From Crazy Frog to Taylor Swift, here are 35 versions of Wham! hit “Last Christmas” ranked. (Getty/Crazy Frog Entertainment/20th Century Fox Television)
Ah, “Last Christmas”. At this point, the festive favourite by Wham! is more than just a song that gets pulled out the attic with the tinsel every year.
Written in George Michael’s childhood bedroom and recorded in August 1984, the track remains part of the very fabric of the holiday season nearly 40 years on from its release. It took 36 years for it to reach number one in 2018, two years after Michael’s death, and this year, it has bagged the top spot once again.
Not only has it sold millions of copies, the song has also been covered by a plethora of artists (six versions were released in 2020 alone). It appears that covering “Last Christmas” is the first lesson in the Open University course for pop stars hoping to obtain an endless festive revenue stream.
As it stands, there are more than 50 official covers of it uploaded to Spotify. The plan was to rank every single cover version, but that would be ridiculous. So, instead we ranked almost every cover version of Wham!’s “Last Christmas”, from harrowing to, well, the original.
If making this list has taught me anything, it’s that recording artists should be banned from covering “Last Christmas” indefinitely. There are truly not many good things to say.
Oh, and I hope I never hear this song again.