You know it’s Christmas when the warbling of The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl’s “Fairytale of New York” begins blasting from your car stereo; or when Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas is You” starts playing in every Subway and H&M across the land.
From Wham! to Slade, East 17 to Paul McCartney, and Jona Lewie to Wizzard, there’s no avoiding these festive artists, whether you’re fed up of their cheeriness or not. But if you look at their names, you’ll notice they all have one thing in common – they’re all pretty old.
According to research on regional radio stations published earlier this month by the Performing Rights Society for Music, the most recent song to break into the top 20 most-played Christmas tracks is Cliff Richard’s “Millennium Prayer,” from the year 2000. Even the more obscure festive tracks – like 1982’s “Christmas Wrapping” by The Waitresses, or 2003’s “Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End) by The Darkness” – date back at least a decade.
But why has it been so long since a new Christmas hit has broken through? “Many of us, regardless of our generation, listen to Christmas music that tends to have come through from the early seventies,” says Paul Carr, professor in popular music analysis at the University of South Wales.
It would be easy, Carr says, to attribute it to the songs being better – but he doesn’t think that’s the case. Instead, he argues there’s a generational effect where we inherit the Christmas tunes beloved by our parents. “We pass these records on to our kids, we listen to them, and consequently these records seem to be having this cyclic impact on generations,” he says.
Nostalgia is a powerful force in popular culture, particularly around Christmas. “Christmas pop songs are all about nostalgia – think about ‘White Christmas’, which is the biggest selling song of all time,” says Alexandra Lamont, senior lecturer in music psychology at Keele University. “All the lyrics are about nostalgia and going back to Christmases in the past.”
In 2017, forensic musicologist Joe Bennett from Boston’s Berklee College of Music analysed the elements of the ultimate Christmas song in research commissioned by British shopping centre chain Intu.
He looked at the UK Spotify charts for the week of December 25. Of the top 200 songs, 78 were Christmas or holiday-related. Lyrically, they all contained something that was either about the home, being in love, lost love, parties, Santa or reindeers, snow or coldness, religion and peace on Earth. 49 per cent of the tracks featured sleigh bells, 95 per cent were recorded in a major key, and the median tempo of the tracks was 115 beats per minute.
Songwriters Steve Anderson and Harriet Green used this information as a recipe for what should have been the perfect Christmas song – “Love’s Not Just For Christmas”. But it didn’t even enter the charts, let alone the festive Christmas canon. “Audiences are, like people, not rational. There isn’t a magic formula,” says Adam Behr, lecturer in contemporary and popular music at Newcastle University. “’Love’s Not Just For Christmas’ is actually surprisingly effective for something that was written by committee, but we like a sense of authenticity and nostalgia.”
It’s also wise to recognise that a song doesn’t necessarily need to be explicitly Christmassy in order for it to do well. “For me, the Christmas pop song might be a pop song which has got content about Christmas in it, while the Christmas pop anthem is more about the themes which occur around Christmas,” says Darren Sproston, professor of music at the University of Chester. “I’m thinking about, for example, East 17’s “Stay Another Day”, which is kind of a Christmas anthem, but isn’t really a Christmas pop song.”
Sproston also points out that Leona Lewis and Coldplay, who appear on Bennett’s top 78 Christmas tracks list, could also be on the cusp of entering Christmas’ most-played. “The Leona Lewis track (“One More Sleep”) fits these criteria better than most of the post-2000 tracks on the list,” says Sproston. “Songs which do not fulfil this criterion perhaps take longer to achieve the requisite familiarity as ‘fans’ pass on their love of a song or artist to the next generation. I think the Coldplay song could belong to this category.”
Bennett’s research identified one artist who bucked the trend, and overcame our preference for old Christmas songs – the one and only Michael Bublé. Of the 78 Christmas songs that made it on to the top tracks of 2016, 25 were released after the year 2000 – and eleven of those were by Bublé, all but one from his 2011 album Simply Christmas.
Bublé’s success – like many of the newer entries on the list – also comes down to nostalgia. When a new Christmas song is released, it’s often just a modern rearrangement of a Christmas classic that makes it successful. Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas”, for example, is a modern rearrangement of the original Live Aid track.
“Sometimes record labels just release the same record, and sometimes they do different versions of it, and repackage it, and it’s a really cheap way of making money that’s virtually guaranteed because every year people buy into Christmas,” says Carr. “The rest of the record industry know that, because they know how to manipulate nostalgia.”
“What’s interesting about Michael Bublé, of course, is he doesn’t try and copy,” Carr continues. “He does different versions that are also massively nostalgic because they’re heavily influenced by people like Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.”
Despite older Christmas songs being played on repeat every single year, we don’t seem to get sick of those old classics. Normally, pop hits go through what Lamont calls an ‘inverted U-shaped curve’ of enjoyment, which consists of going from not really liking a song, to loving it, to hating it after it’s been overplayed. But we find ourselves experiencing Christmas music in a completely different way. “With Christmas music, we don’t usually hear it all year round, so we don’t get the chance to get awfully sick of it,” Lamont says.
Ultimately, there’s no reason why an original track can’t become a Christmas classic in the future. All it needs to do is find itself getting played every year, and that takes time. A Christmas song needs years in order for it to percolate and enter that festive canon.
“’Love’s Not Just For Christmas’ is based on a 1940s to 1990s model of what a Christmas song is like,” says Behr. “Media is changing, and if someone released a Christmas grime track – for all I know it’s been done – it’s unlikely that it would get on to your granny’s playlist. But you or your cousins might listen to it, and again next year, and five years later.”
This week, Billboard announced that Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” had reached number one in the US for the first time, 25 years after it was first released. If anything, this tells us that even massive Christmas classics really do take a while to become a chart hit, if it does become one at all.
“If audiences like it and the gatekeepers – the radio stations – who have the most say decide to play it, then people like Ariana Grande could be the classic Christmas pop songs of the future,” says Sproston. “But only time will tell. There are a lot of Christmas tunes out there, but it will take time to determine whether or not they make that final cut.”
