The singer and activist fights back against criticism of his ‘little song that’s kept millions of people alive’ and reflects on the day he gathered the biggest stars in pop.

Three weeks ago Bob Geldof was in a Montreal hotel, waiting for his room service. A knock came at the door and in walked a man carrying his breakfast. He seemed nervous, fidgety, telling Geldof that he had been in a camp in Korem, Ethiopia, in the early 1980s and how
his older sister, just five at the time, had brought them both there after their parents died. He looked at Geldof and said: “Thank you for my life.”

He told the singer that after aid reached Korem, he had escaped to France, before moving to Canada. Geldof protested — “Stop! You made your life!” — but the man persisted. He took out his wallet and showed Geldof a picture of his wife and six-year-old son. “I said, ‘Great – good-looking kid.’ But he just lunged at me,” Geldof says. “He hugged me and said, ‘Thank you for my son.’”

Band Aid turned 40 on November 25, 1984, the day 37 of the nation’s biggest pop stars gathered in Notting Hill, London, from 11am to 7pm to make Do They Know It’s Christmas? Just one month earlier Geldof had been at home with Paula Yates and their toddler, Fifi, when Michael Buerk’s report from Korem aired on the Six O’Clock News. It showed a nurse, Claire, who had to pick which children would survive and jolted Geldof into penning a song that would make £8 million ($17m) and instigate the Band Aid Charitable Trust, which he is still very active with today and which has raised more than £140m ($300m).

This month, to mark four decades of the charity, Geldof has marshalled a special edit of the song that blends the 1984 original with its hirsute singers – Tony Hadley, Simon Le Bon, Boy George – with cover versions from 2004 (Robbie Williams, Thom Yorke, Sugababes) and 2014 (Emeli Sandé, Ed Sheeran, Rita Ora). It’s a unique marker of what changes but also stays the same in pop (with Bono a constant). The video, out tomorrow, also mixes three generations, and acts as a reminder of who we have lost – including Yates, Sinéad O’Connor and Liam Payne.

I meet Geldof in his office in west London – he is 73, with his white hair wild and tousled, and shows no sign of retiring. Over two hours he is passionate, still full of the piss and vinegar that made the song happen in the first place. Often he is wistful. “Guileless innocence,” he says, beaming, about the original. “It’s so English, spotty, scruffy.” He recalls introducing pre-fame Bono to mid-Wham! George Michael and a quiet Bono admitting, “I get nervous around pop stars.” About himself, Geldof says: “There’s video of me in my best Eighties rolled-up sleeves – what a c***!”

More often than not, though, Geldof simply gets sad, then angry. Each day he wakes up to a full inbox of messages sent to the trust – “It’s just there, all the f***ing time.” He wells up. “Rage is my animus,” he says, before detailing why he will not let go.

“We were sent in reports from contacts in Sudan about the thuggish warring groups rampaging the country,” he says. “Brutes entered a town three weeks ago, lined up all males over ten and killed them. They took a newborn and killed it; they drowned a toddler. Then the rape began.

“Nine months ago,” he continues, “in northern Ethiopia, a number of schools we built got taken out by either a militia or the Eritrean army. They forced male students to rape female members of their family.” He stops for breath. “Look – I’m painting a reality. So in Sudan yesterday we gave hundreds of thousands of pounds to 8,000 children and the exhausted women who made it across the border into Chad. Would you like to stop that? Or, knowing you can’t, at least make a gesture of disgust [by giving to Band Aid], so somebody can take care of these people?”

Last week Ed Sheeran criticised the new edit, saying Band Aid didn’t ask for permission to re-use his vocals from 2014 and he would have declined if asked. He reposted a statement by the rapper Fuse ODG, who refused to take part in the 2014 version and argues that the song spreads the idea that Africa is a victim of “famine and poverty”, which is “not the truth”.

