George Michael’s Christmas Song Makes History With UK’s Christmas Number One Spot, 40 Years On

“Last Christmas” by Wham! has made pop history, topping the Christmas chart for the first time since it was released almost four decades ago.

The popular song, written by George Michael when he was a teenager and one half of the pop duo with his schoolfriend Andrew Ridgeley, has been a staple of the Christmas charts ever since, but never made it to the festive number spot before this year. (It has sat at number one before, in January 2021.)

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The song, whose official video you can watch below, was released in the winter of 1984, but was famously held off the number one spot that year by the UK’s charity anthem “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” sung by the collected efforts of Band Aid. At the time, George Michael, who also sang on the charity song, decided to donate all the profits of “Last Christmas” to the Band Aid fund to aid humanitarian efforts in the Ethiopian famine of that year.

George Michael died in 2016, but his song has continued to rise in popularity. Andrew Ridgeley called Last Christmas finally getting to the festive number one a “fantastic achievement.”

The UK’s Eurovision 2022 runner-up Sam Ryder was also this year’s festive runner-up, bagging the number two spot with “You’re Christmas to Me,” with Mariah Carey’s evergreen “All I Want For Christmas” coming in at number three.

Ridgeley told Radio Times magazine earlier this year how quickly George Michael had come up with the song when they were lounging around as teenagers one afternoon:

“It was autumn 1984. I was round at his house, the football was on the TV, and Yog [as George Michael was known to his family and friends] disappeared. Less than an hour later, he came down from his room, very excited, saying he wanted to play me something. He had the chord sequence, the intro and the chorus. It was a jaw-dropping moment. Even in its most basic, skeletal form, it was so evidently a massive hit, with its brilliant melody and distillation of Christmas.”

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