Can this ordinary couple from Nottingham beat The Beatles’ record and top the Christmas charts for a FIFTH time? LadBaby teams up with money-saving guru Martin Lewis as they release their 2022 hit that reimagines original Band Aid classic
- Mark and Roxanne Hoyle -or LadBaby – are striving for a Christmas number one
- The record-breaking couple have hit top of the charts every year for the past four
- This year’s hit aims to raise money for those affected by the cost of living crisis
Think of festive number ones and some iconic songs spring to mind: Merry Xmas Everybody All I Want For Christmas Is You…; Mistletoe And Wine.
But those of us not of the YouTube generation will perhaps be less familiar with the most recent run of top slotters, especially when you learn that they’re all by the same ‘group’ and share the surreal and very un-Christmassy theme of… sausage rolls.
More unlikely yet, a fifth consecutive number one is on the horizon for this music-making operation who, if successful, will surpass The Beatles’ record for Christmas hits.
So just who is this crack songwriting team taking on the world’s biggest-ever band? Step forward Mark and Roxanne Hoyle, a self-confessed ‘ordinary couple’ in their 30s from Nottingham. For they are the pair behind LadBaby, which is neither band nor record label, but Mark’s blog-turned-vlog about life as a young dad.
Mark,35, and Roxanne Hoyle,38, -or LadBaby – are striving for another Christmas number one this year after reaching the top of the charts four years in a row
Their string of novelty Christmas hits — which have seen them collaborate with music legends Ronan Keating, Ed Sheeran and Elton John — is not a bad achievement for a couple who, by their own admission, ‘can’t really sing’.
Although, naturally, it’s all for a good cause. So far the duo’s zany singing endeavours and promotional tie-ins have raised more than £1million for The Trussell Trust, a UK charity working to eliminate hunger.
This year they’re taking on arguably the most famous Christmas single of all with a cover of Band Aid’s 1984 charity hit Do They Know It’s Christmas?, called Food Aid, which was released yesterday.
Their string of novelty Christmas hits — which have seen them collaborate with music legends Ronan Keating, Ed Sheeran and Elton John
LadBaby announced their fifth attempt for a Christmas No 1 on Sunday as the YouTube stars joined forces with financial expert Martin Lewis (left)
Just how a blog about parenting turned into a Christmas number one hit machine is something I’m keen to discover and chatting to me on Zoom from their home, Mark, 35, and his 38-year-old wife admit they are still struggling to come to terms with the fact that they’ve seen off popular chart-toppers for four years in a row.
‘It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?’ grins Mark. ‘Even to be spoken about in the same breath as Christmas icons like Mariah Carey is funny.’
None of it was remotely planned, as Mark recalls today. The couple, who met 13 years ago on a night out, both originally worked as graphic designers in London before moving first to Hertfordshire, then Nottingham.
They eloped to Las Vegas in May 2015 — exchanging vows in the city’s Little White Wedding Chapel — and when Roxanne subsequently discovered she was pregnant Mark confesses he was ‘petrified’.
Their son Phoenix is now six. Younger brother Kobe arrived two years later. ‘Rox’s friends had settled down, but all my friends were still playing computer games and living in shared houses, and I didn’t have any family that had babies, so I didn’t have a clue,’ Mark confides. ‘I knew I would need to find some like-minded souls.’
Yet while internet research uncovered some dad bloggers, none seemed to fit the bill. ‘I thought, “Well, I’m a lad and I’m having a baby, so I’m going to start my own,” ‘ he explains.
LadBaby was born, although for a year or so it was a low-key affair. ‘It really started out with me posting photos of Phoenix on a Facebook page and writing something about how I was feeling,’ Mark says. ‘I tried to make it funny.’
‘For a long time it wasn’t really going anywhere,’ adds Roxanne, who had given up work to be a full-time mum.
That is until June 2017, when Mark posted his first video focused on — of all things — a lunchbox.
‘I’d lost Phoenix’s lunchbox, so I went to buy another one and realised that a toolbox did the job just as well for a third of the price,’ he says. ‘So I made a little video about it, uploaded it to my 2,000 followers on Facebook on Saturday night and didn’t think much more of it.’
But the following day he went to a children’s birthday party and learned that it had gone viral.
‘One of the dads said it had been watched half-a-million times,’ Mark says. ‘I got out my phone and it was going up by tens of thousands of views in front of my eyes.’ That number continued to grow. ‘In the space of one week it got shared on so many platforms that it got 52million views,’ says Mark, shaking his head at the memory. ‘It didn’t make me any money, but it took my page from 2,000 followers to 25,000 followers in a week.’
‘I said, “It seems you’re quite good at videos, love, so carry on,” ‘ interjects Roxanne.
A new routine was born, in which Mark uploaded a new video every Sunday evening. They were focused on family life hacks, be they making a baby walker out of pipes or a baby gate from half a door.
By October 2018 the antics of LadBaby — now a father of two — had reached a million followers, leading the Hoyles to launch a spin-off YouTube channel.
Last year, the couple made chart history by securing the Christmas number one for a fourth consecutive year , becoming the first musician to do so
Pop stardom was still not remotely on the horizon, however — until someone suggested that Mark’s affection for sausage rolls meant he should make a song about them.
‘Somebody said I was always eating sausage rolls on camera. And it’s true, I was,’ he says. ‘By then we were working with a small management agency who also looked after some local bands, so I asked if one of them could help us do a song which we could release to raise money for charity.
‘We spent two days in a music studio — one day writing it, the second recording and filming it. Then we sat on it until December wondering if it was a bad idea.’
It certainly could have been, given that Mark and Roxanne would be the first to say they aren’t blessed with amazing voices. What they do have, though, is an abundance of charm, not to mention two very smiley, photogenic children.
