Chart Watch Weekly - Christmas 2022
Drowning In Tinsel
Music Week crunches the numbers so we don't have to.
This week last year the Christmas invasion amounted to:
7 in the Top 10
14 in the Top 20
24 in the Top 40
43 in the Top 75
This week the numbers are:
6 in the Top 10
13 in the Top 20
25 in the Top 40
40 in the Top 75
Which in so many ways is an absorbing read. While it feels like the festive chart invasion starts earlier and becomes more intense every year, in actual fact it appears to hover around the same levels. The few contemporary hit singles still around are at the very least holding their own.
However at the very top of the charts we still have what amounts to a tinsel-clad clusterfuck as one seasonal perennial is replaced at No.1 by another. For the second week running we have a record returning to the top of the charts for a second distinct time as Last Christmas by Wham!, last seen at this level in the final chart of 2020, tops the table once more.
Whatever significance this may have had is now completely lost, the presence of a 38 year old track at the top of the charts in 2022 not so much a sensational headline-grabbing moment for the ages but something at which we just roll our eyes and go "oh no again".
I'm not an advocate for adjusting the rules and farming off old favourites to their own distinct countdown, the opportunity to prevent that horse bolting passed long ago. But it means the age of the December charts December celebrating the very best of what the year has to offer and representing a collection of hits that will live long in the memory has long since passed.
For The Love Of Big Brother
With a festive hit from 1984 at the top of the charts this week, it is a fun reminder that the charts that year contained more than their fair share of new seasonal hits. But is only the Wham! track that has ended up a true streaming evergreen.
Last Christmas (coupled with Everything She Wants) in its original issue was famously stranded at No.2 behind the original Band Aid rendition of Do They Know It's Christmas. Despite regular airplay and indeed the fact that streams of all the official versions (1984, 1989, 2004 and 2014) are combined into one, the OG charity collective has tended to be something of an also-ran in the digital era. During the download era it never really gained a market, its best showing being the No.24 peak it scaled in 2007. Once streaming kicked in it has fared slightly better, hitting a festive week Top 10 peak in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 although last year it stumbled and could only make No.12
The Power Of Love by Frankie Goes To Hollywood ranks as an honourable Christmas hit, thanks to its nativity-themed video. But it rarely gets playlisted as such, despite radio airplay increasing at this time of year. Its only seasonal chart run in the digital era came in 2012 when it made No.42. You will search for it in vain in the charts of the present day.
Gary Glitter's Another Rock And Roll Christmas has, bless it, dropped firmly off the radar thanks to his own personal downfall. It has never re-charted beyond its original 1984 chart run, although it formed a core part of Jive Bunny's No.1 hit Let's Party in 1989 (to their everlasting regret).
Also oddly missing from the list of 1984 evergreens is Queen's Thank God It's Christmas, a No.21 hit first time around but once more absent from the charts ever since.
SZA Sisters
Credit where it is due to anyone able to place new material on the charts at this time. They may not necessarily be part of the new year shakeout, but SZA enjoys a brace of Top 40 new entries thanks to the arrival of her album SOS (No.2 on the albums chart behind Sam Ryder) as the most-streamed record of the week.
Kill Bill as predicted is the biggest, smartly hitting No.15 with Nobody Gets Me at No.27.
There's always room for a surprise Christmas drop - all eyes may be on the No.1 race this week (of which more news later) but the surprise new single Let Go from Central Cee (a reworking of Let Her Go by Passenger) should end up with more than enough streams to enter inside the Top 20. And that alone is something to cheer.
Cutting Remarks
It's a fascinating mix of the old and the new on the Hot 100 this week. The old is represented by Christmas songs, and as per the norm Mariah Carey remains supreme. Look at Last Christmas though, rising to what is now an all-time high. The only British-made seasonal classic to have proper transatlantic appeal.
