A familiar song with a slew of new faces hit iTunes Monday morning.
Bono, One Direction, Ed Sheeran and Coldplay’s Chris Martin were among many artists who are hoping to heal the world through Band Aid 30’s charity single Do They Know It’s Christmas?
The original Band Aid charity super group recorded the song in 1984 to fight famine in Ethiopia and raised over 8 million pounds the BBC reported. Now the mission is to stop the spread of Ebola in West Africa.
“The record, it’s a song, it’s a track but it’s an event, and the next stage now is to turn it into a phenomenon like it was in the ’80s,” Bob Geldof told BBC TV on Saturday. “It very much reminds me of 30 years ago. Everyone’s bleary, pop singers, as George Osborne said, are not very good in the morning.”
Geldof, who organized the original effort and co-wrote the original single in 1984, crafted a new version with Midge Ure in order to better reflect what is happening in West Africa. The single, which was released on iTunes Monday morning, topped the charts within an hour of going on sale. “From what we’ve seen from iTunes it’s gone bonkers,” Geldof told Radio 4’s Today program on Monday. “Within four of five minutes we had a million quid.”
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