"Do They Know It's Christmas?" Is The Ebenezer Scrooge of Holiday Songs
“I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, the present, and the future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!”
― Ebenezer Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
1
Recently, when I confessed on Facebook to having an unabashed, abiding love for the 1984 charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” a friend succinctly summed up what many people probably feel about that song: “Eww.” Its enduring ubiquity at the end of the year on the radio (or what passes for “radio” now) certainly lends it a cumulative cloying quality. Even its cowriter Bob Geldof admitted in 2016 that he’s sick of hearing it in supermarkets.[1] Just this week, I myself heard it piped in on little speakers ― following the Vince Guaraldi “A Charlie Brown Christmas” theme ― in a property management company’s office; then, a couple days later, it filled the air around me in a Safeway bathroom. But, of course, I had already subjected my kids to it during a long car ride, because that’s what we do with our obsessions: We push them on others, because we continually feel we can’t solve on our own the mysteries they invoke.
And “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” itself epitomizes that impulse. At its heart, it’s about pushiness and self-absorption, yet those jarring traits are muffled by a melodic rollercoaster, rumbling along on tracks made of such a déjà vu tempo that decades later they seem to connect more and more disparate pieces of music, from the distant past to the imminent future, like a Manifest Destiny railroad of inevitability. It’s enough to make someone ― me ― turn a kinder eye toward my own myopic, selfish moments. That’s what the yearning, bittersweet feeling it evokes in me is about: A kinship with flawed humanity at large, and an acceptance of the parts of myself I can’t change.
Of course, this skirts the criticisms that are normally lobbed at this song. In a 2014 article on “The Federalist” website titled “‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ Is the Worst Christmas Song Ever,” Leslie Loftis doesn’t pull any punches: “[The] song and story of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ and Band Aid has a little of everything to loathe. Condescension. Inane inaccuracies. Smugness. Mullets. All of which are tied up in a failure to actually aid the unfortunate souls the song is about.”[2] Unsurprising for this upstart conservative website, Loftis hyperbolically overstates her case. It was for doing just that that Bob Geldof successfully wrangled an apology from the BBC in 2010, after they aired a story saying that the majority of the money Band Aid raised in the mid-‘80s was siphoned away by Ethiopian rebels and spent on weapons.[3]
Geldof is so earnest about still feeding Africa that in early 2017 a company he founded bought a Nigerian biscuit company, as well as a minority share in an ethical fruit business that will serve numerous West African countries.[4] He and Midge Ure ― the other writer of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” ― are still Band Aid trusties, overseeing the administration of the money raised by not only the 1984 version of their song, but also the 1989, 2004, and 2014 versions.[5] After they had recorded the original version, Geldof and Ure received sage advice from George Harrison, whose 1971 “Concert for Bangladesh” got mired in financial controversy: “Get yourself good accountants.” “We have the same accountants today,” Ure told Rolling Stone in 2014, “who [ensure] we don’t spend a penny on anything. We’ve had no office, no secretaries. We begged, borrowed, and stole telephone lines, space, whatever we could.”[6]
Despite the duo’s obvious good intentions, though ― and stamina for carrying on a project that has now spanned two centuries ― it can’t be denied that Geldof and Ure’s song and the charity work associated with it will always cast a shadow of dubiousness, mostly due to Geldof’s extremely clumsy and patronizing lyrics. (Aside from the fade-out chorus, most of the words were based on a song he had written for his band The Boomtown Rats).[7] Pointing out the cringe-factor in lines like “Well, tonight, thank God it’s them instead of you” (which Bono had to be cajoled by Geldof into singing)[8] is like shooting fish in a barrel, and I’m not here to take arms against a sea of such easily perceived troubles, as Hamlet might say. Following the introspective Danish prince’s lead, I mean for this piece to delve deeper ― maybe not to the level of an existential treatise, but at least to a place where “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” can earn some redemption for affronts against one and all, the way Scrooge does at the end of “A Christmas Carol.”
2
First, to gently steer this consideration in a new direction, I’ll quote at length from a slightly softer recent online drubbing of the song. In his 2016 “Pop Dose” article “The Trouble With ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’” Dw. Dunphy writes:
I don’t have a complaint about the song itself. It is a thoroughly serviceable melody featuring some of the biggest stars in ‘70s-and-‘80s era British rock and pop. It was formulated by The Boomtown Rats’ Bob Geldof who was absolutely sincere in his desire to do good and have his very famous cohorts spread that message. But that’s where my impression of the song takes a sharp right turn, not because the message isn’t still relevant in our modern era. Shame on us, it’s that much more pertinent a statement than ever. The fact is, that’s not why all these outlets are still playing this song. They’re playing it because a gang of people are singing the word “Christmastime” a bunch of times, regardless of every statement that surrounds the term.
