"It's been very crazy." How Radiohead, Coldplay, Gorillaz and more came together to make history with an album that went on sale just one day after its songs were recorded

On Monday, September 4, 1995, some of the biggest names in British music - Radiohead, Blur, Oasis, Suede and Manic Street Preachers among them - assembled in recording studios across the UK to record one-off songs for a unique charity compilation album.

The Help Album was conceived to raise funds for the UK charity War Child, which aimed to provide emergency support to tens of thousands of children trapped in combat zones, with particular focus on those suffering as a result of the Bosnian War which raged from 1992 to 1995. What made the project unique was that every song on the record would be taped in a single day, and the resulting record would be racked in record shops across Britain within a week.

The inspiration behind this idea was Beatles legend John Lennon, who around the release of his 1970 single Instant Karma! said, "The best record you can make is recorded on a Monday, cut on Tuesday, pressed up on Wednesday, packaged on a Thursday, distributed on Friday, in the shops on Saturday." Which was the timeline adhered to by the project organisers.

The Help Album, which also featured single-day recordings from The Stone Roses, Orbital, Massive Attack, Sinéad O'Connor and more, was a huge success, raising £1.25 million for the War Child charity. So successful was the project, in fact, that ten years later, in 2005, the charity sought to revisit the idea, with a new twist: this time around they aimed to have the album available for purchase on the day after the songs were recorded.

The line-up of artists who volunteered their services for the 2005 album, titled Help: A Day in the Life, represented an impressive snapshot of the UK's music scene at the time. Radiohead and Manic Street Preachers were present once again, joined by Damon Albarn's Gorillaz, Bloc Party, Kaiser Chiefs, Ireland's Damian Rice, Babyshambles and more.

At noon on Thursday, September 8, 2005, the members of Radiohead began recording their contribution to the record, I Want None Of This, at Whitfield Street studios in central London.

The September 10 edition of The Guardian newspaper included a feature on the making of the 22-track record.

"Demonstrating the leap into the digital age," wrote journalist Patrick Barkham, "bands squeezed in recordings and performances between tour dates around the world, dispatching their songs over the internet to the Whitfield Street studios. Damon Albarn cancelled a flight to China so Gorillaz could record their track, Hong Kong, Kaiser Chiefs recorded their cover version of I Heard It Through the Grapevine in three spare hours on tour in Berlin, Damien Rice interrupted work on his second album in Dublin, Belle & Sebastian sent in their track from their native Glasgow and the Manic Street Preachers delivered their song from a studio in Wales."

At the 11th hour, Coldplay signed up too, frontman Chris Martin recording a new vocal and new lyrics for How You See The World No. 2 in New York, which Mark Stent, the album's executive producer, mixed at 4am then sent back to Martin for his approval.

"It's been very crazy," Stent told The Guardian. "You can take tracks digitally and put them on to servers, which means songs are coming in from all over the world. Ten years ago it was planes and couriers - PolyGram had a private jet sitting at RAF Northolt."

At 6pm, UK time, on Friday September 9, the album was made available for download from the War Child website. The following week, it debuted on the UK charts at number 10.

History had been made.

Listen to the album below.