Music

Bob Geldof on "Do They Know It's Christmas?": "They knew"

by Jeremy Mersereau

Star-studded, treacly charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas” has taken its fair share of critical lumps over the years, but this is beyond the pale. One of its most high-profile detractors (and creators) admits that the people the song was written to help DID know what day it was. That’s it, that’s the last straw! Stick a fork in this Christmas turkey for good.

“They did know it’s Christmas, Ethiopia’s a highly Christian country,” Boomtown Rats frontman and DTKIC songwriter Bob Geldof told the NY Daily News earlier this week. Just in case you’re not up on your charity single trivia: “Do They Know It’s Christmas” was written in response to the Ethiopian famine of 1983-85, and has raised millions of dollars for charity across its multiple reissues and re-recordings.

While Geldof admitted back in 2010 that DTKIC was perhaps not a great song (he called “Do They Know It’s Christmas” one of the “two worst songs in history”, with the other one being “We Are The World”), he now has a message for the songs and the Band-Aid collective’s legions of haters: “We’ve raised hundreds of millions. So you can laugh about a little pop single but I know what it’s done.”