Its not just Christmas this weekend but its the 40th Anniversary of a remarkable musical event that the world is never likely to forget.  It was the day that Bob Geldorf of The Boomtown Rats and Midge Ure of Ultravox gathered a veritable who’s who of pop music for the star-studded, chart-topping single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?.”  This informal group was called Band Aid and they were all united to raise much need funds for the catastrophic famine in Ethiopia that the BBC had brought to the world’s attention.

So on November 25th a London studio was packed with with most of the biggest stars of the day : they included  Bono, Sting, Jody Watley, George Michael, Paul Weller, Paul Young and Phil Collins, as well as members of Duran Duran, Bananarama, Spandau Ballet, and even the U.S. R&B group Kool & The Gang.  Boy George was a late arrival as he made a special flight back from NY to be there.   Just two weeks later the single was released and sold a million copies within the first week, making it the fastest-selling single in U.K. chart history, and it remained at the top of the charts for 5 weeks. 

The whole remarkable event was captured in a fly-on-the-wall documentary that Netflix earlier thais year (and is now free on You Tube ) and we found it a sheer joy to watch this part of musical history.  However even though it raised over $10 million for Ethiopia within the year there were folks who felt the whole endeavor was condescending, and that it presented a western, colonial, and Christian-centric view of the world while perpetuating stereotypes about a starving Africa.

Band Aid held Live Aid benefit concert the following summer, which featured (among others) the iconic Queen set that many consider the greatest live rock performance of all time. It also went on to inspire “We Are The World” in the US in ’85 and also every holiday season since  “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” inevitably finds its way back to the airwaves.