Not only did it encourage hypocrisy as famous celebs got more famous doing nothing (except Queen who cynically used it as promotion - good for them) but it caused millions of deaths as 1) much of the donations ended up in the pockets of customs officials and 2) it deflected millions away from better, honest, well run charities like OxFam, Save the Children and others.
And I was just about the only person to dare say so.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2k03qz5jqno

Horrific. The fact that the song was shit didn't help either. Geldof didn't appear to understand that lack of cash wasn't the problem. Joe Bloggs sending a fiver wasn't going to feed the starving. It was going straight into the bank accounts of the tinpot dictators.

JK2006 wrote:
Not only did it encourage hypocrisy as famous celebs got more famous doing nothing (except Queen who cynically used it as promotion - good for them) but it caused millions of deaths as 1) much of the donations ended up in the pockets of customs officials and 2) it deflected millions away from better, honest, well run charities like OxFam, Save the Children and others.
And I was just about the only person to dare say so.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2k03qz5jqno


Great minds think alike. I beat you to it by a few minutes with my views and the same link on the music tipsheet section for anyone interested.

I agree, and did even at 15 when it came out. Never wavered. Sometimes people with good intentions make things worse long term.

Even worse JK was the way in the next couple of years people kept jumping on this bandwagon with charity singles that now look in rather bad taste such as Ferry Aid for god's sake after the Zeebrugge capsize, with Let It Be, and literally just 6 months after Band Aid came The Crowd, with You'll Never Walk Alone, after the Bradford stadium fire, then there was another one for Hillsborough too. They were very selective about who they did it for. In the same period nobody bothered to do one for the Piper Alpha tragedy in the North Sea did they.

The stateside copy We Are The World was far superior.

When you think about it, this was the original incarnation of virtue signalling wasn't it.

I disagree, I love the song, its become part of the cannon of Christmas songs that get played every year in supermarkets and on the radio, which hasn't been added to since Mariah Carey in the early 90s. The video is a time capsule of the music scene at the time, with real iconic stars like Boy George, Sting, Bono, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. Sales from the song helped to save millions of lives and raised awareness of the famine in Ethiopia. Ed Sheeran wished that he wasn't on the latest Band Aid single, funnily enough I also wish that he wasn't on it.

Rich wrote:
JK2006 wrote:
Not only did it encourage hypocrisy as famous celebs got more famous doing nothing (except Queen who cynically used it as promotion - good for them) but it caused millions of deaths as 1) much of the donations ended up in the pockets of customs officials and 2) it deflected millions away from better, honest, well run charities like OxFam, Save the Children and others.
And I was just about the only person to dare say so.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2k03qz5jqno


Great minds think alike. I beat you to it by a few minutes with my views and the same link on the music tipsheet section for anyone interested.

I agree, and did even at 15 when it came out. Never wavered. Sometimes people with good intentions make things worse long term.

Even worse JK was the way in the next couple of years people kept jumping on this bandwagon with charity singles that now look in rather bad taste such as Ferry Aid for god's sake after the Zeebrugge capsize, with Let It Be, and literally just 6 months after Band Aid came The Crowd, with You'll Never Walk Alone, after the Bradford stadium fire, then there was another one for Hillsborough too. They were very selective about who they did it for. In the same period nobody bothered to do one for the Piper Alpha tragedy in the North Sea did they.

The stateside copy We Are The World was far superior.

When you think about it, this was the original incarnation of virtue signalling wasn't it.

You are spot it was all about virtue signalling and feeding egos.

I forgot about Ferry Aid. I do know people (not personally) who bought bundles of Band-Aid thinking they are doing their bit for charity. No one knows where the millions went to, I know that farming machinery was abandoned when the fuel ran out or broke down, and a lot of the farmers didn't have knowledge of maintenance.

I forgot all about Ferry Aid, I have never heard of The Crowd, in the mid-80s I was in America.