Myrrhder on the dancefloor: Who will triumph in the race for Christmas number one in 2024?

Deck the halls with boughs of holly, ’tis the season to be falling for a streaming giant’s devious scheme to manipulate users into splashing all the data they’ve harvested off them in the past year across social media. Fa la la la la, etc etc.

Sorry to be a downer, but there’s something I find really dispiriting about Spotify Wrapped, and the way it reduces our private listening habits to a game of performative fandom, while turning us all into a giant free advertising opportunity. Christmas should be a time for cosy jumpers, sleigh bells, Slade and all agreeing how accidentally racist Band Aid was. Not blindly doing the bidding of pittance-per-stream paying Scrooge-y corporate misers. Did you ever see Tiny Tim Cratchit bragging about being in the top 0.05% of Chappell Roan listeners globally? You did not. Although to be fair he probably couldn’t afford a premium account and the ads do start to get really annoying after a while on free.

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I long for a simpler era in Christmas and in music. A time when we all coalesced not around the internet, but the Top of the Pops festive special. An age when Slade slayed, Wham! slammed, Shakin’ Stevens shook and Cliff Richard, well, he just sort of swayed a lot and seemed unsure what to do with his hands. I miss the days when fat money-grubbing scoundrels at least had the guts to look you in the eye in the act of convincing you to waste that lovely crisp tenner you got off gran on a copy of Mr Blobby: The Album come Boxing Day. Or at least insofar as Mr Blobby could look anyone in the eye with his weird, googly too-far-apart peepers.

With all that in mind, I’ve headed out into the blizzard of this season’s festive releases, in search of a Christmas number one to believe in. A shining light to guide us through the darkness and cold of our modern capitalist hellscape. 

Here’s 2024’s would-be Christmas number one hits, unwrapped. 

Sabrina Carpenter, A Nonsense Christmas

From Frank Sinatra to Mariah Carey, the festive TV special is a time-honoured tradition in American entertainment. Disney Channel-reared pop it-girl Carpenter continues it this December with Netflix’s A Nonsense Christmas with Sabrina Carpenter, starring special guests including Shania Twain, Kali Uchis and Tiny Tim’s favourite (possibly) Chappell Roan. It’s titled after an extremely seasonally horny track on Carpenter’s 2023 EP fruitcake, which threatens to leave parents with even more difficult questions to answer this Xmas than even inquiries as to the veracity of Santa. For example: “Dad, what does she mean when she sings ‘I need that Charles Dickens?’”

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Band Aid, Do They Know It’s Christmas? (2024 Ultimate Mix)  

The worst, if best-intentioned, song ever simply will not quit. Bob Geldof’s been pilloried for decades now about reductive depictions of Africa in Do They Know It’s Christmas?, even though the 1984 charity mega single has raised countless millions. True to type, Geldof’s doubling down again on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the song being Christmas number one, with a Trevor Horn-produced megamix bringing together voices from all three previous chart-topping versions to date. One of those voices, Ed Sheeran, said that he’d have refused permission to reuse his vocals if he’d been asked, because his opinion of the song has changed in recent years. Speaking of Sheeran…

Ed Sheeran, Under the Tree

Glass houses etc, Ed, because this song is absolute rubbish. I don’t care if it’s the title track for this December’s feelgood animated kid’s comedy film That Christmas. The youth of today deserve better than fake-sad piano whining full of reheated cliches about fires of love dying and hearts lying lonely under trees. A festive love song written with all the earnestness of a Christmas card to a distant relative who you honestly can’t remember meeting. 

Bath Philharmonia Young Carers’ Choir (feat Ed Davey), Love is Enough

Britain’s second most famous Ed is this year’s unlikeliest candidate for Christmas number one. Having proven his wholehearted passion for ridiculous stunts during the general election campaign by trying everything from bungee jumping to wheelbarrow racing, Liberal Democrat leader Davey takes his biggest risk yet by singing with the Bath Philharmonia Young Carers’ Choir. Except, not really, because his voice is buried so deep in the mix you wonder if they even bothered to switch his mic on. Still, it’s a well-meaning slice of tinselly schmaltz that nods nicely to Davey’s own story as a carer.

Dean & Britta & Sonic Boom, Pretty Paper

It’s not exactly Bing’n’Bowie, but if you love a certain strain of whacked-out early ’90s indie, former Luna members Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips teaming up with Peter Kember from Spacemen 3 (in his solo guise as Sonic Boom) may represent all your Christmases come at once. Their disquietingly dreamy synth-dappled cover of Willie Nelson’s feelbad festive classic Pretty Paper is taken from a full album of seasonal oddities titled A Peace of Us. Phillips describes it as sounding “like Bing Crosby… on acid”. 

Richard Dawson, Boxing Day Sales

The Newcastle-upon-Tyne avant-garde folk musician who brought us one of the most uplifting songs ever written about feeling down in 2019’s Jogging strikes again with his unorthodox bid for Christmas number one. The wonkily beautiful Boxing Day Sales is a withering critique of capitalism that captures some of the strange spiritual emptiness of the festive period, with its mandatory exchange and accumulation of disposable things that nobody really needs. A song for life, not just for Christmas.

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