Even so, Roxanne didn’t have high hopes that their version of Starship’s 1985 release, We Built This City, would be a hit. It featured lines such as, ‘We built this city on sausage rolls’.
The duo, Mark and Roxanne Hoyle, revealed their brand new charity song Food Aid, a rework of the Band Aid classic, in a surprise Instagram video
She recalls: ‘Mark wanted to get into the Top 40 so he could tell his friends he was a pop star, but I thought that was ambitious. I thought we would be lucky to get into the 100s.’
Instead, they went straight to number one, beating no less than Ariana Grande to the top spot, and raising tens of thousands of pounds for The Trussell Trust — chosen because Roxanne’s mother volunteers there — in the process.
‘We realised we were on to something,’ grins Mark. ‘So the next year we did it again.’
In 2019 it was the turn of the 1981 Joan Jett track I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll, with the lyrics changed to — you guessed it — I Love Sausage Rolls. Once more, it went to number one, to the delight of the song’s writer Alan Merrill.
‘He actually contacted me to say he was blown away that his song had got to number one, as it had never got the top spot before,’ says Roxanne. ‘It was quite poignant as he died a couple of months later.’
Mark, meanwhile, recalls the surreal business of conducting Press interviews to promote the single on the fire escape of his office at lunch hour. ‘I was still doing my day job as a graphic designer and had used up all my leave,’ he says.
That changed in early 2020, when the launch of a LadBaby subscription service, together with mounting advertising revenue, meant that Mark and Roxanne were finally earning enough from their content for Mark to hand in his resignation. ‘That was an amazing moment,’ says Mark.
Together the couple’s collective antics have more than 11 million followers on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
Yet despite their spiralling social media presence, neither of the Hoyles could have remotely envisaged what would unfold next when they learned that none other than Boyzone’s Ronan Keating would be willing to collaborate on a Christmas single.
Fast forward a few weeks, and the 2020 Christmas charts featured the undeniably amusing sight of the heartthrob singing ‘Just a sausage roll’ to the tune of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’. ‘He’s such a lovely guy and was really game for a laugh,’ says Mark.
When that single got to number one, moreover, Mark woke to find a congratulatory message on his phone from another pop legend, Ed Sheeran.
The song which aims to raise money for those affected by the cost of living crisis, was released on Friday December 16
‘We spent ten minutes trying to work out if it was really him, didn’t we?’ Mark says to his wife. ‘He said we’d brought the fun back to Christmas and that he hoped we’d do it every year. I was blown away.
‘I replied telling him I thought he was wonderful and that, if he ever wanted to do something, he knew where we are. It was a bit of a joke, really.’
That was that, until late summer last year when The Trussell Trust asked whether the Hoyles would release another festive single.
‘It was a long shot, but I decided to message Ed to say we were doing another charity single and was there a world in which he would consider working on it with us?’ says Mark.
‘He replied within about ten minutes, saying he’d love to — and would we be interested in doing something with Elton John as they’d already been working on something? So I thought about it for half a second, and said: “Yes!” ‘
What followed can only really be described as an unexpected collaboration with two musical giants. ‘Ed basically sent us the song he’d done with Elton and asked if we wanted to work on it, to make it silly,’ says Mark. The couple then met up with Ed in a London hotel to go through their version.
‘If there’s anything more nerve-racking than showing one of the most world-renowned songwriters a song you’ve written in your living room about sausage rolls then I’d like to know what it is,’ says Mark.
‘But it was just so very natural, he was just so lovely.’ Alas, packed superstar diaries meant there was never an opportunity to get Ed and Elton in the studio together at the same time, so filming for the subsequent hit, Sausage Rolls For Everyone, was done separately.
‘Elton had also just had a hip replacement, so that, plus Covid, meant he was in super lockdown mode and didn’t want anyone there that didn’t need to be there,’ says Roxanne. ‘So we filmed on two days — one day with Ed and one with Elton.’
Both stars proved to be incredibly game, leading to the surreal spectacle of them warbling about — and eating — sausage rolls.
‘When Ed arrived I told him I had got all these silly props, but he didn’t have to use them,’ says Roxanne. ‘He said he was happy to do whatever we wanted. So it was a case of: “Dress up as a sausage roll, get in this jumper, eat a Christmas trifle, throw a mince pie at me.” He did all of it. We had a fun day.’
The Elton segment was recorded at the superstar’s record label Rocket, with Elton wearing his trademark zany glasses and gamely munching on a sausage roll, too.
‘He was so lovely, and again, got totally into the spirit of it all,’ says Mark. ‘We’re so grateful because the amazing thing about them being involved is not only can they sing and I can’t, but they can bring a level of exposure to what we do that we never could.’
Naturally, the single went to number one, and has helped bring the Hoyles’ fundraising efforts past the £1million mark. The big question is whether they can do it again for the fifth year running. This week it emerged that the duo has teamed up, not with a rock star, but with money expert Martin Lewis to take on Do They Know It’s Christmas?
‘You can’t get bigger artists than Ed and Elton really, so we knew that if we were going to do anything it had to be something different,’ says Roxanne. ‘With the cost of living crisis, those issues [The Trussell Trust addresses] are now much closer to home.’
Mark adds: ‘It’s also not the sausage-roll-themed song that all the others have been, although there’s definitely a nod to that within the song. And it’s more upbeat than the original one. We still want a bit of festive fun.’
But it will be tough. This year, they’re up against Stormzy, Lewis Capaldi and — naturally — Mariah Carey (yes, it’s another re-release of All I Want For Christmas) for that coveted number one slot.
Still, Mark reveals that Ed Sheeran has given him a vote of confidence.
‘I messaged him a few weeks ago and said I hoped he wasn’t going to be releasing a Christmas song to compete against me,’ he says. ‘He told me he was sure we would smash it.’
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