‘Some artists thought it was too political’: Can Jarvis, Damone, Olivia Rodrigo and the Arctic Monkees reboot the biggest charity album of the ’90s? | music

WWhen Kae Tempest was asked to contribute to a new track by Damon Albarn, which would also feature Fontaines DC frontman Grian Chatten, Tempest says he jumped at the chance. It wasn’t just the artists involved, nor the fact that it was destined for a new compilation for War Child, called Help (2): a sequel to the charity’s huge hit Help (2): After seven solo albums, Tempest began to think about working with others, and so the night before the recording session, he and Chatten went into Albarn’s studio and wrote their verses together, “responding to each other.” And it seems to be working really well, he says: “a real collaboration.”

However, he admits that the actual registration of the flags was a baptism of fire. “Johnny Marr was playing guitar, Femi [Koleoso] “He was playing drums from Ezra’s group. Plus, there was a children’s choir.”

There were other kids at the Abbey Road studio too, filming sessions under the direction of Jonathan Glazer, the Oscar-winning director of The Zone of Interest. When Glazer was asked to produce a film to accompany the album, he decided that because War Child supports children affected by conflict, the project as a whole should reflect “the joy and freedom of childhood.” So he had children in war zones film themselves playing, and asked local schoolchildren to come and document what was happening at Abbey Road.

“We had eight nine-year-olds running around with Sony Handycams, which was just as chaotic and wonderful as you can imagine,” Glazer says. He laughs. “One of the boys was filming Johnny Marr while he was recording, and then he decided he wanted to film something behind him. He pushed the neck of Johnny’s guitar out of the way to get to it.”

While this was going on, every other studio in Abbey Road was busy with artists recording tracks for Help(2): Jarvis Cocker was completing a new Pulp song, Begging for Change, and his English teacher was struggling to overcome disbelief at the fact that the song Lily Fontaine of the band had written while still at university was to feature Graham Coxon on guitar. “The blur has a huge impact on an English teacher, so when Graham walked in there was a kind of nervous silence that fell over the room,” she says.

The simultaneous recordings led to some interesting cross-pollination: The English teacher ended up singing with Albarn’s children’s choir, which Coker also chose to scream on the pulp track, on the basis that, he says, “When you think of children’s choirs, you automatically think of the worst songs in the world, like ‘There’s No One Quite Like Grandma,’ because they take kids with so much energy and life and make them do something they’re supposed to do.” “They’re adults and boring, so I thought it would be better to make them make noise.”

Finally, it was an overwhelming experience. “When I went to the canteen to have a cup of tea, it was full of celebrities,” Tempest says. “You know when you’re a kid and you dream about what life would be like if you made a record? It was like that Which“.

IIt all seems to be very in the spirit of Help’s original 1995 album. Obviously there have been charity compilations before, but Help attracted a notable amount of attention because, as War Child’s head of music, Rich Clarke, noted, the compilers tactfully suggested to the participating artists that they contribute something more special than outtakes that “didn’t make it to the single’s B-side.”

All songs had to be recorded in a 24-hour period. Paul McCartney re-recorded the Beatles’ song “Come Back” with Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller. Manic Street Preachers have donated their first recording since the disappearance of guitarist Richie Edwards. Radiohead presented a new single called Lucky, evidence of the extraordinary artistic development that would become abundantly clear two years later when they resurfaced on the landmark OK Computer.

The resulting album sold 70,000 copies in one day – and would have reached No. 1 had chart rules not prevented compilations, as is the case with multi-artist offerings – and was nominated for the Mercury Prize. She lost to Pulp’s Different Class, but as Coker noted, Pulp donated her prize money to War Child anyway. “Actually, I seriously thought there was a curse attached to Mercury – I don’t think I was in very good shape at the time – so we made a pact that if we won, no one would touch the cup and we would donate the money, which would save us,” he recalls.

