Putting heart back into the Christmas chart
Hands up those who would like to see Tom Waits at Number One in the Irish charts on Christmas Day?
Journalist and blogger Adam Maguire has kicked off an online campaign to get Waits’s Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis to the top of the charts.
Maguire hopes that both fans of the singer and those who simply want to end the annexation of the seasonal chart by X Factor winners will get involved.
“Even though I was never a big pop-music fan, I always remember being entranced by the race for Christmas Number One as a child,” explains Maguire on his Waits for Christmas blog. “It was never about wanting one song or another to win, but simply about the heightened excitement of the race that surrounded the whole exercise.
“Nowadays it’s different. For a start we can be pretty sure that the winner of X Factor will be Number One in Ireland as well as the UK. How sad is it that: the favourite for Number One is an as-yet-undecided artist singing an as-yet-unknown song?”
Maguire thinks Waits’s song is ideal because it is “the absolute antithesis to what generally gets the Number One slot in Ireland. It’s absolutely perfect as a protest against everything that’s wrong with music today and it even has some real humanity in it to boot.”
This campaign has been made possible by the fact that sales of digital downloads of tracks which have not been released as a single now count toward chart positions.
A similar campaign has kicked off in Britain where an attempt is underway to get Malcom Middleton’s We’re All Going to Die to the top of the charts.
The Arab Strap miserabilist faces competition from Eva Cassidy and Katy Melua, Shaun the Sheep and, naturally, the X Factor winner.
Last year’s Christmas number one in Ireland was X Factor winner Leona Lewis (or Leona as she was known then).
The Christmas chart will be released on Friday December 21st. Downloads of A Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis purchased from now until next Thursday from such online stores as Apple iTunes, Eircom Music Club, 02 Napster, Vodafone and Easymusic are eligible for the chart.
An expensive way to stand out from the mainstream masses
8:32 am
I agree absolutely, i hate all the x factor stuff.
Comment by MikeBIn a perfect world arab strap would have been at the top of the charts several times but i don’t think they would have got too far on that show as you’re not allowed to have any soul or originality these days.