The Top 10 Worst Christmas Songs Of All Time

'Tis the season for recycled pop pap to be pumped by radio stations and into stores across the nation. Yes, we get to hear dreadful dirges that would be rightly ignored at all other times of the year because they happen to have festive lyrics and sleigh-bells in the background. Sure, there are some good Christmas themed songs, but they are very much the exception rather than the rule. And in case you were wondering, this is the list of what I reckon to be the very worst - the steaming turds at the very summit of a big ol' pile of crap. In reverse order:

10 Mistletoe and Wine

There is an increasing number of people who want to revise our opinions of the eighties. Sure, the fashion was loud and the music was a bit bombastic on occasion. But actually there was a lot of joy that can be taken from the eighties - even its music.

This song is a standing rebuke to those people. It isn't so much that it is a bad song (although it is - both smug, calculated and an affront to your ears) but the fact that it was so popular. The best-selling single of 1988 - fuck me, that must have been an appalling year for music.

9 Christmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End)

The Darkness were a curious band. Whoever thought that making the sort of pomp rock that even Queen at their height would have avoided while wearing spandex leotards was a long-term career option was hopelessly naive. Nonetheless, they were amusing. For about three minutes. And this song is when the joke ceased to be funny.

It is all very well vying to be Christmas number one, but if you want to actually achieve that with a Christmas song, then it is probably best not to do so by writing Scrooge-like lyrics that carp on about an unpleasant Christmas. Particularly not if your "anthem" sounds like phoned in screeching rock music that has been done about a billion times before.

They didn't reach number one, and this was the beginning of the end for the band. They were beaten by a stripped down cover of a song about teenage alienation and depression. Which is somehow fitting...

8 In Dulci Jublio

Mike Oldfields' Christmas tune (well, his cover of it) sounds exactly how you might expect it to if it had been performed a precocious school orchestra. The whole thing has a jaunty air about it for no reason whatsoever, and some of the instruments involved could shred your nerves. The only real indication that Oldfield had anything whatsoever to do with this song is the guitar solo - which is hideously out of place and an example of fret-wankery that even Spinal Tap would have thought twice about.

7 Driving Home For Christmas

There are many things to romanticise about Christmas, but this song - in which Chris Rea rumbles on about driving during the festive season - represents a level of insanity about Christmas that has seldom been replicated. Honest to God, there is nothing to celebrate about driving - or to put it another way, sitting in traffic - at Christmas time. It certainly isn't something to writing a fucking festive ballad about, Rea, you gravel-voiced cunt.

6 Saviour's Day

Is this song tangibly worse than Mistletoe and Wine, I hear you ask? Well, yes, because Sir Cliff of Dickshaft not only offers and aural atrocity for our delectation, but he also decides that he is going to force his God down our throats at the same time. God-bothering and the musical equivalent of botulism - never going to be a winning combination for me...

5 Proper Crimbo

I don't quite know whether it is the least Christmassy thing of all time, but Bo' Selecta must be a strong contender. A man in a rubber mask making crude jokes that cease to be funny after roughly 3.5 seconds is hardly a natural idea to be converted into a Christmas hit. But they did it anyway.

The end result is a bit like a Christmas hit from The Inbetweeners - but only if the characters from that show were deliberately trying to be more irritating and puerile than ever before while mashed up on an heady mix of ketamine and cheap speed. The fact that it didn't make Christmas number one is one of the few things I can cling to when I want to convince myself that our culture isn't in a permanent decline into utter retardation.

4 Do They Know It's Christmas?

The Band Aid 20 version, fact fans. I'm not saying that the other two versions were any good, but the 2004 version just sounds so weedy and so puny that it is an immediate insult to an already pretty crappy song. Rather like Live 8 which (barring the reunion of Pink Floyd) was a generally bad photocopy of the original Live Aid Concert. But it is worth just stressing how pathetic this version sounds - but then again it would, featuring leading lights such as that dweeb from Coldplay. Ultimately, this song only works if it is done in a big, bombastic and slightly pompous yet earnest way. This version sounds like a demo for an utterly anodyne, unthreatening version of the song. Best avoided. Like the plague.

3 Wonderful Christmastime

Paul McCartney, dick that he is, has still managed to write some great songs in his time. Make no mistake about it, this is not one of them. In fact, it makes John Lennon's hopelessly naive Christmas song look like a bona fide classic - since at least that had passion. This is McCartney at his smug, indolent worst. It is just a really shit, lacklustre song.

It sounds like McCartney just went into the studio one day, armed with a half-written lyric and a kid's synthesizer and churned this piece of shit out. I dare say it would prove that you can't polish a turd had McCartney made any attempt to polish it - as it stands, this sounds like a half-hearted attempt at a song that should have been erased from history.

If McCartney ever wonders why so many people hate him (and I don't, for one second, believe that he does) he should listen to songs like this. People hate you, Paul, because at your worst you are smug, self-indulgent and lazy. Songs like this show you wasting whatever talent you might have in the most cynical way possible.

2 Another Rock n' Roll Christmas

Ah yes, the troubling Christmas song. It is, as Gary Glitter songs go, not too bad. I mean, it has lyrics, as opposed to a chant, and a tune, as opposed to an endlessly repeated four-note melody. But there is the whole problem that it is by Gary Glitter. I mean, he went from the position of slightly oafish glamrock star to monster in next to no time. Which is a problem for this song - with lines such as "I love to hear the children sing", "this ain't gonna be no silent night" and "you'll be rocking/in your stocking/when you see you big surprise/I'll be rocking/in your stocking/you won't believe your big blue eyes", it all becomes a little bit sinister.

And because it ended up on so many Christmas compilations, and because so few people seem to realise it is a song performed by a convicted sex predator, it still gets played to this day. Which I sometimes feel is pretty creepy.

1 The Millennium Prayer

So, Sir Cliff of Dickshaft wanted another Christmas number one, but those behind him were not able to come up with a new song for him to warble at the world. So, what to do? Ah, yes, combine the Lord's Prayer with Auld Lang Syne. What could go wrong? Well, given the idea is toxic shite, pretty much everything. But the fact that, at the millennium, you want to convert people to God by performing a song that sounds like a whiney karoke number means that you are utterly naive and completely worthless.

Seriously, Sir Cliff, you can take your God and shove it.

But, as I mentioned at the start of this unexpectedly long post, despite all the above, I do have a sneaking like for some Christmas songs. And one video a day will appear on this blog of the songs I do actually like until Christmas Day itself. So enjoy. Possibly.