Shakin’ Stevens has revealed the process that went into making what has become a Christmas classic dusted off every December, the hit ‘Merry Christmas Everyone’.

In an interview with the Guardian Shakin’ Stevens reveals how everything fell into place when he heard the song and felt it needed to be a Christmas song. Speaking to the Guardian Stevens said:

I always thought it would be nice to have a Christmas No 1 – if nobody remembers you for the rest of the year, they’ll remember you at Christmas. Bob Heatlie wrote the song especially for me and I thought it had all the ingredients for a Christmas single: festive lyrics, bells, the lot. I listened to it and I could picture snow.

In those days, pop on TV was mostly kids’ programmes and Top of the Pops, so we made a video at Santaworld in Sweden. The young girl starring in it had won a competition to go to Lapland. My son was one of the kids in the log cabin full of toys. Making it was such fun. The Santa was an actor – you’d see him in the canteen having a cigarette and a sherry and he couldn’t get his ’tache off. Because it wasn’t snowing, we had to hire snow machines. It was the same when I did the video for It’s Raining: we used rain machines and I ended up absolutely soaked.

I thought the song deserved to be No 1 and didn’t want it to be a No 2, but in 1984, Band Aid released Do They Know It’s Christmas? There was no way we could compete with such a high-profile charity single, so we held our song back for a year.

The Radio 1 “sleighlist” – the Christmas playlist – only lasted three weeks then, so you didn’t have long to get to No 1. Merry Christmas Everyone went from 38 to 10, then 2, and then it hit the top spot, by which time the rereleased Band Aid single was at No 3. I’m thrilled that people still play our song every year. It’s nice to be part of Christmas.

Read the full interview including songwriter Bob Heatlie’s side of the tale at the Guardian.