....and there won't be an ounce of talent in this studio this Christmas time
In 1984 Bob Geldof and Midge Ure managed to cram together the greatest British and Irish popstars in a recording studio over a period of 24 hours to record one of the most defining songs of the decade: Do they know it's Christmas was not only an excellent song with a decent set of studio muscians (ok: Phil Collins fabricates some pretty bad AOR these days, but he used to be a pretty darn good drummer in his days), but also collected a couple of gazillions of dollars for a good cause, made the world aware of the plight of the starving Ethiopians and kickstarted Live Aid into action.
Unfortunately some weirdo americans picked up the idea and let We are the World loose on the unsuspecting humanity, but it became even worse: 5 years after the original Geldof/Ure masterpiece the frankensteins of the music industry decided to terrorize the world with their version of Do they know it's christmas: Yes, no other than Stock, Aitken and Waterman let out a short grunt, and hey presto, their entire stable of men and women with horrible hairdos, pink miniskirts and no talent whatsoever assembled in a studio in London to perform the biggest musical sacrilege since James Last started to mangle Bach. For some weird reason, a couple of half decent artists appeared as well and so Band Aid 2 was born.
The PWL "artists" (who were probably contractually obliged to appear) were:
The competition (as in horrible pop acts who didn't make it into PWL and a couple of half decent pop/soul acts who really should have known better:
Together they sang to the lifeless beat of A. Linn and a couple of sequenced DX 7's and ruined pretty much everybody's christmas.
Happy Holidays!
P.S. On November 14, 2004 recording for Band Aid 3 has started. Somebody else please node that, because I don't know any of the acts. Well, apart from Travis.