It’s not an outlier. Plenty of Christmas songs aren’t intrinsically about Christmas. “Sleigh Bells” and “Winter Wonderland” get passes for being seasonally-adjacent […] These tunes are still more appropriate for the playlist than “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” because even when the threads of purpose for these tunes are worn super-thin to almost nothing, I don’t believe they ever had a greater purpose in mind than to entertain or comfort.
Geldof intended very much for his song to advocate, so it is weird that such an advocacy has been washed away and the song now has all the subtext of “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”[9]
Dunphy makes a good point about the repetition of the word “Christmastime” (and, I would add, the chiming bell sounds Midge Ure sprinkles liberally throughout the song) having a Pavlovian effect on holiday season listeners. It’s legitimate to bemoan how this superficial aspect of the song distracts from its exhorting message. Yet, the tentative critic Dunphy makes the same mistake as the excoriating one Loftis: Propaganda that fully pulls on the mask of Art ― especially Popular Culture ― can be judged in terms of the former in only the most academic sense. From here on out, it’s only the mask that counts.
“Do They Know It’s Christmas?” stopped being about the famine in Africa sometime between the phone call Bob Geldof had with Midge Ure about a television program on that topic he’d seen with his girlfriend Paula Yates and the moment the two musicians stepped into Sarm West Studios in Notting Hill to drive the world’s first supergroup to produce a Pop masterpiece. Pop Will Eat Itself ― to quote the name of an ‘80s modern rock band ― but it will also eat everything else.
In fact, the more time passes, the more unlikely associations such a classic pulls into its orbit, regardless of the relevance to its creators’ original intentions. I don’t just mean homages and catty critiques (such as “Do They Know It’s Hallowe’en,” the 2005 charity single by a who’s-who of 21st Century indie rock and comedy stars, which, according to its official press release, “stems from a frustration with other benefit songs’ misguided, somewhat patronizing attitude, and Western-centric worldview,” an unwittingly patronizing statement itself that underscores the simultaneously clever and boring product it promoted, which can be heard and seen here).[10] No, what I’m thinking of in particular is the weird whirlpool that Bob Geldof’s life has become over the decades.
It’s as if, while living in the shadow of this hit (which he only sang background vocals on), Geldof’s past, present, and future melded into a Mobius Strip meta-commentary on the prototypical rock star experience.
3
Foreshadowing his later, more famous role as impresario of a series of charity singles, Bob Geldof was originally invited to be the manager of a band being put together by five fellow Irishmen in 1975.[11] Guitarist Garry Roberts wanted to give up singing duties, however, so those got pushed on Geldof, who further took on a leading role in the band by switching its name from The Nightlife Thugs to The Boomtown Rats just before they took the stage at their first show.[12] He had come across the phrase ― in reference to a gang of young oil workers ― in Woody Guthrie’s autobiography Bound for Glory.[13] In true punk spirit, it may have been less the political implications there that appealed to him than the underdog moxie and grit. As Paul Vallely (ghostwriter of Geldof’s own 1986 autobiography Is That It?) wrote in a 2001 article, “[…] Bob has always been a bit of a hustler ― right from his pre-punk days when he bluffed his way into rock journalism in Canada down to the succession of deals his various companies have done out of sight in his post-pop years.”[14]
The Boomtown Rats’ biggest hit embodies this same sense of random opportunism and ambiguity. 1979’s “I Don’t Like Mondays” (which went to number one in 32 countries)[15] came about after Geldof, on tour in Atlanta with the Rats, read a news report on a female mass shooter: 16 year-old Brenda Spencer had opened fire on the San Diego elementary school across the street from her house, killing two adults (including the principal) and injuring nine kids. While holed up during a seven hour stand-off with police, she told a reporter on the phone that she had done it “for the fun of it. I just don’t like Mondays. I just did it because it’s a way to cheer the day up. Nobody likes Mondays.”[16] The original version Geldof wrote was a reggae number[17], but tellingly later the band recorded it as a piano-heavy Elvis Costello-type call-and-response music hall tune. I’m not saying they were deliberately searching for the best way to infuse off-putting irony into a depiction of straight-forward horror. Yet, when watching the video by David Mallet (which can be seen here, with a few shots that uncannily anticipate ones in Pink Floyd’s The Wall, which was still a few years away), you can see the performative aspect that is already evident in the song’s audio heavily underscored by the visuals, of the narrative but especially of Geldof’s preening and alternately dead-pan and overly emoting hands and face.
