“The idea was to not make it shit”: the story of Band Aid 20, the only Radiohead and Rachel Stevens crossover you’ll ever need

The quality control on charity singles is often hit or miss but what can be relied upon with most recording sessions for that sort of thing is the utter hilarity they throw up in putting disparate, they’d-never-usually-cross-paths artists in the same place. Band Aid 20, which itself turned 20 last month, offered up more insane crossovers than most, a tangling of A-list pop stars, Z-list pop stars, reality show winners, all-time legends, furrow-browed art-rockers, rappers, indie heroes and Danel Bedingfield.

The whole thing was overseen by illustrious producer Nigel Godrich, the man behind the mixing desk for OK Computer and every Radiohead album after, and in 2009 he told The Guardian how it all came about.

He got the call, he said, whilst working with Paul McCartney on his album Chaos And Creation In The Backyard, and after agreeing to do it, set about forming the track’s core band. “I asked Paul to play bass, bless him, he said yes,” he recalled. “I asked my favourite drummer, Danny Goffey from Supergrass. Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead helped out.”

Godrich said it wasn’t a problem sourcing the track’s guest singers, the issue was more trying to fend off those who wanted to appear on the song. “I remember being chased down the corridor of a private members’ club by Duncan from Blue’s manager,” he confessed. “I just said, ‘I’m not talking to you about this now’. The idea was to not make it shit.”

Godrich was glad he did it, he concluded, adding that “it raised quite a bit of money.” But when this writer spoke to him in 2022, the producer had changed his tune ever-so-slightly. “I definitely had a bit of a beam me up moment when we doing that Band Aid 20 single,” he said.

Pressed on the matter, he elaborated. “It was just one of those things where you feel like, ‘If I can contribute something then I can help and it’s such a good cause I should do it’ and getting musicians together to do something like that is quite difficult. I was working with McCartney at the time so I managed to strong arm him into coming in and playing bass. And obviously Geldof’s hassling Thom so I had this sort of funny superstar band, which is Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and Danny Goffey on drums and Paul McCartney on bass and Travis frontman] Fran Healy doing the frontman-y bit to get the backing track. It just was a bit of a clusterfuck trying to get the actual track together.”

“The whole thing is just so not me and then what happened was we just couldn’t really get a good take so I was up until three in the morning trying to cut it together without much help from certain parties. It was like, ‘What’s going on here?!’.”

But, like the man said, it raised money for a good cause. The 2004 rendition hasn’t aged particularly badly, even if it is odd to hear Jonny Greenwood’s guitar style segue into a twin solo from The Darkness. And where else could you hear Rachel Stevens singing along to a piano track by Thom Yorke? Revisit Band Aid 20 below:

Band Aid 20 - Do They Know It's Christmas? (Official Video) [4K] - YouTube

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