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Every year we hear the same Christmas songs again and again and again, the playlist seldom changing.
While the supermarkets might stick rigidly to Slade and Wizzard , and the high street coffee shops prefer the gingerbread-and-eggnog stylings of Michael Buble, Norah Jones or the Rat Pack, variation is minimal and certain tracks just will not go away.
You might wonder how much cash the writers of the more ubiquitous seasonal standards squirrel away every year and whether it’s really possible to live on the royalties.
In Nick Hornby’s novel About a Boy (1998), Will Freeman does precisely that, living an agreeably idle bachelor life on the proceeds of a festive single written by his late father.
The truth is, it’s hard to say for sure precisely how much The Pogues or Mariah Carey have coined from their work as the Performing Right Society (PRS) does not reveal the answer in the interest of protecting its members’ privacy.
But research carried out by Channel 5 in 2016 did attempt to find the answer and concluded the top earning songs every year are as follows:
“Merry Xmas Everybody” by Slade £1m (in royalties per year) “Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl £400,000 “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey £400,000 “White Christmas” by Bing Crosby £328,000 “Last Christmas” by Wham! £300,000 “Wonderful Christmastime” by Paul McCartney £260,000 “Stop the Cavalry” by Jona Lewie £120,000 “2000 Miles” by The Pretenders £102,000 “Mistletoe and Wine” by Cliff Richard £100,000 “Stay Another Day” by East 17 £97,000 Amazingly, Roy Wood’s “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday” missed out on the top 10, which is hard to accept given the relentlessness with which he and his fellow glam rockers assault the senses every December.
The above reckoning suggests Slade’s Noddy Holder and Jim Lea take home a cool £500,000 annually each, from a song that was number one in the UK charts in both 1973 and 1989.
“It is definitely a pension plan, yes,” Holder told the BBC.
“It was never designed to be that way but it has taken on a life of its own, definitely... It’s been used for adverts, it’s been used in movies, it’s been used for all sorts of things.”
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Sign up The barstool romance of “Fairytale of New York” – about the love-hate relationship between a pair of Irish-American immigrants seemingly bound to one another however much they might resist it – has deservedly kept Shane MacGowan and Jem Finer in pints of stout since 1987.
The track was actually recorded at the height of summer after producer Elvis Costello challenged MacGowan to write a festive duet to be sung with bassist Caitlin O’Riordan, his wife and the latter’s bandmate.
“I sat down, opened the sherry, got the peanuts out and pretended it was Christmas,” MacGowan recalled in an interview with Melody Maker at the time, lifting the title from a 1973 novel by JP Donleavy.
MacColl, married to producer Steve Lillywhite, was brought in to sing on the demo and the rest is history.
Show all 18 1 /18The 18 greatest Christmas songs of all time – ranked The 18 greatest Christmas songs of all time – ranked 18) "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" – John Lennon and Yoko Ono There’s a caveat to the optimistic message of the song’s title. “War is over,” sing a choir of children over festive tambourines, but only, they add, “If you want it.” Having analysed the success of his previous single, “Imagine,” the former Beatle noted, “Now I understand what you have to do: Put your political message across with a little honey.” On this, an anti-Vietnam war protest song wrapped up in sleigh bells, strings and an anthemic melody, he does just that. AP
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The 18 greatest Christmas songs of all time – ranked 17) "Mary's Boy Child/ Oh My Lord" – Boney M Taking Harry Belafonte’s 1956 hit “Mary’s Boy Child” and singing it in medley with new song “Oh My Lord”, Boney M’s No 1 hit combined Christmas carol-like harmonies with Euro disco, steel drums and a reggae sensibility. It might sound disastrous – but somehow it works. AP
The 18 greatest Christmas songs of all time – ranked 16) "2,000 Miles" – The Pretenders “He’s gone/2,000 miles/Is very far,” sings Chrissie Hynde, above a twanging guitar riff in “2,000 Miles”, her serpentine melody stretching each syllable into several. You could easily assume it’s about two separated lovers, but it was actually written for the band’s original guitar player, James Honeyman-Scott, who died of a drug overdose a year earlier at the age of 25. The song is desperately bleak – as is the case with all the best Christmas songs – but with a note of festive hopefulness too. “The children were singing/He’ll be back at Christmas time.” AP
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The 18 greatest Christmas songs of all time – ranked 15) "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" – Brenda Lee Brenda Lee was just 13 years old when she made herself a rockabilly legend thanks to the recording of this party classic. It always reminds me of scenes in The Santa Clause (one of the best ever Christmas films) where the jaunty number was heavily featured, along with seminal holiday movie Home Alone. RO
