The song was recorded in a matter of hours, and Ure spent the next several days producing and editing in his home studio with engineer Rik Walton. Dawit Wolde-Giorgis, the relief commissioner and the author of Red Tears: Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia, recalled Mengistu describing his strategy with a Maoist parable of draining the sea to capture fish.

The assembled cast of performers had 24 hours to record in the studio, which was made available to them freely by producer Trevor Horn. (Horn had initially been asked to produce the song, but told Geldof it would take him six weeks, which would make a December release impossible; so the task fell to Ure.) Do They Know It's Christmas" remains a holiday favorite. But it turns out that writing a song and raising millions of dollars for food assistance in Africa was the easy part. Getting artists to commit to the project wasn’t as difficult as one might expect. Geldof knew a great many performers, and they could see he was passionate about the cause. Meanwhile, Ure brought needed credibility to the project. The “darker political purpose” Gill alludes to is that resettlement allowed Col. Mengistu to more effectively deal with the alliance of rebel groups, including the Eritrean liberation movement and the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, who opposed the communist military regime.The song’s cultural impact—both good and bad—is also hard to overstate, though many smile at the line “Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?” Aid is just a stopgap,” Bono pointed out not long after Gill’s book was published. “Commerce [and] entrepreneurial capitalism take more people out of poverty than aid. We need Africa to become an economic powerhouse.” One of the reasons the movie is such a hit is that it has not one but two hilarious scenes featuring one of the greatest Christmas Songs ever written: “Do They Know It’s Christmas.” On November 24, 1984, the pop musician Boy George was sleeping in his New York City hotel room when the phone rang. He was touring with the Culture Club and had had a late night partying. The call woke him up. It was Geldof, who the previous day had told George to drop what he was doing and get to London stat to perform a song he had co-written with Ure. Smith’s formula might sound simple, but executing it is not. Power has a way of concentrating and unleashing itself on its own. Dawit Wolde-Giorgis, the author of Red Tears, said this is perhaps the greatest scar of the Ethiopian famine.

As most readers already know, the song had nothing to do with AIDS, but with a famine in Ethiopia. Fewer, however, know that the famine was man-made. Such perceptions should not exactly surprise us. 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. I was a little kid when the song came out, and as a child I wasn’t much of a fan. 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. I was more partial to Burl Ives singing “Holly Jolly Christmas” or the Peanuts characters belting out “ Hark the Angels.” 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.”A 45-year-old farmer named Ibrahim who Gill spoke to decades after the famine recalled being pressed into service digging graves as a young man because there were not enough workers.