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Songs can grow and assume new shapes with time, and pop’s power to engage people has taken Crowded House’s 16-year-old ballad and given it new life as a charitable ode to refugees

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I have two singles of the song Go West. It doesn’t matter which one I play. Either will reduce me to tears, but only one is intended to have that effect. The version that gave Village People a hit in 1979 was intended to be no more or less than a song about the American dream. With words written and sung by Victor Willis (the one who dressed as a naval officer), Go West transcended its lyrical intentions. For thousands of gay men seeking to leave behind the strictures of small-town prejudice, Go West became the new national anthem of New York. Fourteen years later, when Pet Shop Boys enlisted the services of the Welsh male voice choir for their version, Go West meant something entirely different. It was a requiem to the permissive pre-Aids idyll of New York and all the people whose lives it had claimed. One version made you cry because the people who made it had no idea what was about to wreak havoc on their promised land; the other because you knew how this story ended.

Time has a crude way of separating the good songs from the bad songs. The bad songs don’t grow or change. They harden in the light and remain exactly as they were when you first encountered them. The music you keep coming back to, though, isn’t like that. It does all the things that living things do. It grows and assumes new shapes with time. The truths it imparts seem more profound with every year, be it what Martha and The Vandellas’ Heatwave has to say about love or the anguished questing of U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. Some songs connect straight away. Others are gifts from writers to their future selves. These days, when Yusuf Islam – formerly Cat Stevens – sings Father & Son, he does so “from the point of view of someone who has still a lot to learn from their children”.

When Fleetwood Mac perform Silver Springs now, it takes on the form of both a karmic pasting issued by Stevie Nicks to Lindsey Buckingham and an apology from the band who elected, against her wishes, to omit it from the album Rumours. It’s hard not to feel like an intruder when you see Nicks eyeball her ex-lover and sing: “You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loved you.” The best songs transcend the limitations of their authors and display a wisdom often lost on the people who created them. I fear we’ve lost the Morrissey who once sang, “It takes guts to be gentle and kind”, but we still have the bands who hardwired the humanity of his early songs into their outlook: bands such as British Sea Power, whose Waving Flags exhorts new émigrés from eastern Europe to “welcome in/From across the Vistula/You’ve come so very far”.

At times, it seems as if those sentiments are more in evidence in Germany than they are here. Music shouldn’t have to tease out the decency that Ukip and certain sections of the press conspire to suppress but, of course, the fact is that it does. In 1999, three years after their dissolution, Crowded House released an anthology of previously unreleased songs called Afterglow. One song, Help is Coming, dated back to 1995 sessions that the group never completed because, in the words of singer Neil Finn, “the band had lost its way”. Help Is Coming was a hushed, heartbreaking hymn to all those people who, in Finn’s words, “had arrived from Europe on ships to Ellis Island, seeking a better life for their families in America”.

This was the song that faded up into my head in the early hours of last Wednesday, as footage of Syrian refugees alighting dinghies played out in front of me. The following day, I contacted Finn and friends at The Vinyl Factory and asked them if they would produce a vinyl version of Help is Coming, with proceeds going to Save the Children. Since then, it’s hard to comprehend the chain of events that has – via Mat Whitecross’s extraordinary accompanying film – seen the song gain a worldwide release.

In the past five days, together with my wife Caitlin Moran, I’ve taken this song and lobbied iTunes and Universal for its reissue. Every day seems more surreal than the previous one. I’ve received emails from Stella Creasy MP pledging to try to get the Vat removed from sales of the song. Benedict Cumberbatch has filmed an introduction to Mat’s accompanying film and, after his performances as Hamlet at the Barbican in London this week, he has been collecting donations in a bucket. The hourly dispatches keep coming. Last night, I received a text telling me that iTunes has made Help is Coming a “worldwide priority”. I could have spent years campaigning, trying and failing to achieve what it looks like this song – a song that lay dormant on a near-forgotten album for 16 years – will do in just a few hours.

Of course, it shouldn’t take a pop song to emotionally engage people with the plight of those less fortunate than themselves. But there is another way of looking at this. Isn’t it miraculous that a pop song has the power to do that at all?

www.helpiscoming.org
Crowded House’s Help Is Coming is available to buy from iTunes. All proceeds to Save The Children. Text GIVE to 61144 to donate £5

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