The 18 greatest Christmas songs of all time – ranked 14) "Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!" – Dean Martin Few Christmas songs are as cosy as this one. Dean Martin’s smooth, rich voice is as warming as a good glass of whisky; paired with sweeping, romantic strings and a chirpy flute, “Let it Snow!” conjures up images of stockings hanging up over the chimney, a Christmas tree glinting with baubles, and a frost-tinted window with snow falling outside. RO
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The 18 greatest Christmas songs of all time – ranked 13) "Walking in the Air" – The Snowman / Peter Auty Though Aled Jones tends to get the credit for this haunting masterpiece, it is actually the voice of choirboy Peter Auty that appears in the climactic scene of the wordless 1982 animation The Snowman. He wasn’t credited though, and when his voice broke and Jones’s version reached number five in the UK charts, he was almost written out of history. In truth, though, whichever version you hear, the song’s sweeping grandeur is goosebumps-inducing. AP
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The 18 greatest Christmas songs of all time – ranked 12) "Peace on Earth/ Little Drummer Boy" – David Bowie/ Bing Crosby Recorded for Bing Crosby’s TV special Merrie Olde Christmas, and framed around a strange scripted exchange of banter between the two, this mash-up only came about because Bowie hated the song, “Little Drummer Boy”, that he had been asked on the show to sing. So songwriters Ian Fraser and Larry Grossman, alongside the show’s scriptwriter, cobbled together “Peace on Earth” to serve as a counterpoint, while Crosby performed the intended song. They recorded the resulting medley after less than an hour of rehearsal, and five weeks later, Crosby died. AP
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The 18 greatest Christmas songs of all time – ranked 11) "Santa Baby" – Eartha Kitt “Eartha Kitt is the sexiest woman in the world. You don’t write Christmas songs that are sexy. How are we going to do that?” Poor Phil Springer. Half of the songwriting team behind the super sultry “Santa Baby” was always slightly resentful that his biggest hit was a festive one. Well, I’m grateful for it. Eartha Kitt’s huskily delivered letter to Santa Claus is undoubtedly the sexiest Christmas song of all time, and has been covered by everyone from Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift to Madonna (I don’t talk about Madge’s attempt) and Michael Buble. Yet it’s Kitt’s version you find yourself coming back to. RO
The 18 greatest Christmas songs of all time – ranked 10) "The Christmas Song" – Nat King Cole This Mel Torme composition was originally written, according to Torme, with Bob Wells as a mind-over-matter attempt to stay cool during a stifling summer day in 1945. It’s one of Cole’s most enduring hits, and one of the most beloved of all Christmas songs. RO
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The 18 greatest Christmas songs of all time – ranked 9) "I Believe in Father Christmas" – Greg Lake This Mel Torme composition was originally written, according to Torme, with Bob Wells as a mind-over-matter attempt to stay cool during a stifling summer day in 1945. It’s one of Cole’s most enduring hits, and one of the most beloved of all Christmas songs. RO
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The 18 greatest Christmas songs of all time – ranked 8) "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" – Andy Williams Andy Williams’ classic brings to mind the kind of big, brash Christmas’s you see in American films – lots of presents, blazing fireplaces and a huge feast – but also plays heavily on the importance of spending time with your loved ones. It consistently appears in the top 10s of Christmas song rankings, and more than 50 years in, the 1963 staple shows no signs of wearing out. RO
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The 18 greatest Christmas songs of all time – ranked 7) 'Stop the Cavalry" – Jona Lewie It was “just another anti-war song” until Jona Lewie threw a kazoo into the mix. The English singer-songwriter never intended “Stop the Cavalry” to become a Christmas single, but the festive mention in the line “I wish I was at home for Christmas”, along with the addition of a Salvation Army brass band and tubular bell, was enough to convince listeners. The song sold 4m copies upon its release and was only kept off the top slot that Christmas because of John Lennon’s death and consequent position at numbers one and two on the UK singles chart. Lewie told The Guardian in 2015 that he earns more from “Stop the Cavalry” than the rest of his songs put together. RO
The 18 greatest Christmas songs of all time – ranked 6) "Driving Home for Christmas" – Chris Rea In 1978, Rea thought it was all over. His record contract was done, and his manager had just told him he was quitting. Rea wanted to get home from London’s Abbey Road studios to Middlesborough, but his record company wouldn’t pay for a ticket. “My wife got in our old Austin Mini, drove all the way down from Middlesbrough to Abbey Road studios to pick me up, and we set off back straight away,” he told The Guardian. “Then it started snowing. We had £220 and I was fiddling with it all the way home. We kept getting stuck in traffic and I’d look across at the other drivers, who all looked so miserable. Jokingly, I started singing: “We’re driving home for Christmas…” RO
