How Wham! killed the Christmas number one

For 40 years, George Michael’s “Last Christmas” was the bridesmaid. The nearly-but-never-quite. The most successful single never to reach number one, it was pop’s great injustice.

And then the spell broke. In 2023, lifted by Spotify’s algorithm and a wave of goodwill, “Last Christmas” finally reached the top spot at Christmas, giving the much-missed pop icon and friend of Big Issue – a man fanatical about the season – the result he’d always wanted. And having scaled the mountain, the song decided it liked the view. 

In 2024, the song marked its 40th anniversary by becoming the first in UK history to claim consecutive Christmas number ones. Now, heading into December 2025, it’s poised to do it again. Current odds hover around 1/2. It may well be Christmas number one next year too. And the year after that. And the one after that as well.

“Last Christmas” is the final boss of Christmas singles. Last year it drew 12.6 million streams in Christmas week. Streaming algorithms now run the chart, and in December those algorithms assume you’re listening to the same songs as everyone else. Millions of us fire up our Christmas playlists, Alexa starts singing about snow and reindeer, and the same tracks gather the same streams in the same order. 

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The Christmas number one used to be a national event. People argued about it in pubs, placed bets, and tuned into the Top 40 to hear the result. It was news. Just look at 2009, when a public sick of being spoon-fed X Factor winners propelled Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” to Christmas number one in a mass act of protest. The tradition meant something.

Read more:

• George Michael’s incredible generosity went far beyond Band Aid
• ‘Last Christmas is woven in the fabric of Christmas’: Celebrating 40 years of Wham!’s festive classic
• Wham!’s Andrew Ridgeley on losing George Michael: ‘There’s a sadness now to Christmas’

That won’t happen again. Old music is now so dominant in December that almost nothing else gets a look-in. The 2024 Christmas Top 40 contained 27 classic Christmas songs, most at least 30 years old, some older (the oldest, Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock”, a sprightly 67).

It’s the highest concentration of catalogue songs in British chart history. In 2015, there were just six oldies in the chart. Ten years later, they make up most of it – not just Christmas songs, but the same Christmas songs. Pop has calcified. And unless the chart rules change, this is the new normal.

There’s no race any more, no drama, no possibility of surprise; just the annual resurrection of the same classics, each one hauling itself out of the grave like a tinsel-wrapped zombie. A disruptor could still break through, but it would require an enormous, highly mobilised fanbase prepared to buy music rather than stream it (the LadBaby model), or a cultural lightning strike of the kind pop rarely produces now.

Streaming tides are strong, very few can swim against them. We wanted our Christmases traditional and unchanging, ‘just like the ones we used to know’. Well, be careful what you wish for. We’ve put them on permanent loop.

George Michael got his Christmas number one, and that’s only right and proper. But at what cost? Last Christmas he gave us his heart. He will this year too. And every. Single. Year. 

The Story of the Christmas No. 1: Mistletoe and Vinyl by Marc Burrows is out now (McNidder & Grace, £14.99). These titles are available to buy or preorder from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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