Do They Know It’s a Drumtraks?
The drum machine that helped feed the world—and why it never should have happened
It was forty years ago this week that one of the most remarkable moments in pop music history occurred. Even if you weren’t around in 1984, you probably know the event: the recording and rush-release of “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” a charity single by a group of UK musicians known as Band-Aid.
You’ve heard the song, which still gets played regularly around this time of year. Perhaps you’ve seen the video that was shot during the recording, on Nov. 25, 1984, at SARM West Studios in Notting Hill.
And you most likely know that the proceeds from the single, which went into the British charts at Number One, were earmarked to help starving Ethiopians. The group that The Style Council’s Paul Weller dubbed “The Grinning Idiots” might not have fed the world—or even the part they hoped to save—but they’d also answered the call with selflessness and grace.
Next year will be the 40th anniversary of an even better-known, and by degrees, more astounding, manifestation of this charity effort. That was Live Aid, which brought together many of the musicians on the Band-Aid single, assisted by a number of other big names, to create the so-called “Global Jukebox.”
But even if you know all that, there are two things that perhaps you don’t realize about “Do They Know It’s Christmas”—one technical, and one we could call philosophical. We’ll deal with them both in turn here.
***
The technical detail is one that I didn’t learn until just a couple of months ago.
I’d always known that there was a drum machine on “Do They Know It’s Christmas.” The song was written by Bob Geldof, the mastermind of the whole Band-Aid concept, who’d been inspired to write the tune after seeing a BBC video of famine in Ethiopia.
Geldof’s co-writer was Midge Ure, then the frontman of Ultravox. Ure had demoed the song in his home studio “on a Casio mini-keyboard,”1 according to Geldof’s 1986 autobiography, Is That It?
What drum machine had he used, though? I’d always assumed it was a LinnDrum, which was still ubiquitous in the fall of 1984. It turns out I was wrong—though not completely.
Speaking to Ure during his American tour this past summer, the conversation turned to “Do They Know It’s Christmas.” And Ure revealed that his drum machine of choice was—to me—an unexpected one: the Sequential Circuits Drumtraks.
“That’s [from] that period from, like, ’83 to ’86 or something,” he said. “So just about everything that came out of my studio would have had the Drumtraks.”
Songs that began life in Ure’s studio “at the bottom of my garden” included tracks from his 1985 solo debut, The Gift, which reached No. 2 in the British charts, as well as the single “After a Fashion” that Ure recorded with Japan bassist Mick Karn the previous year.
Why the Drumtraks, though—a lesser-known competitor to machines like the LinnDrum and the Oberheim DMX?
For one thing, the Drumtraks was probably the second drum machine ever to boast MIDI capability. 2That meant it was far easier to synch the machine up with other electronic instruments.
For another, the Drumtraks had sampled sounds that were comparable to those found on the LinnDrum and the DMX. What many people don’t realize is why those sounds are so similar.
The surprising explanation is that some of the Sequential unit’s sounds were sampled directly from its two competitors. “I think that’s what we did,” the late Dave Smith, the head of Sequential, admitted when I interviewed him in 2021. “The engineers just went out and borrowed some stuff, twisted ‘em around a little bit, and we just went from there.”
You might be even more surprised that Roger Linn only chuckled when I brought this subject up to him. “He sampled my kick and snare, and I believe he sampled Tom Oberheim’s hi-hat,” Linn confirmed. “But it was a very gray area at the time. Can you really copyright something that’s an eighth of a second?
Linn also pointed out, by way of forgiving Smith this transgression, that “Dave was in Northern California, and Tom [Oberheim] and I were in Southern California, where we had more access to musicians.”
In fact, Linn suggested that he took the sampling as a sort of tribute. “Dave, to his credit, recognized that you lived and died by your presets. So he just wanted good sounds.” He shrugged and grinned. “We were all just cowboys back then.”
***
However good the Drumtraks’ sounds were, however, at least one Band-Aid participant thought the rhythm track needed something extra.
That was drummer Phil Collins, who was already a fairly seasoned drum machine user. He’d used the Roland CR-78 on his first two solo albums, combining it with his own drums to legendary effect on “In the Air Tonight.”
Hearing Ure’s basic track, Collins thought he could improve upon it in a similar fashion. In Is That It?, Geldof recalled the moment:
Phil was setting up his drum kit. We had reservations. Recording drums is notoriously tricky and we already had electronic drums on the backing track. “Nah, it’ll be better if I play live,” said Phil, “I can do some fills between the electronics. Give it a bit of bottle. I’ll mike it up.” He was very casual about it. “Brilliant,”said Midge uncertainly.
