HELP Album 1995-2025

 

I am preparing the manuscript of my music and memory book (My World Music) for my publishers (Riversmeet) , and am adding a chapter on the War Child HELP album which was released 30 years ago. As I do so I am struck by how powerful it was; the quality of the music, the dedication of its artists and the strength of its message - that the war was being challenged by musicians while the politicians and corporate media looked the other way.

Decades later we have a much larger genocide taking place in Palestine and, although there are musicians actively working to expose current war crimes, (step forward Brian Eno and Roger Waters) where is the 2025 HELP album?

In August 1995 I was asked to speak at a demonstration in Trafalgar Square in support of the victims of the Bosnian war. Other speakers included Michael Foot and Brian Eno. I said: “I would like to speak on behalf of the young people of Bosnia. They are like young people everywhere. They take pleasure in music …They have the anger of youth and they can love like only youth can love. The young die when they are the ones who should live …In this war, it is the child who is killed because it is the child who plays in the street when the shell explodes.”

Tony Crean of Go Discs!, the record company that represented Paul Weller, happened to be walking through Trafalgar square and heard me. He later recalled. ‘Shit, I’ve spent the last couple of years of my life thinking about pop music and not realising what was going on under my nose’.

Andy Macdonald, the head of Go Discs! recalls that Tony ‘came into the office like a man possessed. He said, “Boss, I’ve been watching what’s happening in Bosnia. It’s fucking outrageous. We’ve got to do something.” '

And they did. A few days later my War Child co-founder, Bill Leeson, and I were invited to meet Tony and Andy in a Notting Hill restaurant. They told us of their plan to release the HELP album. It was to be recorded in studios on Monday, September 4th, 1995 and be in the shops five days later.

HELP sold over 70,000 copies on the day of its release, becoming the fastest-selling album in British music history. The artists waived royalties and it raised more than £1.5 million. Brian Eno produced the album and was responsible for making sure the recordings were ready for pressing in time for the Saturday release. Racing against the clock, he said of the experience, ‘Tapes were appearing from everywhere, me trying to keep some mental track of it… Enjoyable panic, but I went into Hitler mode in the last few minutes.’

The tracks included Oasis and friends with ‘Fade Away’, The Boo Radleys and ‘Oh Brother’, The Stone Roses (Love Spreads), Radiohead (Lucky), Orbital (Adnan), Portishead (Morning Air), Massive Attack (Fake the Aroma), Suede (Shipbuilding), The Charlatans vs The Chemical Brothers (Time for Living), Stereo MCs (Sweetest Truth), Sinéad O’Connor (Ode to Billy Joe), The Levellers (Searchlight), Manic Street Preachers, (Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head), Terrorvision (Tom Petty Loves Veruca Salt), The One World Orchestra (The Magnificent), Planet 4 Folk Quartet (Message for Crommie), Terry Hall and Salad (Dream a Little Dream of Me), Neneh Cherry and Trout (1,2,2,3,4,5), Blur (Eine Kleine Lift Music), The Smoking Mojo Filters with Paul Weller, Paul McCartney, Noel Gallagher, Steve Craddock , Damon Minchella. Steve White and Carleen Anderson with ‘Come Together’.

Paul Weller recalls that ‘I had to self-medicate because I was so nervous, so I was a fucking mess by the end of it. But Macca was great, man. He was really fucking cool.’Noel Gallagher remembers that, ‘As the tape started, it suddenly dawned on me that I’d never played 'Come Together' before. “What key’s it in?’ I asked. ‘I was fucking winging it.’

Listening to HELP 30 years later I am astounded with the entire album and don’t want to place one track above another. But if pushed it has to be Terry Hall and Salad ( Merijene van der Vlugt) with ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’. Terry Hall referred to his love of the Mamas and the Papas recording and deciding that ‘this is the one’. Of the studio recording session carried out over eight hours he says ‘There was a string section, two dogs roaming around, babies, press and a video crew. It seemed like the whole world was listening to me improvising some harmonies. I always say it was the highlight of our career. It meant the world to us.’