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The 18 greatest Christmas songs of all time – ranked 5) "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" – Frank Sinatra Sinatra’s version of this classic Christmas song opens on his isolated vocals before gradually introducing the swooning choir and tender strings section. And the lyrics: “Have yourself a merry little Christmas/Make the Yuletide gay / From now on your troubles will be miles away/Here we are as in olden days/Happy golden days of yore/Faithful friends who are dear to us / Gather near to us once more.” RO
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The 18 greatest Christmas songs of all time – ranked 4) "All I Want for Christmas is You" – Mariah Carey One of the best moments on American Idol in 2014 was an exchange between judges Nicki Minaj and Mariah Carey, who famously did not get on during the series. As a contestant/Mariah stan [“stalker fan”] told the star he loved “All I Want for Christmas is You“ and hailed it as the “best modern-day Christmas song”, Minaj threw a little shade by saying: “It sure was, wasn’t it?”, emphasis on the ”was“ very much intended. Carey’s response was immediate and dismissive: “Still is, dahling!” She earns a reported £4000,000 in royalties from the track each year, with its lasting popularity testament to just how good a song it is. Its unyielding Christmas spirit and those diminished (infectious) C minor chords combine for the ultimate experience of festive cheer, with a perfect mix of nostalgia and pop sentimentalism thrown in for good measure. RO
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The 18 greatest Christmas songs of all time – ranked 3) "Last Christmas" – Wham! George Michael wrote, performed, produced and played every single instrument on this song, where the narrator looks back with sadness on a past relationship. As with “Fairytale of New York”, you have an upbeat, cheerful rhythm and chirpy instrumentation, against the melancholy of unrequited love in the lyrics, with the suggestion that it was given away too hastily (“This year, to save me from tears/I’ll give it to someone special”). RO
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The 18 greatest Christmas songs of all time – ranked 2) "Fairytale of New York" – The Pogues Some of the best songs combine uplifting instrumentation that contrasts with lyrics that can be downright miserable, and such is the case for “Fairytale of New York”. It has none of the sickly sweet sentimentality of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” or Wham!’s “Last Christmas”. “Fairytale of New York” is a drunken hymn for those with broken dreams and abandoned hopes. Its narrator, an Irish immigrant, is thrown into a drunk tank to sleep off his Christmas Eve binge. Hearing an old man sing the Irish ballad “The Rare Old Mountain Dew”, he begins to dream about the past, and so begins the story of two people who fell in love in America, only to see their plans of a bright future dashed. Shane MacGowan’s slurring, bitter delivery of those opening vocals is played out over romanticised piano chords, then to those wonderful, jaunty strings, with Terry Woods’ mandolin part giving the song an additional Irish brogue. RO
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The 18 greatest Christmas songs of all time – ranked 1) "Winter Wonderland" – Bing Crosby Richard (Dick) Smith was suffering from tuberculosis, an illness which had plagued him since a child, from his bed in a sanatorium in Philadelphia. Gazing longingly out of his window at the snow, he wrote a poem describing all the things he would do when he was well again. He was inspired by the views of people playing in the park across the street from his family home on Church Street, where he’d lived with his mother, brother and two sisters. His father had died when he was a child. After he was finished, he took the lyrics to his friend Felix Bernard, a professional pianist. A copy of “Winter Wonderland” found its way to Joey Nash, lead singer of the Richard Himber Orchestra, who recorded it in 1934. Guy Lombardo heard Nash’s recording and made a record of his own, which became a hit that December. Smith died in 1935 before “Winter Wonderland” became a Christmas hit again for Ted Weems, and long before Crosby recorded his, and arguably the most famous, version. RO
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Mariah’s precision-engineered nuclear warhead of a track only peaked at number two in the UK when it was released in 1994 but its popularity has grown and grown in the interim, thanks in no small part due to its use at the cloying climax of Love Actually (2003).
It’s apparently so popular in Japan she has been known to perform it there in July.
Bing Crosby’s wistful “White Christmas”, written by Irving Berlin, also originated in a movie: Holiday Inn (1942). The crooner plays it at the piano before a roaring log fire in a picture-perfect Christmas Eve sequence.
It is now thought to be the best-selling single of all time, its timelessness no doubt integral to its appeal.
As for Wham!, their melancholy lament for lost love is the best-selling number two record in British chart history, beaten to the top spot in 1984 by the charity single “Do They Know it’s Christmas?” by Band Aid, which has not proven to have quite the same longevity, despite its fine intentions.
