As Ethiopians have pointed out ever since, they did of course know it was Christmas because the starving were mainly Christian,” Gill notes. Helping people is the ultimate goal, and this requires more than just humanitarian efforts, as some members of Band Aid now realize. The song quickly became the fastest-selling single in UK history, a record it would hold until 1997, when it was eclipsed by Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind 1997,” released in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death.

The power of art and celebrity and mass media were combined to engineer a life-saving relief effort in one of the poorest corners of the world. Giving is good and can help those in need, especially when combined with prudence—but it is not an end in itself.We have to drain the sea, or if we cannot completely drain it, we must bring it to a level where they will lack room to move at will, and their movements will be easily restricted. 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. 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.

Working with Action Aid, a global humanitarian group, he spent weeks in Korem, the epicenter of the famine, and the highlands of Amhara. This formula—peace and expanding economic freedom—has the power to transform Ethiopia like no amount of humanitarian aid can. If people were hungry in the highlands, send them off to the lowlands where productivity was high and land was plentiful.

A quarter of a century on, we’re still arguing about the roots of the problem, let alone the solution, and—though there has been progress—Ethiopia’s food insecurity gets worse, not better. If you visit Korem today, you can still see evidence of its works, including a hospital completed on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the famine with proceeds from Geldof and co. Among the many problems it produced was that it created a surplus of labor in some places and a dearth in others. 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.

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. Mengistu Haile Mariam, the General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Ethiopia and chairman of the Derg, a communist military junta that ruled Ethiopia, had adopted a simple strategy for addressing hunger: resettle Ethiopians.Mengistu’s plan might have been effective as a military strategy, but it ravaged the Ethiopian economy. The entire process of writing, recording, producing, and releasing “Do They Know It's Christmas” was remarkably fast—less than six weeks. I didn’t really know what the song was about, but I vaguely remember thinking it had something to do with AIDS, which was new and very scary. Few understand this better than Michael Buerk, the BBC journalist whose report so moved Geldof on that chilly October night in 1984. The assembled cast of performers had 24 hours to record in the studio, which was made available to them freely by producer Trevor Horn.