If you’ve never heard what that “bottle” sounds like unaccompanied, give a listen to the video below.
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And however uncertain he may have been during the recording, Ure was won over in fairly short order.
“Phil Collins came in,” he says today with a smile, “and made it much, much better.”3
***
The philosophical point about “Do They Know It’s Christmas” that time has obscured is this: it should never have happened.
Thinking back on the recording, a couple of years later, Bob Geldof could write, proudly, “It had been a monumental day. There was never one second of rancorous feeling…Inside that room had been the single greatest collection of contemporary musicians in British history.”
But the idea that it had all been engineered by Geldof was perhaps the greatest miracle of a miraculous 24 hours.
Some years back, I wrote an essay comparing “Do They Know It’s Christmas” to the USA for Africa single “We Are the World,” and arguing that the former was superior. The essay was written for a book I no longer seem to have in my possession,4 but after a little digital digging, I managed to uncover a draft.
As I put it back then, it was almost unfathomable that
the man responsible for this single was no longer a famous and successful pop star. In fact, Bob Geldof was, in the autumn of 1984, a self-described “old has-been,” a man whose band was on the verge of disintegration, and whose own prospects after the breakup were none too rosy. Somehow, this washed-up singer managed to convince nearly every important figure in UK music circles to join him—with almost no notice, and no promise of reward—in recording “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”
To be sure, there are plenty of aesthetic reasons to argue that Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is a superior record to its American counterpart. The song Bono once described as “a hymn” has a peculiar timelessness, made more improbable considering it was created during one of the most highly stylized periods in music history. The graceful arrangement—the stark opening giving way to what is largely an ensemble-sung number, punctuated by “clanging chimes of doom”—helps obscure its Eighties origins. And the lyrics’ dignified appeal to holiday charity stands in stark contrast to the song it inspired. If “We Are The World” is a hymn, it is a hymn to the celebrity activist.
But in this argument, the simplest point is also the strongest. Namely, the primary reason “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is the better single is that it happened first. Which begs the question: What if it hadn’t?
Singer Harry Belafonte famously remarked, after “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” became a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic, that he was “ashamed and embarrassed at seeing a bunch of white English kids doing what black Americans ought to have been doing.” Geography was probably a factor: Britain is closer to Africa than America is, perhaps making it more likely the British would take the issue of Ethiopia seriously—as the BBC’s Michael Buerk, who prepared the now famous report on the famine, certainly did.
Also, Britain (and the British music industry) are far smaller than America (and the American music industry), which is no small point in organizing such an endeavor as an all-star charity record. In addition, Geldof had some connections: his then-wife, Paula Yates, was co-presenter of the TV program The Tube -- although only in the tiny, hypercompressed world of UK pop could Yates have made a significant difference.
Regardless: had one of the stars to whom Belafonte was presumably speaking—a Lionel Richie or a Michael Jackson, at the peak of their almost unimaginable commercial success—originated the idea of feeding the world, then the effort would undoubtedly have moved units and raised funds. Had Quincy Jones himself first seen the BBC documentary and been moved to organize a charity endeavor, he would surely have drawn the same sort of star-packed studio.
But what would have happened if Bob Geldof had never seen or been affected by the images of Ethiopia in a BBC documentary? What if he’d been down the pub that evening, or otherwise engaged?
And what if the job of prospective saint had fallen instead to a struggling American musician, who was also, in the fall of 1984, on the verge of irrelevance?
The answer to what would have happened, I thought, was nothing. It never would have worked. It was, like all miracles, an event that could only have happened in the way it did, at the time it did, to the people it did.
There’s another poignant aspect to the recording of “Do They Know It’s Christmas.” It really was the end of an incredible era in British pop music.
The fall of 1984 was the final high-water mark for many of the bands and performers who participated. Duran Duran and Wham! were about to fracture. Spandau Ballet, Culture Club and Ultravox—as well as Geldof’s own Boomtown Rats—had reached their peak, and seen their moment pass. Sting and U2, of course, would go on to bigger things. They would outlive the New Pop movement that had helped support them. And they would make far more sober, and far less colorful, music in the future.
What no one could have known then was that—at the very same time these avatars of British pop royalty were gathered together at SARM West—pop music was already moving on.