The income from the album was used to provide artificial limbs for wounded children, food and clothing to orphanages, the purchase of a refrigerated truck to supply insulin, funding for school meals in central Bosnia, support for a mobile medical clinic, the supply of premature baby units , as well as baby milk, contraceptives and even funding for mine clearance programmes. Linda McCartney supplied 22 tonnes of her veggie burgers which were delivered to three Bosnian cities. Help monies were also used towards the running of the War Child bakery and to expand the charity’s music programmes.

Tony Crean said, ‘we did something with real quality, it’s had an impact that’s lasted. If you chuck a big enough stone in the pond, some ripple will hit something and make a difference.’

Decades later and with another, bigger genocide taking place in Palestine, we need to chuck a fucking boulder into that pond and make a difference.

You can view the 1995 HELP album on YouTube and the Channel 4 TV documentary on the making of the album.You can then donate to Medical Aid for Palestine and if you are in the music business help lift that rock.

David Wilson, co-founder War Child

 

• LEFT FIELD
• http://www.davidwilson.org.uk/2019/09/left-field.html?fbclid=IwAR1kc8mt5b5E1XfR_AO9sEpGOGCE27HRe5FtKigoytbNVVx7ORm53TkRwpQ

MY WORLD CAFÉ

https://riversmeetproductions.co.uk/publications/

MY WORLD MUSIC

My World Music

Ukraine meatgrinder

 

Ukraine - The meat-grinder war

Here’s the history that the politicians and media will never tell you about Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia have been closely connected for over 1,000 years. Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, was once the capital of Kievan Rus and laid the foundations for Russia itself. During the Soviet era, Ukraine was central to the USSR. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was Ukrainian.

That was a long time ago. When the USSR collapsed, Washington stepped in, not to help Ukraine, but to weaponise it against Russia and leave the country defenceless against its bloody fate. Since then, the power brokers are not in Kiev, but in Washington, Moscow, Brussels & London.

The U.S. & NATO promised Mikhael Gorbachev they wouldn’t expand “one inch eastward", but the West poured billions into Ukraine—funding pro-NATO political groups, NGOs & media to manufacture an anti-Russian state.

In 2004, the CIA backed the "Orange Revolution," to overturn an election that favoured a pro-Russian candidate. Ten years later Ukraine’s democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, rejected an EU trade deal that would have destroyed Ukraine’s economy. So the US removed him with the "Maidan Revolution"- a CIA-backed coup—orchestrated by Victoria Nuland. If you have never heard of her you know very little about the region’s recent history. Let’s just say she handpicked Ukraine’s next leader, allowing Kiev to be taken over by neo-Nazi groups like the Azov Battalion, who celebrate their Nazi history and wear SS insignia.

The post-coup regime then banned the Russian language and attacked millions of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the east. That’s when Donbass and Crimea said enough. Crimea held a referendum with over 90% voting to return to Russia and Donbass followed. Kiev then launched a brutal war, shelling civilians for eight years. This started with a massacre of Russian-speaking protestors taking shelter in an Odessa trade union hall. When Russia intervened the media screamed “unprovoked invasion.”

So who is Zelenskyy? Before politics, he was a comedian and actor - literally playing the president on a TV show. Then, with the help of Western PR teams, fiction became reality. His campaign was funded by oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who owned Ukraine’s largest oil company and bank. Once in power, Zelenskyy’s priority wasn’t fighting corruption—it was making sure Kolomoisky, working with BlackRock and Western banks, took over Ukraine’s economy. Meanwhile, Zelenskyy funnelled millions into offshore accounts, and is alleged to have acquired a $34m mansion in Miami as well as a luxury London apartment.

With Ukraine losing the war, Zelenskyy might soon be a resident there as he is being abandoned. Donald Trump told him: "You don’t have the cards." And he’s right. Ukraine needed Western intervention to win and that would mean WW3. Once you’ve chosen to be the puppet of the US empire don’t show disrespect if you want to keep your shirt on. Forget that suit.

