Wizzard reunite with child singers for I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday Official Top 10 Award presentation
Are you ready children?!
Today, Official Charts is happy to present a very special Official Top 10 award to an overlooked, but culturally very significant, group of singers.
As part of the BBC Sounds podcast Christmas Hits Unwrapped, actress Sally Lindsay (who has earned her own Official Christmas Number 1 single as part of the St Winifred's School Choir in 1980) gets stuck in to the secret stories behind some of the country's most beloved Christmas hits.
British glam-rock icons Wizzard - who earned nine Top 40 singles, including 2 Number 1s, in their career - are perhaps now best remembered for timeless festive classic I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday.
As part of Christmas Hits Unwrapped, BBC One's The One Show and BBC Sounds teamed up to reunite Wizzard with the then-schoolchildren who featured their vocals in the 1973 Top 10 hit. As part of the occasion Official Charts was delighted to gift the singers and their old school a very special Official Top 10 award to mark their incredible long-term chart success.
If you didn't know - the children who can be heard on the track were not the hired child actors you can see on the track's official music video or its Top of the Pops performance. Instead, they were an altogether more ordinary (and slightly older) group of schoolchildren from Birmingham.
Now more than 50 years removed from the track's original release, the now (very grown up) gang of kids from Stockland Green School, were reunited with Wizzard keyboard player Bill Hunt, who was on hand to recreate the track in 2024, with a little help from the school's current class of students.
I Wish It Could Be Christmas... first debuted in 1973, and was famously beaten to Christmas Number 1 that year by Slade's Merry Xmas Everybody. Nevertheless, the track reached a peak of Number 4 and still makes a re-appearance every year around the time of the festive season.
Just last week, I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday had broken back into the Top 40 once again; rising to Number 33.
When will the 2024 Christmas Number 1 be revealed?
This year's Official Christmas Number 1 race 2024 kicks off Friday December 13 with sales and streams counting up until midnight (11.59pm) on Thursday, December 19.
Tune in to The Official Chart on BBC Radio 1 on Friday December 20 from 4pm to hear the Christmas Top 40 countdown and the exclusive reveal of the Official Christmas Number 1 2024.
The full Top 100 Official Christmas Singles Chart and Albums Chart will be published on OfficialCharts.com from 5.45pm.
Join the conversation now using the hashtag #XmasNo1. Follow @OfficialCharts on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. For all the latest race updates join the Official Charts mailing list for Breaking News on this year’s race and beyond.
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