Remember Hugh Grant’s character Will Freeman in the 2002 film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel About A Boy? A wealthy and shallow bachelor in his late 30s, Freeman lives in a plush apartment, habitually dates women and browses the shelves of HMV (remember doing that?) in the daytime — free from the burden of having to go to work and actually earn a living every day.

And how does he afford to live such a life of luxury? It’s all because his dad penned a famous Christmas hit in the ‘50s, and its rolling snowball of royalties ensures that Hugh – sorry, Will – can live comfortably without ever having to lift a finger.


This backstory draws largely from reality, with many of the musicians whose hits soundtrack our Christmastime shenanigans every year being set for life off the back of one song. How else can the likes of Noddy Holder, Jona Lewie and Shakin’ Stevens be able to afford to add another extension onto their princely mansions without first receiving their annual festival pay packet?

The real question(s) we want to ask is this: how much dough is actually being earned by these artists at this most wonderful time of year? Who has to share the pot with songwriters, labels and hangers-on? And who got screwed over by the vampires of the music industry? Join us, won’t you, as we dash through the snow on a one-horse open sleigh to shine a light on music’s real-life Will Freemans.

Slade – ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ (1973)

Noddy Holder’s handsome money-maker earns the Black Countryman a hell of a lot of money each and every year. 2013 figures estimated that the Slade single — which has sold over 1.2 million copies and is, according to the Performing Right Society (PRS), the most-heard song in the world — earns £512,000 a year, with a portion of that going to the much-forgotten songwriter Jim Lea, who wrote ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’’s chorus.

A Daily Mail article from 2016 – which cites the Channel 5 programme Eamonn & Ruth: A Million Pound Christmas – claims that the figure is actually now closer to £1 million a year.

The 1973 Christmas Number One has been referred to by Holder as his “pension scheme” (which gives added poignancy to the lyric “Look to the future now, it’s only just begun”). Puts the £20 you stow away each month in the slim hope that you’ll ever be able to afford a house deposit to shame, doesn’t it?

Jona Lewie – ‘Stop The Cavalry’ (1980)


An unlikely Christmas hit due to its anti-war theme – Lewie himself has expressed some bemusement with its festive appropriation – ‘Stop The Cavalry’ has still gone on to become a staple sound of Christmas morning: think where we’d be without that triumphant brass section or that wistful “wish I was at home for Christmas” line.

According to the Mail, Lewie’s hit garners over £120,000 a year – which the 72-year-old rakes in all for himself, since he wrote the lyrics, melody and backing instrumentation.

“‘Stop The Cavalry’ constitutes 50 per cent of my real income,” he one explained. “The thing is, I do everything on the track. I write the lyrics and the melody, so that’s all of the publishing. And because I’m a musician I can do all the backing track, so that’s all the recording royalty. I was a one-man show. And if you can get a track associated with Christmas, you get annual regurgitation, and potential for earning every year.”

Boney M – ‘Mary’s Boy Child – Oh My Lord’ (1978)

The royalties generated from the UK’s biggest-selling non-charity Christmas single (Paul McCartney’s – or, rather, Wings’ – cover of ‘Mull of Kintyre’ just isn’t a Yuletide song, sorry) should have ensured that its creators never needed to work again. But, in an interview with The Guardian in 2011, the group’s singer Liz Mitchell revealed that they’d been screwed over by a nasty circle of Grinch-type figures in the music industry.

“If I was to spend time working out what the record company got – and those in that team of people around us – I would lose my mind,” she fumed, before going on to estimate that each member of the quartet has only been entitled to “maybe a seventh of 1%” of ‘Mary’s Boy Child’’s sales of 1.2 million and counting. Ouch.

Shakin’ Stevens – ‘Merry Christmas Everyone’ (1985)

Michael Barratt makes a tidy sum every December thanks to his chirpy seasonal hit ‘Merry Christmas Everyone’. Barratt, as you might have guessed, is the birth name of one Shakin’ Stevens, whose star might have tumbled into insecurity long ago were it not for this perennial song.

While the singer pockets the windfall from the song’s radio plays (£5,000 to £10,000), much of the estimated £130,000-worth of royalties actually goes to the writer of the song, Bob Heatlie.

Wham! – ‘Last Christmas’ (1984)

Following the sad passing of George Michael on Christmas Day 2016, sales of Wham!‘s ‘Last Christmas’ significantly increased on the Official Charts Company’s (OCC) previous estimate of 1.78 million copies sold. It’ll be a while before a clearer idea of the current royalties from ‘Last Christmas’ emerges, but The Telegraph suggested in 2015 that the figure was once as high as £470,000 a year.

Wham!’s hit originally lost out to Band Aid in the race for Christmas Number One back in 1984 – but it very nearly hit the number one spot in 2017 after a campaign was launched to get it to the top of the charts in Michael’s memory. Funnily enough, it peaked at number two in the chart dated January 4, 2018.

Mariah Carey – ‘All I Want For Christmas’ (1994)

Despite only just passing a million sales in the UK in recent years, Mariah’s thumping take on Christmas – which, rather interestingly, was written and recorded entirely on co-songwriter Walter Afanasieff’s computer – has enjoyed huge success across the world, with one figure quoting the song’s royalties at an eye-watering $60 million (£45.5 million). In 2015, the Daily Mail estimated Mariah was making £376,000 from ‘All I Want For Christmas’ per year.

‘All I Want For Christmas’ has found a special kind of popularity in Japan, where it’s twice gone platinum – Carey has even been known to perform it over there in the middle of July.

The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl – ‘Fairytale Of New York’ (1987)

Apparently this song came about as a result of a bet with Elvis Costello that The Pogues couldn’t write a Christmas song “that wouldn’t be slushy” – well, the band only went and emphatically won that bet, creating one of the finest seasonal pop songs of modern times in the process.

Shane MacGowan and the late, great MacColl’s back and forth is still as timeless as ever, and it’s no wonder that people continue to snap up ‘Fairytale of New York’ every December: the OCC estimates that it’s been bought 1.2 million times.

How does that translate into cold, hard cash? Well, the most recent estimate by The Mail in 2016 reckons that it generates around £400,000 a year. Christmas at MacGowan’s gaff must be a right laugh.