‘It’s Christmas’ again as Band Aid turns 20

A 20th-anniversary rerecording of “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” the 1984 British all-star single that kicked off a wave of philanthropic efforts to address famine in Africa, is expected to debut at No. 1 in England after being gobbled up by consumers upon its U.K. release Monday, 15 days after it was recorded.

Retailers reported that the new version, featuring Coldplay’s Chris Martin, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Dido, U2’s Bono and Paul McCartney among the 40 participants under the name Band Aid 20, is “flying off the shelves,” and could sell as many as 500,000 copies its first week in stores, according to the British pop music website NME.com.

That’s not as fast as the original, spearheaded and sung by Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof and Ultravox’s Midge Ure along with Sting, Duran Duran, Culture Club and other British pop music heavyweights.

The original version sold 750,000 copies its first week in stores in November 1984, and inspired U.S. musicians to create their own benefit recording, USA for Africa’s “We Are the World,” which spent a month at No. 1 on the national sales chart after it came out four months later.

The British single topped the charts in England, but reached only No. 13 in the States. Geldof told The Times last week that record company officials won’t release the new version stateside. It is, however, available as an import single in some stores and for download on various sites, including the official website, www.bandaid20.org.

The release of “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” whose proceeds will go to famine relief in the Darfur region of Sudan, coincides with the DVD release of Live Aid, the benefit concerts of July 1985 that took place in London and Philadelphia and have since generated more than $140 million for African famine victims. The Live Aid DVD debuted last week at No. 2 on Billboard’s Top Music Videos chart.

Geldof originally promised all the participants that Live Aid, which attracted a worldwide television audience estimated at 1.5 billion, would never be rebroadcast nor released on video. But he recently changed his mind after discovering that bootleg copies were being sold on the Internet.

“Every one of our stores is doing extremely well with it,” said Bob Feterl, Southwest region director for Tower Records. “The amount of press it’s generating, the fact that it was never supposed to come out on video, a lot of the artists aren’t around anymore, the time of year, the charity involved, all those things tie in.”

Some “very informal talks” have been held about a remake of “We Are the World,” akin to the Band Aid 20 recording, said Ken Kragen, the veteran manager who helped put USA for Africa together two decades ago.

What is certain, Kragen said, is that a two-disc, four-hour DVD set devoted to the story behind “We Are the World” will be released Feb. 1. He’s also finalizing plans for a simultaneous worldwide radio broadcast of the original recording by Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner and others.

“We have no interest in just celebrating something that happened 20 years ago,” Kragen said Monday. “We’re using it to do some good right now. That’s the only reason I’d be doing this.”