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‘I’ve no idea whose Rolodex Johnny Depp was on’: how the stars collided to make War Child’s Help

• On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the greatest musical charity event since Live Aid, Ed O’Brien remembers life in the former Yugoslavia, or at least a snapshot of it. In the Radiohead guitarist’s 1970s and 1980s childhood, he says, “my father took us on three consecutive cheap holidays [there]. It was like Greece or Italy. Then you heard about Srebrenica.” As he puts it, “much of the early- to mid-1990s seemed to be defined by what was going on in the Balkans”, as the collapse of the Soviet bloc catalysed a multi-party civil war in that region. By the middle of 1995, the siege of Sarajevo, ethnic cleansing and (that July) mass murder in Srebrenica were seared into the consciousness of Britons. Genocidal killing was happening in former package-holiday destinations, only a 150-minute flight from the UK. In London that summer, Tony Crean, a marketing manager at record label Go! Discs (home of Portishead and Paul Weller), watched the horrors unfolding on the nightly news. This was the summer of Peak Britpop – the Blur vs Oasis battle for the Number One slot made the Nine O’Clock News – and, like many of his peers, Crean had been happily caught up in the musical gold-rush. But, as he recently told Dorian Lynskey, this meant “not realising what was going on under my nose”. Things changed after the massacre of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, killed by Bosnian Serb forces led by Ratko Mladić. “Srebrenica was high in everybody’s mind,” recalls James Dean Bradfield, the Manic Street Preachers frontman. “Seeing people behind barbed wire fences, looking at their interminable fate – that echo down from European history, revisited in our time, was deeply disturbing.” Crean began talking to peers and artists in the British music industry. What could they do to help? He spoke to a new charity, War Child, with which the producer and artist Brian Eno was involved. It had been founded in London in 1993 by British filmmakers Bill Leeson and David Wilson; shooting on the ground in the former Yugoslavia, they’d seen first-hand the brutality of the war, notably as it impacted on children and young people. In their first year they had run a convoy of equipment and food to the Balkans to establish a mobile bakery.