How Bob Geldorf’s Christmas Miracle Changed Pop Music Forever
On a chilly October 23rd, 1984, Bob Geldorf turned on the BBC to watch a tragedy unfolding in Ethiopia.
The country was experiencing one of the worst famines on record and the images of suffering moved Geldorf to despair.
As frontman for the British pop act Boomtown Rats, Geldorf knew he had no political sway to make change.
But, he thought, he could raise awareness through music.
That night, Geldorf hopped on a call with one of the hottest New Wave artists at the time, Midge Ure of Ultravox.
Geldorf’s idea was to produce a Christmas song to raise funds for Ethopians.
Not by his band or Ure’s but by all the hot British and Irish artists at the time—the more stars they could get, the bigger the splash they could make. They would call it Band Aid.
There was just one problem.
It usually took several months to produce a record, and Christmas season was only a month away.
If they wanted this song to happen, it would take something of a Christmas miracle.
That Unreasonable Man
Artists tend to be impractical.
Lost in the big ideas, they often fail to consider what it takes to bring them to life.
Physicist Joe Polchinski once mused that he would never have attempted writing his game changing book on String Theory had he known how much work it would take.
But he didn’t know, and so he pushed ahead with the project. And altered Theoretical Physics profoundly in the process.
As George Bernard Shaw wrote, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Toward the end of 1984, Bob Geldorf was that unreasonable man.
Making History
By November, Geldorf had secured 24 hours of studio time and he had convinced his record company to distribute the record at no cost.
And, amazingly, he had gotten commitments from dozens of the top pop acts at the time—Duran Duran, Sting, Bono, Bananarama, Boy George, George Michael, Phil Collins.
They recorded Geldorf and Ure’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ in one day on November 24.
The spectacle of so many celebrities alone caused a stir, and the story made history as the first music industry piece to appear on the front page of The Daily Mirror.
By the time the song was released December 3rd, the demand was insatiable. Everyone was playing the song on repeat in the UK and in America.
‘Do They Know’ quickly became the biggest-selling single of all time in the UK at over 3 million copies sold, raising $24 million worldwide and inspiring benefit concerts USA for Africa and Live Aid, which raised $150 million.
True to Geldorf’s word, every penny went to famine relief in Ethiopia.
