Why I’m Team Geldof in his beef with Ed Sheeran

The recent scuffle between Bob Geldof and Ed Sheeran over the ‘right’ way for multimillionaire rock stars to behave towards Africa offers a striking illustration of two kinds of pop arrogance, ancient and modern. To mark the 40th anniversary of Band Aid’s ‘Do They Know it’s Christmas?’, a new ‘ultimate mix’ was released this week. It blends several versions of the charity song together, recorded over the decades. Sheeran’s 2014 vocals harmonise with Chris Martin’s from 2004 and Boy George’s from 1984. And Sheeran is not happy.

In one corner is the motor-mouthed Irishman. He may now be bruised and battered from personal tragedy and Brexit Derangement Syndrome, but he’s still touched with the same passion (‘Give us the money!’) that made his impoverished countrywomen send him their wedding rings when they had nothing else to give during the Live Aid show, back in the summer of 1985.

We all know that the past is a foreign country but watching television footage of the November 1984 recording of the first Band Aid single, or the Live Aid concert in 1985, will strike anyone but the most robotic viewer as poignant. Yes, the belief that popstars could ‘feed the world’, bypassing normal politics, may have been naïve, but it still showed a genuine generosity of spirit that’s sorely lacking these days. Geldof and Co’s response to the famine in Ethiopia makes the virtue-signalling pop stars of today look like moral pygmies (with no offence to Africa’s actual pygmies).

Back then, I had been conducting a long-running feud with Geldof’s then partner, the late Paula Yates, ever since we were bratty 17-year-olds. But when the Band Aid record came out, I went out and bought 10 copies. Even I, who had seen the Sex Pistols as a teenager, loved it. Of course Bono and Sting were annoying, but that’s like blaming dogs for barking. Yes, the song had some lyrical howlers in it – which of us hasn’t fervently thanked the Lord for making people other than ourselves starve? – but George Michael’s radiant young voice cut right through all the rubbish.

Pop music was fun back then, and not just because Status Quo locked Spandau Ballet in the toilet at one point in the proceedings. These were the heady days of Smash Hits and ceaseless back-biting between bands. Rumour has it that the Human League turned down Band Aid because someone from Virgin Records just asked if they wanted to ‘make a record with Bob Geldof’ and they immediately said no. I loved seeing those who accepted turn up in the video all hungover and flash, but like serious children, shining with good intentions. Geldof wasn’t everyone’s glass of Guinness, and was only ever a third-rate pop star, but he was sincere and driven by a desire to do good, not to ponce about showing off luxury beliefs, as is so often the case today with those famous people who involve themselves in politics.

And of course, anything Ed Sheeran’s against, I’m naturally for. I shouldn’t really have to write anything about the ginger whinger in the opposite corner, given his inexplicable level of fame and success (in 2015 he made $33million without doing anything). But for anyone who’s been living on Bluesky or somewhere equally isolated, suffice to say that Sheeran sums up all that is bad about 21st-century pop music, from his appearance to his private education. He embodies the colonisation of rock’n’roll, created by the poor and sexy, by the posh and plain.

Unlike Geldof’s trad pop-star bombast, Sheeran’s is a stealth arrogance, but arrogant he undoubtedly is. He just had to issue an hilarious apology on Instagram for interrupting a discussion between football professionals on live television, a piquant snapshot of how the People’s Game – like their music – has been gentrified by the ignorant and educated. But he’s still as grasping as any Eighties popinjay. Of his huge hit ‘Galway Girl’ (which, amusingly, his record label asked him not to release), he observed: ‘There’s 400million people in the world that say they’re Irish, even if they’re not – and those type of people are going to fucking love it.’

In a vignette which perfectly sums up the hypocrisy of green-leaning megastars, Sheeran has long been waging a war with his Suffolk neighbours over his perfectly legitimate right as a pop star to possess a swimming pool. Eventually he got a licence to build a ‘wildlife pond’ in order to ‘support nature conservation’, so long as it wasn’t used for swimming. But of course the jackass couldn’t resist posting himself on social media jumping into the ‘pond’ in swimming trunks, leading a neighbour to complain to the Mail: ‘He might be Mr Nice Guy to everyone else, but he just does what he likes.’

Such arrogance on the part of woke celebs needs a mighty ‘Wokescreen’ to maintain the pristine public image, so it was no surprise to see Sheeran issue a statement last week saying that he had not been asked whether he wanted to have his vocals reused on the new mix of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ (he appeared on the 2014 version of Band Aid, which raised money for Ebola relief). He even said he would have refused, due to his ‘understanding of the narrative’ having changed in the past decade. Sheeran posted an Instagram statement by the Ghanaian-British singer Fuse ODG which accused Live Aid of ‘[dehumanising] Africans and [destroying] our pride and identity in the name of “charity”’.

Not surprisingly, Geldof wasn’t having any of it, giving a good account of himself to The Sunday Times: ‘Why would Band Aid scrap feeding thousands of children dependent on us for a meal?… Because of an abstract wealthy-world argument, regardless of its legitimacy?’

A pleasing class-war aspect was added to the barney when one of the original singers on the 1984 single, Tony Hadley of Spandau Ballet (son of an electrical engineer and an NHS worker), said of Sheeran (son of an arts curator and a jewellery designer) on BBC Radio 2 this week: ‘I think [Sheeran] should shut up, to be honest. If you take that route, then nobody does anything to help anybody.’ Live Aid promoter Harvey Goldsmith said it even better: ‘Stuff him’.

There are arguments for and against foreign aid. But I’d wager that Sheeran believes that large amounts of taxes should go to the developing world in some way, be it in farming subsidies or in the preposterous idea of reparations. It’s charity – as opposed to government knowing what’s best for us and taking our money to use as it pleases – that the woke have a problem with, partly because of its Christian connotations, and partly because the generosity of the likes of the late George Michael show them up as the selfish, swimming-pool-building, bourgeois skinflints they often are. And why should the views of Sheeran and his prissy critics have any more weight than that of Africans themselves? Many are alive today because of Geldof’s brash action, movingly expressed in the Zimbabwean singer Alton Edwards’s song, ‘Thank You From Africa’, which is little known here, but is widely played on that continent.

Perhaps the naïveté of Band Aid is what makes it such a powerful symbol of the age. We look back to the 20th century with all its freedoms – great and small – as a time when an element of goodwill was still implicit in human interaction. It was a more open-hearted, less culturally suspicious age before censuring and censoring and cancelling. When I hear the original Band Aid record, I’m back there once again, in that past which is a foreign country – and all the more unreachable because, like at the end of Planet of the Apes, it’s buried in the rubble beneath our feet, and we did it to ourselves.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Her book, Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics, is published by Academica Press.