The upshot is that, while catchy, it’s not really clear what “I Don’t Like Mondays” is about. I grew up hearing it on the radio regularly, and it was only in 2017, via the podcast “My Favorite Murder,” that I learned of the Brenda Spencer backstory. As the website “Song Facts” points out, “At a basic level, this is often heard as a song lamenting the beginning of the work week. Some radio stations play this every Monday at a certain time.”[18] As we’ll see again with “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” malleable meaning is an intrinsic given with popular culture, and especially with music that people project their own emotions and experiences onto.
In any case, Geldof’s effective mugging into the camera in that video probably led to his being offered the lead role in The Wall (which was originally going to be filled by the rock opera’s mastermind Roger Waters).[19] This would be the second of four distinct things in his life that would draw Geldof into the public eye (after The Boomtown Rats’ big hit), yet, in a way, it would tie all of them together, retroactively.
In the 1982 film, he plays Pink, a depressed rock star, who is first seen in a trashed hotel room. Through flashbacks and animation, The Wall chronicles his nervous breakdown, as he processes childhood issues and more, leading to his eventual catharsis. Famously, Waters’s libretto castigates the machine-like UK school system and folds in touching storylines about Pink’s distant father and the mother whose advice he dearly yearns for. At one point, after learning his wife is having an affair, Pink brings a groupie back to his hotel room (who runs out when he begins tearing the place up). This is the first plot point that weirdly mirrors Geldof’s own life, maybe more so than Waters’s.
In 2000, Cameron Crowe made the film Almost Famous, which featured, almost as much as its made-up rock group, a groupie played by Kate Hudson named Penny Lane. This character was based on the real life Englishwoman Paula Yates.[20] At 17, Yates flew to Paris to attend a Boomtown Rats show, after which she pursued Bob Geldof with a “Rottweiler” determination, according to The Telegraph.[21] She clung to him so tightly that his friends nicknamed her “the limpet.”[22] Soon, she and Geldof settled into domestic life, and at only 23 she was made co-host of the English pop music tv show “The Tube.”[23] In 1986, she and Geldof got married in a ceremony that was almost a reunion of the original Band Aid line-up: Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran gave Paula away, Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox of The Eurythmics were best man and maid of honor, and other guests included David Bowie, Midge Ure, and other members of Duran Duran, as well as Spandau Ballet.[24] Yates had given birth to their first daughter Fifi in 1983[25], then in 1989[26] and 1990[27] she gave birth to Peaches and Pixie. Throughout the ‘80s and early ‘90s, Yates authored seven books, at first on the topic of being adjacent to the world of rock and then on the topic of parenting. Her final book, 1993’s Village People, was a thinly fictionalized chronicle of the bucolic life she and Geldof and their three daughters enjoyed on their country estate. The next year, she would throw that all away ― and the turmoil and deaths that followed could truly be the basis for a modern opera or Shakespeare play.
By that point, Paula Yates had switched over to a new show called “The Big Breakfast” (co-produced by Planet 24, a company co-owned by Geldof), in which she interviewed pop stars while they lay together on a bed.[28] In a sense, she had monetized a slightly sanitized version of the teenage hobby that had brought her and Geldof together in the first place. Now, though, that setting would bring their shared life to an end. In 1994, she interviewed INXS frontman Michael Hutchence there, their legs entwined, and she said on tv, “For the first time, this is a guest I want to have my leg over.”[29] By the next year, she had left Geldof to be with Hutchence[30] (and, in 1996, after two decade together, she and Geldof officially divorced).[31] In a sense, though, she had begun to transition from one man to the other long before. She first met Hutchence in 1985, when she interviewed him for “The Tube” (at a time when Geldof was swamped in the logistics of putting to use the money he had raised with “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” just months before ― it became the fastest selling single in UK chart history, selling a million copies in the first week alone and passing 3 million on the last day of 1984).[32] According to INXS’s tour manager, during that earlier taping, he had to ask Yates to leave Hutchence alone after she walked up to him and said, “I’m going to have that boy.” Again according to the Australian band’s 2005 official autobiography, she was undeterred and began to show up at various INXS shows for the next few years, sometimes even bringing her youngest daughter Fifi along.[33] Regardless of how far back her obsession with Hutchence went, by July 1996 she had had his baby: Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily.[34]
His only child would only know him for just over a year, though, for Michael Hutchence would commit suicide in a Sydney hotel room on November 22, 1997. In the hours before hanging himself, he had learned from Paula Yates, in England, that their bitter custody battle with Bob Geldof had taken a turn for the worse (this all followed the discovery of drugs in their family home by their nanny that fall)[35] and she would not be bringing their baby and her older daughters to Australia. Hutchence then called Geldof and berated him unintelligibly.[36] The irony of what transpired in the following years can’t be overstated.
