London, England, October 23rd, 1984. Surrounded by club music, mullets and Thatcherite excess, Bob Geldof was an artist in decline, and he bloody well knew it. As lead singer for the Boomtown Rats, his band slid down the charts and hit songs were further away than ever. He considered trying his hand as a solo act, but if he couldn’t make it in a band, why would anyone want him without a band?
The future seemed grim indeed.
That evening, as he pondered his falling fortunes, Geldolf and his partner Paula Yates turned on the BBC news. Immediately, Geldolf found himself staring down the tenth level of hell. Journalist Michael Buerk was doing a live report from Ethiopia. The famine ripping the country to pieces was then in the middle of killing anywhere between 300,000 to 1.3 million people. Buerk’s BBC News team were the first to raise widespread awareness to the tragedy.
Geldof was horrified. For him, the worst part was watching the young volunteer nurse Claire Bertschinger distribute what little food she had to around 300 people, condemning the rest to certain death. Suddenly, Geldolf’s first-world problems seemed very small indeed. The report spurred him to help those emaciated figures right there and then.
His initial idea was to write a song and record it with the Boomtown Rats. But there was just one problem: the Boomtown Rats were yesterday’s news. Even if he wrote the best song ever (unlikely), his influence just wasn’t big enough for any charity record to do anything. If he wanted to make a real impact, he needed friends in higher places.
In finding such friends, Geldof’s partner Paula Yates proved instrumental. At that time, she presented the music show called The Tube. On November 2nd, one act appearing on the show was Ultravox, who were then at the top of their game. Ultravox made a name for themselves pioneering a sound akin to heavy metal on synthesizers while rivaling Kaiser Wilhelm II in terms of dodgy facial hair. The lead singer was Midge Ure, a Scotsman with whom Geldolf previously worked. Geldolf called his partner and asked to speak to Midge so they might arrange a meeting.
Ure skipped Buerk’s initial report, but he quickly cottoned on to Geldof’s passion for doing something to help. In short order, Ure and Geldolf settled on an idea: a charity Christmas pop song to raise awareness and funds for the starving people of Ethiopia.
Their charity act would be called Band Aid and their song would be called Do They Know It’s Christmas.
Like Invading Russia Month From Now.
On paper, a charity Christmas song was brilliant, but the logistics quickly smacked both men in the face. For one thing, they had just four weeks to make a song out of literally nothing, rope in dozens of highly sought after pop stars, get all of said pop stars into the same room, and make a complete song using donated studio time. It would be the musical equivalent of invading Russia in winter.
Undaunted, the duo went to work. First, Geldolf scribbled lyric ideas in the back of a taxi on his way to a meeting with Ure. (Cover songs were out because they would need to pay royalties, decreasing donations.) The lyrics on offer amply matched the horrifying state of affairs: the contrast between the gluttonous Christmas feasting in the West, and the unimaginable horror in Ethiopia, painted a powerful picture. Ure could see the darkness Geldolf wrote out, but felt he couldn’t improve them. One idea was to use the word ‘Ethiopia’ rather than the final version’s ‘Africa’, but the excess syllables ruined the rhythm track. Nevertheless, they had complete lyrics and that was enough. Next, Ure had to shove a square peg in a round hole by bolting Gelfolf’s abrasive lyrics onto a Christmasy-sounding melody.
Remarkably, that’s what he did. In short order, Ure had a synth-pop demo committed to tape, complete with his own rubbish guide vocal. Now, he could invite fellow A-List musicians into the studio to do a proper job. Among the first recruits were Simon Le Bon (and the rest of Duran Duran), Sting (fresh from divorcing The Police and then launching a successful solo career) and the band Spandau Ballet (whom Geldolf recruited by accosting guitarist Gary Kemp in an antiques shop).
While Ure worked to make a song that sounded even vaguely appealing, Geldolf put his considerable powers of persuasion to work by ensuring even more talent appeared and that no excess costs went into the making of the record. That meant persuading (read: commanding) his record label to distribute the record for free and demanding music magazines give them free advertising space.
It also meant corralling someone into making a record sleeve. Geldolf approached Peter Blake, a renowned artist whose resume included the cover of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. In a few short days, Blake sketched out the most arresting artwork of his career. The final sleeve looked like The Nutcracker meets Dante’s Inferno: stylized Western children wearing fancy clothes are surrounded by toys and food…and they make no notice of two starving Ethiopian children photographed in the foreground.
Finally, Notting Hill’s Sarm West Studios—Bob Marley’s old stomping grounds—gave Geldolf’s supergroup exactly 24 hours of free studio time to make this song on Sunday November 25th, 1984. Most records take months or even years, so meeting the deadline inevitably meant an all-nighter.
Could they do it?
