Band Aid saved my life after millions saw me starving to death on TV – here’s why critics like Ed Sheeran are wrong
SLOWLY shaking her head with disgust, Birhan Woldu is seething that her beloved Band Aid has come under attack.
“That song helped keep me and thousands of others alive,” said the mother of two, with the grace and poise of an Ethiopian princess.
Speaking to me at her rented apartment in the highlands of Tigray, Birhan is naturally protective over the 40-year-old pop song that has proved a constant milestone in her life.
And the 43-year-old is also quick to defend the 1970s punk rocker whose sense of injustice created a social movement that defined a generation.
Sir Bob Geldof calls Birhan “the daughter of Band Aid”.
She considers him a second father.
As a starving child, her image in a TV report helped alert the world to the tragedy unfolding in Africa.
Today — 40 years after she almost perished in Ethiopia’s biblical famine — she has a heartfelt message for the Boomtown Rats frontman.
Speaking down the lens of Sun man Louis Wood’s video camera, she told Geldof: “Hello my dad, how are you? I’d like to meet you again.
“I need to introduce my husband and kiddies to you one day.
“I hope we will meet again. I love you. Thank you, Bob.”
As for the notion that the re-released Do They Know It’s Christmas? is tarnishing Africa’s image, she says of critics: “They are very wrong.
“It’s a misunderstanding, misconception, a misrepresentation of Bob Geldof’s work. It’s not true.
“I know the truth. Band Aid’s money has helped fund schools and hospitals. It’s very important for Tigray, Ethiopia and Africa.”
‘Hard nuts were crying’
Shortly after meeting Birhan on the day the new Band Aid single was released, my phone rings with an unmistakable Dublin accent on the other end.
Some 3,700 miles away, Robert Frederick Zenon Geldof, 73, is about to go on BBC’s The One Show to push the latest remixed incarnation of Do They Know It’s Christmas?
“Birhan is what Band Aid’s all about,” he told me.
Hello my dad, how are you? I’d like to meet you again. I need to introduce my husband and kiddies to you one day. I hope we will meet again. I love you. Thank you, Bob
Birhan's message to Geldoff
The first time Geldof met Birhan was in a meeting engineered by The Sun in Ethiopia in 2004.
Recalling our suggestion that Do They Know It’s Christmas? should be re-released that year, he said now: “I was tired. I told you, ‘If you f***ing organise it, I’ll do’.”
So The Sun’s then-editor Dominic Mohan got Coldplay’s Chris Martin and Fran Healy from Travis on board and it was a goer.
The 2024 version is a mash-up of the four previous incarnations of the song — including 2004’s rendition — remixed by producer Trevor Horn.
As Geldof enthused when he told Live Aid viewers to “give us your f***in’ money” in 1985, he tells me: “The new version is really fantastic, absolutely beautiful.
“Zoe Ball was sobbing when she played it on Radio 2. She had to stop and put on another track.
“All the f***ing hard nuts in the control room, I swear to you, they were crying. Trevor Horn has made this scrap of a song a work of art.”
Not everyone agrees.
Ed Sheeran said he would not have allowed his vocals from the 2014 version to be used had permission been sought.
Geldof’s 1984 lyrics have come under intense scrutiny.
It’s a f***ing pop song, not a doctoral thesis
Geldof
Sheeran endorsed a statement by British-Ghanaian rapper Fuse ODG who blamed Band Aid for “perpetuating damaging stereotypes” of Africa and “destroying” the continent’s “dignity, pride and identity”.
But Geldof’s having none of it, telling me: “It’s a f***ing pop song, not a doctoral thesis.”
Meanwhile, in her neat living room, Birhan performs Ethiopia’s coffee ceremony for us with daughters Claire, 13, and ten-year-old Ariam handing out popcorn.
Her dad Woldu, 73, and husband Birhane, 43, proudly look on from the sofa.
Incense is burned, mingling with the aroma of the roasting coffee beans.
Dressed in a traditional white embroidered dress and shawl, Birhan looks back on an astonishing life.
Born into this world on a dried ox skin splayed across the earthen floor of a mud-walled hut, she would go on to greet Madonna on the Live 8 stage in 2005 watched by billions around the world.
Along the way she has met Brad Pitt, the Beckhams and Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates and appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
Both her and Geldof’s lives are inextricably entangled with Band Aid.
