WHAM! took the festive number 1 with Last Christmas, fulfilling George Michael’s greatest wish seven years after his death.
The song ended up selling 5,926 copies ahead of Sam Ryder’s You’re Christmas To Me, giving it victory for the Eighties group.
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Wham! hit Last Christmas is the official UK Christmas number oneCredit: Michael Putland
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He defeated strong competition from Sam Ryder. Credit: Shutterstock
George, who was in Wham! featuring Andrew Ridgeley, was determined to take the Christmas number one spot when it was first released in 1984, but was beaten by Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas?.
The news was revealed tonight on Radio 1’s Top List show by host Jack Saunders.
The bittersweet song about heartbreak during the holidays gained popularity after George’s death and reached number one for the first time in January 2021.
It returned to the top spot twice in 2022 and spent the last two weeks in the top spot.
Before that, he held the title of the best-selling single that never topped the official charts.
The band’s former manager Simon Napier-Bell said George had always believed Last Christmas was “the best thing he ever wrote” – which is why he was particularly disappointed at its failure to claim the top holiday spot.
He explained: “It’s amazing how Last Christmas stands. If it was made this week, would you make it differently?
“He was always a bit upset about the fact that he knew agonizingly that it was the best thing he’d ever written.
“George above all wanted to be remembered as a great songwriter. And I think it’s in the back of his mind?
“It was quite embarrassing that the song he got was so perfectly Christmassy.”
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This is the first time that Andrew and George’s Christmas number one hit Credit: Getty
The video, which has been viewed 857 million times on YouTube, was filmed at a ski resort in Switzerland and features Kathy Hill as Andrew’s girlfriend, who previously broke George’s heart.
Andrew and George talked about the creation of the song in their Netflix documentary of the same name, which was released in June.
Andrew explained: “George needed success as a songwriter for personal affirmation.
“One Sunday at his mom and dad’s house, there was a football game on TV. Yog just stood up and said, ‘I’ve got to go up there, I’ve got an idea’.”
George continued: “I went downstairs and said to Andrew, ‘I did it.’ I said, ‘We’ll have four No1s this year and we’ll have a Christmas No1’. I let him go and he said, ‘Fuck yes. That.’
“We knew we had No. 1 in our hands. The release was for the second week of December.”
After being beaten by a charity single raising money to help the hungry in Ethiopia, he continued: “That’s what was so ironic about the patch – Do they know it’s Christmas?.
“Everyone else just thought it was fantastic, it was going to be great, it was going to be No. 1 and it was going to be this and that.
“I had the same feelings about it, but I just had this little fucking ego that I just had to squash, and it went, ‘S**t, s**t, s**t.’
“Because this little ego in me had this master plan for four No. 1 singles this year and it was all set.”
It is now the ninth best-selling single in British music history, with 1.9 million copies sold, not including streams, while the Band Aid song, on which George also sang, is the second biggest seller.
YouTuber LadBaby has won the coveted Christmas No.1 spot for the past five consecutive years with his new sausage roll-themed singles in aid of food bank charity The Trussell Trust.
Last Christmas he managed to achieve the incredible feat despite millions of people trying to avoid the song during December as part of a game called Whamageddon.
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Source: HIS Education