Despite its legacy as a Christmas classic, East 17’s signature song “Stay Another Day” actually has much darker undertones. Tony Mortimer wrote the song after his brother, Ollie, took his own life:

I had the melody and the chords and I was looking for a story to go on top of it. It was based on my brother’s suicide and losing someone. What would you do if you had one more day with a loved one? Over time I started to put together the story and I wrote it in a different way to any song I’d written before. It’s a different way of writing because they were just sections of statements, rather than a verse being a story from beginning to end. If you take the first verse, it was just sections like ‘Don’t you know we’ve come too far now just to go and try to throw it all away’ and ‘I’ve only just begun to know you, all I can say is won’t you stay another day.’ It was all based on conversations I’d had with my brother and I was trying to change it into a love song about the end of a relationship.

(Songwriting Magazine)