Slade – ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’

20 December 1973

In a titanic Yuletide chart battle of the kind not seen again until that time you stuck it to Simon Cowell by buying a Rage Against The Machine single with a sweary chorus, Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ beat Wizzard’s ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day’ to the 1973 Christmas number one spot in the UK and in Ireland. Both songs have since become part of the ambient noise of our Christmasses. (Wizzard’s song has never topped the Irish or UK charts, though neither has Mariah’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’.)

But is their popularity waning? Slade’s song re-charted at no. 37 in Ireland for Christmas 2021 but at Christmas 2025 only appeared at no. 77; Wizzard’s song fell from no. 27 to no. 45 on our charts in that time too. And this is while all the other perennial festive favourites have held much the same chart place year on year, with Brenda Lee’s ‘Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree’ even experiencing a top ten revival in the 2020s. Have today’s automated Christmas streaming playlists become too Americanised for a bit of British glam? Are the young people rightly wary of ’70s pop stars with tinfoil clothes and zany hair? Or do the dadrockers think the old seasonal hits by Slade and Wizzard are now uncool but not the one with the homophobic and misogynistic slurs because that’s by an Artistic Poet Genius? It’s hard to say.

I doubt Slade’s joyful and triumphant ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ will disappear completely from our Christmas consciousness. It’s popular in the senses of ‘much-loved’ and ‘of the people’, especially in the relatable scenes of Christmas Day dinner with granny and snow-day high jinks. Okay, so Santa’s helpers aren’t “fairies” and you don’t go down a snowy slope on a “buggy”. Those blips are just incidental. The bit everyone treasures from ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ may look unremarkable out of context and in cold print, but the chorus lyric of “Look to the future now” is a genuinely spine-tingling pop moment, capturing all the hope, empathy and positivity that even in hard times a shared day of celebration can aspire to offer. And then there’s Noddy Holder, the Dickens of glam, with his climactic town-crier signal that festivities can begin. If we really want to rage against the machine for Christmas, let’s make sure the algorithm doesn’t consign Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ to Christmas past.