This was now a historic catastrophe for Zelenskyy and his version of Ukraine. “A disaster” and “bitter chaos” (The Economist); a “meltdown” that “could not have gone worse” (Financial Times); a “historic escalation” (Der Spiegel); a “disaster for Ukraine” and a “spectacular confrontation” (Le Monde); an “upbraiding” and “debacle” for Zelensky (New York Times).

Meanwhile Ukraine is running out of soldiers, and Ukrainian men are hunted like animals to be shipped off to the frontlines and a hopeless meat-grinder war.

Putin explained to journalist Pavel Zarubin that Moscow is open to business cooperation with the US regarding rare earth deposits everywhere in Russia, including territories recently conquered from Ukraine. Both Trump an Putin, representing US and Russian oligarchic regimes, are in it for the money.

The US has an impressive record of first using and then liquidating puppets. To name only a few, Ngo Dinh Diem of former South Vietnam, Manuel Noriega of Panama, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, and Osama Bin Laden.

Washington’s European vassals seem to be choosing the worst possible moment to finally rebel: They have helped drive an insane proxy war forward and pushed Ukraine into an abyss with fanatic, self-destructive submissiveness to US rulers. It is the Europeans who are now trying to obstruct the search for peace.

It is as perverse as you can imagine. These European ‘elites’ still manage to surprise: whenever you think they have done their very worst, they upstage themselves.

The U.S. started this conflict, which has always been a U.S. proxy war against Russia as well as a grab for Ukraine resources. Trump? True to form, he shifts position with an ever-eager eye for his personal opportunity. He escalated the conflict by increasing the arms sent to Poroshenko 2017-2019 and to Zelensky 2019-2021. Now he dumps his erstwhile ‘ally’.

And Zelenskyy? He was elected on the promise to end the attacks against eastern (Russian) Donbas regions, and subsequently did the opposite. He shut down all 14 opposition parties, closed all major media, embezzled $400 million of U.S. aid (see Seymour Hersh), closed Russian Orthodox Churches, and jailed opposition leaders and journalists.

He preferred Antony Blinken's and Victoria Nuland's brutal strategy, with approximately a million Ukrainian men killed to date in this conflict. Millions have emigrated, with many forced into the front lines and their deaths.

The mafia third degree televised interview between the orange man and the clown prince has got everyone to a point which started with the US neo-cons and their support for Ukrainian fascists in 2014.

Nevertheless, many prefer to stand with Ukraine and fly its flag, forgetting that a flag represents a state and not its people. The people’s flag would not be yellow and blue but red. Sadly not representative of a socialist present and future, but dipped in the meat-grinder blood that has become the fate of the Ukrainian people.

Meanwhile in Gaza?

Careful where you place your flowers

I was at the Gaza/Palestine rally in Whitehall yesterday (18 Jan 2024) which was to have concluded with a march to the BBC and I witnessed all that happened. 

The police banned the rally from being held, as originally planned, outside the BBC because they said it would offend the kahal kodesh (congregation) at a neighbouring synagogue during their time of service. The pro-Palestine movement have never threatened synagogues and, in any case there would be more Jews on the march than several synagogue congregations. These photos show orthodox Jews at the rally, descendants of holocaust survivors and the Jewish Bloc.

When the march organisers said they would rally in Westminster, place the Jewish Bloc at the front of the march, and arrive at the BBC long after any religious service, the police then changed the reason for the ban.It would be a nuisance to traffic. All marches are a nuisance to traffic. Their reasoning was obvious. The state broadcaster and its propaganda needs to be shielded from the opponents of the genocide they support.

After the Whitehall rally ended the organisers announced that they and some ‘celebrities’ present would now walk to the BBC and, if prevented from doing so, would lay flowers in front of police lines. To my way of thinking that is positively Gandhian. Later in the day The Guardian reported that  "More than 70 pro-Palestinian demonstrators were arrested in central London on Saturday on suspicion of breaching protest conditions after some allegedly broke through a police line as they marched from a rally in Whitehall."

