Do They Know It's Christmas Yet?: They took a trip back to 1984 and broke it.

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It turns out that writing a song and raising millions of dollars for food assistance was the easy part. Administering aid effectively was far more difficult. Indeed, evidence suggests that tens of millions of dollars of international aid— not from Band Aid, but from other relief initiatives—were siphoned off to fund a paramilitary group of communist rebels.

As most readers already know, the song had nothing to do with AIDS, but with a famine in Ethiopia. Fewer, however, know that the famine was man-made. Once [Bob] had Midge on board, all Bob’s friends who know his musical limitations would think ‘we know the record will get made now, so it’s not going to embarrass us,” one person familiar with the project observed. At some point, however, I began to love “Do They Know It’s Christmas”—I still get chills every time Bono hits “well tonight thank god it's them instead of you.” The assembled cast of performers had 24 hours to record in the studio, which was made available to them freely by producer Trevor Horn. (Horn had initially been asked to produce the song, but told Geldof it would take him six weeks, which would make a December release impossible; so the task fell to Ure.) World poverty is a burden to be shared, but there is another principle now widely recognized,” Gill writes. “Poor countries will emerge from poverty only when they take full charge of their own destiny.”

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On a chilly October night in England in 1984, Bob Geldof was alone watching TV. As the frontman of the Boomtown Rats, Geldof had tasted fame and success, but his music career was now at a crossroads. The band was in shambles, and Geldof was trying to “manage the decline” as he considered his next step. It has become the iconic poor country,” Gill wrote in his 2010 book Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid. “Instead of its glorious past and rich culture, we now associate Ethiopia with famine.”

Aid is just a stopgap,” Bono pointed out not long after Gill’s book was published. “Commerce [and] entrepreneurial capitalism take more people out of poverty than aid. We need Africa to become an economic powerhouse.” Do They Know It’s Christmas” was released on December 3. It opened with Paul Young on vocals, followed by Boy George, George Michael, Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran, Sting, and Bono. Numerous other artists also participated in the project. Geldof received a dose of perspective that night when he turned on the BBC and saw a news report delivered by journalist Michael Buerk depicting a severe famine in Ethiopia. Such perceptions should not exactly surprise us. Ethiopia’s famine claimed as many as a million lives, according to official estimates (the actual total is likely closer to 400,000); so it’s not unusual that many would associate the land with starvation.Do They Know It's Christmas" remains a holiday favorite. But it turns out that writing a song and raising millions of dollars for food assistance in Africa was the easy part.