Inside War Child UK Charity Album

Abbey Road Studios was buzzing with activity last fall. Longtime record executive Rich Clarke remembers the scene in the London studio’s cafeteria in late November 2025: “You look up and you’ve got [Fontaines D.C.’s] Grian Chatten having a talk with [the Libertines’] Carl Barât by the door,” he says. “You’ve got Damon Albarn sat with Jonathan Glazer on one table. And then suddenly all of Pulp walk in and they’re in a queue to get their lasagna.”

Those luminaries were all there to work on HELP(2), a compilation album supporting the charity organization War Child UK, where Clarke serves as head of music. Out March 6, it’s a majorly star-studded affair, with new songs and covers by Olivia Rodrigo, Cameron Winter, Wet Leg, Sampha, Arlo Parks, Depeche Mode, Big Thief, and many others. The first single from the album, “Opening Night,” is also the first new song that Arctic Monkeys have released since 2022: a perfectly louche anthem-in-waiting with an instant-classic lead vocal from Alex Turner.

Founded in the early Nineties by a pair of filmmakers who were horrified by the violence of the Bosnian Civil War, War Child provides services to children who are affected by global conflict — meaning not just the immediate needs of food, water, and shelter, but also longer-term support for mental health and education. The organization has a long history of partnering with musicians, going back to 1995’s The Help Album, which boasted new songs from Paul McCartney, Radiohead, Blur, Oasis, Portishead, and more of the biggest names in British music. “That had a huge effect for the charity,” Clarke says. “At that point, they were doing minor things, delivering supplies behind siege lines in Sarajevo. It allowed the organization to scale up, because crucially, it had money to fund activities.”

The idea for a new Help album had been percolating since around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “Since that moment, we’ve seen escalation of violence in the Middle East. We’ve seen the civil war in Sudan go to probably the largest humanitarian crisis in the world right now — there’s 15 million children who are in need of humanitarian assistance in Sudan,” Clarke says. “There’s been a real feeling from the artist community of wanting to do something.”

Monkey Business for a Good Cause

The project gained speed in late 2024, when producer James Ford came on board, followed quickly by Arctic Monkeys, with whom he’s worked closely for many years. “Anything James touches turns to gold,” drummer Matt Helders tells Rolling Stone. “If he’s putting something together, we know it’s going to be for the right reasons, and also be a good-quality thing, as well.”

Arctic Monkeys have their own relationship with War Child going back to 2018, when they played a show at the Royal Albert Hall and donated the proceeds to the organization. A live album from that concert, released two years later, yielded even more funds for children affected by war. “I think we’re just shy of £1.5 million from the show and the record,” Clarke says.

When the band met up at Abbey Road toward the end of 2025, it was their first time together in a studio in a few years. They decided to revisit an unfinished song that Turner had been toying with for more than a decade; Helders estimates that it first surfaced “in Joshua Tree, when we used to record out there.” (Dedicated Monkeys scholars can deduce that it probably entered the picture during the sessions for 2009’s Humbug or 2013’s AM, both partially recorded in the California desert.)

“He never got to scratch the itch of completing this song,” Helders says. “It was just one of those that wouldn’t go away in his head, I think. There was never a full version of it. We’d jam it out and try to write parts for it. It never got over the finish line, but it was too good to just leave alone.”

Now, they tried taking another run at “Opening Night” in the style they’ve evolved into on later albums like Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino and The Car. “And it just worked,” Helders says. “It’s different to what it was going to be if we did it 10, 15 years ago, but we were all really happy with it… It’s almost like this song was waiting until we were good enough to do it.”

Coming Full Circle

The rest of the HELP(2) sessions, the bulk of which took place over three days at Abbey Road, featured some other familiar faces, too. Back in 1996, when Pulp won the Mercury Prize for their era-defining album Different Class, they donated their winnings to War Child, feeling that The Help Album ought to have won instead. Three decades later, Jarvis Cocker and company stepped up to contribute a characteristically droll rocker called “Begging for Change” to the new project.

The original Help album, released at the height of the Britpop craze, included an instrumental track from Blur. This time, Blur guitarist Graham Coxon dropped by Abbey Road to sit in with the indie band English Teacher, while Albarn teamed up with Chatten and rapper Kae Tempest to polish off a new song called “Flags.”

“It was quite major chords, which is unusual for me,” the Blur/Gorillaz singer tells Rolling Stone. “So when conversation of War Child came, I thought it was quite a good thing to present as an idea.”

Albarn is a fan of both Chatten and Tempest, calling them both “huge talents,” and he was delighted to form an impromptu trio with them in the studio. “Flags” wound up featuring guitar from Johnny Marr, Portishead’s Adrian Utley, and Dave Okumu, as well as backing vocals from Cocker, Barât, Declan McKenna, Marika Hackman, the members of Black Country, New Road, and several other musicians who were around that day.

“We did it all together, like a band,” Albarn says. “When you do music for charity, it can be a bit trite somehow. But I don’t think we got distracted by that sense of, ‘Oh, we’re doing a charity record.’ We all just enjoyed recording together in Abbey Road.”

All of this action was recorded on hand-held cameras wielded by a crew of grade-schoolers that Glazer, the filmmaker behind The Zone of Interest and Under the Skin, sent to Abbey Road to document the sessions. “It’s to tell the story through the eyes of children,” Clarke says. “At one point, they’d be sat next to Damon on the piano stool, or sticking a camera up Jarvis’ nose in the vocal booth in Studio Three. It had a wonderful effect on the atmosphere, because once you’ve got kids running around, it just takes the stress away.”

Sadly, Ford, who was diagnosed with leukemia in early 2025, was unable to attend the sessions in person. So War Child brought in top producers including Marta Salogni and Catherine Marks to help out, and Ford continued to provide as much remote input as possible.

On the final day of recording, Dec. 17, Olivia Rodrigo came by Abbey Road to record a quietly stunning cover of the Magnetic Fields’ “The Book of Love”; the track also features Coxon on acoustic guitar. Ford, who was receiving treatment in the hospital at the time, guided the session over Zoom. “He was actually talking into Olivia Rodrigo’s [headphones] while she was recording, while he was having a blood transfusion,” Clarke says. “Remarkable man, and an absolute genius.”

Around Christmas, Clarke got to hear Arctic Monkeys’ “Opening Night” for the first time. A longtime fan of the band — “I’m old enough to remember seeing them in Camden in skinny jeans and a flannel shirt and long hair” — he knows that getting a new single from them is no small feat. “We didn’t take it for granted,” he says. “I was absolutely blown away. It’s a brilliant track, isn’t it?”

With “Opening Night” out now and the album arriving on streaming services soon, he’s looking forward to seeing how fans respond to all the music that got made at Abbey Road for War Child. “The wonderful thing is, these rights are going to support children affected by conflict in perpetuity,” Clarke says. “The music’s the legacy piece, and the quality of that will carry through for the next 30 years, we hope. Fingers crossed.”