No one 'broke through’ a police line. Two lines of police stood aside and even drove their vehicles away from blocking the road. I walked through the first line and exchanged smiles with the cop I walked past. They clearly wanted the marchers to proceed. After Trafalgar Square a third line of police and their vehicles did not move aside and Chris Nineham, chief steward, then attempted to effect the laying of flowers in front of the police by Juliet Stevenson, an 87-year old holocaust survivor  and others. No attempt was made to continue on to the BBC. Chris was violently arrested, held in custody for 19 hours and charged under the Public Order Act for 'organising an illegal demonstration'. Terms of his bail mean he is not allowed to organise or take part in any demonstration. This is a threat to all our civil liberties.

The truth is that the police wanted the marchers to go through their first two lines so that they could represent them as an unruly rabble set upon breaking through their lines. They successfully fooled The Guardian, but none of us who were there. 

Michael Rosen puts it well...

“Arresting demonstrators who are posing no threat to public order, and posing no threat to individuals or groups, is an expression of state power ...It's hard to gauge, but it seems as if the mainstream media are finding it hard to sustain the idea that what Israel has been doing in Gaza is legitimate. But in essence, the view that Israel's acts are legitimate, is the government view and is part of its alliance with the US. It's just possible that some people on high made calculations that arresting people will discourage some from attending demonstrations ... It looks as if the Met has boobed. We can see film of the police letting the leaders of the march through (thereby collaborating with them in 'breaking the law'!) ”.

Chris Nineham was held for19 hours, charged under the Public Order Act and then  released on bail. More than 40 others are still in custody as I write this. Release them all without charge Meanwhile we must charge the police and their State masters with using the laying of flowers in front of the police to move this country uncomfortably nearer a police state.

While writing this I received an email from a friend of mine .... 

“Nothing about this (the events as described above) on the News.  When I walked up Whitehall after my meet with friends at Tate Modern - I wandered into Trafalgar Square. I was wearing my Palestine scarf and a policewoman told me if I didn’t move in 30 seconds I would be arrested. I asked why. She said the square was a ‘non designated area’ and started counting . I said this was nuts and went off to see Francis Bacon. Earlier I had a Palestininan flag on my bag - a doorman at the Tate said I had to remove it. Why said I? Because the Tate is neutral. FFS

We can see what Gaza looks like. Are we really being told that we shouldn't have the right protest about this - Michael Rosen

End the Genocide march

 

Jewish Network for Palestine on 18 January Palestine march

"Saturday's march route has been reversed, we will go from Whitehall to the BBC. It's very important we get as many as possible for this march as the police pressure is mounting to ban us ... What the march organises are anticipating is a standoff with the police and so they are strategically putting all the "names" MPs and celebs on the front line and after them the Jewish bloc. So if the police do go in heavy, that's who they'll be arresting! It’s vital we continue to take to the streets in huge numbers to demand an end to British complicity in Israel’s genocide and apartheid, including through an end to all arms trade with Israel."

I have added this: The police say there is a synagogue close to the BBC. There isn’t. In any case there are likely to be more jews on the demo than in the synagogue and that assumes all synagogue attendees are Zionists. They are not. So if the police ‘kick off’ they will be arresting Jews for being too close to Jews. You cannot make this stuff up. It would be funny but the issue is genocide and that is not funny, join me on Saturday.I will be marching again walking with a stick, so hope to see you all there

Was It A Light in The Dark?

‘It Was A Light in The Dark’ ’ (The Guardian, 3 Jan.2025) was published to mark The Guardian’s decision to make War Child one of its charity appeal partners for 2025. Sadly it does so by straying far from the truth. 

