Band Aid 20
Do They Know It's Christmas?

With three years of press stuffed full of fear and distrust, with us being trained to rat on our neighbours and look at strangers as enemies, all in the service of some sinister 'War On Terror'... how about we just for one moment, prize ourselves off our cynical arses and do something to make the world a better place?

...Bob Geldof is back again, nowadays prefixed by 'Sir', bawling at us to help a bunch of people existing in a living hell in Sudan, armed with a new supergroup and a new version of 'Do They Know It's Christmas'. It is one of the **worst records I have heard in recent memory, and more on that later, but how about we get inspired by Sir Bob, follow the sentiment and part with some of our hard earned cash... Watch the Band Aid 20 video, shed real tears at the skeletal Sudanese kids, caught between a genocidal militia's rock and starvation's hard place, but then shed indie tears that our established heroes Radiohead, and their producer Nigel Godrich, could be involved in such a shocking record, and finally extricate ourselves from our muso doldrums and vow to *do* something...

• Visit the Band Aid 20 website here and make a direct donation.

• Forfeit a couple of pints every month and feed the money to Oxfam's direct debit scheme here

• If you're in the mood for good music, you could get hold of the Live Aid DVD at any good record store.

  It all goes to the same place...

What I can't, in my heart of hearts, motivate myself to do, is buy this single. I cannot believe that a respected producer is happy to put his name to such an awful sounding record. There was all that talk about Bono and Justin Hawkins vying for the line that heralds the first chorus, and seniority won the day... and where Justin would have sung his heart out for us, Bono rewards us with a fkin _croak. Never before have I so yearned for **Simon Le Bon and George Michael.

...But you know what.. I don't think anyone on the record seems to care. Everyone's so wrapped up in the altruism of the sentiment that they've lost sight of any sense of pride in their actual work. This record is pure cp. It is symptomatic of all that is wrong with Britain, an attempt yet again to make scam win over substance, to make gimmick win over greatness. The fact that this record will sell based on the guilt trip alone appears to have led it's producers to believe that they could get away with anything vaguely intelligible, and somehow everyone's missed the point that a good pop record would also have sold to people who *_didn't give a st_* about people dying in Africa. I hear no passion, no performance, no charisma... just a mixture of musicians and manufactured mediocrities going through the motions. I am inclined to say to the participants 'Do YOU know it's Christmas'?