Band Aid - Do They Know It's Xmas

[Avondklok]

Everyone loves to hate this now, but it's not so far off 40 years old!!!! And everyone meant well. I was a teenager back then and to see everyone join together in a way never seen before at that point was just marvellous. Ditto Bandaid that followed. I hate that it gets so slagged off these days, though I do understand the arguments.

If you've got the spare time to scour the past for things to be offended by, you're doing better than a hell of a lot of people.

@BakedTattie

I love the video how they are look completely off their faces

To be fair, it’s well documented that many of them were

I find it ridiculous the people even have to explain this song. Nobody is suggesting that there would be snow in Africa or Africans can't read dates, are ignorant etc. It's about how our Western preoccupations and desires at this time of year - a white Christmas, presents, celebrating the perfect Christmas etc. are completely irrelevant compared to the suffering that was going elsewhere in the world.

You don't have to like the song (I don't particularly), you can think it's shit, but it raised a lot of money and made people feel that they were lucky at a time of year a lot of people feel entitled and sweat the small stuff.

Oh,. look, it's time to show how cool and enlightened we are by slating a song from decades ago which at least got people's attention and money. Yes, there is lots in it that is problematic. But the motive for creating it was far nobler than any of this self conscious wittering.

I get called 'woke' as an insult on a regular basis and can happily work myself up into a fit of righteous indignation without much effort but I remember Band Aid and Live Aid and the footage from Ethiopia and for all Geldof's many, many faults and all that is wrong with the song and the beliefs it plays into, I am still glad he and others cared and tried and wanted to get starving people fed.

I love it and especially loved George Michael's bit as he was my heart throb
....I guess that makes it totally dated then lol

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The lyrics are pretty offensive and patronising, but I still love it as a song and I love the video as well, it's just pure 80s nostalgia!

When any of you has made up lyrics and a song that raises millions and millions of pounds to help others in need let me know.
Otherwise please pipe down and realise it was a song of its time and did an awful lot of good. The words appealed to the masses and got people to give.
Pack it in. People are giving the lyrics way to much headspace

www.officialcharts.com/chart-news/midge-ure-do-they-know-it-s-christmas-isn-t-perfect-but-it-does-the-job-__7253/

Midge Ure:

“I initially recorded the melody on a little toy keyboard onto a cassette. It was a lot slower than on the record. I sent it to Bob and he came over a couple of days later. He had this idea. He came up with the majority of the lyrics and at the time I thought these two things were totally incompatible.

“We started with these lyrics, ‘there won’t be snow in Ethiopia this Christmas’, which didn’t quite work, so we changed ‘Ethiopia’ to ‘Africa’, leading into the last bit, ‘feed the world’. The really hard part was to have this quite ominous change of time and then finish with this almost positive singalong part which would be so memorable. That was difficult.”

“At first, Bob wanted Trevor Horn to produce the record, but he takes six weeks just to produce a single! We just didn’t have that. So, I just said leave it with me. Because I had a studio at the house, I went down there for four days and knocked this think into shape. Bob would pop in occasionally, but I carried on working on the music, putting it together, instrument by instrument. “John Taylor [of Duran Duran] came down and laid down a track, and Paul Weller did some guitar which we didn’t actually use. But everything on that record is synthesised, except for Phil Collins drums, plus I also nicked a drum sound from Tears For Fears, from The Hurting.”

“A couple of people came down to my studio and did their vocal parts before the day itself - and then we had only 24 hours in the studio [Sarm Studio]. I would like to think that we did make the best job of it. But we had no budget to make this, the time constraints were huge, we had to grab whoever, whenever we could. As you can imagine, these people are all over the world and weren’t all available when we wanted them.”

You have to look at it as a song and as a record. What we made was a record and it did a brilliant job. It was quite nicely produced, it had lots of textures on it, lots of highs and lows - and you hear it coming out of the radio and it still does the job today. As a song, if you take away the periphery, the artists, the money raised and the reason we made it, I think it’s not that great. It’s not the best thing I’ve been involved in. But as a record…”

@phoenixrosehere

Hmm let me think: would I rather listen to Band Aid which raised millions for charity ? or someone singing about her fat ass and how she likes anal sex ( many thanks Cardi B )? gosh, it's a tough choice.