On September 17th, 2000 ― on Pixie’s 10th birthday ― Paula Yates died from a heroin overdose.[37] A couple months later, a British High Court awarded Bob Geldof custody of Tiger Lily Hutchence, to be raised by him along with her three step-sisters.[38] In 2007, Geldof formally adopted her, appending his last name onto her long moniker, after that of her birth father.[39] Yet the tragic saga of that family wasn’t quite done.
In the spring of 2014, Peaches ― Geldof and Yate’s second oldest daughter ― also died of a heroin overdose. She had been 25, with a husband and two young children.[40] Like her mother, she had begun a career as both a writer and a tv presenter.[41] Continuing his magnanimous tendency to foster connections with those not directly in his orbit, Bob Geldof actually married his second wife (French actress Jeanne Marine) in the same church where the funeral services for both Peaches and Paula Yates were held. That was in 2015. Back in 1986, his and Yates’ star-studded marriage blessing had taken place there, at the St. Mary Magdalene and St. Lawrence Church. It was also where Peaches had married her husband.[42] And, in 2016, his oldest daughter, Fifi, held her wedding there, too.[43]
There’s a through line connecting everything, Geldof and his family seem to believe, but it needs our help sometimes staying on course. Weird mirror image parallels may occur without any effort of our own ― such as Bob Geldof, the man who played the wasted rocker Pink, first seen in The Wall in a trashed hotel room, losing his wife and one-time-groupie to Michael Hutchence, a rock star who was on the final leg of the tour for his band’s album Elegantly Wasted, when he killed himself in a hotel room so trashed that the investigating detectives believe he had been rummaging around for drugs.[44] Or they may occur with our partial involvement ― such as the “bizarre property settlement [after Geldof and Yates’ divorce] in which they swapped homes, with Geldof moving into Hutchence’s digs and his ex moving back into her former home with her new lover.”[45] Or they may undeniably be our own doing ― such as Geldof’s 2010 investment in Groupcall, a company whose technology allows UK schools to automatically text parents when their kids are truant, something that sounds like a storyline from an updated version of The Wall.[46] Speaking of inserting himself into the educational system, years after he wrote his autobiography Is That It?, extracts were still being photocopied and passed out to students as part of the official curriculum, according to its ghostwriter Paul Vallely.[47] Then, there is Geldof’s championing of “Fathers’ Rights” (to not be separated from their children in custody cases)[48], something that certainly makes sense in terms of his personal life and the custody struggle he went through with Paula Yates ― but still, when you consider that his character in the Pink Floyd movie yearned for a father figure, this too traces a mirror image trajectory of something from art he helped create.
While it’s true that “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” doesn’t really fit this rubric, that’s not the point I’m making with this long digression about Bob Geldof’s odd life. The point is that, in the same way that the lives of the creators of art can become enmeshed in a feedback loop of fated and self-made references, so it is with those of us receiving the art. We too just suck out the marrow our particular systems crave, unwittingly most of the time, and make no bones about what’s left behind. What comes to us, then, and what we seek out, reinforces what we’ve previously taken in.
4
What this all comes down to is the recognition that there are many more facets to things than originally meet the eye. Imagine you’ve never seen a Rubik’s Cube before and someone hands you one that has been twisted this way and that: Not only will you focus on the exposed side coming toward you, but you also won’t give any thought to the random patterns on the sides hidden by the person’s hands. Or, to take a more germane example, imagine the song “We Are the World” from the distanced perspective we’ve gained over Michael Jackson’s lifetime in the years since his death.
