Posthumous win for George Michael
The 2024 UK Songwriter Award posthumously goes to George Michael for his Wham! song Last Christmas. The track recently made UK chart history when it finally became the Official Christmas Number 1 single 39 years after its first release. Despite hitting the coveted Christmas Number One slot Michael's song was ranked at only 18th overall for the year, based on total UK streams, downloads, vinyl and CD sales by the Official Charts Company. But analysis of the data and statistics shows that Last Christmas was the highest placed song by a solo British songwriter in terms of total distribution for the year, beating all other solo writers. All songs in first 17 places above Last Christmas were either written by non-UK (mostly US) songwriters or by a songwriting team. Even highly placed UK performing singer-songwriter artists such as Raye, who was third overall in distribution terms for her single Escapism, relied on co writers for their chart hits. Last Christmas was originally a hit for Wham! in 1984 spending five consecutive weeks at number two in the UK Singles Chart. It was held off the top Christmas spot that year by Band Aid's Do They Know Its Christmas? on which Micheal also performed, and he further supported the Band Aid cause by donating all of his proceeds from Last Christmas to Ethiopian Famine Relief. The original Wham! track was recorded in the summer in a studio covered in Christmas decorations to set the mood. George Michael wrote, performed, produced and played every instrument on the track. It became a regular annual Christmas favourite and the original 1984 recording has been in the UK charts many times in subsequent years reaching number one for the first time in January 2021 and it hit number one again in 2022. The song has also been covered by many other well known artists including Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande and Billie Piper. Comments are closed.
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