“Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl While PRS does not reveal the royalties collected by its artists, it has listed Britain’s most popular Christmas songs by radio airplay since 2012, ranking them accordingly: It is now thought to be the best-selling single of all time, its timelessness no doubt integral to its appeal.Īs 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.Ī 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. The crooner plays it at the piano before a roaring log fire in a picture-perfect Christmas Eve sequence.

It’s apparently so popular in Japan she has been known to perform it there in July.īing Crosby’s wistful “White Christmas”, written by Irving Berlin, also originated in a movie: Holiday Inn (1942). 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). MacColl, married to producer Steve Lillywhite, was brought in to sing on the demo and the rest is history. “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. 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. 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. It’s been used for adverts, it’s been used in movies, it’s been used for all sorts of things.” “It was never designed to be that way but it has taken on a life of its own, definitely. “It is definitely a pension plan, yes,” Holder told the BBC. 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 19. “Mistletoe and Wine” by Cliff Richard £100,000Īmazingly, 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. “Stop the Cavalry” by Jona Lewie £120,000

“Wonderful Christmastime” by Paul McCartney £260,000 “White Christmas” by Bing Crosby £328,000 “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey £400,000 “Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl £400,000 “Merry Xmas Everybody” by Slade £1m (in royalties per year) 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.īut research carried out for Channel 5 in 2016 did attempt to find the answer and concluded the top earning songs every year are as follows:

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