All I Want For Christmas Is You has now spent 10 weeks in total at the top of the American charts over the past few years. She joins Boyz II Men and Drake as the only acts to have had as many as three singles enjoy double-digit residencies at the top of the charts. Not entirely coincidentally two of them have a song in common, as Mariah's duet with Boyz II Men on One Sweet Day enjoyed an epic 16 week run at No.1 in 1995 and 1996. Truly they were hideous times.
SZA debuts with some style at the top of the Billboard 200 and as you will see above places two singles in the Top 10 of the Hot 100. In all she has 21 chart singles this week. 21 places that might otherwise have been occupied with Christmas songs I guess,
Ribbit Bruce, Ribbit
Oh now the Australian charts are all kinds of fun this week. First, to singles where we witness the welcome(!) return of an old friend:
Like clockwork. All I Want For Christmas Is You is once more top of the Australian singles chart. They never get tired of it. Apparently.
But here's the albums chart this week, with one notable record of the season holding its own at No.3 for a second week.
Australian Frog Calls is actually the second in a series, a follow-up album to Australian Bird Calls which was a similar success on the ARIA albums chart earlier this year. Designed to highlight that one in six Australian native frog species are currently threatened, with four already extinct, the album does indeed contain little more than recordings of frog calls. Some are from biological recordings, some from public submissions. And it is a surprisingly popular choice amongst Australian record buyers.
Full marks though have to go to one online publication which took time to review the album with... well, see for yourself.
Croak croak croak. Bonk croak, bleat croak bleat croak ribbit.
Euro-Roundup
For the final newsletter of the year, rather than pick out a specific European country to visit, I thought it would be fun to revisit two of my favourite Euro-hits of the year which we've highlighted in these pages.
Pride of place has to go to Italy's smash of the summer La Dolce Vita which it was a joy to hear on the radio when I visited the country back in August. It could have become a crossover hit if anyone had been minded to make it that way, but it remains a fun flashback to what was a golden pop music summer.
But the other favourite lost Euro smash was a song which really should have come to wider attention than it did, performed as it was by a British act with an English lyric. The Benelux countries went nuts for this in the spring, but is passed largely under the radar everywhere else. OK, it is an unashamed 80s new wave pop flashback. But it is still one of my favourite tracks of 2022.
The Christmas Race!
We, and by that I mean absolutely everyone, would love there to be something resembling a race for Christmas No.1. Because yet another LadBaby-led parade does nothing for marketing the concept or even generating anything resembling public interest.
That said, although Feed The UK is as you might expect in the lead in the chart race, as of Monday evening this wasn't an insurmountable one and Official Charts were more than happy to trumpet that Last Christmas (the closest contender) was closing the gap by a few thousand sales a day.
As of Tuesday morning, while I don't have access to any official sales update, I note that the odds for Ladbaby on the Betfair market have shrunk considerably, suggesting that those in the know have piled on having seen the latest numbers.
Full credit this week should go to Central Cee who took the bold step of dropping a brand new single in the week of the Christmas chart and which appeared to be on course to do some quite spectacular Spotify numbers over the weekend. Based on the old Passenger song Let Her Go, his tender ballad Let Go seems likely to land just outside the Top 10 when the Christmas chart is unveiled on Friday.
As for the other wild card contenders to be Christmas No.1, The Sidemen and The Kunts respectively. Neither have a sniff, alas. And the latter are going to have to put a sprint on if they want to replicate their Top 5 successes of the past two Christmases.
The Chart Watch newsletter will take a break for Christmas and will return in the new year. But it will look a little different next time around, Twitter has announced it is shutting the Revue platform on which it is hosted. Good job I have two weeks to find another provider. See you in January!
The new UK charts are announced by Radio One from 4pm every Friday, can be seen in full on officialcharts.com and musicweek.com, and you can read by own detailed charts analysis - now celebrating its 30th year online - at chart-watch.uk.
There's no charge for this newsletter, and never will be. But if you fancy thanking me for the work that goes into putting it together, then you can always buy me a coffee. I promise not to spend a single penny on anything Ladbaby has created. Seems the least I can do.