Help...

Nine years ago (is it really that long?), in September 1995 a relatively new charity, War Child released an album, which must still be a contender for "best charity record of all time". War Child was initally set up to help the kids caught up in the war in former Yugoslavia, but it's still going today, still helping in Yugoslavia, but also now in many other places around the world. And sadly there are far too many places where its help is needed.

The idea of the "Help" album was to get some of the best musical artists of the day to all record a song on the Monday, then have the record mixed, mastered, pressed, distributed during the week, into the shops on Saturday, and sell enough records to get to number one in the UK album charts the next day. A pretty tall order.

Bands included Oasis, Radiohead, Blur, The Charlatans, The Manics, The KLF, Orbital and many others. And Sinead O'Connor. Twenty in all. The finished product ended up being pretty fabulous. Not every track was great. Blur's "Eine Kleine Lift Musik" was particularly disappointing, despite having a great title. And I can never have too little Paul Weller. But there's no need to dwell on the low points.

High points are many. Suede's cover of "Shipbuilding", the Manics doing "Raindrops keep falling on my head". A fabulous Portishead track, "Mourning Air", and the high spot, Radiohead's "Lucky". It turned up later on "OK Computer", but that was about a year later. I remember hearing it the first time and finding it hard to believe that they'd put something that good on a charity album. Possibly still one of my all time favourite songs.

The album ended up selling loads, getting to number one as desired, and raising well over a million quid.

War Child have been involved in many other projects since then. Some musical, some not. There was a pretty decent album of covers out last year. Now they have a new thing: War Child Music. An online music download service, offering just a few carefully chosen exclusive tracks each month. First month sounds alright - it includes tracks by Radiohead, Bloc Party ("Forever!") and a version of "The sun ain't gonna shine any more" by Keane. Seems reasonably priced, especially if you subscribe. Three and a half quid gets you all the tracks each month. Sorry if I sound like an advert, but it seems like a good idea to me.

And if you never actually bought the "Help" album back in '95, you can download the whole thing for a bargain £3.50 from the same site. You'll probably even get a track listing thrown in, which is more than those of us who bought it originally did! I'm listening to the album as I write and it's still sounding good. Mostly good, anyway.

Hey! Was that a serious post just then? Damn, must be losing it.