Bob was determined to do something after seeing BBC correspondent Michael Buerk’s harrowing 1984 reports from Ethiopia of thousands starving in a “hell on Earth”.
Among the suffering masses, Birhan — stick-thin with her forlorn milky eyes rolling back into her head — was filmed apparently dying by a Canadian CBC film crew led by Brian Stewart.
Her dad Woldu remembers: “Birhan was dying in my hands. I didn’t notice people were filming me.”
A ragged funeral shroud had been laid out for three-year-old Birhan and her grave had already been dug at a clinic run by nuns on the outskirts of Tigrayan capital Mekele.
Yet, by some miracle, her pulse returned and she survived.
The CBC crew later returned to the clinic and to their amazement found Birhan alive.
Today, she has little memory of famine times, saying: “Just to see my picture from then is upsetting.”
Her mother Alemetsehay and big sister Azmera perished in the famine.
Back in Britain, Geldof had rallied 80s pop and rock royalty — including Bono, Sting and Boy George — to sing his lyrics which Ultravox’s Midge Ure had put to music.
The catchy pop record captured a public mood.
Some bought boxes of the single to send as Christmas cards.
Others bought 50 copies, kept one and put the others back.
Geldof told me on Monday: “The bloke driving me around to all the studios today is a Serbian called Vlad.
“He was watching Live Aid as a 21-year-old and thought Britain was so amazing, so exciting, that he just left his home and came here.”
‘Happy and healthy’
At the Wembley Stadium Live Aid concert the following summer in 1985, CBC’s desolate footage of starving Birhan was played on the big screens with The Cars’ haunting track Drive.
The camera lingered on Birhan’s apparent final moments on Earth.
It was the centrepiece of the gig watched on 85 per cent of the world’s TVs.
After her unwitting brush with fame, Birhan carried on with her life, herding the family’s goats in the parched mountains of Tigray.
Appearing on documentaries by CBC and the BBC, she studied plant science at college.
Then in 2004, I travelled to Tigray and interviewed Birhan for a Band Aid anniversary piece.
Geldof and Sir Tony Blair were in Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa for a conference at the same time.
What would happen if The Sun arranged for the father of Band Aid to meet its daughter for the first time?
When Bob and the then Prime Minister clapped eyes on her, they both appeared close to tears.
Birhan presented Blair with a cross from Lalibela, Ethiopia’s holiest Christian site.
Today she recalls: “He was very happy. He said he’d keep it at home.
“Bob hugged me and called me his daughter.”
Sun Editor Dominic had called me moments before the meeting with the idea to ask Bob if he would re-record the Band Aid song.
Geldof gave his expletive-laden affirmative without missing a beat.
The Sun then flew Birhan over for the London recording and then for the massive Live 8 concert.
Backstage a host of celebrities queued up to meet her.
Brad Pitt quietly introduced himself, as did a chatty David and Victoria Beckham.
Then the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, said hello.
At the time she did not realise who most of the famous faces were.
But when Jeremy Clarkson ambled past at the Hyde Park, London, supergig she shrieked with recognition. Top Gear was hugely popular in Ethiopia.
Back in Ethiopia, she married and had her two daughters.
Her marriage would break down, while she had to put up with assumptions from some in her community that fame had brought her wealth.
Then, in 2020, a civil war broke out in Tigray with widespread atrocities, including massacres of civilians and rape, in the following two years.
It resulted in famine and starvation again stalking the land.
Birhan recalled: “Artillery was often passing over our heads.”
To support her family, Birhan sold coffee beans on the street.
Some three years ago she met new husband Birhane while working for the World Food programme where he was a supervisor.
Today Birhan says she’s “happy and healthy”.
Now the woman who has been an inspiration to so many wants to start her own charity to help children with disabilities.
To date, Band Aid Charitable Trust has raised almost £150million, with Geldof adding: “The song’s vigour after 40 years is astonishing.
“An American newspaper said recently it’s probably the most powerful song ever written in rock and roll.”
Birhan now hopes Do They Know It’s Christmas? will be a huge hit once more and that another Live 8-style concert will follow.
“I want my daughters to come and see me take part,” the daughter of Band Aid says.
“It would make me so proud.”
- In tomorrow’s paper: how band aid’s cash is still changing lives.