Earlier this week, subscribers to the email newsletter Rocking Vicar found in their inbox a heartfelt plea relating to the Indian Ocean tsunami. It alerted readers to the DJ and composer Mike Read's forthcoming charity single, Grief Never Grows Old, featuring Cliff Richard, Ronan Keating and Boy George, and recommended urgent action: "If enough people contribute to the Disasters Emergency Committee, then there would be no need to visit this record on the public." This seems to be a fantastic plan.
The arrival of Grief Never Grows Old, so soon after Band Aid 20, suggests that the UK may once more break out in a rash of charity singles to match that of the mid-1980s. Then, in the wake of the original Band Aid, virtually no sad event could pass without musicians and minor celebrities rushing into a recording studio, headphones and pained expressions at the ready. A nadir was reached with Doctor in Distress by the aptly named Who Cares? - a stellar line-up including the Moody Blues' Justin Hayward and one of Bucks Fizz, simultaneously raising money for cancer research and protesting the BBC's decision to cancel Dr Who. Then again, it's hard to pick a single low point, because they all hit one: artistically, at least, the charity single never works.
The standard complaint - that the artists involved are always too middle-of-the-road to come up with anything other than mawkish bilge - was disproved by Band Aid 20. It featured Dizzee Rascal, possibly Britain's most groundbreaking artist, yet his contribution was widely deemed the most risible of all. The problem runs deeper: rock and pop are incompatible with records that are intended to draw attention to the desperate plight of those caught up in a recent disaster.
The things that rock and pop do well - irreverence, iconoclasm, flamboyance, fun, creating moral outrage - have no place on a charity single, as Justin Hawkins of the Darkness discovered during the recording of Band Aid 20. Instead, everyone involved is forced to fall back on things rock and pop music traditionally do badly: earnestness, didacticism, moral outrage. You might just get away with it if you had time to craft something full of subtlety and nuance, but charity singles are invariably made in a hurry, and there's nothing subtle about rattling a collection tin. It's one aspect of the 1980s that doesn't need reviving.