The American charity single came about because Harry Belafonte saw what Bob Geldof had accomplished and he wanted to create something even bigger, as well as something that would feature more musicians of African descent. Less than two months after the release of “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” 45 musicians (including Geldof in the chorus) participated in several days of recording. Then, on March 7, 1985, the single was released, selling out its first pressing of 800,000 copies within three days. Before all that, though, the song had to be written, quickly. Quincy Jones had been brought in as the producer, and he tapped Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and Lionel Richie to write it.[49] As Wonder had limited time, it was really just Jackson and Ritchie who wrote it.[50] And, in fact ― according to La Toya Jackson, who watched them work on it in the Jackson family home in Encino ― Michael wrote 99% of the lyrics, “but he’s never felt it’s necessary to say that.”[51] What resulted are lyrics that are almost as saccharine and clichéd (“You know love is all we need”) as Geldof’s are patronizing and illogical. But one line in “We Are the World” stands out like a sore thumb now (although I’m sure then it got washed down without a thought, along with everything else): “We are the children.” While, of course, it’s likely Lionel Ritchie helped brainstorm where to place that line, odds seem pretty good that Michael Jackson suggested it in the first place. Because it was he, not Ritchie, who had an obsession with children, to put it mildly.[52]
It’s rare to come across such a “Gotcha!” facet to a pop song, though. More often we have to attend closely to subtleties ― such as the fact that, unlike “We Are the World,” which is unsurprisingly written in the first person plural, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is unusual for its second person framing. Most pop songs are written from the first person singular perspective (“I Walk the Line,” “I Will Survive,” “Bad,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”), with the first person plural coming in a distant second (“We Will Rock You,” “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit”). Actually, the first verse of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” does have an “our” and two “we”s. But then its final line abruptly shifts to “your,” and from the long second verse to the end of the song it’s all second person, with a salting of third person lines (as in the title). By the end, in fact, we get nothing but the terse imperative “Feed the world” repeated till the fade-out, which is to say an order to “you,” the listener. (This, again, harkens back to The Wall, which features a song that is literally called “Hey You”). It is as if the song itself can’t help but imitate Geldof’s own ratcheting-up, impatient nature.
It could be argued that Geldof’s pushiness is the main reason any and all of the Band Aid projects (and thus maybe even “We Are the World”) came to pass. While it’s been debunked that, during the televised Live Aid concert in the summer of 1985, he said, “Just give us the fucking money,” he did say, “People are dying NOW. Give us the money NOW. Give me the money now.” And when a later outburst to a tv presenter about captions on the screen got caught on an open mic (“Fuck the address, just give the phone, here’s the number…”), donations actually increased to 300 pounds per second.[53] A long profile on him in Rolling Stone from August of that year says it all in its headline: “Bob Geldof: The Man Who Wouldn’t Take No For An Answer.” A sample of the article’s text reads:
The meeting continues for another two hours, dominated by Geldof. He rails against the trucking companies in Port Sudan that are holding up distribution of Band Aid foodstuffs. He curses out British ticket agencies scalping Live Aid tickets at nearly double the price. He says he wants to initiate legal action against companies holding money made from the sale of Band Aid merchandise […]
Finally, Geldof loses his temper completely.[54]
And here we begin to circle this fractal-ship of an essay in for a landing, at the spot where my own fond feelings for “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” lie. I have to honestly say it’s not the social activist message. And it’s not Geldof’s anger. But it’s adjacent to that. It’s the sense of urgency that builds, first as Midge Ure’s orchestration changes from verse to verse, and then as a plateau is reached at the end with a repeated series of crescendo-ing notes.
Now is when it’s necessary to register an obvious point: musical preference plays a large part ― perhaps even the largest part ― in all this. Of the two songs discussed in this section, some people might prefer “We Are the World” purely in terms of its sound, but not me. Clocking in at 7 minutes and 50 seconds, more than twice the length of “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” the American song starts in first gear and never shifts to accommodate any built-in bumps or friction. (The increase in volume of the repeated chorus, far from counting in this regard, actually serves to underscore the lack of momentum to the song). It’s one long, straight Sunday drive on a country road. Even watching the video is a chore, with the famous participants seeming like serviceable cogs in a protracted process. Sure, you can see a few smiles on faces, but overall it feels like you’re watching the dictionary definition of “overwrought.”
The video for “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” on the other hand, is full of life in the broadest sense. It shows concentration on the singers’ faces (and maybe even some puzzlement at the lines Geldof has set out for them), but it also shows smiles and a whole cornucopia of surprising, pleasant moments between people: the laughing attempt of a guitarist to get his neighbors to join him in a Rockets-type bobbing motion; a man turning a silly face to the camera; another man giving a woman a quick kiss on the cheek, followed by her rotating the name of the soda can she’s holding into view; shots of the back-up chorus participants getting out of cars in the street and walking, in their gaudy ‘80s outfits, through a gauntlet of paparazzi, as well as shots of the project’s own videographers filming all this; Phil Collins, done with drumming, standing with a sweaty towel around his neck, like a boxer who’s retreated to his corner of the ring; two random babies, held by adults, reaching their hands out to each other; and ― there! ― that guitarist has achieved the open-mouthed, synchronized motion with his two buddies he’d attempted earlier; and now we see a guy signing an autograph for a little girl; and another turns and sees the camera and points and laughs. Two guys are even shown speaking unheard words to each other when they should be chanting the final chorus. This whole scene has the innocent, joshing-around vibe of a junior high school party, as caught on home video by an excited kid whose parents are comfortably ensconced in the tv room downstairs.
