When 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 for a new compilation benefiting War Child, called Help(2): a sequel to the charity’s hugely successful 1995 compilation Help. After seven solo albums, Tempest had begun thinking about working with others, and so the night before the recording session, he and Chatten repaired to Albarn’s studio and wrote their verses together, “responding to each other”. It seemed to work really well, he says: “A true collaboration.”
Nevertheless, he concedes, the actual recording of Flags proved to be quite the baptism of fire. “Johnny Marr was on guitar, Femi [Koleoso] from Ezra Collective was drumming,” he laughs. “Plus, there was a children’s choir.”
There were other children in Abbey Road studio, too, filming the sessions under the supervision of Jonathan Glazer, the Oscar-winning director of The Zone of Interest. Asked to make a film to accompany the album, Glazer decided that because War Child supports children affected by conflict, the overall project should reflect “the joy and freedom of childhood”. So he got children in war zones to film themselves playing, and asked pupils from local schools to come and document what was happening in Abbey Road.
“We had eight nine-year-olds running around with Sony Handycams,” says Glazer, “which was every bit as chaotic and wonderful as you can imagine.” He laughs. “One of the boys was filming Johnny Marr while he was recording, then he decided he wanted to film something behind him. He just sort of pushed Johnny’s guitar neck out of the way to get to it.”
As this was happening, every other studio at Abbey Road was occupied by artists recording tracks for Help(2): Jarvis Cocker was completing a new Pulp song, Begging for Change, and English Teacher were struggling to overcome disbelief at the fact that a song the band’s Lily Fontaine had written while she was still at university was to feature Graham Coxon on guitar. “Blur are a massive influence on English Teacher,” she says, “so when Graham walked in there was a kind of nervous hush that came over the room.”
The concurrent recordings led to some intriguing cross-fertilisations: English Teacher ended up singing with Albarn’s children’s choir, who Cocker also co-opted to scream on Pulp’s track, on the grounds 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 a lot of energy and life and make them do something supposedly grown-up and boring, so I thought it would be better to just get them to make a noise”.
All told, it was an overwhelming experience. “When you went to the canteen to get a cup of tea, it was full of famous people,” says Tempest. “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.”
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It all seems perfectly in keeping with the ethos of the original 1995 Help album. There had obviously been charity compilations before, but Help attracted a remarkable amount of attention because, as War Child’s head of music, Rich Clarke, notes, the compilers tactfully suggested to the artists involved that they contribute something more special than an outtake “that didn’t make the cut for a single’s B-side”.
All songs had to be recorded in a 24-hour period. Paul McCartney re-recorded the Beatles’ Come Together with Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller. Manic Street Preachers donated their first recording since the disappearance of guitarist Richey Edwards. Radiohead offered up a new song called Lucky, evidence of an extraordinary artistic evolution that would become fully apparent two years later when it reappeared on the epochal OK Computer.
The resulting album sold 70,000 copies in a day – it would have gone to No 1 had chart rules not precluded compilations, as they still do for multi-artist offerings – and was nominated for the Mercury prize. It lost out to Pulp’s Different Class, but as Cocker notes, Pulp donated their prize money to War Child anyway. “I actually, seriously, thought there was a curse attached to the Mercury – I don’t think I was very well at the time – so we made a pact that if we won, no one was going to touch the trophy and we’d give the money away and that would save us,” he recalls.
It was, Clarke says, the making of the charity. War Child was set up in 1993 by two film-makers, David Wilson and Bill Leeson, who had seen the effects of war in the former Yugoslavia first-hand. The charity had tried putting on gigs, arranging a fashion show and an art exhibition curated by Brian Eno and David Bowie, but the release of Help “suddenly gained national and even international press, and put over £1m in the bank”.
The decision to record a sequel has, Clarke says, “been kicking around for two or three years”, inspired partly by the original Help album’s 30th anniversary, partly by the severity of the crises in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine and Syria, and partly because fundraising through music has become more challenging. We’re in a very different world to when Band Aid, We Are the World or indeed Help could easily shift loads of units, and benefit from the public’s close pre-internet focus on a few radio and TV stations.
In the wake of Help, War Child released a string of albums featuring an array of big names, but as the digital era dawned, they pivoted away from compilations (the economics of streaming, Clarke says, mean “it’s impossible to raise any money from digital-only projects”) and towards putting on live shows including the Brits Weeks performances, with considerable success. Post-Covid, that too became challenging: fewer tickets were being sold, and artists began worrying that doing a charity gig would undermine ticket sales for their own gigs.
Heartened by robust sales of physical formats – 9.7m CDs and 7.6m vinyl albums in the UK in 2025 – and the belief that “streaming is weighted to the top artists, and we could get some top artists involved”, War Child approached producer James Ford (Florence, Jessie Ware, Pet Shop Boys) to oversee the new album. With Transgressive Records co-founder Toby L, Ford set about making a list of potential artists.
“Obviously, a lot of people I know and I’ve worked with were easy targets, so we started with them: Fontaines DC, Arctic Monkeys, Depeche Mode, Gorillaz, Pulp and people like that,” Ford says. Thereafter, “it was actually a great insight into the industry: which people are willing to do something. People who you’d think would be into it flat-out refused because they saw it as too political or something like that. It was fascinating.”
Ford assembled a striking and eclectic cast that ranges from Olivia Rodrigo to Young Fathers – not to mention the first new Arctic Monkeys material since 2022’s The Car and the improbable sound of Depeche Mode covering hippy troubadour Donovan’s Universal Soldier. It’s stylistically far more diverse than the original album, a reflection of a more fragmented and diverse musical era – indie rock abuts R&B, jazz coexists with mainstream pop – and features a succession of collaborations: Arooj Aftab working with Beck; Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell alongside Anna Calvi, Nilüfer Yanya and Dove Ellis. It’s hugely impressive, both as an achievement and as a listening experience: like their Britpop-era predecessors, the contributors have brought, as Ford puts it, “their A game”.
But there were complications. Not long after he was asked to lead the project, Ford was diagnosed with leukaemia. “So the actual week of the Abbey Road sessions, I was in the ICU with a pipe coming out of my fucking neck,” he says. “But because of technology, I could actually be in hospital, on my laptop, listening to what they were doing on the desk. I could press the space bar and talk to everyone’s headphones, so I was remotely producing a lot of the tracks. 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 sort of kept me sane. To have something that connected me to the real world, to something I love, was a life-saver, really.”
Everyone seems justly proud of the end result: the quality of the music, the degree of cooperation, the opportunity to raise money and awareness – even the unique interviewing techniques of Glazer’s primary school camera operators, whose line of questioning involved quizzing Tempest about ice-cream and demanding to know how old Cocker was (“I said, that’s the worst question ever to start off with – I’m 62, thanks for reminding me”). In fact, says Koleoso, who as well as working on the Albarn track contributed a new Ezra Collective collaboration with Greentea Peng, the presence of the children was a masterstroke. “It humanised the cause quite beautifully in the room,” he says. “They were having the time of their lives, and that’s what you hope and pray for all children, regardless of where they were born.
“And it puts things into perspective, what’s important and what’s not. This kid who was filming looked at my drum kit and he was just like, ‘Wow’. Just that ‘wow’ – it reminds you of why you started making music in the first place.”
• Help(2) is released 6 March on War Child Records
