Unfortunately, Band Aid redo is no sticker

How bad is that Band Aid 20 song? It's enough to make you nostalgic for the Band Aid II song recorded in 1989 by a bunch of Stock, Aiken and Waterman muppets, writes Brian Boyd

Do They Know It's Christmas? That's like a bunch of musicians from Africa recording a song to alleviate suffering after an earthquake in Denmark and calling it Do They Know It's Ramadan?

One of the participants on the re-recording, Travis's Fran Healy, has opined that any criticism of the new song is "disgraceful", so here goes.

First thing: the Sugababes, Will Young, Robbie Williams and Busted should have been served with an exclusion order preventing them going anywhere near the studio. All four acts are irredeemably hopeless, and their places could have gone to overlooked- on-the-day acts such as The Libertines and The Streets.

The production on the song is trite and banal. The Aphex Twin has long voiced the complaint that his music is only ever used on television to accompany scenes of dark tragedy, so there's a producer who could have done something a bit innovative with the arrangement of the backing track. The same goes for Massive Attack.

Similarly, The Libertines could have gone off on an "emotional reunion" trip and injected a bit of elegantly wasted poignancy into the proceedings. The Streets would have been great, seeing as Mike Skinner would have interjected "mate" into his lines at regular intervals - as in "there's a world outside your window, mate, and it's a world of dread and fear, ain't it?"

And we never got the big weedly-weedly guitar solo from The Darkness, or any big-hair falsetto out of Justin Hawkins - which is what the song was crying out for. The only one pushing himself a bit on the vocal front is Keane's Tom Chaplin, while it's still not to late to erase Dizzee Rascal's "rap" from future pressings. And what is Dido doing in there while Beth Orton was passed over?

Do They Know It's Christmas? was released on the heel of a recent survey by the aid organisation Voluntary Services Overseas, which found that two-thirds of British and Irish people still think that Africa is dependent on the West. The simple fact is that for every pound transferred in aid, two to three pounds come back to the West because of the structural imbalance of trade.

The original song was written in response to the Ethiopian famine of 1984; it has been re-released in response to the Dafur famine of 2004. Some members of the Ethiopian government have expressed concern about the original lyrics being used, in that they forever tie their now-changed country to appalling TV images of mass famine.

The government also points out that the relative stability in the country has meant, for the first time, a number of positive articles appearing in the Western press recommending the country as a holiday destination, highlighting its wildlife and long archaeological history.

The World Development Movement, an umbrella group of poverty action groups, welcomes the humanitarian initiative behind the re-recording, but also takes issue with the old lyrics still being used. WDM (www.wdm.org.uk), which works quietly but vigorously behind the scenes to change Western governments' policies on trade and debt issues in Africa, has even launched a competition for better words for the song.

"Those who take their picture of Africa from these lyrics will be mislead about the true nature of the situation" says WDM director Mark Curtis. "It's the shackles of debt, conflict and unfair trade that afflict African nations. The problem in Ethiopia today is not that "nothing ever grows", the problem is that the coffee that they are growing is worthless because of the mismanagement of the global economy by countries like ours."

[ bboyd@irish-times.ie ]