Who are Bob Geldof and Midge Ure?
Bob Geldof
In the 70s Bob was the lead singer for the Boomtown Rats. Their most famous song was "I Don't Like Mondays" It's about a school shooting that happened in San Diego.
By 1978, they had achieved their first UK hit single "Rat Trap", and later achieved a second hit with ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’.
In 1981, Bob Geldof was invited to take part in a concert for Amnesty International and this sowed a seed of future ideas for Bob.
It was in 1984, that Bob moved from being a rock star to an international celebrity for raising awareness of humanitarian charities. In 1984, Ethiopia and other African countries experienced a severe famine which led to many thousands of people starving to death. The plight of starving children was widely seen on TV. Bob Geldof with Midge Ure decided to do something about it – releasing the single – “Do they Know its Christmas Time”. It was a spontaneous event with many of the best-known names in pop music invited. It became an instant bestseller selling a record 3 million copies.
Midge Ure
Midge is a Scottish singer involved in several bands and was the frontman for Ultravox. In 1984 he co-wrote the song "Do They Know It's Christmas" and is the second highest-selling single on the UK chart history. One of the key members of the new wave band Ultravox, guitarist/vocalist Midge Ure began his professional music career with Salvation, a Glasgow-based group that became the bubblegum band Slik in 1974. Upset in the change of direction, Ure left the band to join the Rich Kids, a punk-pop group led by former Sex Pistol bassist Glen Matlock. The Rich Kids only released one album, 1978's Ghosts of Princes in Towers, before breaking up later that year. Ure spent a brief time with the Misfits (not the American band) before forming Visage with drummer Rusty Egan and vocalist Steve Strange; he left the group to replace Gary Moore in Thin Lizzy, who had left in the middle of an American tour. After the tour was finished, Ure fulfilled an agreement to join Ultravox as the replacement for John Foxx.