Recording Day
When that Sunday morning arrived, Geldolf and Ure arrived into Notting Hill at 8am with the media—who were no doubt curious to see if the promised cast of A-Listers would actually turn up. Surprisingly for pop stars with the scheduling rectitude of paper airplanes, they all did. To keep everyone’s egos in check, Geldolf arranged a large group photo to appear in the next morning’s papers and to have the whole group of around 40 artists sing the end chorus (FEED THE WORLD! LET THEM KNOW IT’S CHRISTMAS TIME AGAIN!) as a team building exercise.
After that, some parts of the recording went by easily. Phil Collins was asked to lay down a live drum part to replace the demoed drum machine. His first take impressed Ure and Geldolf but Collins felt he could do it better a second time. The second take was somehow an improvement over the fantastic first take. In short order, the drums were finished.
Other parts were much harder. Remember, Ure was producing and so had the unenviable job of asking each vocalist to record a line or two which he would then cut-and-paste together to make the final song. Production was further complicated because Geldolf offered musical inputs which Ure found annoying; Geldof’s suggestions were closer to the rough melody he first presented but didn’t match what the song turned into.
Also not helping was the absence of a big star: Boy George (Karmakarmakarmakarma chameleon!!!). Geldolf somehow flagged down the phone number to George’s hotel room…in New York. He immediately called to berate Boy George for being asleep five timezones away. Boy George was then ordered to haul ass down to JFK airport and take a Concorde to London. Remarkably, this ranting worked. Boy George wangled his way onto the final New York to London Concorde of the day, and showed up in Notting Hill at 6PM to record his part.
Once the artists finished recording, Ure stayed up all night mixing the record. He left the following morning, in his words, “never wanting to hear that record again”. The universe denied his request. The song promptly sold a million copies in its first week, stayed at number one all the way through to Christmas, raised 8 million GBP, forced Margaret Thatcher to waive the usual Value-Added Tax associated with such records, and shamed prominent American artists into producing their own charity record—We Are The World.
A Commercial and Charitable Success, But Artistically?
Immediately, Do They Know It’s Christmas earned mixed reviews. Most agreed the song’s melody was catchy but also syrupy. All agreed the participants were there for the right reasons. The lyrics on the other hand were a different story. Certain cultural commentators who gave them a read found them to be racist, colonialist, inaccurate and downright condescending.
Indeed, the whole image of “Band-Aid” was enough to short-circuit the mental capacities of some critics. Not only did the thoroughly white Bob Geldolf and Midge Ure have the effrontery to put on a charity single, but in their quest to help a group of starving Ethiopians, they also roped in mostly white male artists to perform on it. This criticism would haunt Geldolf the following year when he staged the epic Live Aid concert and subsequent charity efforts. This whole shindig is about helping various African peoples, so why not call upon African artists and their rich variety of talents to help? Geldolf found this reasoning utterly spurious: as far as he was concerned, the unvirtuous music-buying public would only pay to see the select 0.00000001% of artists who had titanic star power. As such, that’s who he needed to put on the bill, imagery be damned.
Nevertheless a question still remains: is Do They Know It’s Christmas a racist dumpster fire covered in greasy synthesizers or a positive (if flawed) charity song? It’s a tough call, so to settle it once and for all, let’s break down the lyrics line-by-line and give them a final, unbiased score.
What Were These Airheads Singing?
Atop the song’s clanging synth bell intro, Paul Young starts off with the first verse.
It's Christmas time, and there's no need to be afraid/At Christmas time, we let in light and we banish shade
So far so good, nothing to see here. Boy George, after zipping across the ocean to contribute, sings the next verse:
And in our world of plenty we can spread a smile of joy/ Throw your arms around the world at Christmas time.
This line is a tad dodgy. ‘In our world of plenty’ was a self-evident truth in the West. Those who objected need only to have looked at the Berlin Wall imprisoning half of Europe or, better yet, the starving people of Ethiopia to quell their doubts. But what about ‘we can spread a smile of joy’? It’s also true because it’s hard to smile when basic meeds are not being met. Or as Bertolt Brecht put it, ‘grub first, then ethics.’
Anywho, the late George Michael comes in with the next line.
But say a prayer/Pray for the other ones/At Christmas time
Another banal lyric. How many attendees of a Christmas Eve church service are beseeched to be more charitable, especially when the suffering of others is as plain as day?
If George Michael didn’t sing an offensive lyric, maybe the next pair of vocalists, Simon Le Bon and Sting, sang something stupid:
It's hard, but when you're having fun/There's a world outside your window/ (Sting joins in here) And it's a world of dread and fear/ Where the only water flowing/Is the bitter sting of tears.
Disregarding the pun of Sting singing the lyric ‘sting of tears’, here’s where the song enters truly sketchy territory. Le Bon and Sting are chastising the listener for having a ball while immense suffering is going on anyway. The unhappy world they paint thus far is vague, but easily imaginable.
