Revealed! This year's total hottest contenders for the Christmas Number one

The battle for the 2020 Christmas number one single is hotting up.

For the last 52 years, the festive chart-topper has been a charity single about cheese and onion pasties, apart from that one time a Facebook campaign put a gif of Eddie Murphy tapping his head at number one. What about this year? 

Right here, on this page, I can exclusively reveal the eight singles that are vying for this year's ultimate festive first place.

Jess Glynne: Lonely This Christmas
The all-conquering Clean Bandit collaborator hopes to tune into the melancholic side of Christmas with this Elvis Presley classic. The song will be played at half-speed with a gentle folk backing, while Glynne will be laying down her vocals in the chinos department of a burned-down BHS. The cover design will be a sad-face emoji with just a hint of a wink.

Liam Gallagher's Low Slung Birds: Standing On The Shoulders Of Santa
This interminable dirge will feel very much like the non-week between Christmas and New Year, with the over-produced guitars engendering a sense of pointlessness in all who listen. The video will feature Michael Smiley from Spaced being a cheeky chappy before falling into a Victorian sewer and being made to eat his bowler hat. Liam will pronounce "Christmas" as "Chris-me-yaaaass".

Russ Abbott: A Potato
This cheery comedy legend racked up millions of YouTube hits from an old quiz show clip of him singing a silly song about a raw potato. To entertain families during lockdown, he revived the song by video-duetting with many famous people such as Bella Emberg, Prince Andrew and Pol Pot. As a result, potatoes sold out on supermarket shelves across the UK and people had to use toilet roll instead.

The Paul Brothers feat. EMF: Let's All Come Together, Bitches
YouTube superstars Jake and Not-Jake Paul will spend the Christmas season spitting into people's faces, pulling down skirts and laughing at funerals. YouTube will validate their behaviour by not poking them in the eye with a stick. The Pauls will put no effort into their Christmas single, which will be written and recorded in its entirety by EMF. The Gloucestershire popsters didn't want to do it, but it's been a while since Unbelievable and they need the money.

Cat Bin Lady: Drop It Like It's Hot
Although vilified first time round, Cat Bin Lady had an unlikely surge in popularity this year when video remixer Mini-Disc Man made a supercut of her binning a cat set to an old Snoop Dogg track. To offset this yuletide's many feline deaths from inevitable copycat pussycat trashcannings, all profits from this single will go to the Wheelie Bin Protection League.

Robbie Williams: Hello?
This comprises seven hours of Robbie Williams stuck inside a chimney going "hello? hello? anyone?" over and over again, before succumbing to a lack of oxygen and, one day, falling as bones into an open grate while an unsuspecting family celebrates Hanukkah. Not his greatest work, but a damn sight better than his video for Rock DJ.

Various artists: Screams from the void
This is not a song. It is the sound you have been hearing in your brain throughout 2020. You've been humming 'Jingle Bells' to yourself to drown out the noise. When Santa arrives he will devour the saucer of mince pies you left out for him with his seventeen tongues, and then his reindeers will start screeching, the terrible cacophony consuming all known energy and light. Also your fairy lights will stop working, revealing your Christmas tree to be little more than a purloined slab of forestry left to rot inside a house.

Kirsty McColl: F*** You, You W****ing B***boy F**** 
Not one for kowtowing to woke culture, McColl's archive recording says what we've all been thinkin— (that's enough - ed)

Further Fats: Live blog – Rage Against The Machine versus a small boy with white teeth (2009)

Further Fats: Fat Roland's Christmas message – just like the Queen's but with more poopy baubles (2019)

Snoop left his old name lion about somewhere

Kanye Leopard.

LL Cool Jaguar.

Busta Panther.

Notorious BIG (CAT).

Ghostface Puma.

This is the world in two years time.  Snoop Doggity-Dogg, best known for his hits My Name Is Snoop Dogg, Snoop Dogg Is My Name and Drop It Like It's Snoop Dogg Yes That's My Shizzling Name, has changed his name to Snoop Lion.

This is the biggest name change in popular music since the Morning Benders toured the UK to gales of laughter. Snoop Puddytat probably phoned Prince to ask for advice, although all he'd get is crackles on the line and sound of the paisley berk drawing squiggles on his face in crayon.

I like cats. Scratchy, Simon's Cat, Snarf, Stimpy, they're all great. But other than Orbital's talking ones, I'm not sure I want them in my music. 'Caterwaul's a word for a reason, you know. Before others start changing their names, I hope they paws for thought. Paws. Pause. Hello? Is this microphone on?

