No woke bandwagon can cancel Band Aid (Image: BBC )
Forty years ago this week, the cream of Britain’s pop crop – including the likes of Paul Young, Tony Hadley, Bono, Boy George and George Michael – tipped out of bed, rocked up at Trevor Horn’s west London studio and recorded, under the guidance of Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof and Ultravox frontman Midge Ure, a song that changed the world.
Not only did Do They Know It’s Christmas?, released on December 7, 1984, enter the British chart in the top slot and become the Christmas number one – a holy grail back then – but it sold a million copies that first week, three million by New Year’s Eve, hit the jackpot in 13 other countries and raised £8million within a year to help relieve famine of biblical proportions in Ethiopia.
It subsequently inspired Live Aid, Comic Relief and was a shot in the bicep for the way we do charity. It’s cheap to argue with those who give freely of time and talent to achieve a selfless goal.
Yet argue people did. The melody was simplistic, the song lacked a chorus and what were we doing feeding Africa when charity should begin at home? The lyrics have since been dismissed as trite, even offensive.
They are arguing again. This time, as the Ultimate Mix fifth version of the fundraising record is released, featuring Chris Martin harmonising with Sugababes and George Michael duetting with Harry Styles, African activists and musicians – such as Ghanaian-English singer and rapper Fuse ODG – are castigating Geldof for being patronising and colonial, and for “perpetuating damaging stereotypes that stifle Africa’s economic growth, tourism and investment”. In the blue corner, Ed Sheeran’s whingeing at the way he sounded on the 2014 version, re-deployed on this one, and says they shouldn’t have used his voice again without his permission.
Crybabies. Get a life. Millions of fellow humans are trying to.
Those who criticise the lyrics miss the point. The words were metaphorical. There may not have been much snow in Africa. But as one of the oldest communities in Christendom, Ethiopians knew better than anyone that it was Christmas time.
They just had more pressing things to worry about than marking the coming of Christ. Such as saving their kids and trying not to die of starvation.
Those moaning that the world has moved on and that it’s politically incorrect to patronise African countries can do one, too.
International development and aid have indeed evolved over the past four decades. It doesn’t mean millions are no longer in need.
Sensibilities have advanced, but the problems continue. Only last year, the Band Aid Charitable Trust distributed more than £3million to African nations, providing clean water and training, and building libraries and schools. Just last week, serious sums were committed to help the desperate Sudanese, while cash to feed 8,000 children in the same part of Ethiopia as what started all this was handed over. Geldof has made the mission his life’s work.
The power of records to generate magnificent wealth may be diminished. That doesn’t make music impotent. New versions raise awareness among younger generations of the monumental work that still needs to be done. Work that will continue, long after Saint Bob is gone.
The single, out today, is available to download or purchase on CD or 12-inch vinyl. Buy it.
Otherwise, do we know it’s Christmas time at all?
Tributes to our luminaries obit too belated
We should celebrate people while they’re still alive (Image: Caroll Taveras / Bradford Enterprises)
I have gone off obituaries. Reading those of the late novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford this week, all I felt was, what a waste.
So much talent and marvellousness reduced to ash. Shouldn’t we celebrate such achievers much more during their lifetime, rather than extol their elaborate virtues once they are dead?
BTB, 91, was, like her most famous work, A Woman of Substance. She wrote 40 novels and scored more than 90 million book sales. I’ve never read a single one. I don’t know anyone else who has, either. Just saying.
I witnessed why you don’t mess with Moss
Kate Moss has been everywhere this week (Image: Mert & Marcus)
Kate Moss has been everywhere this week. Sleek and luscious in leopard-print and sequins, the 50-year-old’s timeless sex appeal wins again.
I’m just jealous. It would look like fancy dress on me. Every item in her Zara Christmas collection has probably sold out by now, and will be changing hands on eBay for fortunes.
I had a soft spot for Mossy during her Grunge-Barbie phase. Devoid of glamour, with sweaty hair, dung-encrusted wellies and filthy shorts, there was still a Croydon-ness about her that I loved.
She wore the kind of stuff I liked. When I sat beside her at the bar of a private members’ club one night, she was dressed in jeans and a black leather jacket. As was I.
Her diffident smile lit up the place – until a sozzled golden girl plonked herself next to the pianist and started howling a popular tune. Kate stood this for all of two minutes before striding over and instructing the broad to shut up. The offended matron refused: “Make me!” Kate did.
You would have paid to watch the outcome.
■To the Royal Festival Hall next week, for my youngest’s second graduation. My three children already stand proudly in their caps and gowns in matching frames on my office wall. I refer to them as the Three Degrees.
But now that Bridie’s Masters degree is in the bag, I must make room for a fourth picture, so the name no longer applies. I lamented this to a DJ pal, who coined an alternative.
The pictures to hide a nasty stain that’s lying there (if you know, you know) will henceforth be known as the Four Tops.
■Jude Law claims a world exclusive, revealing on Zoe Ball’s breakfast show that the chocolate box cottage in classic Christmas film The Holiday starring himself, Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz doesn’t exist. It was nothing but a façade in a field, he says.
He’ll need to do better than that. Our dear chum Chris Charlesworth, David Bowie’s former publicist who rose to fame on the Melody Maker, has dined out on this for years. He and his wife live round the corner from said field.
Hey Jude, we already knew.
Jude Law in The Holiday (Image: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock)
Dads and husbands may be confined to the annals of human history as IVF booms
The number of women opting for IVF has tripled over the past ten years. The majority of applicants are not couples who have failed to conceive naturally, either.
Single motherhood, once frowned upon, has become a societal norm. As has egg freezing: standard practice among women in their 30s of good educational and financial status but without prospect of a suitable match, who’ve had it up to here with being used for sex by commitment-phobic men found on dating sites. The number one reason for IVF or donor insemination treatment, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority reported this week, is not lesbianism, woke-ism or strident careerism, but want of The One.
What has happened? Has the thoroughly modern woman of independent means studied the market, wouldn’t touch them with yours and reckoned she can have a better life by cutting out the middle man and going it alone? In which case, what becomes of millions of rejected males, and what will be the effect on millions of sons without a male role model? A new dystopia looms, the implications of which we should fear. We all know the patriarchy has had it. Women’s rights, now at the forefront, can no longer be ignored.
But follow the rabbit down the hole. Some people’s ideal, of an eventual matriarchy in which actual men are held superfluous to procreation, is not merely sinister. What will it do to the human race?
