Do They Know It's Christmas Yet?: They took a trip back to 1984 and broke it.

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People were very busy burying the dead,” he said. “Because the Derg [the communist military regime running Ethiopia] had taken so many people away for resettlement, there was a shortage of labour and some of us were forced to become gravediggers.” Lessons From Band Aid Once [Bob] had Midge on board, all Bob’s friends who know his musical limitations would think ‘we know the record will get made now, so it’s not going to embarrass us,” one person familiar with the project observed.

As most readers already know, the song had nothing to do with AIDS, but with a famine in Ethiopia. Fewer, however, know that the famine was man-made. For this reason, Ethiopia “has insisted on charting its own development course.” They expelled the communist regime in 1991. They’ve steadily expanded economic freedom (though the country still has a long way to go), and prosperity has surged as a result. In 2018, Abiy Ahmed ended the country’s 20-year war with Eritrea, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.What few realize is that the famine was not an accident. Though drought played a role, many have overlooked that the Ethiopian government's military policies were the primary catalyst. Fifteen thousand children here now. Suffering. Confused. Lost,” Buerk says, as the camera pans to emaciated bodies of starving Ethiopians. “Death is all around. A child or an adult dies every twenty minutes.” Dawit Wolde-Giorgis, the relief commissioner and the author of Red Tears: Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia, recalled Mengistu describing his strategy with a Maoist parable of draining the sea to capture fish. On a chilly October night in England in 1984, Bob Geldof was alone watching TV. As the frontman of the Boomtown Rats, Geldof had tasted fame and success, but his music career was now at a crossroads. The band was in shambles, and Geldof was trying to “manage the decline” as he considered his next step.

The song was recorded in a matter of hours, and Ure spent the next several days producing and editing in his home studio with engineer Rik Walton. The “darker political purpose” Gill alludes to is that resettlement allowed Col. Mengistu to more effectively deal with the alliance of rebel groups, including the Eritrean liberation movement and the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, who opposed the communist military regime. Getting artists to commit to the project wasn’t as difficult as one might expect. Geldof knew a great many performers, and they could see he was passionate about the cause. Meanwhile, Ure brought needed credibility to the project.

Do They Know It’s Christmas” was released on December 3. It opened with Paul Young on vocals, followed by Boy George, George Michael, Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran, Sting, and Bono. Numerous other artists also participated in the project. Aid is just a stopgap,” Bono pointed out not long after Gill’s book was published. “Commerce [and] entrepreneurial capitalism take more people out of poverty than aid. We need Africa to become an economic powerhouse.” Do They Know It's Christmas" remains a holiday favorite. But it turns out that writing a song and raising millions of dollars for food assistance in Africa was the easy part. Nearly four decades later, “Do They Know It’s Christmas” holds a mixed legacy. On one hand, it remains one of the most popular Christmas songs in the world—and for good reason. The song channels the spirit of Christmas, which calls on us to love and care for our fellow man—and to freely give to those in need. Its message of hope, charity, and idealism moves us, which is part of its magic.