Geldof’s response? “This little pop song has kept millions of people alive. Why would Band Aid scrap feeding thousands of children dependent on us for a meal?” He reels off all the work the charity does, from education to healthcare. “Why not keep doing that? Because of an abstract wealthy-world argument, regardless of its legitimacy? No abstract theory regardless of how sincerely held should impede or distract from that hideous, concrete real-world reality. There are 600 million hungry people in the world – 300 million are in Africa. We wish it were other but it is not. We can help some of them. That’s what we will continue to do.”

Nothing has really changed for Geldof. In 1984 he and Yates watched Buerk at home. “Which is a measure of where we were as a band,” he says of his group the Boomtown Rats. “No group should be at home at 6pm. But Buerk gave a masterclass. He was spitting with anger, but in a polite, English way. Paula grabbed Fifi and ran upstairs. I sat appalled. If this was happening to my kid, what would me and the missus do? Here were parents holding children in the death throes of starvation, but by chance I was born in Dun Laoghaire – what the f***? You don’t know how lucky you are.”

Which is when he realised he had agency – as a pop star with hits and, due to Yates’s job presenting the music show The Tube, contacts. The next day he and Midge Ure from Ultravox decided to write a song, with Bono’s line, “Well, tonight thank God it’s them instead of you,” a direct response to Buerk’s report.

But the song needed a headline too. Geldof was thinking Give Peace a Chance, The Times They Are A-Changin’ and scribbled “Feed the world” on his notepad. “It has run the gamut of naff to become part of the season’s backing track,” he says. “In Tesco it’s Cliff Richard at the plum pudding, Slade at the bacon and then you reach the turkey …” He beat-boxes out the song’s intro and smiles.

“It’s not a great song,” Ure admits when we speak the next day. “There is no chorus; the structure is bizarre. Had we known it would end up side-by-side with Silent Night and White Christmas we’d have tried to write a better track.”

Ure, though, has little time for other people who pick it apart. For instance, a constant criticism has been that it actually does snow in Africa, but Ure says Geldof’s original lyrics went, “There won’t be snow in Ethiopia this Christmas time” — but that is simply too many syllables.

“And it’s a pop song,” Ure says with a shrug. “We have lines there because they rhyme, not because they make sense. There are many keyboard warriors out there, and in the time it takes them to write a scathing remark some child has died. They talk while we actually do something. All those stars turned up on that Sunday morning with hangovers, but were there for a reason. Although it’s also possible that they were just scared of Bob.”

Bananarama arrived at Sarm Studios in their manager’s two-door Golf. The trio — Keren Woodward, Sara Dallin, Siobhan Fahey — were in their early twenties with two albums under their big Eighties belts. There were only four women on the day — them and Jody Watley from Shalamar — and they had no idea of the magnitude of the project until they spotted Paul Weller and Duran Duran and thought, “Wow, what is this?”

They did not hear the song until they were inside, but their contribution – on the chorus – was not tricky to figure out. “We added a very loud harmony,” Woodward says, “that cut through despite Bono blasting out behind us.”

Dallin looks back at the video and “sees those three little girls singing — we were just embarking on our career”.

“I still really enjoy it when it comes on the radio,” Woodward adds. “And if I’m in the car I’ll absolutely sing along – in all the different voices, obviously.”

In 1984, Spandau Ballet were in their imperial phase – one year after True. They had arrived that morning from Germany. “We got picked up from the airport in this big Daimler,” Gary Kemp says, laughing. “We did think we had got the tone wrong.” Sting turned up on foot holding a copy of The Observer.

Still, this was the first song of its kind. “I don’t remember charity being in my life before then,” Kemp says. “Maybe it was for the middle classes, but that record gave the general public empowerment — it changed society.

“When I look at the old footage, we’re having too much of a good time,” he continues. “Now people are wonderfully earnest and make all the right faces for cameras, but we were just a bunch of Smash Hits front pages. Geldof was the only person in the room with the anger and cojones to really make this happen.”

Did he buy the single afterwards? “Yes, of course!” he says with a laugh. “That was really important.”

