1 post tagged “shipbuilding”

The "Help! Album" released in 1995 for The War Child foundation was a particularly stunning album. Not only was it recorded in one day (Monday 4th of September), mixed the next day and was in shops by the Saturday but it helped raise more than £1.25 million for the charity which, at the time, was dealing with 2 million families displaced by the fighting in Sarajevo.

Produced by Brian Eno, the track listing was a veritable who's who of prominent British (-ish, technically Neneh Cherry is Swedish) artists including the first recording by the Manic Street Preachers since the disappearance of Richey Edwards, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty - better known as the KLF - recording as One World Orchestra and a hauntingly spare version of "Ode To Billy Joe" by Sinead O'Connor.

Many of the tracks actually benefited from the short turn around time. As Eno put it

"You know what sounds so great about these tracks? 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."

Not least of these was Suede's cover of Elvis Costello's "Shipbuilding"

which was itself originally written during the Falklands War in 1982 in response to the seeming contradiction that whilst the war bought prosperity back to the traditional shipbuilding areas like Merseyside, Tyneside and Belfast it was also these areas that traditionally provided many young men to join the military.

Anyway, great album if you can get hold of it and the official account of how it happened is also well worth a read.