From some draft or other of my Band-Aid essay:
(I)f one is charting the close of what has come to be considered the Age of the Haircut in popular music -- the end of the Second British Invasion, the last moment before the asteroid hit and wiped out the colorful dinosaurs of New Pop -- then Band Aid seems the most fitting moment. Which is all the more ironic, given the contrast between the style-over-substance philosophy commonly attributed to this era, and the reality of what this generation of musicians actually accomplished with “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”
The asteroid in question landed, in fact, at nearly the same moment the musicians of Band Aid were gathering at SARM West Studios in November 1984. It was a new single from a Liverpool group called Dead or Alive, but it would end up being much more than that. The song was a piece of audio Kryptonite that would affect British pop for years to come.
It didn’t seem that way at first, when “You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)” began its slow climb to the chart summit. There was something beguiling, in those days, when MIDI and sequencing were still in their infancy, about the crispness and perfection of the song, the way its interlocking parts fit seamlessly together. It was a precision that had only been matched, perhaps, by Kraftwerk, and it was a precision that had attracted Dead or Alive’s flamboyant lead singer, Pete Burns, in search of the hard, metallic disco sound of his dreams.
“You Spin Me Round,” with its dense layers of chattering syncopation, was a star-making moment. What no one realized then was that the star it was making would not, in the long run, be Burns. Instead, the single was the first step toward unprecedented domination of the British charts by a production team with a lawyerly name that suggested its ruthless efficiency. Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Peter Waterman—known, in time, as simply SAW—would go on to score more than two hundred hits, and a baker’s dozen UK Number Ones, with variations on the programmed, processed sound of Dead or Alive’s breakthrough.5
That ending might be sad for those of us who came of age during this golden era of the New Pop—but it’s also a reminder that, as the poet Robert Frost put it, “nothing gold can stay.” You have to treasure those moments—especially when they’re as unlikely as this one was. And then you have to keep thinking about them, and writing about them, so that they are never truly lost forever.
So here’s to Sunday, November 25, 1984, forty years on. And here’s to a happy Thanksgiving to us all.
Tune in for more exclusive interviews about drum machines and electronic percussion, coming soon! Meanwhile, follow me on Twitter (@danleroy) and Instagram (@danleroysbonusbeats), and check out my website: danleroy.com.
Dancing to the Drum Machine is available in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle/eBook from Bloomsbury, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and other online retailers.
Quite possibly the Casio CZ-101, which was also used on Ure’s solo debut, The Gift.
The first MIDI drum machine was the Roland 909, which debuted a year earlier, in 1983. And once again, the MIDI capability is easy to explain: Tadao Kikumoto, the primary engineer of the 909, is also the guy who gets credit for writing the MIDI protocol.
Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits had teamed with four Japanese manufacturers—Roland, Korg, Yamaha, and Kawai—to develop a MIDI protocol that he was sure that reluctant American music companies would ultimately be forced to adopt. He was proven correct.
Another distinctive percussive element of “Do They Know It’s Christmas” is also a borrowing. The tom sounds at the beginning of the song are a sample from the opening of the 1983 Tears for Fears song “The Hurting.” “So they were on the song,” Ure says with a grin, but “they didn't know they were on the record for a while, until I told them.”
Thanks to Midge Ure himself for correcting my mistake here. I erroneously wrote in the first draft that the sample was the bell sounds—which Midge points out came from a Yamaha DX7.
It’s probably not an accident that I can’t find the book. The editors at Random House—on the advice of their lawyers—objected to my fictionalized what-if. I imagined what would have happened if an American rock star in a similar career circumstance as Geldof in 1984—I chose Doug Fieger of The Knack—had tried to organize an American charity record first. The project, I speculated, would have been a complete nonstarter: the first such effort could only ever have happened in the UK.
The lawyers insisted on several rewrites of an essay I was convinced was perhaps the best thing I’d written to date—an assessment with which the collection’s editor agreed. In one version, I turned Fieger into a fictional character to try to assuage the alleged legal concerns. Nothing worked, and in the end, all those elements were scrubbed from the essay, leaving it bollocksless. The whole thing was a thoroughly unpleasant—though certainly eye-opening—experience. I consoled myself with the thought that at least it wasn’t my own book.
In my book Dancing to the Drum Machine, I spoke with Phil Harding, the engineer behind those SAW hits. He was a hugely entertaining interview, and I highly recommend picking up his two books, in which he tells the SAW story as well as anyone is likely to do.