White Rabbit
The Twelve Songs of Christmas Bob Stanley
A nostalgic journey through Britain's cultural and social history told via twelve iconic Christmas number ones by one of the greatest pop historians of his generation.
The Twelve Songs Of Christmas will tell the whole story by covering a dozen Christmas number ones, stretching from Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer in 1950 – a song that feels like it's been around forever – to Wham's Last Christmas, which finally made it to number one in 2023, thirty-nine years after it was first released.
Each chapter will talk about the background behind each song, the songwriter and the performer. Not all of them will be Christmas songs – the Beatles dominated the Christmas number one slot in the sixties, and the Spice Girls likewise in the late nineties, but none of them were Christmas songs. Pink Floyd's one and only number one single soundtracked a bleak Christmas at the end of the seventies, with the country, a few months into the Thatcher era, in a depressing state of flux.
The book will also dig into the Christmas records that didn't make it to number one, including lesser-known gems like Kate Bush's December Will Be Magic Again, denied in 1980 as the world mourned the death of John Lennon, and Mariah Carey's leviathan All I Want For Christmas Is You, which has still never made it to become the Christmas number one, even in the streaming era.
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