In fact, that’s when I myself heard this song the most: in junior high school. (The shot in the music video of Sting glancing over at Bono and Simon Le Bon echoes still photographs my friend Christo’s dad took of us and our friend Dave getting suited up for our ninth grade dinner dance). I likely didn’t hear “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” much the year it came out, or even the year after that, because the radio station I listened to (KITS, in the San Francisco Bay Area) only played a narrow range of Top 40 hits and the highest it charted in the US was #13 (in mid-January 1985).[55] I was nine that winter and it would be another three or four years before my family got a tv, so I also missed out on the Live Aid telecast. However, in 1986, after a slow integration of different genres, the radio station I listened to abruptly switched to a total modern rock format (and changed its call sign to LIVE 105).[56] Out of a sense of inertia, I stuck with it, and thus the bare bones of my adolescence (I began junior high the next year) were fleshed out by this type of music, with its mostly British and melodic, synth-centric bent. Much more so than other Bay Area stations (and likely more so than most stations in the US), LIVE 105 kept playing “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” every winter, year after year, in such regular rotation that I came to categorize it not as a holiday song, but as just another catchy New Wave hit, along the lines of what I heard consecrated on the station’s Year End Countdown. At the end of 1986, these were the top 10:
1. New Order ― “Bizarre Love Triangle”
2. Depeche Mode ― “But Not Tonight”
3. Erasure ― “Oh L’Amour”
4. The Smiths ― “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”
5. The Smithereens ― “Blood and Roses”
6. The Housemartins ― “Happy Hour”
7. INXS ― “What You Need”
8. R.E.M. ― “Superman”
9. Dramarama ― “Anything Anything”
10. Peter Gabriel ― “In Your Eyes”[57]
And, if I came to pay little attention to the meaning of the lyrics in “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” it’s likely because those of so many other songs I heard on LIVE 105 were either nonsensical (pretty much any Talking Heads or R.E.M. tune, or any of the many sample-heavy ones by bands like B.A.D., Coldcut, and The Art of Noise) or else their lyrics reinforced my growing feeling that trying to interpret something in one clear-cut way was a fool’s errand. After all, “Bizarre Love Triangle” itself contains the lines: “But there’s no sense in telling me/The wisdom of the fool won’t set you free/But that’s the way that it goes/And it’s what nobody knows/Well every day my confusion grows.”
The person who has gotten short shrift in this essay so far is Midge Ure, and it is he ― more so than Geldof― who is responsible for making “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” so memorable and catchy. (Now, however, Ure regards it as one of the worst songs he’s ever written: “The template for a pop song is not there. There is no chorus in that song. It doesn’t repeat itself once, because it came together in such a bizarre way.” However, he does concede that “The momentum the artists gave it in the recording studio is what made it,” which corroborates what I laid out above).[58] He first began setting Geldof’s lyrics to music on a keyboard in his kitchen[59], then he took over producing duties when Trevor Horn (originally from the band The Buggles ― known for the song that kicked off MTV: “Video Killed the Radio Star” ― but later the producer of many ‘80s UK hits) couldn’t make it into the studio he owned.[60] As with Geldof, Ure was hardly the most famous of those who participated in the charity song. Yet, for years he had been building up his talent for composing pop songs as a respected journeyman musician. During one year (1979-1980), he was involved in three different successful bands: Visage, Thin Lizzy, and Ultravox. Ultravox brought him his greatest recognition, first with the 1981 single “Vienna” and then with “Dancing With Tears In My Eyes,” released just half a year before “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” You can hear the kinship to those songs in the ethereal bridge that precedes the “Feed the world” outro, beginning at 2:19.
But it is that outro that I have deliberately saved for last. For me, it is the Minotaur at the heart of this song’s maze, the mystery I most hoped to defeat by spreading this obsession across so many pages.
