.

And just like with buying gifts, the key for any artists involved now, according to Official Chart Company boss Martin Talbot, is to step into Christmas with confidence and a strategy, and to go early.

“The singles market is very much dominated by streaming these days, in general terms, throughout the year,” he says.

“But the Christmas market is the one market where you can sell a lot of physical [copies and] a lot of downloads and actually make a big difference. Because people want to buy gifts.

“That’s where Wham! [with the 40th anniversary re-release] will do really well this year.”

Physical or download sales count for much more than streams in the chart in the digital era.

“The other thing is, if you’ve got a charity record, let’s not be shy about it,” Talbot notes.

That’s an adage not lost on Bob Geldof and the Band Aid team, who are going again with their own 40th anniversary Ultimate Mix, which has made headlines this time after Ed Sheeran said he would have preferred for his vocals not to have been used again because of the song’s portrayal of Africa.

“When people engage with charity records, they’re not doing it because they specifically want to listen to the charity record over and over again, Talbot notes.

“Streaming doesn’t really work.” Instead, he says: “It’s all about voting. And you cast your vote by buying a download or by buying physical products.”

East 17, Reverend and the Makers and The Celebs are all also having a go in aid of various charities this year, as are South Yorkshire Fire & Rescue.

Mariah’s slow-burning 1994 anthem finally topped the UK chart for the first time in 2020, returning to the summit in 2022.

Yet despite it being screeched by revellers across the country every December, the unofficial queen of Christmas (her bid to trademark that moniker was denied by US authorities) has never been at the top of the UK chart in Christmas week itself.

“It was the first Christmas song I ever wrote and I was just thinking about all the things that I really did want at Christmas,” she recently told Rylan in a BBC interview.

“I guess I turned it into, if there’s something that you love, it means more than all that stuff.” Aww.

Her tune, like Wham!’s and Band Aid’s, has benefitted from being heavily promoted by streaming services like Spotify, Apple and Amazon on their top Christmas playlists.

In recent years, Amazon has thrown its might behind new Christmas songs that are exclusive to its service. They have included Sam Ryder’s You’re Christmas To Me, which narrowly lost out to Wham! last year, and Ellie Goulding’s River, which topped the chart just after Christmas in 2019.

This year, Grennan’s soulful, lovelorn It Can’t Be Christmas is only available via Amazon Music.

Grennan, who actually penned the track in Los Angeles in the summer, said it was a “no-brainer” for him to team up with the streamer to create his own festive song.

Amazon has also commissioned Icelandic-Chinese singer-songwriter Laufey‘s Christmas Magic.

She said being asked to come up with an original to go up against the usual suspects was “such a fun challenge”.

The classically-trained star’s jazzy number features in Red One, a holiday-themed action movie starring Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans and Lucy Liu – and made by Amazon.

Chart expert James Masterson says the Christmas number one race began as an invention of British bookmakers in 1984.

While it used to produce many bona fide pop hits, he believes the concept has been “ruined” in recent years, not least by the admittedly well-intentioned LadBaby.

“It became pointless speculating as to what was going to be Christmas number one,” he says of the LadBaby era.

“Which is why, when he didn’t release a song last year, it left this void and it was a void that nobody came along to fill.”

Last Christmas “won by default”, he says, because it appears at the top of all the Christmas playlists playing “the same old songs, every single year, in much the same order”.

Due to a crowded Christmas market, Masterson says many record labels began to feel it’s not worth worrying about the end of years chart any more.

Chart rules dictate that songs released in the last three years are weighted more favourably than those already in the Christmas canon.

But even with that factor in their favour, he feels it is increasingly difficult for artists with genuinely good new seasonal songs to “achieve enough momentum” to “get lucky”.

“My view is that if Last Christmas by Wham! gets the Christmas number one again by default, it would be a disaster for the whole concept,” he concludes.

So anyone launching a late bid – be it fans of the late Liam Payne, Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey or Yorkshire Pudding Boy – will probably require a cracking campaign.

There have been upsets in the past – fans of Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name put a small-but-welcome dint in the X Factor monopoly in 2009.

Talbot thinks that if Sheeran really “wanted to really go for it” with Under The Tree, his song from Richard Curtis’s That Christmas movie, he could challenge Wham! and Carey.

Alternatively, the “Wicked phenomenon could be really powerful”, meaning Cynthia Ervivo and Grande’s Defying Gravity could pull off a “surprise” as families and friends head for outings to the cinema.

US pop sensation Sabrina Carpenter has released a Christmas-centric EP, Fruitcake, which could top the festive album chart, but its tracks don’t seem to be in the running for the singles crown.

So it’s beginning to look a lot like Wham! will be Christmas number one again – just like last Christmas.