Show all 40 1 /40The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), The Velvet Underground It was Andy Warhol who wanted Lou Reed and John Cale to let his beautiful new friend Nico sing with their avant-garde rock band. Truthfully, though, Victor Frankenstein himself couldn’t have sewed together a creature out of more mismatched body parts than this album. It starts with a child’s glockenspiel and ends in deafening feedback, noise, and distortion. Side one track one, “Sunday Morning”, is a wistful ballad fit for a cool European chanteuse sung by a surly Brooklynite. “Venus in Furs” is a jangling, jagged-edge drone about a sex whipping not given lightly. “I’ll Be Your Mirror” is a love song. European Son is rock’n’roll turned sonic shockwave. That’s before you even get on to the song about buying and shooting heroin that David Bowie heard on a test pressing and called “the future of music”. Half a century on, all you have to do is put electricity through The Velvet Underground & Nico to realise that he was right. Chris Harvey
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You (1967), Aretha Franklin When Jerry Wexler signed the daughter of a violent, philandering preacher to Atlantic records, he "took her to church, sat her down at the piano, and let her be herself". The Queen of Soul gave herself the same space. You can hear her listening to the band, biding her time before firing up her voice to demand R-E-S-P-E-C-T 50 years before the #MeToo movement. Helen Brown
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Master of Puppets (1986), Metallica Despite not featuring any singles, Metallica’s third album was the UK rock radio breakthrough they’d been looking for. In 1986, they released one of the best metal records of all time, which dealt with the potency and very nature of control, meshing beauty and raw human ugliness together on tracks like “Damage Inc” and “Orion”. This album is about storytelling – the medieval-influenced guitar picks on opener “Battery” should be enough to tell you that. Although that was really the only medieval imagery they conjured up – they ripped Dungeons & Dragons clichés out of the lyrics and replaced them with the apocalypse, with bassist Cliff Burton, drummer Lars Ulrich, guitarist Kirk Hammett and singer/rhythm guitarist James Hetfield serving as the four horsemen. Roisin O’Connor
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Remain in Light (1980), Talking Heads “Facts are simple and facts are straight / Facts are lazy and facts are late…” sang David Byrne, submerging personal and planetary anxieties about fake news and conspicuous consumption in dense, layers and loops of Afrobeat-indebted funk. Propulsive polyrhythms drive against the lyrical pleas for us to stop and take stock. Same as it ever was. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Catch a Fire (Jamaican version) (1973), Bob Marley and the Wailers The album that carried reggae music to the four corners of the Earth and made Bob Marley an international superstar also set the political tone for many artists to follow. Marley sang of life “where the living is hardest” in “Concrete Jungle” and looked back to Jamaica’s ignoble slaving past – “No chains around my feet but I’m not free”. He packed the album with beautiful melodic numbers, such as “High Tide and Low Tide”, and rhythmic dance tracks like “Kinky Reggae”. Released outside of Jamaica by Island Records with guitar overdubs and ornamentation, the original Jamaican version is a stripped-down masterpiece. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Revolver (1966), The Beatles An unprecedented 220 hours of studio experimentation saw George Martin and The Beatles looping, speeding, slowing and spooling tapes backwards to create a terrifically trippy new sound. The mournful enigma of McCartney’s “For No One” and the psychedelia of Lennon’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “She Said, She Said” can still leave you standing hypnotised over the spinning vinyl, wondering if the music is coming out or being sucked back in. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Like a Prayer (1989), Madonna It may be the most “serious” album she’s ever made, yet Like a Prayer is still Madonna at her most accessible – pulling no punches in topics from religion to the dissolution of her marriage. In 1989, Madonna’s personal life was tabloid fodder: a tumultuous marriage to actor Sean Penn finally ended in divorce, and she was causing controversy with the “Like a Prayer” video and its burning crosses. On the gospel abandon of the title track, she takes the listener’s breath away with her sheer ambition. Where her past records had been reflections of the modern music that influenced her – Like a Prayer saw her pay homage to bands like Sly & the Family Stone, and Simon & Garfunkel. The album was also about an artist taking control over her own narrative, after releasing records that asked the audience – and the press – to like her. RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Led Zeppelin IV (1971), Led Zeppelin Millennials coming at this album can end up feeling like the guy who saw Hamlet and complained it was all quotations. Jimmy Page’s juggernaut riffs and Robert Plant’s hedonistic wails set the bench mark for all subsequent heavy, hedonistic rock. But it’s worth playing the whole thing to experience the full mystic, monolithic ritual of the thing. Stairway? Undeniable. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The Best of the Shangri-Las (1996), The Shangri-Las Oh no. Oh no. Oh no no no no no, no one ever did teen heartbreak quite like the Shangri-Las. Long before the Spice Girls packaged attitude for popular consumption, songwriter Ellie Greenwich was having trouble with a group of teenagers who had grown up in a tough part of Queen’s – “with their gestures, and language, and chewing the gum and the stockings ripped up their legs”. But the Shangri-Las sang with an ardour that was so streetwise, passionate and raw that it still reaches across more than half a century without losing any of its power. "Leader of the Pack" (co-written by Greenwich) may be their best-known song, but they were never a novelty act. This compilation captures them at their early Sixties peak. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), David Bowie Flamboyance, excess, eccentricity – this is the breakthrough album that asserted Bowie as glam rock’s new icon, surpassing T Rex. He may have come to rue his Ziggy Stardust character, but with it, Bowie transcended artists seeking authenticity via more mundane means. It was his most ambitious album – musically and thematically – that, like Prince, saw him unite his greatest strengths from previous works and pull off one of the great rock and roll albums without losing his sense of humour, or the wish to continue entertaining his fans. “I’m out to bloody entertain, not just get up onstage and knock out a few songs,” he declared. “I’m the last person to pretend I’m a radio. I’d rather go out and be a colour television set.” RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Unknown Pleasures (1979), Joy Division In their brief career, ended by the suicide of 23-year-old singer Ian Curtis, Joy Division created two candidates for the best album by anyone ever. Closer may be a final flowering, but Unknown Pleasures is more tonally consistent, utterly unlike anything before or since. The mood is an all-pervading ink-black darkness, but there is a spiritual force coming out of the grooves that is so far beyond pop or rock, it feels almost Dostoevskyan. There are classic songs – "Disorder", "She’s Lost Control" and "New Dawn Fades" – and for those who’d swap every note Eric Clapton ever played for one of Peter Hook’s basslines, the sequence at 4:20 on "I Remember Nothing" is perhaps the single most thrilling moment in the entire Joy Division catalogue. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Hejira (1976), Joni Mitchell Though her 1971 album, Blue, is usually chosen for these kinds of lists, Mitchell surpassed its silvery, heartbroken folk five years later with a record that found her confidently questioning its culturally conditioned expectations of womanhood. Against an ambiguous, jazzy landscape, her deepening, difficult voice weighs romance and domesticity against the adventure of “strange pillows” and solitude. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Body Talk (2010), Robyn The answer to whether Robyn could follow up the brilliance of her self-titled 2005 album came in a burst of releases in 2010, the EPs Body Talk Pt 1, Pt 2 and Pt3, and this 15-track effort, essentially a compilation album. It includes different versions of some tracks, such as the non-acoustic version of “Hang With Me” (and we can argue all night about that one), but leaves well alone when it comes to the single greatest electronic dance track since “I Feel Love”, “Dancing On My Own”. Body Talk is simply jammed with great songs. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Off The Wall (1979), Michael Jackson “I will study and look back on the whole world of entertainment and perfect it,” wrote Jackson as he turned 21 and shook off his cute, controlled child-star imagery to release his jubilant, fourth solo album. Produced by Quincy Jones, the sophisticated disco funk nails the balance between tight, tendon-twanging grooves and liberated euphoria. Glitter ball magic. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Illmatic (1994), Nas How good can rap get? This good. There are albums where the myth can transcend the music – not on Illmatic, where Nas vaulted himself into the ranks of the greatest MCs in 1994, with an album that countless artists since have tried – and failed – to emulate. Enlisting the hottest producers around – Pete Rock, DJ Premier, Q-Tip, L.E.S and Large Professor – was a move that Complex blamed for “ruining hip hop”, while still praising Nas’s record, because it had a lasting impact on the use of multiple producers on rap albums. Nas used the sounds of the densely-populated New York streets he grew up on. You hear the rattle of the steel train that opens the record, along with the cassette tape hissing the verse from a teenage Nasty Nas on Main Source’s 1991 track “Live at the BBQ”: ‘When I was 12, I went to Hell for snuffing Jesus.” RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Trans-Europe Express (1977), Kraftwerk This is the album that changes everything. The synthesised sounds coming out of Kraftwerk’s Kling-Klang studios had already become pure and beautiful on 1975’s Radio-Activity, but on Trans-Europe Express, their sophistication subtly shifts all future possibilities. The familiar quality of human sweetness and melancholy in Ralf Hutter’s voice is subsumed into the machine as rhythms interlock and bloom in side two’s mini-symphony that begins with the title track. Released four months before Giorgio Moroder’s "I Feel Love", Trans-Europe Express influenced everything from hip-hop to techno. All electronic dance music starts here. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Kind of Blue (1959), Miles Davis With the sketches of melody only written down hours before recording, the world’s best-selling jazz record still feels spontaneous and unpredictable. Davis’s friend George Russell once explained that the secret of its tonal jazz was to use every note in a scale “without having to meet the deadline of a particular chord”. Kind of Blue is unrepeatably cool. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Astral Weeks (1968), Van Morrison “If I ventured in the slipstream, between the viaducts of your dream…” To enter this musical cathedral, where folk, jazz and blue-eyed soul meet is always to feel a sense of awe. Recorded in just two eight-hour sessions, in which Morrison first played the songs to the assembled musicians then told them to do their own thing, Astral Weeks still feels as if it was made yesterday. Morrison’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics within the richness of the acoustic setting – double bass, classical guitar and flute – make this as emotionally affecting an album as any in rock and pop. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die West Side Story Soundtrack (1961) “Life is all right in America / If you're all white in America” yelp the immigrants in this passionate and political musical relocating of Romeo and Juliet to Fifites New York. Leonard Bernstein’s sophisticated score is a melting pot of pop, classical and Latin music; Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics sharp as a flick knife. An unanswered prayer for a united and forgiving USA. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Sign o' the Times (1987), Prince Sign o’ the Times is Prince’s magnum opus from a catalogue of masterworks – a double album spanning funk, rock, R&B and most essentially, soul. It is the greatest articulation of his alchemic experiments with musical fusion – the sum of several projects Prince was working on during his most creatively fruitful year. On Sign o’ the Times, the bass is king – Prince cemented his guitar god status on Purple Rain. There are tracks that drip with sex, and love songs like “Adore”, which remains one of the greatest of all time. Stitched together with the utmost care, as if he were writing a play with a beginning, a middle and an end, the album is a landmark in both pop and in art. RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Pet Sounds (1966), The Beach Boys Caught in the psychological undertow of family trauma and all those commercial surf songs, 23-year-old Brian Wilson had a panic attack and retreated to the studio to write this dreamlike series of songs whose structural tides washed them way beyond the preppy formulas of drugstore jukeboxes. Notes pinged from vibraphones and coke cans gleam in the strange, sad waves of bittersweet melody. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Ys (2006), Joanna Newsom Weave a circle round her thrice… Joanna Newsom is dismissed by some as kookily faux-naif, but her second album, before she trained out the childlike quality from her voice, may be the most enchanted record ever made. At times, she sounds other-worldly, sitting at her harp, singing to herself of sassafras and Sisyphus, but then a phrase will carry you off suddenly to the heart’s depths – “Still, my dear, I’d have walked you to the edge of the water”. Ys’s pleasures are not simple or immediate. Newsom’s unusual song structures, with their fragmented melodies, and strange and beautiful orchestral arrangements by 63-year-old Van Dyke Parks, take time to work their magic. But once you’re bewitched, Ys’s spell never wears off. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988), Public Enemy Public Enemy’s second album is hip-hop’s game-changing moment, where a new musical form that arrived fully born after years of development away from meddling outsiders found its radical voice. It Takes a Nation of Millions… is still one of the most powerful, provocative albums ever made, “Here is a land that never gave a damn / About a brother like me,” raps Chuck D on “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos”. Producer Hank Shocklee creates a hard-edged sound from samples that pay homage to soul greats such as James Brown and Isaac Hayes, and Flavor Flav gives it an unmistakeable zest. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Pink Floyd It’s easy to knock these white, male, middle-class proggers, with their spaceship full of technology and their monolithic ambitions. But the walloping drums, operatic howls and “quiet desperation” of this concept album about the various forms of madness still resonates with the unbalanced, overwhelmed and alienated parts of us all. Play loud, alone and after dark. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998), Lauryn Hill Lauryn Hill raised the game for an entire genre with this immense and groundbreaking work. Flipping between two tones – sharp and cold, and sensual and smoky – the former Fugees member stepped out from rap’s misogynist status quo and drew an audience outside of hip hop thanks to her melding of soul, reggae and R&B, and the recruitment of the likes of Mary J Blige and D’Angelo. Its sonic appeal has a lot to do with the lo-fi production and warm instrumentation, often comprised of a low thrumming bass, tight snares and doo-wop harmonies. But Hill’s reggae influences are what drive the album’s spirit: preaching love and peace but also speaking out against unrighteous oppression. Even today, it’s one of the most uplifting and inspiring records around. RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971), Serge Gainsbourg The great French singer-songwriter provocateur probably wouldn’t get too many takers today for a concept album about a tender love between his middle-aged self and a teenage girl he knocks off her bicycle in his Rolls-Royce. But, musically, this cult album is sublime, an extraordinary collision of funk bass, spoken-word lyrics and Jean-Claude Vannier’s heavenly string arrangements. “Ballade de Melody Nelson”, sung by Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, is one of his most sublimely gorgeous songs. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die In My Own Time (1971), Karen Dalton There’s nothing contrived about Karen Dalton’s ability to flip out the guts of familiar songs and give them a dry, cracked folk-blues twist. Expanding the emotional and narrative boundaries of songs like Percy Sledge’s When a Man Loves a Woman is just what she did. Why has it taken the world so long to appreciate her? HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Let England Shake (2011), PJ Harvey “Goddamn Europeans, take me back to beautiful England.” PJ Harvey may have sounded like she was channelling Boris and Nige when she made this striking album in 2015, but few Brexiteers would want to take this journey with her. Let England Shake digs deep into the soil of the land, where buried plowshares lie waiting to be beaten into swords. Death is everywhere, sometimes in its most visceral form: “I’ve seen soldiers fall like lumps of meat,” she sings on “The Words That Maketh Murder”, “Arms and legs are in the trees.” Musically, though, it’s ravishing: Harvey employs autoharp, zither, rhodes piano, xylophone and trombone to create a futuristic folk sound that’s strikingly original yet could almost be from an earlier century. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Boy in da Corner (2003), Dizzee Rascal It’s staggering to listen back to this album and remember Dizzee was just 18-years-old when he released it. Rising through the UK garage scene as a member of east London’s Roll Deep crew, the MC born Dylan Mills allegedly honed his skills in production after being excluded from every one of his classes, apart from music. If you want any sense of how ahead of the game Dizzee was, just listen to the opening track “Sittin’ Here”. While 2018 has suffered a spate of half-hearted singles playing on the listener’s sense of nostalgia for simpler times, 15 years ago Dizzee longed for the innocence of childhood because of what he was seeing in the present day: teenage pregnancies, police brutality, his friends murdered on the streets or lost to a lifestyle of crime and cash. Boy in da Corner goes heavy on cold, uncomfortably disjointed beats, synths that emulate arcade games and police sirens, and Dizzee himself delivering bars in his trademark, high-pitched squawk. RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Hounds of Love (1985), Kate Bush Proof that a woman could satisfy her unique artistic vision and top the charts without kowtowing to industry expectations, Kate Bush’s self-produced masterpiece explored the extreme range of her oceanic emotions from the seclusion of a cutting-edge studio built in the garden of her 17th-century farmhouse. The human vulnerability of her voice and traditional instruments are given an electrical charge by her pioneering use of synthesisers. Thrilling and immersive. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Blue Lines (1991), Massive Attack A uniquely British take on hip hop and soul that continues to influence booming modern genres like grime and dubstep, the Bristol collective’s debut gave a cool new pulse to the nation’s grit and grey. You can smell ashtrays on greasy spoon tables in Tricky’s whisper and feel the rain on your face in Shara Nelson’s exhilarating improvisations. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Surfer Rosa (1987), Pixies It only takes 20 seconds of opening track Bone Machine to realise Pixies and producer Steve Albini have stripped down the sound of rock ’n’ roll and rebuilt it piece by piece. The angry smack of Led Zep drums, ripe bass, and sheet metal guitar straight off the Stooges’ Detroit production line are separated and recombined. Pixies’ sound is already complete before Black Francis embarks on one of his elusive pop cult narratives (“your bone’s got a little machine”). The tension between the savagery of his vocals and Kim Deal’s softer melodic tone won’t reach its perfect balance until their next album but their debut, Surfer Rosa is gigantic, and deserving of big, big love. Its “loud, quiet, loud” tectonics would prove so influential that Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain would later say he “was basically trying to rip off the Pixies”. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Talking Timbuktu (1994), Ali Farka Toure and Ry Cooder If you ever doubt the possibility of relaxed and respectful conversation across the world’s cultural divisions, then give yourself an hour with this astonishing collaboration between Mali’s Ali Farka Toure (who wrote all but one of the tracks) and California’s Ry Cooder (whose slide guitar travels through them like a pilgrim). Desert meets Delta Blues. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The Great Gospel Men (1993), Various artists Compared to the blues, the incalculable influence of gospel music on pop, soul and rock ’n’ roll has been underplayed. It can be found in every song on this brilliant 27-track compilation. If you can’t hear James Brown in the foot-stomping opener “Move on Up a Little Higher” by Brother Joe May, you’re not listening hard enough. The road to Motown from “Lord, Lord, Lord” by Professor Alex Bradford is narrow indeed, but you could still take a side-turning and follow his ecstatic whoops straight to Little Richard, who borrowed them, and on to the Beatles who copied them from him. The swooping chord changes in James Cleveland’s “My Soul Looks Back” are magnificent. All the irreplaceable soul voices, from Aretha Franklin to Bobby Womack, were steeped in gospel. This is a great place to hear where they came from. Companion album The Great Gospel Women is a marvel, too. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Hopelessness (2016), Anonhi “A lot of the music scene is just a wanking, self-congratulatory boys club,” said this angel-voiced, transgender artist in 2012. Four years later, the seismic drums and radical ecofeminist agenda of Hopelessness shook that club’s crumbling foundations to dust. The horrors of drone warfare, paedophilia and global warming are held up to the bright lights in disconcertingly beautiful rage. HB
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die In Utero (1993), Nirvana Kurt Cobain had one goal with In Utero: to pull Nirvana away from what he dubbed the “candy-ass” sound on Nevermind – the album that had turned them into one of the biggest rock bands on the planet – and take them back to punk-rock. He asked Pixies’ producer Steve Albini to oversee production. It didn’t exactly eschew commercial success upon release (it went on to sell 15m copies worldwide), but the heaviness the band felt as they recorded it bears down on the listener from the opening track. Disheartened by the media obsession with his personal life and the fans clamouring for the same old shit, In Utero is pure, undiluted rage. “GO AWAYYYYYYYYYYY” he screams on “Scentless Apprentice”, capturing the essence of Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume: Story of a Murderer and using it as a metaphor for his disgust at the music industry, and the press. RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Curtis (1971), Curtis Mayfield Curtis Mayfield had been spinning golden soul music from doo-wop roots with The Impressions for more than a decade before releasing his first solo album, which contains some of his greatest songs. While some point to the 1972 Blaxploitation soundtrack Superfly as the definitive Mayfield album, Curtis is deeper and more joyous, its complex arrangements masterly. Mayfield’s sweet falsetto sings of Nixon’s bland reassurances over the fuzz-bass of “(Don’t Worry) If There Is a Hell Below We’re All Going to Go”; doleful horns give the politically conscious “We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue” a profound emotional undertow; “Move On Up” is simply one of the most exhilarating songs in pop. To spend time with Curtis is to be in the presence of a beautiful soul. CH
