Few understand this better than Michael Buerk, the BBC journalist whose report so moved Geldof on that chilly October night in 1984.

In 2018, Abiy Ahmed ended the country’s 20-year war with Eritrea, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Indeed, evidence suggests that tens of millions of dollars of international aid— not from Band Aid, but from other relief initiatives—were siphoned off to fund a paramilitary group of communist rebels.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. A motley crew of the most popular UK performers in the world gathered, including Phil Collins, who arrived with his entire drum set, as well as Sting, George Michael, and others. 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. and they had invited a host of popular British and Irish recording artists to perform the new song, which was written for a specific purpose: to raise money for Ethiopians suffering one of the worst famines in modern history. 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.

Gill said perhaps the most obvious consequence of the Band Aid campaign was that Ethiopia became a sort of caricature of poverty and starvation in the minds of westerners. A quarter of a century on, we’re still arguing about the roots of the problem, let alone the solution, and—though there has been progress—Ethiopia’s food insecurity gets worse, not better. Among the many problems it produced was that it created a surplus of labor in some places and a dearth in others. 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. But it turns out that writing a song and raising millions of dollars for food assistance in Africa was the easy part.The assembled cast of performers had 24 hours to record in the studio, which was made available to them freely by producer Trevor Horn. Geldof received a dose of perspective that night when he turned on the BBC and saw a news report delivered by journalist Michael Buerk depicting a severe famine in Ethiopia. As the economist Adam Smith once pointed out, “little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice. The song quickly became the fastest-selling single in UK history, a record it would hold until 1997, when it was eclipsed by Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind 1997,” released in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death. George arrived at Sarm West Studios in Notting Hill on November 25, exactly a month before Christmas.