When writing about War Child’s music projects in post-war Mostar (Bosnia Herzegovina)  and the work of the Pavarotti Music Centre (PMC), The Guardian claims that the centre ‘still provides music lessons and therapy to children in the city.’ There is NO therapy carried out at the music centre and NO music lessons. The only two music activities in the building are the town’s music school which has nothing to do with the PMC and Mostar Rock School which rents space from PMC for their work. Indeed when rock school organise concerts in the building they have to pay PMC for that! I need to add that the Rock School is as near as you get to music activities which reflect the early ideals of the music centre (bringing everyone together with music). 

I do not wish to criticise anyone at the PMC today - some of them remain my good friends - but they are in an insidious position, unable to work alongside the centre's founding ideals and are subject to political controls. That is a result of the removal of War Child support. 

War Child itself withdrew their support for the Pavarotti Music Centre soon after The Guardian’s 2001 article which exposed wrongdoing in the charity, and was followed by Jon Snow’s Channel 4 interview with Rosie Boycott (then Chair of War Child trustees). I was subsequently sacked by War Child for being the ‘whistleblower’ and as a result I had to leave my job as first Director of the music centre.

The parlous state of the Pavarotti Music Centre soon followed as the centre not only lost War Child support, but that of the patrons, including Luciano Pavarotti, Tom Stoppard, David Bowie, Juliet Stevenson and Brian Eno, among others. War Child has refused any support for the music centre for over 20 years and Rob Williams, then War Child CEO (salary £118,000), asked me to refrain from media comments without making clear that that I have no connection to the charity.

In 2017 I wrote an article which The Guardian published about my experience of corruption in the charity which I had co-founded. A year later the newspaper published an article about Orhan (Oha) Maslo and his great work as Director of the Mostar Rock School. 

In conclusion I think it wrong for War Chid to be favoured  as a Guardian  'charity partner' on the misleading assumption that they are involved with music projects that have sadly long-since disappeared,

I would like very much not to have to engage in any of this. I am 80 years old and have been ill. But Mostar is part of my life, indeed part of my family. Those who live there, and continue to unite young people with music, deserve to be served by the truth. That truth is not in The Guardian's "It Was A Light in The Dark". The light is coming from another direction.

Everything I mention here is supported by Guardian articles. See the below Guardian links.

David Wilson

co-founder War Child

First Director Pavarotti Music Centre

Guardian articles

STARS QUIT CHARITY IN CORRUPTION SCANDAL

MOSTAR ROCK SCHOOL

MY GUARDIAN ARTICLE ON WAR CHILD AND CORRUPTION

The Jimmy Saville of Nation States

 

It reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about. Many South Africans are beginning to recognise the parallels to what we went through  . Desmond Tutu

We now have a law that confirms the Arab population as second-class citizens. It therefore is a very clear form of apartheid. I don’t think the Jewish people survived for 20 centuries, mostly through persecution and enduring endless cruelties, in order to now become the oppressors, inflicting cruelty on others. This new law does exactly that. That is why I am ashamed of being an Israeli today.   Daniel Barenboim

The founder of Zionism at the end of the 19th century, Theodor Herzl, was an admirer of the British Empire and wrote to Cecil Rhodes, founder of the white settler colony named after him, He said, “You are being invited to help make history. It does not involve Africa but a piece of Asia Minor, not Englishmen but Jews … I turn to you … because it is something colonial ..”

Chaim Weizmann, who suceeded Herzl added that “Should Palestine fall within the British sphere of influence and should they encourage Jewish settlement … we could develop the country, bring back civilisation and form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal.”

You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist. Prayers at the US Embassy, on the day Trump moved it to Jerusalem, were delivered by Robert Jeffries, a Dallas megachurch pastor who said Hitler was sent by God to drive the Jews to their ancestral land.

The Jewish opponents of Zionism could be found at the same time as Herzl in the Jewish Bund, founded in 1897 in Poland and Russia. They stressed the principles of, socialism, secularism and doyikayt or “localness.”