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Rumours (1977), Fleetwood Mac Before they went their own way, Fleetwood Mac decided to tell a story that would be the quintessential marker for American rock culture in the Seventies. As Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks tossed the charred remains of their relationship at one another on “Dreams” and “Go Your Own Way”, the rest of the band conjured up the warm West Coast harmonies, the laid back California vibes of the rhythm section and the clear highs on “Gold Dust Woman”, in such a way that Rumours would become the definitive sound of the era. At the time of its release, it was the fastest-selling LP of all time; its success turned Fleetwood Mac into a cultural phenomenon. RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Are You Experienced? (1967), Jimi Hendrix A virtual unknown to rock fans just a year before – Hendrix used Are You Experienced? to assert himself as a guitar genius who could combine pop, blues, rock, R&B, funk and psychedelia in a way no other artist had before. That’s even without the essential contributions of drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding, who handed Are You Experienced? the rhythmic bridge between jazz and rock. Few album openers are as exquisite as “Purple Haze”. Few tracks are as gratifying, as sexy, as the strut on “Foxy Lady”. And few songs come close to the existential bliss caused by “The Wind Cries Mary”. Hendrix’s attack on the guitar contrasted against the more polished virtuosos in rock at the time – yet it is his raw ferocity that we find ourselves coming back to. Few debuts have changed the course of rock music as Hendrix did with his. RO
The 40 best albums to listen to before you die We Are Family (1979), Sister Sledge Disco’s crowning glory is this album that Chic’s Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards made with Kathy Sledge and her sisters Debbie, Joni and Kim. Nile and ’Nard were at the peak of their powers, classic songs were pouring out of them – We Are Family was released in the same year as the epochal “Good Times” by Chic – and this album has four of them, “Lost in Music”, “He’s the Greatest Dancer”, “Thinking of You” and the title track itself. Sister Sledge gave Rodgers a chance to work with warmer, gutsier vocals than the cool voices he used to give Chic records such laid-back style and the result is a floor-filling dance party, punctuated by mellow ballads. CH
A Facebook campaign to get “Last Christmas” to number one in 2017, in honour of George Michael’s passing on Christmas Day 2016, narrowly failed to achieve its goal: the song charted third behind Eminem and Ed Sheeran.
While the PRS is coy on the subject of royalties, it has listed Britain’s most popular Christmas songs by radio airplay since 2012, ranking them accordingly:
“Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday” by Wizzard “Last Christmas” by Wham! “Merry Xmas Everybody” by Slade “Stop the Cavalry” by Jona Lewie Given that the above listing is grounded firmly in British tastes – and in the 1970s and 80s – it’s interesting to cross-reference it with Spotify’s worldwide popularity league table, which contains several much newer international entries.
According to new research from Slingo in December 2022, which assesses how many times a given song was added to a playlist, BTS vocalist and K-Pop superstar V is the new champ, appearing twice in the top five.
“Christmas Tree” by V (2,172 playlist appearances) “All I Want For Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey (1,522) “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” by Michael Buble (916) “Last Christmas” by Wham! (813) “Sweet Night” by V (765) “Underneath the Tree” by Kelly Clarkson (737) “Santa Tell Me” by Ariana Grande (717) “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” by Andy Williams (655) “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” by John Lennon (627) “Holly Jolly Christmas” by Michael Buble (567) Another interesting approach was taken by Casino Kings , which came out with its own list this year ranking the classics by social media likes, determined by adding up the number of likes the official music videos for each song had garned after being posted on Facebook, producing the following top 10.
“Last Christmas” by Wham! (10.9m likes) “Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl (3m) “All I Want For Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey (1.5m) “Driving Home for Christmas” by Chris Rea (1.3m) “Merry Christmas” by Ed Sheeran and Elton John (699,000) “Blue Christmas” by Elvis Presley (605,000) “Christmas in Hollis” by Run-DMC (581,000) “Mistletoe” by Justin Bieber (414,000) “Father Christmas” by The Kinks (279,000) “Santa Claus is Comin' to Town” by Bruce Springsteen (250,000)
Arguably, it’s time to shake up our approach to popular Christmas music – The Ramones, The Sonics, Tom Waits, Sufjan Stevens, John Prine, Half Man Half Biscuit, Isaac Hayes and the outrageous Clarence Carter all wrote Yuletide anthems that deserve a far wider audience.
But tradition is a stubborn business and MacGowan and MacColl, at least, deserve their place among the most enduring seasonal hymns and carols.
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