Well, that’s the Christmas Number One wrapped up, decked with boughs of pastry and stuffed up the arse of LadBaby’s festive turkey, then. Ed Sheeran and Elton John have, in the name of charidee, given their Christmas song ‘Merry Christmas’ to LadBaby to rework into another sausage roll themed megahit. Great for the Trussell Trust food bank charity that get all of the profits; not so great for the NHS which has to deal with the tsunami of long-term heart disease from all that processed pig eyelash.
LadBaby will now undoubtedly break the record for the most Christmas Number One singles in a row (The Beatles and Spice Girls currently hold the title, with three each). I’m not playing Scrooge McDuck’s anti-charity advocate here, but doesn’t LadBaby’s omnipotence take all the excitement out of the one week of the year that anybody cares about the singles chart anymore? After all, don’t we all love a good Christmas showdown?
The public are more inspired and engaged by battles than back-slaps, and the more public and vindictive the better: more press, more profile, more impetus to buy into one side or the other, more social media campaigning, more cash shovelled into the charity coffers. Have we taken nothing positive from Twitter obliterating western democracy?
Amid all this unity, goodwill and community, then, where’s the real spirit of Christmas? The drunken animosity, the bitter present envy, the fist fights over scattered Jengas? Answer – it’s in the comments of virtually every NME Facebook post in the shape of (full disclosure) my mate Steve Ludwin and his Christmas song ‘Ed Sheeran Kills Jesus’.
A piece of pure, sadistic festive bile, ‘Ed Sheeran Kills Jesus’ relentlessly attacks the nation’s most lovable man-boy for making “dire” music that “feels like a pig shat in my head”. A video of Steve performing the song tied to a bed and vomiting green goo in the style of Linda Blair in The Exorcist was, perhaps understandably, banned from YouTube within minutes of going up. So he’s taken to touring the village pubs and community halls of Ed’s home county of Suffolk to play the song to the baffled pensioners of the Sheeran heartlands. At time of writing, Ladbrokes are not offering odds on its chances of becoming a chart-topping Xmas party classic.
Now any proceeds Steve makes from his song aren’t going to charity at all; they’ll be piled back into more of his diabolical works. And I’m all for LadBaby, Ed, Elton and the Trussell Trust doing what they can to put a sticking plaster over the gaping wounds of Tory neoliberalism. But frankly, they’d do a lot more to help those forced to rely on food banks, and the rest of the country besides, if they all clubbed together with punk act The Kunts to help ensure their Xmas offering ‘Boris Johnson Is Still A Fucking C***’ wins this year – in an explosive chart war against my mate Steve.
The follow up to last year’s Top 5 hit ‘Boris Johnson Is A Fucking C***’, ‘Boris Johnson Is Still A Fucking C***’ capitalises, in glam-rock style, on the copious opportunities afforded throughout the past 12 months to call Boris Johnson a c***. Let us count the ways: mishandling the pandemic even after a year of practice; pushing through legislation allowing for further privatisation of the NHS while simultaneously overseeing the removal of our right to protest it; driving a bulldozer through our international rights as Europeans and the economic prospects of those of us staffing what’s set to become the west’s most notorious money-laundering tax haven. Having – and this is what really cut through to Tory voters; far more the 150,000 unnecessary deaths – some lockdown parties.
And that’s all before we consider the decade of austerity, zero hours and unemployment-hiding Tory policies which created a poverty crisis in the UK and drove millions to food banks in the first place – the Trussell Trust distributed 40,000 food parcels in 2010 and 2.5 million in 2020. While I salute their work, and LadBaby for supporting them, in this Xmas chart race it’s The Kunts who are really tackling the root cause of the nation’s poverty problem head on.
The most impactful way of changing Britain for the better, then, is by Elton, Ed, LadBaby and The Kunts joining forces, in aid of Trussell Trust, to make the 2021 Xmas chart race the ultimate battle between good and evil. If it helps, I’m sure Steve could have a whip round and get James Corden in the video.