Today marks both my return (yeah, yeah - I've been busy!) and the beginning of the 12 Days of Christmas. As in a previous lifetime and in a previous blog, I've chosen to mark them with my favorite Christmas carols. No, not the Jingle Bells variety (which, incidentally, isn't even a real Christmas carol but more an all-around winter time song), but more like the modern(er) day, less chestnut-y type carols. Yeah ... like the ones they play on CHOM ...
Do They Know It's Christmas? - Band Aid (follow the link for the video ...)
Band Aid was a British and Irish charity supergroup, founded in 1984 by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia by releasing the record, 'Do They Know It's Christmas?'. The recording studio gave Band Aid no more than 24 free hours to record and mix the record, on November 25, 1984. The following morning, Geldof appeared on the Radio 1 breakfast show to promote the record further and promise that every penny would go to the cause. This led to a stand-off with the British Government, who refused to waive the VAT on the sales of the single. Geldof made the headlines by publicly standing up to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and, sensing the strength of public feeling, the government backed down and donated the tax back to the charity. The record was released on November 29, 1984, and went straight to No. 1 in the UK singles chart, outselling all the other records in the chart put together and surpassing all expectations. It became the fastest- selling single of all time in the UK, selling a million copies in the first week alone. It stayed at No. 1 for five weeks, selling over three million copies and becoming easily the biggest-selling single of all time in the UK, thus beating the nine-year record held by Bohemian Rhapsody. It has since been surpassed by Elton John's 'Candle in the Wind 1997' (his tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales) but it is likely to keep selling in different versions for many years to come.
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