The iconic lyric Bono never wanted to sing: “I’ll sing any line but that one”
The entire rock landscape has seemed to turn Bono into something more than just a frontman. Some of the kinks in the armour may be self-inflicted, but for as long as he’s been in the public eye, the U2 frontman has gone from one of the most important figures of all time to the kind of artist that some feel embarrassed to say that they liked once upon a time. But Bono has always been a fairly unassuming frontman, but even he had reservations when making the charity single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’.
But when you think about it, playing the rock frontman card when raising money for charity is probably the last thing anyone wants to do. Along with not being a team player amidst your fellow legends, it would usually lead to a PR nightmare if someone found out that one of the biggest rock stars in the world suddenly had to get up on their high horse because they can’t be bothered to help fight against injustice.
Then again, Bono was never one to shy away from the hard tasks. He was the one who helped lead the performances at Live Aid with his stellar performance of ‘Bad’, and even though it looked like one of the more sinister things for a frontman to do in the 2000s, his decision to work with George W. Bush helped raise a lot of money for relief funds in Africa.
So, if anything, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ was just Bono following in the footsteps of his heroes. George Harrison had first thought of pampered rock stars giving their services for a good cause during The Concert for Bangladesh, but Bono’s grievances with ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ just came down to one line of the tune.
While most artists on the track would have to just sing one line, Bono remembered being unhappy that he got caught with the more political lyric, recalling in Surrender, “I had to sing the most troubling line of the whole tune, ‘Tonight thank God it’s them instead of you’. When Bob [Geldolf] handed me the lyric, I said, ‘I’ll sing any line but this one’. Maybe it’s that thought that got me here.”
Granted, it’s not like that kind of heavy-handed didn’t already fit with what Bono was already doing in U2. Albums like October and War straddled the lines of having religious and political themes across their runtime, so having him be the one that reminded people of the suffering in the world probably was a bit too on-brand for what was known for.
But when you think about it, there was no other way it could have gone. I mean, considering the number of artists at play, would you choose someone like Boy George or George Michael over Bono when it came to singing about the problems of the world?
It’s not like Bono wasn’t able to take it in stride, either, even managing to take that kind of pointed songwriting approach even further when working on later albums like The Joshua Tree. Regardless of his wariness, Bono’s performance on ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ is a reminder of his own philosophy on music. It’s not just about the song; it’s about having a spiritual experience every time you sing it.
