Music

All I Want For Christmas Is You: The enduring appeal of Mariah Carey’s classic as it finally makes UK No 1


It’s the indisputable jingle that signals Christmas is here – just the first few chords of All I Want for Christmas is You and we know the festive season is upon us.

Good luck even trying to escape the interminable Mariah Carey hit at this time of year – every radio station, every supermarket aisle, every Christmas party (via Zoom, god forbid) has it playing throughout December. (Carey, it should be said, believes Christmas starts on 1 November.)

But despite its seemingly ubiquitous presence during the festive period, the song has missed out on topping the charts for 26 years – until this week.

Top of the charts

The song racked up 10.8 million streams over the last seven days, the most streams in a week by any song in 2020 so far. Across its lifetime, it has shifted a remarkable 1.24 million pure sales, making it the UK’s 84th best-selling song in history, according to Official Charts Company data. 

When it was first released in 1994, All I Want For Christmas Is You peaked at No 2, missing out on the coveted Christmas No 1 to East 17’s Stay Another Day

Mariah Carey’s hit racked up 10.8 million streams over the last seven days, the most streams in a week by any song in 2020 so far (Photo: NBC/NBCU Photo Bank/Getty)

For 70 weeks since it has sat in the Top 40, making it the charts every year since 2007 with the advent of streaming. No other song has spent more weeks in the Official Chart Top 40 before eventually reaching No 1 in UK chart history.

British success story

Celebrating the news of her first UK number one since 2000, Carey told OfficialCharts.com: “Happy Christmas UK!! We finally made it!!! We are keeping the Christmas spirit alive together despite how dismal the year’s been.”

The record isn’t just good news for Carey, who has made more than $60m (£45.4m) from the song to date, according to Forbes, but it’s also a British success story. The Hipgnosis Songs Fund, a UK investment firm, bought a 50 per cent stake in the song’s rights in November.

The song cemented its status as an all-time classic when it was included in another British cultural staple, Love, Actually, released in 2003, in which it plays a central role in the plot. 

And the success certainly surprised Walter Afanasieff, the man who created the song alongside Carey.

Singer Mariah Carey has made more than $60m (£45.4m) from the song to date (Photo: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

In an interview with Business Insider in 2013, Afanasieff admitted that he had warned the popstar against the song because it didn’t adhere to conventional holiday music or the sounds of the time.

It breaks many rules of other popular festive songs. For one, it’s not about Jesus or present giving or Rudolph or snowmen but a gender neutral love song. It is – as the star says herself – pure festive joy.

“My first reaction was, ‘That sounds like someone doing voice scales,’” Afanasieff said. “Are you sure that’s what you want?”

The seriously wealthy music mogul is also behind My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion and worked with Carey on hits Dreamlover and Hero.  Every year he hears the megahit he co-wrote with Carey consume the airwaves. Co-creating the song is the most wonderful thing that ever happened to him, he has admitted – and yet he and Carey have not spoken in more than 20 years.

Row over how the hit was written

Carey has claimed the idea for the song came to her while alone at a house in New York, listening to It’s a Wonderful Life and toying around on a Casio keyboard.

Afanasieff doesn’t know why she says that. “I know when I look at the song’s copyright — 50 per cent to her, 50 per cent to me — we both wrote the song,” he told the New York Times

“We just did whatever the hell we wanted, including this totally slow intro-verse that ends in the title of the song,” Afanasieff has said. “There’s no rhyme or reason, it just worked out, even though it broke certain rules. I think that’s part of the reason it’s lived so long.”

It’s claimed the core of the song took just 15 minutes to create, and lives on as, arguably, the western world’s favourite festive song.

“I can say that my ex-wives, my children and my grandchildren are enjoying a lot of nice things because of that song,” Afanasieff once joked.

Asked what the song means to her, the New York born megastar has been unusually humble. 

“I take myself out the equation and just enjoy it as a spectator,” Carey has said. “People want to get so specific, and I’m like, dudeit’s a song.”



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