DO They Know It’s Christmas? is being rereleased with modern artists like Harry Styles added in. It could be a traumatic trip down Memory Lane if you’re middle-aged, so brace yourself for the following…
Bananarama are old now
Any young person you discuss Band Aid with probably won’t be sure who these 80s icons were, and there’s no grimmer indicator of the passage of time than the fact that Sara, Siobhan and Keren are all in their 60s now. At least they’re still fit. You’re not. None of this is good.
£8 million hardly buys you anything these days
Another unwelcome reminder of your age is that the original single raised just £8 million. Even adjusting for inflation it’s still only £25 million, which is not that much in modern Britain with its mad property prices. The proceeds of the original would only buy Ethiopians 36 semi-detached houses in London now, but at least a lucky few would be on the property ladder.
Your 1984 youth is gone forever
Unlike in 1984, you won’t be rushing home from WHSmith to play the 7” single way too many times. Nor will you be insanely excited about getting a new pair of Pumas, or the slim possibility of snogging someone at the next crap teenage party you go to. Now you just feel a bit knackered all the time and not very excited about anything. Although that’s not really Midge Ure’s fault.
A lot of the artists are dead
There are many fatalities among the Live Aid line-up of 1985: Freddie Mercury, George Michael, David Bowie, Status Quo’s Rick Parfitt, John Entwistle of The Who, Tom Petty if you count the American bit, and non-household names like Dire Straits guitarist Jack Sonni, plus others. Even the cameraman Freddie did a dance with on stage is dead. It’s hard to be joyful about Band Aid 2024 when it’s basically a massacre.
Two Bonos is against nature
Most people are weary of Bono and wish he’d have a long holiday from being famous. However this year’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? will feature Bono singing in 1984 and also him breathily yowling away now. This is just unnatural and wrong, like trying to weaponise dinosaurs. Why can’t we learn from Jurassic World?
Christmas is rubbish when you’re an adult
Ethiopians may not have known it was Christmas, but you as a child definitely did. It was a time of both ‘big’ and ‘small’ presents, playing handheld Pac-Man on the last day of school, cracking loads of Brazil nuts just to use the nutcracker, building a muddy snowman and barfing up a massive tin of Quality Street. All that is no longer for you. The BBC may be plugging Band Aid 2024 relentlessly, but you won’t be getting an AT-AT Walker this year.
Massive ennui about our rebooted, recycled world
If you recently laboured through Alien: Romulus, the shitty Star Wars sequels, Netflix’s The Day of the Jackal, and so on, you can be forgiven for thinking creativity and risk-taking are dead, and all anyone is interested in is reliving the glories of the past, even charity records. Ant and Dec may as well rerelease Let’s Get Ready to Rhumble and we can relive the heady days of Childline 2013.