By this point, Bono of the then-rising band U2 joins Le Bon and Sting to complete the image of a Christmas Carol-esque hellscape.
And the Christmas bells that ring there/are the clanging chimes of doom
After this verse, the song gets in more trouble. Le Bon and Sting fall away and Bono steps up to belt out his solo verse, the wording of which initially made him flinch:
Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you!
Read casually, it would seem Band Aid is condoning the suffering of starving people, but that complaint misses the obvious. Namely, upon seeing images of carnage on the news, most people’s first instinctive reaction is ‘Thank God that’s not me’. Geldolf gives you no room to hide.
If the next verse didn’t exist, I think the message of Bono’s line would have been clearer, but here’s where critics of the song hit their mark. After Bono, a large chorus of vocalists sing the following:
And there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas time/the greatest gift they'll get this year is life
Dear God. Where to start? First off, Africa’s the world’s second largest continent, not a rinkydink country, so the crude stereotyping feels more prevalent here than elsewhere. Further to that, “the greatest gift they’ll get this year is life” is infuriatingly ambiguous. Life? Is that it? They already have life, and it thoroughly sucks. What’s frustrating is if Ure and Geldolf tweaked the melody enough to put in ‘Ethiopia’ rather than ‘Africa’, the verse would hit much harder. The issue they’re singing about is specifically confined to that country. If they somehow pulled that off, they’d get away with the next line.
Where nothing ever grows/No rain nor rivers flow
In the context of the famine, the line is painful, accurate, and highlights the issue directly. If food were growing and water plentiful, then obviously this song wouldn’t need to exist. But courtesy of the screwed up previous verse, it paints a needlessly bad image of an entire continent that echoes the grotesque attitudes of the past.
Accurate or not, the story in the song leads the vocalists to ask:
Do they know it's Christmas time at all?
Technically the answer’s yes because Ethiopia has one of the oldest Christian communities in the world and they know damn well it’s Christmas. However, I always felt criticizing the song’s rhetorical question missed the spirit of what the single was trying to do. Christmas is about celebration and joy (Jesus entered the chat after all). However, if your world is more Old Testament than New Testament as it were, then it sure doesn’t feel like Christmas.
The next few lyrics are a baffling call and response, with Jamaican singer Marilyn and Heaven 17’s Glenn Gregory doing the ‘call’ and Paul Young doing the ‘response’.
Here's to you/ Raise a glass for everyone/ Here's to them/Underneath that burning sun/Do they know it's Christmas time at all?
I don’t know what the hell’s going on here. It sounds like they’re toasting and acknowledging the Ethiopians but then they ask the title question again, contradicting everything. I think if they had more time they would have put something else here but whatever.
Thankfully there are no more verses. Instead we get a full chorus outro with a impassioned plea from every Band Aid participant:
Feeeeeeedd the woooooorld/Feeeeeed the wooooorrrrld/Let them know it's Christmas time again! (repeat until fade out)
Anyone who objects to the idea of ending world hunger is a total sociopath so I’m not gonna entertain criticism of that line. As for ‘let them know it’s Christmas time again’, it has weird echos of the Three Shepherds learning of Jesus’s birth so it’s not too bad but the other verses knock it down a bit.
Conclusion
On the problematic art scale, where does ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ find itself? Answer: in a little bit of trouble.
Writing off the whole song as colonialist or condescending is blatantly wrong, and anyone who says otherwise should know better. That said, the song’s real lyrical problems can be isolated to one key line, the lyric about snow in Africa. It’s weird, distracting, and has a deleterious effect on the verses latched to either side of it. Bono’s chiming scream about ‘thank god it’s them’ takes on a sinister meaning, and the famine-specific verses that follow look like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness set to pop music.
However, I firmly believe history and context are crucial in any form of art criticism, and history has a few important things to say here. Namely, Geldolf had to write an original pop song with syllables that fit together in less than four weeks. Further to that, what matters in pop music is not the lyrics but the melody. Listeners aren’t responding to the text itself but the vocal melody underneath it. As Ure revealed in later years, the word Ethiopia simply didn’t fit the musical tune they’d written. The unintended consequence was a lyrical misunderstanding that I suspect would have been rectified if they had more time available to them.
And history has something else to say: both Geldolf and Ure have stated the quality of the song doesn’t matter because nobody personally profited from it. In his autobiography, Midge Ure is unequivocal: “it is a song that has nothing to do with music. It was all about generating money...The song didn't matter: the song was secondary, almost irrelevant.” In an 2010 interview, Geldof put a more humorous take on it:” I am responsible for two of the worst songs in history, with the other one being ‘We Are the World.’”
Do They Know It’s Christmas was the first mega-charity song and no other song has matched it since save We Are The World. Geldolf and Ure captured lightning in a bottle, which means someone got electrocuted along the way.