In 1984, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure co-wrote ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, a massive hit single that raised £8m for charity, remained the all-time best-selling UK single for thirteen years, and established music as a means for raising money for charity, spawning Live Aid and the later incarnations of Band Aid. Its famous chorus “feed the world” has become iconic in the struggle against Third World poverty.
However, it is George Harrison’s 1971 single, ‘Bangla Desh’, that is widely considered to be the first true charity single. But it wasn’t even The Other Beatle who first had the idea of using music to raise money for a good cause. In 1742, Handel held a charity concert in Ireland at which he first presented his Messiah. All the money made went towards prisoners’ debt relief, the Mercer’s Hospital, and the Charitable Infirmary.
Despite these precursors, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ and the subsequent Live Aid concert organized by Mr Geldof himself remain one of the most iconic moments in musical, and cultural charity history. The list of artists who made it to the studio to record the song on November 25th 1984 is quite staggering: Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, George Michael, Sting, Bono, Phil Collins, the list goes on. A number of artists also recorded messages for the B-side of the single, including David Bowie, who said, “It’s Christmas 1984, and there are more starving folk on our planet than ever before.”
The song comes under a lot of criticism, often over its wording, which creates an implicit divide between the affluent West and the starving Ethiopians — “do they know?” — but the lyrics are to some extent aware of this. Bono chimes in at one point with an ironic “well tonight thank God it’s them, instead of you”. It is impossible to get away from the song being a case of rich musicians singing to affluent Westerners, but the self-awareness present throughout is often missed, and, in any case, it is the effect that matters.
It’s not just the approximate total of £50m raised by the song itself and the concert following it; it’s the US follow-up involving Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and others, it’s the huge rise in awareness as a result of popular culture taking up the cause of the starving majority and it’s the mass of charity records and charity concerts that it has spawned. Yes, it seems crass and yes, it’s all sickeningly self-congratulatory, but these aspects are part of the reason that this sort of thing works — the 2004 song ‘Grief Never Grows Old’, released in aid of the Indian Ocean tsunami was an appalling piece of crap, but I still bloody bought it.
‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ has a remarkable legacy, especially for such a bad song, and we would do well to think about the good it did before we criticize its intelligence or its sensitivity.