What a VERY strange and a disturbing comparison..

Valid though.

I can only feel sorry for the lot that find this song offensive. I will play it all day long today.

@Positivevibesonlyplease Brilliant cover version by Boris et al! Thanks for sharing.

Band Aid, Live Aid, Do They Know It's Christmas... all examples of 'the people' getting together, trying to improve the world, led by charismatic if imperfect individual/s. Not leaving it to governments. Your purchase, or your donation, is going to count. It's down to you, the person in the street. You can make a difference. Very, very empowering.

The song might be simplistic in it's message - and yes, we knew at the time that a lot of the people suffering weren't Christians, but Christmas is not just for Christians and the 'Christmas spirit' is to be extended to everyone - and not politically correct for today's miserable, intolerant, nit-picking, woke society but it was what we had and what we did.

What are you doing?

The only thing we need to know is whether Radio 1 have banned it for being offensive 🤣

The whole song is a depressing dirge
I hated it in 1984 (?). Hate it now

Especially the line ‘tonight thank God it’s them instead of you ‘- what an awful thing to say

@Heatherjayne1972

The whole song is a depressing dirge I hated it in 1984 (?). Hate it now

Especially the line ‘tonight thank God it’s them instead of you ‘- what an awful thing to say

When's your flight for Syria then? Have you paid the people smugglers to get you on the last dinghy out of Dodge?

Anybody who doesn't thank God it's them and not you is lying.

It's not offensive, unless you have so little to do you are looking to be offended

It raised MILLIONS

I enjoy it every year

Fuck off and find a real cause

@KaptainKaveman what does Cardi B have to do with Christmas songs??

Especially the line ‘tonight thank God it’s them instead of you ‘- what an awful thing to say

That line is meant to be raw because it's the brutal truth. I think lots of people are offended by this line, and actually they're not understanding it properly.

@TheSilentStars. @Sojo88
The song was written in 1984 about starving CHILDREN. In Africa -not Syrian refugees in2020
‘Thank god it’s them instead of you’- yeah great Let’s be glad babies are starving as long as it’s not us
Dreadful

I'll always remember DS when he was at junior school years ago singing this with his class at the Christmas concert. They sang the "Feed the world" chorus with such fervour, it had me in tears, I can still see his rapt little face! For that reason, I can't ever dislike it, though I take on board one or two comments on here.

@unlimiteddilutingjuice

Christmas in the Coptic church is January the seventh. It's not so much that they "don't know it's Christmas" more that they know it definatly isnt (yet).

Ah, the people who think they’re so clever with the Coptic church dates! They’re always something.

1. It’s not the point
2. The song says Xmas time not Xmas day
3. It’s not the point

[quote Heatherjayne1972]**@TheSilentStars. @Sojo88
The song was written in 1984 about starving CHILDREN. In Africa -not Syrian refugees in2020
‘Thank god it’s them instead of you’- yeah great Let’s be glad babies are starving as long as it’s not us
Dreadful[/quote]
@Heatherjayne1972 it’s supposed to be dreadful. It’s supposed to bring the listener up short with the thought that the starving child that they see on the news could be their own child - and it’s just luck that it’s not.

It’s a great line, very powerful.

It’s certainly a dreadful thought - but why is dreadful as a line?

It's a shit song and looking back on it, the lyrics are at best naive and at worst problematic. It did raise a shit load of money for good causes, but the distribution of that money was incredibly mismanaged and a great deal of it found it's way to Mengistu who used it to fund his regime.

It was, of course, all done with the best of intentions but that doesn't make it "woke" (Just fuck off with that term) to actually educate yourself about the wider history of it all.

And you can all also fuck of with the "well, what have YOU done posts". Nothing is immune from criticism and we examine things like this so we can learn and do things better.

It's not an awful thing to say at all - it's not wishing starving Ethiopians ill, it's to make those of us who aren't starving in a famine realise how much better off we are.