The Making of Band Aid: Secrets and Stories From the Star-Studded Session
It’s not yet Thanksgiving, but those commercial-free holiday-music marathons are already inescapable. Listen long enough and, after repeat playings of Mariah Carey and Mannheim Steamroller, you’ll eventually be treated to that darkest of year-end chestnuts: Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”
“The lyrics are bleak, but essentially so, and a welcome change from the bromides of mistletoe and the saccharine Christmas fare that is usually served up,” says Sting, recalling the charity single he recorded 30 years ago – on November 25th – as a member of the mostly-British supergroup.
Nearly 40 artists – many of the biggest acts of the early Eighties, like Duran Duran, Culture Club, Wham!, even a then-bubbling-under U2 – converged that day at London’s Sarm Studios in response to a harrowing BBC report on the starving victims of the Ethiopian famine. And every year since, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” reminds us, as we gobble down our holiday dinners, that “there’s a world outside your window/it’s a world of dread and fear.” Then, in its bluntest moment: “Tonight thank God it’s them instead of you.”
“It was a song written for a specific purpose: to touch people’s heartstrings and to loosen the purse strings,” says ex-Ultravox singer Midge Ure, who wrote the song with Band Aid organizer Bob Geldof, frontman for the Boomtown Rats. “[The lyrics] had to be brutal. We were looking at television pictures of children spending five minutes trying to stand up.”
“Band Aid and Live Aid were a great contradiction to what people thought, another side of the decade,” says Boy George. “The Eighties were about greed and excess – we were called Thatcher’s Children.”
“We got lumped in with Thatcherism because people thought we were living the high life,” adds Simon Le Bon. One reason Le Bon and his contemporaries found Band Aid so attractive, he says, was because it “was this opportunity to do something that wasn’t about ‘me.’ It made you feel you could do something useful. We made young people believe they had some kind of power and were able to do something that did have an effect.”
In stores just three days after it was recorded, “Do They Know” remained the U.K.’s biggest-selling record until Elton John’s Princess Diana tribute version of “Candle in the Wind” overtook it almost 15 years later.
Earlier this month, new group of stars came together (at the U.N.’s request) to record a 30th anniversary update, but Geldof himself still has trouble hearing the original. “I associate it with the meat counter at my local supermarket,” he says. “Every time I arrive to buy the fucking turkey, I hear [hums the song’s intro]. The butcher looks at me with a little smile and I go, ‘Yeah, yeah. Give me the fucking turkey, dude.'”
Here, he and his cast of musicians detail their world-changing session and share some of their favorite untold stories from the making of the hit.