Bob Geldof defends Band Aid’s impact as fundraising single turns 40

They may have been dubbed cynics at the time, but the naysayers who pointed out some of the lyrical weaknesses to Do They Know It’s Christmas? in retrospect, probably did make a few salient points.

“There won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas time,” sang Bono and a slew of other pop stars. The fact this might be a surprise to Tanzanians and Kenyans living anywhere near Mount Kilimanjaro was considered, at the time, a sarcastic joke for satirists and the very mean-spirited.

Four decades on from the release of one of the biggest charity singles of all time, a 2024 Ultimate Mix of the song, which first came into being after Bob Geldof was traumatised by the images of starving Ethiopians reported by Michael Buerk for the BBC that autumn, will be released on Monday. Whether people buy it or not, the Christmas perennial will no doubt be playing in stores, supermarkets and shopping centres nationwide.

But one star who won’t be enjoying the new Ultimate Mix is Ed Sheeran who, earlier this week, stated on Instagram that he hadn’t been consulted about his voice (taken from the 2014 version) being used again.

“My approval wasn’t sought on this new Band Aid 40 release,” Sheeran wrote. “Had I had the choice I would have respectfully declined the use of my vocals.” The Galway Girl star went on to say that he had been educated in the ways that negative stereotyping of Africa can be sustained by charity singles, a volte face Sheeran attributes to the influence of British-Ghanaian rapper Fuse ODG, who has complained that, “while they [charity singles such as Band Aid] 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”.

But whether true or not, amid the clamour, it’s important to state that Geldof wasn’t the first to come up with the idea of pop stars getting together to raise money for charity. George Harrison rounded up Bob Dylan, fellow ex-Beatle Ringo Starr and Eric Clapton among others for a concert at Madison Square Garden in aid of the humanitarian crisis unfolding in the then newly-independent state of Bangladesh 13 years before Band Aid.

Geldof himself hit back yesterday, saying: “ ‘It’s a pop song FFS… 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.”

Music writer Patrick Humphries believes Do They Know It’s Christmas?, and subsequent concert jamborees in London and Philadelphia, don’t quite chime with modern sensibilities about celebrity fundraising.

“The legacy is white men patronising black Africans, something Comic Relief had to deal with later,” he contends. “But for me the consensus was, ‘By buying this record, I am doing something to help’.

“At a time when pop music was all about Thatcherite self-involvement, emphasised by groups like Wham, Duran Duran, and Spandau Ballet who seemed to sum up the whole Yuppie ‘greed is good’ ethos, at least here were rock stars being responsible and doing something for other people.”

The song was a hit in the UK, having sold nearly four million copies to date.

By refusing to deal with managers and agents and speaking only to the stars themselves, Geldof’s confrontational approach meant that he was able to corral Sting, Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran, Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet, Paul Young, Boy George, George Michael, Bono, and Phil Collins into Sarm West Studios in Notting Hill on November 25, 1984.

Their task was to sing a song that he had already partially written, with the intent that it could potentially be used as a vehicle for his band, by now hideously past their best post-punk act, the Boomtown Rats.

Selling almost four million copies in the UK and 12 million worldwide, Do They Know It’s Christmas? spent five weeks at the top of the singles chart and has gone on to raise more than £140million in the past four decades through the song itself, three subsequent versions (released in 1989, 2004 and 2014) the Live Aid and Live 8 concerts and innumerable other philanthropic ventures that have been rolled out by the Band Aid Charitable Trust.

Yet controversy dogged Geldof’s project from the outset. As early as 1986, the American music magazine Spin published a damning article on the project, claiming that proceeds from the song, as well as Live Aid, may have unintentionally helped Ethiopia’s ruling dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam to purchase weapons from the Soviet Union. Geldof has never commented on the expose but he has issued stern rebukes to critics of Band Aid over the intervening years. “They [critics of the project] can f*** off,” he once said with his trademark bluntness.

Yet critics of Band Aid have refused to heed Geldof’s advice. Former Medecins sans Frontieres president Rony Brauman said, “aid could be turned against those toward whom it was directed and those delivering the aid integrated into a system of oppression”.

He went on to add that relief agencies and their funders could be “part of the problem, not part of the solution”.

Geldof once said that he was “happy to shake hands with the devil on my left and the devil on my right to get to the people who need help”. Yet this attitude, laudable as it may seem on the surface, isn’t without complications.

David Rieff, author of A Bed For The Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, wrote: “Geldof takes a morally serious dispute with respectable arguments on both sides… and turns it into a p***ing match in an alley behind a pub.”

Zambian-born economist Dambisa Moyo’s book Dead Aid is dismissive of the celebrity aid concept in its entirety. She claims many aid organisations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are more interested in perpetuating poverty in order to justify their own existence, while also contending that only 10% of Africans were living in poverty in the 1970s, compared to 70% 40 years later. Yet if you boil Band Aid’s mandate down to pure money-making, it’s hard to argue with Geldof’s decision to make a single using only the most successful, and predominantly white, British talent.

An attempt by Jerry Dammers of The Specials to release a charity record using black musicians, entitled Starvation, enjoyed only minimal success. The song which featured the biggest stars on the 2Tone record label hobbled home to a peak chart position of 33 in the UK singles charts in 1985.

“My memory is that the criticism was aimed at Geldof reviving his career – the Rats had long gone off the charts,” recalls Humphries. “But the song took on its own momentum and by buying it people felt they were helping. I remember Geldof saying people would press cash on him so he had to keep it in a separate pocket.

“He was a perfect spokesman, articulate, passionate, a force of nature, I can’t imagine anyone else making it work.

“But I don’t think it would have the same impact if it happened now. I think there would be so many barriers and the BAME quotient would have to be paramount. The 1984 original was aimed at the Smash Hits pop fan, which I guess accounted for so many white contributors.”

Today one small, somewhat depressing, justification for the awkwardness of the original lyrics comes, ironically, in the form of climate change.

The rapidly receding snow caps on Mount Kilimanjaro have resulted in there being 90% less ice on and around its summit today than there was when humans first made scientific studies in the late 19th century. Bono and co’s refrain of their not being any snow in Africa may, this Christmas, make sense.

Patrick Humphries new book, With The Beatles, is published by Great Northern Book priced £25