Who will be Christmas No 1? Why the pop charts are weirdly more relevant than ever before

When was the last time you really cared – or even knew – what was at No 1 in the UK singles chart? It is true that the era of No 1s sparking newspaper headlines (Blur and Oasis battling it out with Country House and Roll With It springs instantly to mind), of people genuinely being interested in who the guy from White Town was, or of thinking that Babylon Zoo’s Spaceman would always be a timeless classic are long gone.

It is now more than 13 years since Top of the Pops last broadcast its perky weekly update of chart goings-on to rapt homes and now, well, does anybody really care who’s at No 1? At least two people do.

For the past 10 weeks, the UK’s most popular single has been a track called Dance Monkey, written and performed by a former busker from Australia called Tones and I. No less irritating than Spaceman, it is an EDM-lite party tune that gets played at parties you probably wouldn’t want to be invited to. Yet its unwavering dominance is currently under threat from the YouTube star and dad blogger LadBaby with I Love Sausage Rolls, his own meaty take on Joan Jett’s glamrock smash I Love Rock’n’Roll and a fundraiser for the foodbank charity The Trussell Trust.

If LadBaby’s attempt at chart supremacy sounds unlikely, then the fact that he scored last year’s Christmas No 1 with a similarly sausage roll-centric take on Starship’s We Built This City (sweeping aside Ariana Grande and her very much inedible Thank U, Next) should be extremely telling.

This development isn’t just because people really, really love sausage rolls. Changes in the way the charts collect data means streaming stats and YouTube plays are now taken into consideration, so the charts are more representative of what people are listening to than ever before. As a result, songs such as Dance Monkey can organically climb up the charts as they did in the 70s. Smaller, unknown artists are in with a chance again, rather than being bulldozed by major label pop acts. It might seem as if No 1s don’t matter any more, but to a younger generation the charts are more relevant than ever – whether they know it or not.