Band Aid 20
Take an existing, terrible Christmas song. Admittedly, having the words ‘Terrible’ and ‘Christmas song’ in the same sentence is a bit redundant, but you see where I’m going with this.
Get together a group of nice, media-friendly musicians. Nobody too threatening or challenging — those nice boys from Keane and Snow Patrol, say, and that lovely Fran Healy and Justin Timberlake Hawkins. Also, Dido, and, for a bit of pizazz, throw Robbie Williams into the mix as well.
Make sure that anybody with any real musical credibility — Neil Hannon, Damon Albarn, Olly Knights, Gale Paridjanian — are tucked away in the chorus. Realise that the more people you have singing at once, the less it actually matters who they are as it will all blend into one big noise anyway, so chuck Daniel and Natasha Beddingfield in for good measure.
Have a bit of petulant — and public — squabbling over who gets to sing Bono’s famous line from the original. After everyone involved is revealed to the public to be a git, give the line back to Bono.
Have Dizzie Rascal in to rap, because urban music is cool. Don’t give him too much to do, though — wouldn’t want to scare people!
Get Lemar and Will Young in as well, because they’re also cool. They were on the telly!
Attempt to make it sound a bit different by putting the emphasis on some words in different places. So, for example, change “Feeeeeed the WOR-rld” to “Feeeeeed the wor-RLD” and “TONIGHT thank God it’s them instead of you” to “Tonight thank God it’s them inSTEEEEAAADDD of you”. It’ll make all the difference, and will distract you from the cacophony of what is charitably called ‘the singing’.
Cause a severe crisis of conscience in DJs across the land, who want to play the song because it’s for a good cause, but don’t want to play the song because it’s not very good.
Repeat all of this in a few years time. There’ll never be a shortage of humanitarian disasters or depressing and mediocre bands, after all.
There will be many who will buy this song because the money will go to help people in the Sudan. I suggest people who aren’t buying it, or don’t like it but are buying it anyway, donate directly to the British Red Cross instead. Of course, the release of the song does help draw attention to the plight of the Sudanese, so I can’t fault it there — and, after all, what would Christmas be without terrible, terrible music?