Adele must be feeling pretty silly at the moment, now that Band Aid 30’s version of Do They Know It’s Christmas has become the year’s biggest-selling single.
She had the chance to become part of history – specially the part of history where people watch the Band Aid 30 video five years from now and say things like “Who’s that?” and “Why is Olly Murs dancing so joyously to a song about fatal internal haemorrhage?” and “Oh God, remember when vloggers were a thing?” – but she turned it down.
To be fair to Adele, though, you’re screwed the second anyone asks you to perform on a charity single. Accept the invitation and people will rail at you because they don’t like the idea of millionaires asking the less well-off for money, or because they think that Ebola is a less worthy cause than malaria, or because things like this perpetrate an ignorant and outdated western idea of Africa.
On the other hand, if you decline the invitation, there’s a good chance that Gandalf will call you an arsehole on the internet. You can’t win either way.
Surely Adele could have struck some kind of compromise. Maybe she could have followed Rita Ora’s lead and recorded her vocals a few hours before anyone else turned up, ensuring she received a few flattering close-ups in the video instead of being ignominiously stuffed between two people off YouTube in the chorus. Or maybe she could have changed her line to something insultingly insipid, given that everyone else basically did that anyway.
But it’s too late to speculate like this. We should all just hope that Adele has been chastened enough to appear on Band Aid 40 – alongside Olly Murs, three sexy robots and Bono’s sunglass-wearing skeleton – when it’s invariably unveiled on The X Factor in 2024.