“Oh,” says Francis Rossi from Status Quo when I ask the same question. “No – but I should’ve done.” Rossi and his bandmate Rick Parfitt were, by all accounts, the life and soul of Band Aid, clearly happy to be there via means both natural and chemical. “We weren’t the only two,” Rossi insists. “It’s just we had more and were more generous with it.” He means drugs and mentions one person who still owes him for dope, “and everyone did us for coke too. Rick was pissed witless.”

So what are Rossi’s main memories when he watches the video back? “I got caught staring at Jody Watley’s bum,” he says. “And I’m not one of those bum blokes, but it just looked so great in those jeans and the camera’s looking at me so I think, ‘Oh s***.’” Still, I say, it must have been good to be part of the phenomenon? “It always smells a bit to me when we as an industry do charity stuff because it never does the career any harm. ‘Oh, he’s involved with charity – he’s such a good man.’ So was Jimmy f***ing Savile.

“Also, what’s the difference now?” he continues. “There are the same ads on TV telling us to raise money. And all these comedians say that some kid walks six miles every day to water – why don’t they move closer?”

Dare I ask why he and Parfitt went along? “It could have been our manager, or someone said it’d be good to have them because they’re funny like Morecambe and Wise. We were the old people.” Who did they know? “I knew Sting, but he was, like, ‘Steer clear of Quo, they’re not hip.’ Also, Paul Weller – grumpiest shit on the planet, lovely bloke. But he never mentioned that Rick had helped him out with this and that. Liking Status Quo is not one of those things people like to admit to.”

What about Geldof and Ure? “I knew Midge — I used to call him Smudge. I knew Geldof too. He was the ultimate upstart, but I’m not sure he’s actually grown out of that.” But you respected what he was doing? “Absolutely. And I thought the song was OK. The sentiment was there. All credit to the upstart.”

Geldof is realistic about Band Aid in 2024. There are more distractions than there were 40 years ago. The all-encompassing success of Band Aid in 1984 was such that it led to offshoots: Fashion Aid, Theatre Aid, Secretary Aid. “For us to top the charts we sold 620,000 copies,” Geldof says. “Will this new version make anything like that one? No, because there are no f***ing record shops. If we have 620,000 hits on Spotify, what will that make? Literally a quid?”

The way that Geldof sees it, Band Aid in 1984 was a success for many reasons, but mostly because of how Britain was at the time – post-punk, striking, Margaret Thatcher saying, “There’s no such thing as society.” He believes that the people who bought the hit did it as a rebuke. “No such thing as society?” he jeers. “It’s all about greed? Really? No! People were not going to go along with that.

“And now it’s a fractious world – febrile,” he continues. “I’ve never felt it so fragile, and people have lost any ability to control events. From the cost of living to horror in Ukraine. To the horror of Palestine. A million can march, but nobody gives a f***. Or Trump, or the rise in Europe of fascists. What can you do? People are uneasy and uneasiness comes from a loss of control.

“But on this issue you have agency,” he adds sternly – meaning Band Aid. “And I can guarantee your personal action here will result in a kid sleeping warmer, fed that night. This is one issue in which you have power. You get to tilt the world a fraction – and I know: ‘Here is f***ing Geldof banging on.’ But the instrument of this control, as corny as it may sound, is this thing – this OK tune.”

So he keeps trying. He says he needs to speak to the Spotify boss Daniel Ek to ask if Spotify can make a financial exception for the charity. He has not yet been in touch with Keir Starmer, as he was with Tony Blair – “But I could easily.” He says he would meet with Trump about Africa – “But he calls them ‘shithole countries’.” He is also eager to point out that he is compiling a double Boomtown Rats record, going on a pivot about how he only started that band because “this girl wanted to shag me”. Their 50th anniversary is imminent. “And so it doesn’t occupy my day,” he says of Band Aid, laughing – but who really believes him?

Do They Know It’s Christmas? 2024 Ultimate Mix is out now.

Written by: Jonathan Dean

© The Times of London