5
Alternated and overlapping with the chorus “Feed the world” is a line that is so hard to hear clearly that some online lyric sites don’t even include it at all.[61] As one half of the singers rises up to a high A on “World,” extending it a second half note to the G just below, the other half of the singers begins a two-part run of eight quarter notes from the exact same spot: Let (A), Them (G), Know (F), It’s (E), Christ (F), Mas (E), Time (D), A (C). The second syllable of “Again” is a middle C/high G half note chord that doubles as the return to the word “Feed.” That “Let” is somehow both jarring and drawn out, like the edge of a snow shovel sliding through the powder of the preceding word “World” and then hitting the hidden sidewalk, where it scrapes along the concrete. It always gives me chills more than even Midge Ure’s haunting chime sounds.
There is more to this that gets to me, though. There is a complexity to the two-part vocals here (as well as the third part of the instrumentation) that taps a preferred musical aesthetic that was growing in me before I first heard “Do They Know Its Christmas?” and has only become more entrenched in the years since. Coincidentally, I hear it in the original pop rock Christmas song: John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band’s 1971 “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” Again, there are two sets of vocals (John Lennon’s and the Harlem Community Choir’s), weaving together over the instrumentation in a hypnotic rocking motion. Closer to the release of “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” though, was my exposure to a very different piece of music: Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. My parents took me and my sister to see it performed at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, and the richness of the classical master’s last piece had a beguiling effect on me. Yet, somehow I was also struck by the simplicity of his melody for the “Ode to Joy” that closes it. The runs of quarter notes (and a few eighth notes), while not the same as at the end of “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” nonetheless have a Venn Diagram-type overlap in my layperson’s musical brain. (When the recording of Leonard Bernstein conducting that symphony at the Berlin Wall in 1989 became available the following year, my parents bought the cassette, which I treasured so much I took it to college and, on a road trip with a friend, even tried to learn the German words so I could chant along). It’s not so much about the melodies, as the cadence they ride on top of.
There’s an approximation, a rough sense of things that tells me ― and maybe just me ― when something has echoes of what I’m drawn to here. (Sometimes, exact overlaps can be found, though: “Ode to Joy” and “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” have the same number of beats per minute).[62] In 1985, Simple Minds released their two biggest hits, “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” and “Alive and Kicking,” and the latter has that complexity I discussed above, with Jim Kerr’s lead vocals dancing majestically with the back-up vocals of Robin Clark, both of which are heightened by some of the best instrument tracks ever laid down in a rock song. These rippling similarities continue long past the ‘80s, though. I love Lady Gaga’s 2008 hit “Poker Face” and Adele’s 2010 hit “Rolling in the Deep” for the same reason. The Killers’ 2003 breakout hit “Mr. Brightside” doesn’t have the overlapping complexity of those two, but still there is something about the way Brandon Flowers sings the verses that twangs that cadence string in me. It’s the same with the hard-hitting 4/4 time signature on “Diamond Heart” off Lady Gaga’s 2016 album Joanne. Each of these has trapdoors I drop through, not just back to “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” but to each other and so much more.
As with the weird way Bob Geldof’s life has become a broken mirror of a film he starred in, so it is with “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” for me. When I hear it, it’s like being blinded by a multi-faceted prism on a sunny day. What all those other pieces of music it links to have meant to me, at those different parts of my life, come shooting through, making me feel like there is something ineffable anchoring me in place, even as my life changes suddenly, from one era to the next. Now, I probably won’t take Geldof’s lead and play it at a loved one’s funeral, as he has returned again and again to that totem-like church. But, on the other hand, as this viral video of an Irish pub singing “Mr. Brightside” for a friend’s wake shows, maybe I should do even more to indulge this cadence I’m weirdly fixated on.
The catharsis such art provides is why I titled this piece “‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ Is the Ebenezer Scrooge of Holiday Songs.” While it’s understandably reviled in some circles, to me it is a miser turned magnanimous, entering the room of my heart with endless presents and the promise that I too can “live in the past, the present, and the future” through the magic of music.
