I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday – The Best of Wizzard

It’s a strange quirk of British popular culture that three groups from the early 1970s – Slade, Mud and Wizzard – return unfailingly to the airwaves each December and remind us that fifty years ago there was a thing called glam rock.

This platform-heeled triumvirate of power chords, glitter and sleigh bells are colourful remnants of a gaudier time, suspended in aspic by the nostalgia of Christmas. You might think of them as the congealed salads of popular music.

I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday was far from Wizzard’s only hit, in fact it’s not even their biggest in chart terms. See My Baby Jive and Angel Fingers had both been number ones for the band in 1973, but IWICBCE was pipped to the no. 1 spot that year by Slade’s rollicking Merry Christmas Everybody.

But in the popular imagination Wizzard will forever be associated with Christmas and Christmas alone. Singer Roy Wood’s resemblance to a slightly maniacal, electric kool aid Santa Claus might have more than a little to do with it, but his musical legacy goes way beyond Wizzard.

The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis puts it best: “There are worse fates for a musician than to write a song so indelible that it becomes part of the fabric of national life, but Wood’s latterday image as a hirsute bringer of seasonal jollity does seem to undersell his talent quite dramatically.”

A founding member of both ELO and The Move, Wood’s place in posterity was already assured as the writer of, among many other hits, Flowers In The Rain, famously the first song ever to be played on BBC Radio 1 when it launched in 1967.

The version of IWICBCE you hear on radio and TV every Christmas isn’t actually the 1973 original. In 1981 EMI had plans to re-release the song and try to improve upon its no. 4 peak, but had to admit to Wood that they had lost the masters.

The song was hastily re-recorded from scratch, with Wood playing every instrument and a new children’s choir drafted in from a school next door to the studio. It peaked at no. 41. But streaming has seen IWICBCE steadily improve its chart peak every year for the last decade. There’s still time Roy!