For 40 years, Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? has been praised by some as a triumph of charitable fundraising and festive songwriting – and condemned by others as the most high-profile example of white saviourhood in pop.
Now, to mark its latest anniversary, the song is coming back around for a fourth time, in the form of an all-star splicing of the three previous official versions.
Announcing the new version, Bob Geldof, who masterminded the 1984 original, says Do They Know It’s Christmas? “tells the story not just of unbelievably great generational British talent, but still stands as a rebuke to that period in which it was first heard. The 80s proclaimed that ‘greed is good’. This song says it isn’t. It says it’s stupid.” Proceeds will benefit the Band Aid Charitable Trust, which supports health and anti-poverty initiatives across Africa.
Subtitled “2024 Ultimate Mix” and released on 25 November, the new version of the song certainly has an impressively A-list cast of singers. Contributors from the 1984 original include George Michael, Boy George, Sting and Simon Le Bon; Robbie Williams, Dido and Sugababes are among those from Band Aid 20 in 2004; while alumni from 2014’s Band Aid 30 include Ed Sheeran, Sinéad O’Connor, Sam Smith, Seal, Guy Garvey and One Direction. There will also be two appearances by Chris Martin, and three from Bono.
The backing band is compiled from the original and 2004 versions, with Paul McCartney and Duran Duran’s John Taylor on bass, Thom Yorke on piano, Phil Collins on drums, and Justin and Dan Hawkins from the Darkness on guitar.
Stitching them together for the new version is Trevor Horn, the music producer known for 80s hits with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, ABC and more, who was originally asked by Bob Geldof to produce the 1984 original. In the end, Ultravox’s Midge Ure produced Do They Know It’s Christmas? in Horn’s studio, with Horn later providing a 12in remix.
There are no vocalists or musicians from the unofficial 1989 version helmed by Stock, Aitken and Waterman, though a press statement said that version was “deeply loved by Bob and Midge”.
The 2024 version will have a music video that splices performance footage from across the years, directed by Oliver Murray, who did a similar job with the video for the Beatles’ 2023 song Now and Then.
Sir Peter Blake, the pop artist who created the artwork for the 1984 release, returns to create a new image for the cover of the 2024 version, which will be available on CD and 12in vinyl as well as streams and downloads.
Do They Know It’s Christmas? was created by Geldof and Ure to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia, and was followed the following year by Live Aid, the US-UK benefit concerts featuring iconic performances by artists including Queen, David Bowie and Elton John. Each project was a huge success and the Band Aid Charitable Trust has raised £150m in its history.
But the endeavours have also been criticised as having a paternalistic, even neocolonial framing of aid to Africa. The lyrics to Do They Know It’s Christmas? referred generically to “Africa” rather than Ethiopia, and featured lines such as Bono’s “Well tonight thank God it’s them, instead of you”, which have been seen as othering. Questions have also been raised about the distribution and use of Live Aid funds within Ethiopia.
In 2015, Adekeye Adebajo, then executive director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution, wrote in the Guardian: “Three decades after Live Aid, it is clear that celebrity efforts to ‘save Africa’ have often done more to reinforce negative media stereotypes about the ‘dark continent’ and to portray its one billion citizens as helpless victims in a new ‘white man’s burden’”.
Band Aid 30’s lyrics were partially rewritten to address the negative stereotyping in the original. The aforementioned Bono line was replaced with “Well tonight we’re reaching out and touching you”, while “where the only water flowing is the bitter sting of tears” was replaced with “where a kiss of love can kill you and there’s death in every tear”.
The changes were still criticised. After declining to join the 2014 recording, British-Ghanaian vocalist Fuse ODG wrote in the Guardian that he was “shocked and appalled” by the new lyrics. “The message of the Band Aid 30 song absolutely did not reflect what Africa is truly about … I, like many others, am sick of the whole concept of Africa – a resource-rich continent with unbridled potential – always being seen as diseased, infested and poverty-stricken.”
Regardless of its reception, the new version will probably become one of the favourites in the race for this year’s Christmas No 1, which is currently too early to call. The huge yearly popularity on streaming of both Wham!’s Last Christmas – 2023’s festive chart-topper – and Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You means that each will chart highly again. Ed Sheeran, who had 2021’s Christmas No 1 in a collaboration with Ladbaby and Elton John, may find success again with Under the Tree, a song for new Richard Curtis film That Christmas.
Another Christmas favourite that has surged back into the charts with the advent of streaming is Brenda Lee’s 1958 song Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, which topped the US chart last year for the first time, and has reached as high as No 4 in the UK in recent years. Lee has just released a Spanish-language version to further its popularity this year: its producer recorded a new cover version by a Spanish singer, then used AI to interpret that cover in Lee’s voice.