lonely this christmas

So Here It Is, Merry Christmas…

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I’d like to wish each and every one of UK Number Ones Blog’s readers a very merry Christmas. In blog world its December 2002, but in the real world it’s December 2025, and I hope the festive season is a great one for all of you.

And if you have time, why not have a look back through some of my many Christmas-themed posts from over the years. Starting with, of course, our hallowed Xmas Number Ones. In the fifty years I’ve covered there have been twelve #1s with an explicitly festive theme. From Dickie Valentine in 1955, through (deep breath) Harry Belafonte, Slade, Mud, Johnny Mathis, Boney M, Band Aid (and Band Aid II), Shakin’ Stevens, to Cliff (and more Cliff, and even more Cliff…)

And then of course there are plenty of other legendary Christmas number ones that have little or nothing to do with Christmas, but which have become synonymous with the season. The Flying Pickets, Renee and Renato, East 17, Bob the Builder, Pink Floyd, Mr Blobby, St. Winifred’s Choir, Little Jimmy Osmond… A largely motley crew I will admit, but nothing reveals the British psyche more than the crap they send to #1 for Christmas.

In fact, why not check out the polls I ran a couple of years ago, in which you can vote for your favourite (and least favourite) festive chart-topper. The initial results saw Slade as winners, and a tie between Blobby and the St. Winifred’s kids for worst, but the polls remain open and votes are coming through every so often. Your vote still counts!

Moving away from actual number one singles, I’ve also done posts on two festive perennials which probably should have made the top. Wizzard’s 1973 #4 hit ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday’ is one of my all-time favourites, but isn’t all that well-known outside of the UK. While John & Yoko’s ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ is another, somewhat more melancholy, classic that probably was the unofficial number one single in the weeks after Lennon’s murder (all of which I explain in this post here.)

And finally, last year I did a ‘Cover Versions of Christmas #1s’ post, featuring Oasis (and Steps) doing Slade, Korn doing Pink Floyd, and Shaky covering himself!

All that’s left to do now is to wish you all one more Merry Christmas, and to leave you with a festive classic that has never made it beyond #10 in the UK, but which may well go higher this year due to the sad news of Chris Rea’s death yesterday.

We’ll be back before 2026, with a special New Years post.

Cover Versions of Christmas #1s

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For our last post of the year, let’s take a look at some classic Christmas number ones, but in versions you might not have heard before… Some good, some not so good, some just plain odd.

Starting with the daddy of all festive chart-toppers, Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’. Noel Gallagher recorded a cover for the ‘Royle Family’ Christmas special in 2000 (a sitcom that his band had famously contributed the theme song for). It sounds exactly as you’d expect Noel Gallagher doing a cover of Slade’s Christmas classic would. Except it lacks the raucous energy of the original, instead opting for a woozy drone. And there’s no It’s Chriiiiissssttttmmmmmaaaaasssss…. So shame on you, Noel.

That same year, way over on the other side of the pop spectrum, Steps recorded their own version, and is it wrong that I’m enjoying this version more…? For a start, they lead with It’s Christmaaaaaas… so bonus points there. But there’s also something in the propulsively camp beat, and the faux-Cher autotune, that is more in keeping with the anarchic original.

Or if neither of those straight covers do it for you, then how about this remix that made #30 in 1998? It’s a bizarre record: a fairly anonymous trance beat over which Slade occasionally pop up. Flush were a Swedish act, and this was presumably made with Slade’s permission, given that it’s Noddy Holder’s vocals.

Christmas #1 the year following Slade’s colossus, Mud took a more sombre approach to festive pop on ‘Lonely This Christmas’. In 2013 Traitors! recorded this fun pop-punk version for a charity album called ‘It’s Better to Give than to Receive’. And that’s about all I know. The band don’t have a website or Wiki page, and their only other release seems to have been a four track EP. I don’t even remember where I heard this version first, but it’s been on my festive playlist for a few years now. So thank you Traitors!, whoever you are/were.

Of course, Christmas is actually about more than just presents and gluttony… There’s also ‘Die Hard’. I mean, there’s also the birth of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus H Christ. And sometimes religious songs have made Christmas number one, such as in 1976. Johnny Mathis’s version of ‘When a Child Is Born’ is fairly gentle and respectful, not enough to wake the sleeping babe in his crib. The same cannot be said for larger than life Greek Demis Roussos, who rattles the gates of heaven with his bombastic take. If I were Jesus, I know which approach I’d prefer.

