Pop stars record fastest ever album for war children

Pop stars Radiohead, Razorlight and The Coral are to record the fastest album ever made to raise funds for children affected by wars.

Around 20 acts will each record a new song in a single day on the 10th anniversary of the first "War Child" album, Help, which raised nearly £2 million for children in Bosnia.

The new album, Help: A Day in the Life, (and individual tracks) will be available for downloading on the War Child and other websites on the day of recording on September 9, making it the fastest album ever made. A CD will be released in the following weeks.

Radiohead, whose track Lucky was one of the highlights of the first CD, were among the first bands to sign up to the new venture. Other acts expected to take part include the Zutons, Bloc Party, Hard-Fi, The Coral, Elbow and Manic Street Preachers, who also took part in the original project by recording Burt Bacharach's Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.

Despite fears that charity fatigue may have set in following recent fund-raising for tsunami victims and Live 8, the War Child charity hopes the new album will benefit children in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Mark Waddington, War Child's chief executive officer, said: "As a music fan, I know what the original Help album meant and as the present CEO of War Child I know what it achieved.

"It was my intention that any new album should match up to the feats of the past. That's why we have set ourselves the challenge of remaking history and releasing the fastest album ever again. It's a tall order but we feel with the support of amazing artists such as Radiohead and Hard-Fi we can make it happen."

The original Help was the brainchild of four music industry publicists, Terri Hall, Tony Crean, Rob Partridge and Anton Brookes who had been shocked by the massacre at Srebrenica and the sieges of Sarajevo and Mostar.

It was recorded in studios across Europe on 4 September, 1995, by bands including Orbital, Stone Roses, Suede, Massive Attack, PJ Harvey and Sinead O'Connor with Brian Eno as its executive producer.

Paul McCartney recorded a version of Come Together with Paul Weller and Noel Gallagher of Oasis.

The finished product was released less than a week later and went straight into the charts at number one after selling more than 71,000 copies in its first day in the shops - a record six days from when recording began to reaching the top of the charts the following weekend.

It raised enough money to enable War Child to carry out aid projects in Bosnia Herzegovina straightaway. War Child had been established two years earlier specifically in response to the conflict in the Balkans.

- THE INDEPENDENT