29 November 2019
With three chart-topping singles that year, including our Christmas number one, Lewis Capaldi ruled the Irish charts in 2019. His was a benign reign. ‘Before You Go’ may not vary much from his earlier ‘Someone You Loved’ and ‘Hold Me While You Wait’, but Capaldi’s likeability, sincerity and craft from those tracks also hold true here. If you’re familiar with the personal stories behind both songs, then you may recognise in ‘Before You Go’ a similar core sadness to a previous Christmas number one, East 17’s impressive ‘Stay Another Day’. It’ll be the start of the following year before Capaldi’s track tops the charts in the UK, where the festive winner was the latest episode of enforced jollity from LadBaby, the perfect Christmas number one act for a Brexit Britain which had just made Boris Johnson buffoon-in-chief.
Billie Eilish’s subdued ‘Everything I Wanted’ followed by the desolated ‘Before You Go’ may seem a sombre way for us to end the ’10s, decade of Jedward and Katy Perry. That year also, there were no festive songs, old or new, in Ireland’s Christmas top ten. In hindsight, though, this chart-top mood for December 2019 seems prescient. Unless you were a World Health Organization scientist with a close eye on worrying developments that month around a wet market in Wuhan, no one had any idea just what was in store for us in 2020.
