Bob Geldof on 40 Years of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’: Charity, Controversy & Changing Lives

The new 2024 Ultimate Mix celebrating Band Aid’s iconic “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” anthem for famine relief is “the preface for what’s happening next year,” according to Bob Geldof.

Geldof — who launched the charity initiative during the fall of 1984 and has guided it through 40 years of aid efforts, primarily in Africa — tells Billboard via Zoom from London that 2025 will bring about more special celebrations, for the 40th anniversary of the Live Aid concerts that followed in the song’s wake and the 20th anniversary of the Live 8 global concerts in advance of the 2005 G8 summit in Scotland. On tap is the return of John O’Farrell’s successful Just For One Day: The Live Aid Musical to London’s West End; it premiered at The Old Vic earlier in 2024 and will make its North American debut at the Ed Mirvish Theatre in Toronto during January. On July 13, the actual 40th anniversary of Live Aid, streets around London’s Shaftesbury Theatre will shut down and the performance will be streamed to video screens outside the theater.

Geldof says the Live Aid concerts will also be re-televised around that time, along with documentary series being produced by CNN and the BBC, a book and other events.

“That’s not us; that’s just people doing it…all out of this little pop song we made 40 years ago,” Geldof says. “And I thought, ‘Well, we should preface this year by bringing out the record,’ but instead of doing it again with this generation of (performers), why not take the three generations that made it happen and bang ’em on one single.”

“Do They Know It’s Christmas? (2024 Ultimate Mix)” — which debuted on Nov. 25 and will be released commercially on Friday, Nov. 29 — does just that, with Trevor Horn, who co-produced the original version with Midge Ure of Ultravox, mashing together performances from that and sequels recorded to commemorate the 20th anniversary in 2004 and the 30th during 2014. Accompanied by a new Oliver Murray-directed video fusing footage from all three (as well as the late David Bowie’s introduction for the original and footage from Michael Buerk’s BBC News report from October of 1984 that inspired Geldof to launch the project), the “2024 Ultimate Mix” offers a panoply of pop icons, primarily British but also Irish and American, blended into yet another interpretation of the song.

“I was very hands-off and, like (Geldof), gobsmacked at this opus (Horn) managed to come up with,” says Ure, who co-wrote the U.K. chart-topping song with Geldof four decades ago (the original also reached the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100). “It’s very clever. I can hear elements of the original recordings in there. It’s a bit of a miracle that he managed to pull together things that were recorded at different tempos, different speeds, maybe different pitches and integrate them into one track where you get vocalists who maybe weren’t born when the original was done harmonizing or singing alongside some of the original vocalists. It’s a bit of a masterpiece, I think.”

Geldof is equally effusive about the record — which, among other juxtapositions, features U2’s Bono’s parts (and footage) from all three recordings. “It is so beautiful, this production, properly beautiful,” he says. “It’s so moving.” But he adds that Horn balked a bit when Geldof first presented him with the “Ultimate Mix” idea.

“I said, ‘Trevor, you’re good. Can you take these thousands of people and bang ’em together?’ And he said, ‘No, I can’t, f–k off!’” Geldof recalls. “And I said, ‘There must be…’ ‘How can I possibly do it? Everybody’s singing the same words. They’re at different tempos. They’re different keys.’ I said, ‘Ehhh — you can do it!’ (laughs) He said, ‘I’m going to have to repeat the lines.’ I said repeat the lines! Who cares! Just get on with it!’ And he put together the voices, conceivably the greatest voices in British rock, together almost perfectly. It actually is in the producer’s art a work of genius. It really is one of the great records — I truly believe that. It’s nothing to do with our song, or Band Aid. I just went, ‘Omigod!’

“So billions of dollars of debt relief for the poorest people in the world came from this small song, (written) one damp October afternoon. The common thread is this tune. That’s the thing that alerts everyone, drives through constantly, coming out again with a different idea each time.”

British artist Peter Blake, 93, who designed the 1984 single cover for “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” returned to create a new image for the “Ultimate Mix.”