Clarke says that was the reason for setting up the charity. War Child was founded in 1993 by two filmmakers, David Wilson and Bill Leeson, who saw the effects of war in the former Yugoslavia firsthand. The charity attempted to hold parties, arrange a fashion show and an art exhibition sponsored by Brian Eno and David Bowie, but the release of “The Help” “suddenly gained national and even international press, and deposited over a million pounds in the bank”.

Clarke says the decision to record a sequel “was back and forth for two or three years,” inspired partly by the 30th anniversary of the original Help album, partly by the severity of the crises in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine and Syria, and partly because fundraising through music was becoming more difficult. We’re in a very different world than when Band Aid, We Are the World, or Help could actually move large amounts of units with ease, taking advantage of the close pre-Internet public focus on a few radio and TV stations.

In the wake of Help, War Child released a string of albums featuring a host of big names, but as the digital age dawned, they moved away from compilations (Clarke says the economics of streaming meant it was “impossible to make any money from digital-only projects”) and towards playing live shows including Brits Weeks shows, with great success. Post-Covid, this also became a challenge: fewer tickets were sold, and artists began to worry that doing a charity concert would undermine ticket sales for their own gigs.

Thanks to strong sales of physical formats – 9.7 million CDs and 7.6 million vinyl albums in the UK in 2025 – and the belief that “streaming is likely for the big artists, and we can get some of the bigger artists involved”, War Child approached producer James Ford (Florence, Jessie Ware, Pet Shop Boys) to oversee the new album. With Toby L., co-founder of Transgressive Records, Ford began compiling a list of potential artists.

“Obviously a lot of people I knew and worked with were easy targets, so we started with them: Fontaines DC, Arctic Monkeys, Depeche Mode, Gorillaz, Pulp and people like that,” Ford says. Then, “It was actually a great take on the industry: that people were willing to do something. But the people who you thought would get fully into it said no because they thought it was too political or something. It was great.”

Ford has assembled a stunning and eclectic cast ranging from Olivia Rodrigo to the Young Fathers – not to mention Arctic Monkeys’ first new material since 2022’s The Car and the unlikely sound of Depeche Mode covering hippie troubadour Universal Soldier Donovan. It is more stylistically diverse than the original album, a reflection of a more fragmented and diverse musical era – indie rock borders on R&B, jazz coexists with mainstream pop – and features a series of collaborations: Arooj Aftab working with Beck; Wolf Alice Ellie Rosell alongside Anna Calvi, Nilufer Yanya and Dove Ellis. It’s hugely impressive, both as an achievement and as a listening experience: like their predecessors in the Britpop era, the contributors brought, in Ford’s words, “their signature A-game”.

But there were complications. Shortly after being assigned to lead the project, Ford was diagnosed with leukemia. “So, the actual week of the Abbey Road hearings, I was in the ICU and had a tube coming out of my neck,” he says. “But because of technology, I could be in the hospital, on my laptop, listening to what they were doing at the desk. I could press the space bar and talk into everyone’s headphones, so I was producing a lot of the tracks remotely. Olivia Rodrigo was singing live with strings and I was talking to her: ‘That was great, but try another take.’ I was having a blood transfusion at the time.”

“It was one of the most bizarre experiences of my life. But it kind of kept me sane. Having something that connected me to the real world, to something that I loved, was life-saving, really.”

Everyone seems rightly proud of the end result: the quality of the music, the degree of collaboration, the opportunity to raise money and awareness – even the unique interviewing techniques of the camera operators at Glazer Elementary, whose line of questioning included questioning Tempest about ice cream and demanding to know how old Coker was (“I said that was the worst question you could ever start with – I’m 62, thanks for reminding me”). In fact, says Colioso, who in addition to his work on Albarn’s track contributed to Ezra’s new group collaboration with Greenty Bing, the presence of the children was a masterstroke. “He humanized the issue so beautifully in the room,” he says. “They were having the time of their lives, and that’s what you hope and pray for for all children, no matter where they’re born.

“And it puts things in perspective, what’s important and what’s not important. This kid who was filming looked at my drum kit and said, ‘Wow.’ Just that ‘wow’ — it reminds you of why you started making music in the first place.”