It’s an iconic song that’s graced the world’s airwaves for nearly 40 years, and now Midge Ure has revealed Bob Geldof’s first response on hearing the song to Band-Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? was less than flattering.
Midge Ure, who co-wrote the charity single, said the singer claimed that it was rubbish but that it would do when he played him the tune on a toy keyboard.
The Boomtown Rats frontman, now 71, also told Midge Ure he thought it sounded like the theme tune to the 1960s British police TV drama Z-Cars.
Midge Ure, 69, said the pair then went to work on the track that has gone on to raise more than £200 million to help fight starvation in Africa since its release in 1984.
The Ultravox singer, originally of Cambuslang, near Glasgow, told the How to Be 60 podcast they’d thought of absurd ways to come up with money but settled on making music.
He added that they spent two hours trying to think of ridiculous ways of trying to raise some money then finally succumbing to the fact that they were rubbish at everything except maybe writing a song.
He said that they thought that if they wrote a Christmas song and got all of their friends involved, they could raise £100,000.
He said that luckily he’d just finished building his studio and sent Bob a cassette of this little thing he did on a toy keyboard. He said it was rubbish and that it sounded like Z-Cars, but that it would do. Then he came over with a right-handed guitar upside down because he’s left-handed, with barely any strings on it and started singing.
He told Bob to leave him and then he recorded them on a cassette and spent four days playing all the instruments and doing the arrangement for the song while Bob bludgeoned all their friends to come along and had a strength in name and fan base which was extremely important. Then, of course, the entire thing went mad, but whether he liked the song or not, Bob has been dining out on it.
However, you have to admit the Band-Aid concert would have been forgotten long ago if it hadn’t been for Freddie Mercury.
Bob Geldof did a good thing at the time – he wanted to do something to help. How much he helped is another thing, but his heart was in the right place, although he’s presumably profited a lot off the back of it, and I’m sure there were loads that wanted to climb aboard his bandwagon. He’s an extremely impressive man that didn’t have the best life growing up but has always been there for his own family.
Yes, of course, he wanted the notoriety, who wouldn’t?
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