Limahl has expressed a desire for his festive track to become a hit via a West End or Broadway show.
One Wish for Christmas – originally released as London for Christmas in 2012, and later retitled in 2020 – yearns for togetherness and shared experiences during the holidays with a special someone.
The pop legend, 67, keeps working the romantic tune – which follows a couple on a city break in London – so it gets picked up and used in a successful screen or stage production.
Asked why One Wish for Christmas has been re-released for 2025, Limahl exclusively explained to BANG Showbiz: “To use a theatre metaphor – the song is currently on the fringe, meaning it’s not in the West End yet.
“So that’s where my track, One Wish for Christmas, is at the moment. It’s off Broadway, it’s on the fringe.
“And what I’m trying to do is get it into the West End or on Broadway. So I’m an independent artist, releasing digitally, because the technology allows us to do that.
“And every Christmas, I keep nudging my track. The video views are heading to 100,000, and the streams are going up.
“And I hope, eventually, one day, it will fall on the right ears and just get its break, which is really what every project needs.”
He wants One Wish for Christmas to take off like 36-year-old actor-and-comedian Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer – the 2024 award-winning Netflix miniseries that reflects Richard’s real-life stalking ordeal, which also began in 2019 as a one-man show at Edinburgh Fringe.
Limahl continued: “To put that in perspective, Baby Reindeer started on the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and, of course, somehow on its journey, it got picked up by Netflix.
“I mean, creatively, at some point, you have to let go. You hear things you’ve worked on, and you think, ‘Mm, mm, mm.’
“But I’m quite happy with how it sounds, but there can always be other interpretations, and that does interest me.
“It’s difficult, but we’ll see.”
The star – who shot to fame with pop band Kajagoogoo in the 1980s – admitted One Wish for Christmas, which he wrote with Jon Nickoll and Ian Curnow, was not an easy song to pen.
Limahl – who, with the duo, tweaked the lyrics to London for Christmas, and injected new emotional and orchestral elements into the new version – explained: “I jokingly said I always wanted to write a Christmas song.
“And Jon and I both agreed, laughing, that’s an impossible task because everybody’s already sung about sleigh bells and Santa.
“But once we decided that we could place our couple on a city break in London, the city I spent 50 years living in, the city I still love.
“As Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great literary legend, once said, ‘The man who is tired of London is tired of life.’ And that’s kind of how I feel.
“London is almost like the equivalent of the Big Apple [ New York], the city that never sleeps, in that respect.”
And The NeverEnding Story hitmaker hails One Wish for Christmas – which name-checks landmarks, including the London Eye, Big Ben, and Trafalgar Square – as his love letter to London.
Limahl said: “It was fun name-checking all these places that I love, that I visited, that are real to me. London as a destination city for the world, I think a lot of people will relate to that.”
Limahl’s new Christmas single, One Wish for Christmas, is out now via Christopher Music. More info and links at ffm.to/onewishforchristmas, and limahl.com.
Watch the video here – youtube.com/watch?v=rv64KLxB7AM.