THE HELP STORY On September 9, 1995, War Child released an album called ‘Help’, featuring some of the best in Brit Pop including Oasis, Radiohead and Blur. In a story featuring Tony Blair, car crashes, private jets, Pot Noodles, John Lennon and a pregnant bear... here, for the first time, we tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the making of Help. A few months before the album was released, Tony Crean – the then International Marketing Manager at the record label Go! Discs - was laid up with a dose of the ‘flu’. At the same time, the fighting in and around the Bosnia capital, Sarajevo, was reaching its height. The inter-ethnic conflict had taken the lives of 250,000 people and displaced a further two million. Hundreds of thousands of families, men, women and children were left with nothing. When Tony Crean returned to work, he couldn't stop thinking about "Everyone was aware of it, but no one knew what to do," he said. "I was reading a quote from a charity worker who said, 'We need £200,000 to feed and clothe these children, and it's £200,000 we haven't got'. And I thought, 'if Melody Maker and NME readers just gave a pound each that would do the trick'," he said. "Then I saw Black Grape at the Hanover Grand."

At the show, Crean bumped into the band's then PR Manager, Anton Brookes. " Brookes talked to the band that night about doing something. They said yes. A phone call later and The Stone Roses agreed to help out too. "The initial idea was a big gig with The Stone Roses and Black Grape," said Roses' PR Terri Hall. "But the venue, Old Trafford Cricket Ground, fell through." Over a Chinese meal, Crean, Brookes, Hall and fellow PR Rob Partridge realised that between them they knew every British rock and dance act worth their salt. With The Grape and The Roses on board maybe other acts would help out. Maybe they could put together an album... When John Lennon released his 'Instant Karma' single in February 1970, he said records should be like newspapers, reflecting events as they are happening. "The best record you can make," the Beatle claimed, "is recorded on Monday, cut on Tuesday, pressed up on Wednesday, packaged on Thursday, distributed on Friday, in the shops on Saturday." As ideas go it fitted the brief rather nicely.

So, Help would be recorded on a Monday, mastered on a Tuesday, pressed on a Wednesday... you get the idea. The plan involved releasing the album on a Saturday and celebrating its Number One status on Sunday, making it the fastest album ever recorded.

Days after this first meeting, Crean returned to War Child with a list of artists who'd be up for contributing to the record including Portishead, The Stone Roses, The Chemical Brothers, Paul Weller and Massive Attack. Within days, the Help album was full steam ahead with the finest British acts of the moment lining up studios from Wales to Malaga. "The idea was to get some of the laziest people you could think of to do something as quickly as possible," offered Crean. "That a band like the Stone Roses, who took five years to record one album, could actually turn round a track in a day sends out a signal that anything is possible."

When the clock hit one minute past midnight on Monday, September 4, 1995 there was no going back. The KLF - operating under the name “One World Orchestra” - finished their track, 'The Magnificent', at 10am, talked the Yugoslavian embassy into issuing them with visas by 10.30am and promptly boarded a plane to Sarajevo to, among other things, debut the track on the underground B92 radio station in the very city it would be helping. At 9am on the morning of September 5, War Child patron, Brain Eno, began the process of mastering the album at London's Townhouse Studios. Despite a number of "technical hitches" (Crean crashed his car while trying to tune the radio, the tapes of The Manics' song missed the last ferry from France and Neneh Cherry's caught the last cargo plane out of Malaga in the nick of time), the tapes were all where they were supposed to be "You know what sounds so great about these tracks?" asked Eno as he listened to the tapes for the first time. "They're all so fresh. I really hope it sets a precedent - that people will stop messing about in the studio for months on end, emerging with the sort of over-processed nonsense often presided over by the likes of me."

The non-stop 32-hour production process ran six hours over schedule. But, as one clever person noted, the deadline would be met because Saturday isn't movable. By Wednesday, finished copies of the album - with artwork by John Squire of The Stone Roses and Massive Attack's 3-D as well as sleeve notes by Nirvana's Krist Novaselic , began to arrive at the distribution centre of Go! Discs' parent company in Chadwell Heath. By Friday, a fleet of Securicor vans had delivered over 300,000 copies of the album to record stores the length and breadth of the country in preparation for the following day. When record shop doors opened for business on Saturday morning, War Child couldn't have wished for more. The record sold, in one day, enough copies to become Number One. Help went on to raise a staggering £1.25 million - far more than anyone at War Child had dared to wish for. Money from the album began helping the children of Bosnia immediately. Thanks to a £300,000 advance handed over by Go! Discs' Andy Macdonald on the day of recording, War Child was able to get to work before the album was released.

The positive affect of Help was soon felt across Bosnia - £100,000 of prosthetic materials for making artificial limbs was delivered to Tuzla and Sarajevo, a mobile bakery was given a new lease of life in Mostar, premature baby units arrived in Banja Luka, a mobile Medical Centre in Bihac. School meals were provided to children in the frontline town of Olovo and over 320,000 condoms were delivered across the country. At the Q Awards in November 1995, Tony Blair stepped up to present the record with a specially-created award. "This is a remarkable album," he said. "At a time when there was a danger of the West turning its back on the war in Bosnia, it helped put it back in the headlines and reactivate public interest. It helped us be aware of our responsibilities to other people." The Brits also recognised the release by creating a new award. Pulp's 'Different Class' lifted the Mercury Music Prize the following year, but Jarvis gave the award and prize money to War Child saying that 'Help', which was also shortlisted, would have been a better choice.

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