Forty years later Geldof and Ure have slightly divergent views of the song they’re both justifiably proud of. “I’ve decided it is a pretty good tune this year,” Geldof says. “Y’know, I remember when about three in the morning (in 1984) I said, ‘Leave it, that’ll do.’ We kept going ’til five, and ‘that’ll do’ was where we were at. And it did; ‘It’ll do,’ and it did.”

Ure, meanwhile, views “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” as “not that good. Both Bob and I have done better. If you forget who’s singing it, it sounds like an Ultravox track. I think it stands up better as a recording than a song. As an event, as a production, as a record, it excelled. It did more than any of us ever expected.”

That the song, and Band Aid, continues to thrive after four decades goes far beyond the intended one-off, what Geldof calls a “crap little Christmas song.”

“It was meant to be a six-month project spending the seven, eight million pounds it generated,” remembers Ure, who also serves as a Band Aid trustee. “Of course, within that six-month period it grew from a record into suddenly putting together Live Aid…and compounded by the fact that nobody thought for one nano second that if you make a Christmas record it might just get played every year. We could only focus on the Christmas of ’84 going into ’85; if we could get it to No. 1 oever the Christmas period, great. But we never saw life beyond that. The last 39 years has proved that wrong.”

No good deed goes unpunished, of course — or free of controversy, which Band Aid and “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” have faced over the years, and recently. Most notably Ed Sheeran publicly said he would not have allowed his performance from the 2014 recording to be used, saying that “my understanding of the narrative associated with this has changed” — specifically citing the Ghanian-English artist Fuse ODG’s contention that the song “perpetuates damaging stereotypes” about Africa. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has dismissed the effort as “well-meaning at the time” but lamented that it’s “frustrating to see our nation’s ancient history, culture, diversity and beauty reduced to doom and gloom.” He also contends that Band Aid “has not evolved with the times (and) might end up doing more harm than good.”

Geldof is quick to counter that “this little pop song has saved millions of lives” but acknowledges that “the debate rages around it. That’s fantastic, because then you can access the politics with the culture debate as sensitivities and sensibilities and opinions change and just absorb it all. I like that because I’m energized by it, and you just f—ing go for it, man.”

Geldof says he’s reached out to Sheeran to discuss the matter, but they’ve not connected yet. “We’ll have a talk,” he says. “Let me be clear — he’s a really good bloke, and he’s a clever man. He’s a massive talent, so all respect. I put in the call. We’ll have a chat. We’ll agree, we’ll disagree, whatever the f—. We’ll sort it out. That’s the way stuff gets done.”

Ure chalks up any controversy to “just human nature, sadly. We’ve had 40 years of this. The amazing thing is we’re talking about this piece of music, this little pop song, 40 years later. And it’s not an exclusive club; any musician can stand up and say, ‘Well (proceeds from) my next record are going to go to whatever and I will do with them what I see fit.’ Fine. But in order to do that you don’t have to try to destroy something that has been nothing but good. And that’s what seems to happen. But for God’s sake, it’s a piece of music and it’s not made to be analyzed.”

Geldof adds that “after being asked about it every day for 40 years,” he seldom needs to be reminded of the impact of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” or Band Aid. Bringing the “2024 Ultimate Mix” out this week he saw radio station air personalities and engineers openly weeping. And during a recent trip to Montreal, he met a room service waiter who was a child in Ethiopia during the mid-‘80s; his parents had starved to death and he and his sister were taken to Band Aid-funded orphanages and schools.

“He pulled out his wallet and he took out a photograph of himself, his wife and a six- or seven-year-old kid,” Geldof says. “They were wearing Manchester City football kid; I said, ‘Man City, lame, but great kid. How’s he doing at school?’ And (the waiter) threw himself on me and buried his head in my chest and said, ‘Thank you for my son. Thank you for my life.’

“It’s a lot to take on. You can’t say, ‘Well, it’s not actually me; it’s, like, millions and millions of people.’ But if it came down to just that, just that little boy in his Man City shirt, then 40 years — well worth it.”