Do They Know It's Christmas Yet?: They took a trip back to 1984 and broke it.

Product Information

It has become the iconic poor country,” Gill wrote in his 2010 book Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid. “Instead of its glorious past and rich culture, we now associate Ethiopia with famine.” The assembled cast of performers had 24 hours to record in the studio, which was made available to them freely by producer Trevor Horn. (Horn had initially been asked to produce the song, but told Geldof it would take him six weeks, which would make a December release impossible; so the task fell to Ure.) It turns out that writing a song and raising millions of dollars for food assistance was the easy part. Administering aid effectively was far more difficult. Indeed, evidence suggests that tens of millions of dollars of international aid— not from Band Aid, but from other relief initiatives—were siphoned off to fund a paramilitary group of communist rebels. Smith’s formula might sound simple, but executing it is not. Power has a way of concentrating and unleashing itself on its own. Dawit Wolde-Giorgis, the author of Red Tears, said this is perhaps the greatest scar of the Ethiopian famine. Fifteen thousand children here now. Suffering. Confused. Lost,” Buerk says, as the camera pans to emaciated bodies of starving Ethiopians. “Death is all around. A child or an adult dies every twenty minutes.”

On a chilly October night in England in 1984, Bob Geldof was alone watching TV. As the frontman of the Boomtown Rats, Geldof had tasted fame and success, but his music career was now at a crossroads. The band was in shambles, and Geldof was trying to “manage the decline” as he considered his next step. There was a charming naivete about this song,” Sting said years later, while speaking to Ure. “I think a more sophisticated song wouldn’t have worked. It had to be a kind of Christmas carol, nursery rhyme, simple, idealistic vision. And that’s exactly what it was.” People were very busy burying the dead,” he said. “Because the Derg [the communist military regime running Ethiopia] had taken so many people away for resettlement, there was a shortage of labour and some of us were forced to become gravediggers.” Lessons From Band Aid The song was recorded in a matter of hours, and Ure spent the next several days producing and editing in his home studio with engineer Rik Walton. What few realize is that the famine was not an accident. Though drought played a role, many have overlooked that the Ethiopian government's military policies were the primary catalyst.Such perceptions should not exactly surprise us. Ethiopia’s famine claimed as many as a million lives, according to official estimates (the actual total is likely closer to 400,000); so it’s not unusual that many would associate the land with starvation. A 45-year-old farmer named Ibrahim who Gill spoke to decades after the famine recalled being pressed into service digging graves as a young man because there were not enough workers. Getting artists to commit to the project wasn’t as difficult as one might expect. Geldof knew a great many performers, and they could see he was passionate about the cause. Meanwhile, Ure brought needed credibility to the project. By all appearances, it was a massive success. The power of art and celebrity and mass media were combined to engineer a life-saving relief effort in one of the poorest corners of the world. I was a little kid when the song came out, and as a child I wasn’t much of a fan. I didn’t really know what the song was about, but I vaguely remember thinking it had something to do with AIDS, which was new and very scary. I was more partial to Burl Ives singing “Holly Jolly Christmas” or the Peanuts characters belting out “ Hark the Angels.”

The “darker political purpose” Gill alludes to is that resettlement allowed Col. Mengistu to more effectively deal with the alliance of rebel groups, including the Eritrean liberation movement and the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, who opposed the communist military regime. Mengistu’s plan might have been effective as a military strategy, but it ravaged the Ethiopian economy. Among the many problems it produced was that it created a surplus of labor in some places and a dearth in others. On November 24, 1984, the pop musician Boy George was sleeping in his New York City hotel room when the phone rang. He was touring with the Culture Club and had had a late night partying. The call woke him up. It was Geldof, who the previous day had told George to drop what he was doing and get to London stat to perform a song he had co-written with Ure. Gill said perhaps the most obvious consequence of the Band Aid campaign was that Ethiopia became a sort of caricature of poverty and starvation in the minds of westerners.

The song’s cultural impact—both good and bad—is also hard to overstate, though many smile at the line “Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?”

Geldof and Ure had created a charity superband called Band Aid (get it?), and they had invited a host of popular British and Irish recording artists to perform the new song, which was written for a specific purpose: to raise money for Ethiopians suffering one of the worst famines in modern history. Do They Know It's Christmas" remains a holiday favorite. But it turns out that writing a song and raising millions of dollars for food assistance in Africa was the easy part. This is not to diminish the work of Band Aid. If you visit Korem today, you can still see evidence of its works, including a hospital completed on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the famine with proceeds from Geldof and co. Peter Gill was one of the few western journalists in Ethiopia in 1984. Working with Action Aid, a global humanitarian group, he spent weeks in Korem, the epicenter of the famine, and the highlands of Amhara. One of the reasons the movie is such a hit is that it has not one but two hilarious scenes featuring one of the greatest Christmas Songs ever written: “Do They Know It’s Christmas.”Many westerners are oblivious to the causes that underpinned Ethiopia’s famine, but Ethiopians are not, and they appear to have learned an important lesson. Dawit Wolde-Giorgis, the relief commissioner and the author of Red Tears: Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia, recalled Mengistu describing his strategy with a Maoist parable of draining the sea to capture fish. Do They Know It’s Christmas” was released on December 3. It opened with Paul Young on vocals, followed by Boy George, George Michael, Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran, Sting, and Bono. Numerous other artists also participated in the project. As most readers already know, the song had nothing to do with AIDS, but with a famine in Ethiopia. Fewer, however, know that the famine was man-made. This is not to suggest that aid initiatives cannot help those suffering, or that people should not give to those in need. Giving is good and can help those in need, especially when combined with prudence—but it is not an end in itself. Helping people is the ultimate goal, and this requires more than just humanitarian efforts, as some members of Band Aid now realize.

World poverty is a burden to be shared, but there is another principle now widely recognized,” Gill writes. “Poor countries will emerge from poverty only when they take full charge of their own destiny.” The entire process of writing, recording, producing, and releasing “Do They Know It's Christmas” was remarkably fast—less than six weeks. The] biggest toll of the famine was psychological,” Dawit wrote. “None of the survivors would ever be the same. The famine left behind a population terrorized by the uncertainties of nature and the ruthlessness of their government.” Aid is just a stopgap,” Bono pointed out not long after Gill’s book was published. “Commerce [and] entrepreneurial capitalism take more people out of poverty than aid. We need Africa to become an economic powerhouse.” At some point, however, I began to love “Do They Know It’s Christmas”—I still get chills every time Bono hits “well tonight thank god it's them instead of you.”

Nearly four decades later, “Do They Know It’s Christmas” holds a mixed legacy. On one hand, it remains one of the most popular Christmas songs in the world—and for good reason. The song channels the spirit of Christmas, which calls on us to love and care for our fellow man—and to freely give to those in need. Its message of hope, charity, and idealism moves us, which is part of its magic. A motley crew of the most popular UK performers in the world gathered, including Phil Collins, who arrived with his entire drum set, as well as Sting, George Michael, and others. Once [Bob] had Midge on board, all Bob’s friends who know his musical limitations would think ‘we know the record will get made now, so it’s not going to embarrass us,” one person familiar with the project observed. Geldof received a dose of perspective that night when he turned on the BBC and saw a news report delivered by journalist Michael Buerk depicting a severe famine in Ethiopia.