And then there are the times when the festive number one isn’t about Christmas at all. in 1979, Pink Floyd made number one with their first chart hit in over a decade, ‘Another Brick in the Wall Pt II’. In 2004, nu-metal band Korn covered all three parts of the song (Pt II starts around the 1:30 mark). It was described as “one of the worst classic rock covers of all time” by Ultimate Classic Rock magazine, but I suspect they might be a tad biased against anything released post-1980. I’d call it a brutally efficient cover version.

‘Another Brick in the Wall Pt II’ then returned to the charts in 2007 when remixed by Swedish DJ Eric Prydz. His take, ‘Proper Education’, made #2, and gave us an interesting video in which a group of young hooligans break into some flats and… turn off all the energy wasting devices.

Our final cover is a 2015 remake of Shakin’ Stevens’ 1985 Xmas #1 ‘Merry Christmas Everyone’, by Shaky himself. ‘Echoes of Merry Christmas Everyone’ is a completely re-imagined bluegrass version, with lots of banjo and harmonica, recorded to raise money for the Salvation Army, and it’s amazing how a jaunty, slightly irritating original, was transformed into a melancholy, slightly haunting cover.

That’s it from the UK Number Ones Blog for 2024! I’m going to take a couple of weeks off, before returning in the first week of January, when I’ll be launching a couple of new features to mix things up in amongst all the usual chart toppers. I’d like to thank everyone who has read, followed, liked and commented this year, and wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy new year!

362. ‘Lonely This Christmas’, by Mud

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And so we reach, and pass, the midway point of the 1970s. But not with a song that faces forward, pointing the way into a bright new sonic future. Oh no, this next hit draws heavily, very heavily, a little too heavily, on what went before…

Lonely This Christmas, by Mud (their 2nd of three #1s)

4 weeks, from 15th December 1974 – 12th January 1975

Bum-bum-bum-bum… Finally, Christmas in the real world and Christmas in my countdown coincide. Bum-bum-bum-bum… Of the four explicitly Christmas-themed #1s so far, this is the first I’ve posted in December. And what an appropriate song for this sad, socially distant festive season: It’ll be lonely this Christmas, Without you to hold, It’ll be lonely this Christmas, Lonely and cold…

This time last year, Slade were giving us pure Xmas escapism. This year, though, Mud are wallowing in misery. There’s no other word: it’s a miserable song. Obviously, you expect a record called ‘Lonely This Christmas’ to be sad, bittersweet, maybe even a little maudlin. But not this bad. I really don’t see the appeal of listening to this over a glass of mulled wine. The only things I see, Are emptiness, And loneliness, And an unlit Christmas tree…

It is possible to write a good-but-sad Christmas song. ‘Last Christmas’ would be the classic example. Then there’s Elvis’s ‘Blue Christmas’, which admittedly is more sexy than sad. And Elvis is a relevant comparison here, as Mud’s lead singer Les Gray is serving his best impersonation of The King in the vocals (and the famous TOTP performance below). He goes full ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ when we come to the spoken word section: Remember last year, When you and I were here…? Just why someone from Carshalton had to put on such a strong American accent is unclear, though I guess it would have taken away from the Elvis vibes.

I’ve heard it said that this song might have proven more popular than usual in 2020, and would maybe head higher up the streaming charts thanks to the pandemic. But it appears people are simply doubling down on Mariah Carey and Brenda Lee, and who can blame them? If your Christmas actually is miserable, and lonely, then you don’t need reminding through song. As for me, I’ve always included this in my festive playlists out of habit, because it was a huge seventies Christmas #1. I’m deleting it, though, right now. (Or at least replacing it with this pop-punk cover version.)

The big question here is: what happened to the band that recorded ‘Tiger Feet’? Where did they go? Can they come back? ‘Lonely This Christmas’ is everything Mud’s first, glorious chart-topper isn’t. If only they could have recorded a Christmas hit with the energy and enthusiasm of ‘Tiger Feet’… If only. By the end, when we get a ‘Jingle Bells’ coda, and a Merry Christmas darlin’, Wherever you are… I’m done. That’s plenty. After an autumn of disco, glam rock is really starting to show its age…

Still, Mud aren’t done. Not quite yet. I’ll hold off on the bio for now. Coming up next, in my final post before Christmas, we’ll visit a festive classic that really should have been a #1…