Various Artists - Help!: A Day in the Life (2005)

1) Coldplay - How You See the World No. 2; 2) Razorlight - Kirby's House; 3) Radiohead - I Want None of This; 4) Keane & Faultline - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road; 5) Emmanuel Jal - Gua; 6) Gorillaz - Hong Kong; 7) Manic Street Preachers - Leviathan; 8) The Kaiser Chiefs - I Heard It Through the Grapevine; 9) Damien Rice - Cross-Eyed Bear; 10) The Magic Numbers - Gone Are the Days; 11) Tinariwen - Cler Achel; 12) The Coral - It Was Nothing; 13) Mylo - Mars Needs Women; 14) Maximo Park - Wasteland; 15) Elbow - Snowball; 16) Bloc Party - The Present; 17) Hard-Fi - Help Me Please; 18) The Go! Team - Phantom Broadcast; 19) Babyshambles - From Bollywood to Battersea; 20) George & Antony - Happy Christmas, War Is Over

A charity album turned scene compilation, mid-00s UK in a thrilling nutshell.

Key tracks: "Leviathan" (Manic Street Preachers), "Gone Are the Days" (The Magic Numbers), "Kirby's House" (Razorlight)

War Child - a UK-based charity established to aid children in war-torn regions - at one point in time realised that charity music compilations are an excellent way to raise funds for good causes, especially if you actually give the artists free reins rather than go for jolly charity singles. 1995 saw the release of War Child's first collection The Help Album, and since then the charity have been periodically releasing collections of brand new music to raise awareness and money, focusing on the current and contemporary artists of the given year the release comes out, each of whom contribute something new and unheard - whatever they want.

Because of the way they come about, War Child albums have inadvertently become snapshots of the British music scene of whichever time period one gets released in. The Help Album united the biggest names in and around Britpop as well the nascent threads of pre-millennium anxiety that was about to take over, becoming one of the decade's definitive various artist compilations if you're in any way that taste inclined. In 2005, on the tenth anniversary of the original release, the official sequel Help!: A Day in the Life acted as a similar definition of where British music was in the mid-00s: the rise of the new art rock scene, the oversaturation of landfill indie, the masters of yore exploring new paths and the mashing of other sounds and genres into the traditionally British songwriting, represented here through the twenty songs. Besides the returning veterans (Radiohead, Manic Street Preachers, Damon Albarn by way of Gorillaz) and the few then-upcoming future stars (Bloc Party, Elbow, The Go! Team), looking at the tracklist is a right blast in the past, glowing with names that at one point in time meant something but now have been lost completely in time: The Magic Numbers, Mylo, The Coral, etc, etc. If you want to know what music in the UK sounded like in 2005, Help!: A Day in the Life is practically a Nuggets compilation.

Each War Child selection comes with a gimmick and the one for Help! was that each song was recorded, produced and released within the same 24 hours, taking advantage of the growing digital download market (the CD arrived a little later). Given the circumstances, it's really surprising just how much effort nearly everyone involved has put in - maybe realising that going for zero effort in a charity compilation probably isn't cool, not that it stopped Babyshambles whose "From Bollywood to Battersea" is exactly the kind of "pub's closing in five, let's call it a day" garbage they were synonymous with (why we ever as a species thought Pete Doherty should have a record deal, I've no idea). Coldplay recycle a prior Japanese bonus track off X&Y and call it 'No.2' (though the differences are so minor I can't even detect them), but at least it's a good song, and Chris Martin sounds downright angry at one point in it which is a surprising turn of events. A number of artists also turn in covers, which isn't too unexpected: The Kaiser Chiefs turn "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" into a laddy pub disco anthem (shudder), Keane's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" sounds like a Keane song, and Boy George and Anohni dueting on John Lennon's "Happy Xmas" is some kind of a LGBT fever dream that strangely works, Ending the album on a Christmas song (and let's remember this was released in autumn originally) is a bit off-kilter and out of everything on the record it screams "charity album" the most, but there's sincerity and warmth in the makeshift duo's performance that closes the record in an unexpectedly poignant way.

It's the original material that keeps me coming back to this record though. The artists I already knew and loved are in strong form, with Manics previewing their imminent return to guitar riffs with the fiery and frivolent (those handclaps!) "Leviathan", Elbow's "Snowball" is full of barely restrained anger as Guy Garvey fantasises over the ghosts of war-killed innocents coming back to haunt Tony Blair over a deceptively pretty melody which by the end has morphed into a villain song, The Go! Team's "Phantom Broadcast" is a delightful Bollywood spaghetti Western theme, and the contemplative "Hong Kong" is one of my favourite Gorillaz songs and absolutely worth looking up for anyone who enjoys Demon Days. I don't think anyone else in Radiohead but Yorke ever even knew "I Want None of This" existed and it's certainly no "Lucky" (their original The Help Album contribution), but Yorke mashing his piano hauntingly is always engaging to at least some degree. Meanwhile the "forgotten" artists remind why they did inspire budding fanbases in one point in time - The Magic Numbers have always left me a little cold but "Gone Are the Days" genuinely makes me wish I'd love them because it's such a jubilantly lovely summer number, and Mylo's "Mars Needs Women" is a fun slice of mid-00s hipster house. Even the pub rock acts I could barely stomach back in the day cause me to question my 2000s self, courtesy Razorlight's "Kirby's House" and Hard-Fi's "Help Me Please" - both more engaging and inspired than anything else I've ever heard from the two acts, as if the mere presence of the more esteemed peers pushed them further (both acts also re-recorded these songs for their follow-up albums, which means even they were impressed by the tracks).

Not all here is gold and that's just the nature of twenty-track various artists compilations, and the slightly less exciting cuts most of the time pick up enough power through their peers that they work in the flow, next to a lot of great music from acts that may not have crossed your mind for eons. The thing is, I bought this for pennies for the sole purpose of nabbing a few non-album tracks off artists I like and yet it's turned out to be something very different: a rock solid scene compilation. The 2000s were when I really took off as a music fan and my attention was very heavily focused in the British music media and independent scene; Help!: A Day in the Life brings me right back to that time period, of online fanzines and forums, of hype machine going up and down on each new act. It was a genuinely exciting and fertile period for British music, and the wild and varied sounds and accents of this compilation represents it incredibly well.

Rating: 8/10