Do They Know It's Christmas?

Anyhow, back to the book festival, we literally rocked up to see Derek Forbes.

He's a former bassist with Simple Minds at their peak during the, you know, 1980 to kind of 85, just before they opened the US side of the, what's it called, Feed the World.

Oh, gosh, I've had a blank.

I can't remember what that is.

I know the one you're talking about.

What's it called? Yeah.

It wasn't Feed the World, but it was something like that, yeah.

That's so bad.

Do they know it's Christmas time? You know, those tubular bells on...

Feed the World, all those things.

That's a DX7 with those classic bell sounds developed from FN synthesis, developed by John Showning a decade earlier.

That's amazing.

Or Jamie Feerick.

Because he was so skinny, they would all sing Feed the World to him.

Now

there'd be a fucking two-page document online, like him talking about it, people like up in their arms and all that, and it was just like, that's funny.

Not Christmas.

was recorded in like July or something like that.

Yeah, so...

The single had been prompted by the BBC News coverage of the famine in Ethiopia.

However, when the Boomtown Rats frontman Bob Geldof assembled a group of artists to record Do They Know It's Christmas?, Queen were not involved.

Their absence was widely noticed.

When Queen were invited to appear at Live Aid that July, Freddie told me he didn't want to do it.

I mean, for our generation, wasn't it? And what I remember about it was, you know, they talked about how it brought musicians together in a way that, you know, because obviously musicians would be very, very sniffy about each other.

No matter how depressed I get, I'll never look as miserable as Paul Weller did during the recording of Feed the World.

But actually, he was quite into it.

You know, in as much as he wanted to be his own guy, he knew everyone.