Holiday Video of the Day: Band Aid, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”

This arrived during my senior year of high school, so I look upon it as a snapshot of my general Anglophilic pop sensibility at the time, and it’s a perfectly solid Christmas pop choral benefit — completely beats the hell out of “We Are the World,” which followed the pop star choir formula a few months later. (In fact, I think “Just Give a Kidney” is better.) Not a lot of the Band Aid performers still have rock-ribbed music careers these days (no, I’m not a “Fandau”), but Paul Weller was there, so it will forever have the mark of cool.

As a footnote, the part that Paul Young sang at the beginning was written for David Bowie to sing, but scheduling issues forced Bob Geldof to sub-in Mr. Young. Bowie did sing it at Live Aid the following summer, and my sense is that the original single would have much more solid legs if Bowie had made it on time for the recording session. Subsequent re-recordings have been total wastes of time.