Whatever your thoughts on it - and Ed Sheeran’s have changed, it turns out - Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? represents a key moment in pop history.
Released in 1984 to raise money for the famine in Ethiopia, It birthed the concept of the star-studded charity single and featured some of the biggest music stars of the time.
Now, as the song gets set to mark its 40th anniversary, Band Aid ringmaster Bob Geldof, who wrote Do They Know It's Christmas? with Midge Ure, has been reflecting on the day it was recorded at Trevor Horn’s Sarm Studios in London. And, in his interview with the Radio Times, he touched on what has become one of the song’s most controversial lines.
The phrase "Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you" was sung by Bono, and has come to be viewed by some as condescending in tone, and to perpetuate the stereotype that the people of Africa are ‘victims’ who deserve our pity. And it turns out that, even as he was about to record it, Bono wanted to double-check with Geldof that he definitely wanted to go with it.
“Bono took me aside and asked if I was sure I wanted him to sing this line about ‘Tonight, thank God it’s them instead of you.’” remembers Geldof.
“I was able to say, this is not soggy liberalism; this is coded anger, like Michael Buerk’s [news] report. And because he’s got a voice from God and he can absorb the sense of a song like few others, he nailed it.”
For better or worse, Bono’s line became one of Do They Know It’s Christmas’s most iconic. So much so that, when a new Band Aid cast assembled in 2004 to re-record the song, there was a bunfight over who was going to sing it. Both Robbie Williams and The Darkness’s Justin Hawkins were said to be keen, but the debate was ended by the arrival of a familiar face.
"They were still arguing when the door swings open and in walks Bono, who says, 'Are we doing my line yet?'” remembers Geldof. “He came back and sang it again in 2014, when we were doing it for the Ebola crisis." (This time, the line was changed to "Well tonight we're reaching out and touching you.")
This was the version that featured Ed Sheeran, and his vocals are also set to be included on the 2024 Ultimate Mix, which also fuses elements of the 1984 and 2004 recordings (Band Aid II, which was released in 1989 and produced by Stock Aitken Waterman, seems to have been completely forgotten about). However, in a statement, Sheeran said that he wasn’t consulted about this, and that, if he had been, he would have “respectfully declined the use of my vocals.”
Sheeran cites a post by Fuse ODG, the British-Ghanian rapper who was also invited to appear on the 2014 Band Aid but turned it down. “I recognised the harm initiatives like it inflict on Africa," he wrote. "While they may generate sympathy and donations, they perpetuate damaging stereotypes that stifle Africa's economic growth, tourism, and investment, ultimately costing the continent trillions and destroying its dignity, pride and identity."
Geldof, though, recently defended Do They Know It’s Christmas’s legacy and rejected the idea that it reinforces “old Colonial tropes.” In a response to an article written by British academic Colin Alexander for The Conversation, he said: "This little pop song has kept hundreds of thousands if not millions of people alive.
"In fact just today Band Aid has given hundreds of thousands of pounds to help those running from the mass slaughter in Sudan and enough cash to feed a further 8,000 children in the same affected areas of Ethiopia as 1984.
"Those exhausted women who weren’t raped and killed and their panicked children and any male over 10 who survived the massacres and those 8,000 Tigrayan children will sleep safer, warmer and cared for tonight because of that miraculous little record. We wish that it were other but it isn’t.
"‘Colonial tropes’ my arse.”
Do They Know It’s Christmas? - 2024 Ultimate Mix will be released to digital platforms on 25 November. The Band Aid Compilation CD and 12-inch vinyl will be released on 29 November. All proceeds raised from physical and download sales will go to the Band Aid Trust.