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/bob-geldof-do-they-know-its-christmas-time-a7478901.html
[2] http://thefederalist.com/2014/12/03/do-they-know-its-christmas-is-the-worst-christmas-song-ever/
[3] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1326411/BBC-sorry-claiming-Bob-Geldof-Live-Aid-funded-Ethiopian-weapons.html
[4] http://punchng.com/irish-musician-acquires-nigerian-firm-for-80m/
[5] https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/music/midge-ure-and-bob-geldof-deny-that-band-aid-is-over-35188051.html
[6] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/making-of-band-aid-20141125
[7] ibid
[8] ibid
[9] http://popdose.com/the-trouble-with-do-they-know-its-christmas/
[10] https://web.archive.org/web/20070809204421/http://www.vice-recordings.com:80/halloween/press.html
[11] http://www.boomtownrats.co.uk/the-boomtown-rats.html
[12] ibid
[13] http://thegreatrockbible.com/portfolio-item/the-boomtown-rats-biography/
[14] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/bob-geldof-boomtowns-tycoon-9137443.html
[15] http://www.boomtownrats.co.uk/the-boomtown-rats.html
[16] http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=698
[17] ibid
[18] ibid
[19] https://www.popmatters.com/162226-the-cinematic-experience-of-roger-waters-the-wall-live-2495823353.html
[20] http://articles.latimes.com/2000/sep/20/news/cl-23611
[21] https://www.thecut.com/2014/04/explaining-the-geldof-family-tree.html
[22] http://articles.latimes.com/2000/sep/20/news/cl-23611
[23] ibid
[24] http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/bob-geldof-wed-church-funerals-5461071
[25] http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2361301/bio
[26] http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1912922/bio
[27] http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2368067/bio
[28] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2002/mar/25/channel4.mondaymediasection
[29] https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/life/features/michael-hutchence-and-paula-yates-doomed-love-36341951.html
[30] https://www.independent.ie/woman/celeb-news/the-passions-of-paula-yates-26332697.html
[31] http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/michael-hutchence-planned-to-leave-paula-yates-before-death-kirk-pengilly-says-20140223-33b75.html
[32] “Band Aid sales top 3m ― proceeds set to reach Ethiopia by summer,” Music Week, January 12, 1985, p. 3
[33] Anthony Bozza and INXS, INXS: Story to Story: The Official Autobiography, London, Bantam, 2005, p. 228
[34] http://www.imdb.com/name/nm7909111/bio
[35] https://www.independent.ie/woman/celeb-news/the-passions-of-paula-yates-26332697.html
[36] http://www.mtv.com/news/2003/bob-geldof-talks-about-final-hutchence-phone-call/
[37] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/nov/09/drugsandalcohol.taniabranigan
[38] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1378636/Geldof-wins-custody-of-Paula-Yatess-daughter.html
[39] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/18/bob-geldof-peaches-paula-yates-press-boomtown-rats
[40] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/news/thomas-cohen-speaks-peaches-geldofs-death-children-not-enough/
[41] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/peaches-geldof-inquest-tragic-final-moments-of-socialite-s-life-revealed-9622553.html
[42] http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/bob-geldof-wed-church-funerals-5461071
[43] https://www.thevow.ie/bob-geldofs-daughter-weds-in-church-where-sister-peaches-and-mother-paula-yates-are-buried-35020021.html
[44] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2560498/Hunting-bins-dregs-cocaine-cigarette-burns-bone-Michael-Hutchence-detectives-reveal-desperate-destructive-final-hours-rock-star-hanged-himself.html
[45] http://people.com/archive/inx-plicable-vol-48-no-23/
[46] http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/manchester/hi/people_and_places/newsid_8482000/8482677.stm
[47] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/bob-geldof-boomtowns-tycoon-9137443.html
[48] https://fnf.org.uk/about-us-2/history/message-from-bob-geldof
[49] http://www.goldminemag.com/articles/we-are-the-world-25-years-later
[50] Lisa D. Campbell, Michael Jackson: The King of Pop, Wellesley, MA, Branden Books, 1993, p. 109
[51] J. Randy Taraborrelli, Michael Jackson: The Magic, The Madness, The Whole Story: 1958-2009, New York City, Grand Central Publishing, 2009, p. 342
[52] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1195825/Stain-Michael-Jacksons-legacy-Humiliation-dark-obsession-children.html
[53] http://www.bobgeldof.com/content.asp?id=257
[54] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/the-man-who-wouldnt-take-no-for-an-answer-19850815
[55] https://www.billboard.com/music/Band-Aid/chart-history/hot-100
[56] https://www.sfstation.com/2017/12/23/bay-area-radio-station-rebrands-from-live-105-to-alt-105/
[57] http://www.rocklists.com/kits-1986.html
[58] http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12763164.Whatever_happened_to_Midge_Ure_/
[59] ibid
[60] http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/culture/music/15435577.Music__Trevor_Horn_on_perfecting_the_art_of_noise_over_four_decades/
[61] http://www.metrolyrics.com/do-they-know-its-christmas-1984-version-lyrics-band-aid.html
[62] https://songbpm.com/ode-to-joy?q=Ode%20to%20Joy; https://songbpm.com/do-they-know-it-s-christmas?q=Do%20They%20Know%20It%27s%20Christmas