Doyikayt was encapsulated in the Bund slogan: “There, where we live, that is our country.” One of their early leaders, Viktor Adler, declared “Bundists wish to shatter the existing economic frameworks and show the Jewish masses how a new society can be built not by escape, but by struggle. We link the essence of the Jewish masses’ life to that of humankind.

Here are past and present advocates who have linked their lives to humankind. Perhaps we will now be able to hear their voices more clearly.

Albert Einstein; “The (Israeli) state idea is not according to my heart. I cannot understand why it is needed … I believe it is bad ... There could be no greater calamity than a permanent discord between us and the Arab people … We must strive for a just and lasting compromise with the Arab people … Let us recall that in former times, no people lived in greater friendship with us than the ancestors of these Arabs."

Sigmund Freud: “I concede with sorrow that the baseless fanaticism of our people is in part to be blamed for the awakening of Arab distrust. I can raise no sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of a Herodian wall into a national relic, thereby offending the feelings of the natives.”

Erich Fromm, social psychologist: “The claim of the Jews to the Land of Israel cannot be a realistic political claim. If all nations would suddenly claim territories in which their forefathers lived two thousand years ago, this world would be a madhouse.”

Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz: “Everyone has their Jews and for the Israelis they are the Palestinians”.

Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising compared the Palestine resistance to ZOB, the Jewish fighters in Warsaw.

 

Hannah Arendt, political scientist: “The trouble is that Zionism has often thought and said that the evil of antisemitism was necessary for the good of the Jewish people.”

Martin Buber, Israeli philosopher: “How great was our responsibility to those miserable Arab refugees in whose towns we have settled Jews who were brought here from afar; whose homes we have inherited, whose fields we now sow and harvest; the fruits of whose gardens, orchards and vineyards we gather; and in whose cities that we put up houses of education, charity and prayer. . ”

Isaac Asimov, novelist: “I find myself in the odd position of not being a Zionist ... I think it is wrong for anyone to feel that there is anything special about any one heritage of whatever kind.”

Harold Pinter. On Israel’s 60th anniversary said, “We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land."

Uri Avnery, ex-Israeli army officer: “What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints.”

Daniel Barenboim, Israeli pianist and conductor: “I don’t think the Jewish people survived for 20 centuries, mostly through persecution and enduring endless cruelties, in order to now become the oppressors, inflicting cruelty on others.”

Lenni Brenner, writer and civil rights activist: “The Zionist leaders were uninterested in Fascism itself. As Jewish separatists they only asked one question, the cynical classic: 'So? Is it good for the Jews?'”

Richard Cohen, US columnist: “The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake … the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare.”

Henry Siegman, Rabbi and director of the U.S./Middle East Project: “Israel has crossed the threshold from ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ to the only apartheid regime in the Western world.”

Prof Norman Finkelstein: “Every single member of my family on both sides was exterminated. Both of my parents were in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And it is precisely and exactly because of the lessons my parents taught me and my two siblings that I will not be silent when Israel commits its crimes.’

Richard Falk, former UN special rapporteur on human rights, called Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories “a crime against humanity.” Falk also has compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to the Nazi treatment of the Jews.

Alexei Sayle: “Israel is the Jimmy Saville of nation states.”

Miriam Margolyes: “My support for the Palestinian cause is fiercer because I am Jewish.’

Noam Chomsky, “The last paradox is that the tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story—hard to understand and even harder to solve.”

Michael Rosen on the children of Gaza

Don't mention the children.

Don't name the dead children.

The people must not know the names

of the dead children.

The names of the children must be hidden.

The children must be nameless.

The children must leave this world...

having no names.

No one must know the names of

the dead children.

No one must say the names of the

dead children.

No one must even think that the children

have names.

People must understand that it would be dangerous

to know the names of the children.

The people must be protected from

knowing the names of the children.

The names of the children could spread

like wildfire.

The people would not be safe if they knew

the names of the children.

Don’t name the dead children.

Don’t remember the dead children.

Don’t think of the dead children.

Don’t say: ‘dead children’.