And it's the weird transition. Eek-a-Mouse wouldn't change his name to Eek-a-Buffalo, and neither would a dog turn into a lion. If they did, the local park would get much more interesting very quickly. And not in a good way.

Snoop's real name is Calvin. He's even got that wrong. That was the boy; Hobbes was the lion.

Still, he's working with Major 'Diplo' Lazer, the chap behind MIA's ear-busting Paper Planes who describes his own music as Hare Rama James Bond Ethiopian lumberjack. And as long as Snoop Liony Lionn doesn't start rhyming his name with "iron" and "zion" (why, Bob, why?!), we should be okay.

KRS-Ocelot.

No, it doesn't work. It just doesn't work.

Further Fats: Homoerotica *and* analogue ambience: my levels of internet presence (in which I plug a website that has since, wisely, changed its name).

Homoerotica *and* analogue ambience: my levels of internet presence

The delightfully named Fat Roland's Shit Drizzles [update: link now broken] is my new secondary blog for all the little things I see on the internet that don't deserve to sully this main website.

The title comes from a Facebook conversation in which I inexplicably commented that "I dream in shit-drizzles", and then pretended that's what Snoop Dogg means when he says "shizzle", as in "shizzle my nizzle you mizzle-fizzling wizzle-pizzler."

My internet presence is a bit like Inception, with different layers. This blog is like being on a plane and remains the most important place from which everything else extends. Level 2 is my Shit-Drizzle site, which is a bit like a chase in a battered old van. My Twitter feed (which appears in the column on the right of this page) is an anti-gravity fist-fight in a hotel.

I wouldn't recommend you go any deeper. My Facebook account, which is mainly for real-life friends, is pummeling down a ski slope on the snowy fourth level. 'Down' being the operative momentum. The final level is internet limbo, which includes my rarely-visited nightmares of MySpace, Disqus, Digg, YouTube, Delicious, StumbleUpon and varous forums.

Just so you feel you aren't missing out, here is a selection of recent tweets of mine. Meanwhile, jump on Fat Roland's Shit-Drizzles where you'll find a stream of Gold Panda's debut album and a brilliant track from Squarepusher's new project.

Recent slightly-edited-for-the-blog tweets:

- It's not called the Mercury Music Prize, is it? It's the Mercury Prize. They omitted the object of their hate.

- Mussunt drunktweet. Th consekwenshes cud be mbarrassin. (I actually don't remember tweeting this.)

- I am *not* going to see The Expendables. It is an anagram of Elephant Sex Bed, and I don't fancy THAT.

- I had no idea Brian Eno did the music on Sebastiane. I might watch it some time. Homoerotica *and* analogue ambience... what's not to like?!

- And the Boyz. Heavy D and the Boyz. They never get credit. Like the Nu Power Generation, the On-U Sound System or Katrina's Waves.

- Mary Anne Hobbs: "My final guest may be Burial or Madonna or Sting or Adamski or Bowie or Lennon or Elvi--" oh it's Burial.

- For the second time today, a passing sheep has stopped still, looked me straight the eye, then taken a massive piss.

- All the greatest people are born on August 13th. A. Hitchcock, F. Castro, R. Hull. All the greats.

- I shouldn't have read The Road while I'm camping at a festival. I've been hiding under my groundsheet hiding from rapey cannibals.

M*therf*dding Risil is not the m*therf*dding shizzle, m*therf*dders

Risil's album Non Meters (pictured) is the only album in the world* that can only be described with a four syllable word: polyrhythmic.

It's a collaboration between (pay attention now) Prefuse 73's Guillermo Herren, Hella's Zach Hill, Battles' Tyondai Braxton (no, not the hit singer of Unbreak My Heart), Tortoise's John McEntire... oh and blah blah blah, about a thousand other people.

With such talent on display, and with a band name sounding like it was dream up by Snoop Dogg, you'd expect more than just expansive, lurching psychedelia that doesn't quite gel.

There Has To Be is the soundtrack to half my nightmares, and the frenetic drumming on Zantra is most pleasing. But, Risil is not the shizzle.

Speaking of Snoop Dogg, you know Dogg After Dark? The programme where Calvin Broadus Jr gets it aaawwwn with bee-yatches, young hippety-bling superstars and besuited gangsters? That's my house every night.

Without the women.

Or the gangsters.

Or the hop hop.

Or the television coverage and numerous producers giving it the sheen of credibility, when in fact it's just a West Coast version of The Word.

*there may be one or two others.