A host of stars including Pete Doherty and Imogen Heap are in the studio today covering John Cage’s silent recording 4’33”, with plans for a ‘Cage against the machine’ Christmas number one battle against Simon Cowell and the X factor winner.
Orbital, The Kooks, Billy Bragg, UNKLE and Enter Shikari are all amongst the ‘supergroup’ covering the avant garde composer’s lauded piece, in which he asked an entire orchestra to put down their instruments and recorded their silence.
The charity single will be released on 13th December on Wall of Sound recordings, and will go head-to-head with the X Factor winner’s single in a repeat of the battle which saw Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name hit the top spot last year.
A Facebook group, ‘John Cage’s 4’33” for Christmas number one 2010′ was launched in the summer as a bid to get the original recording to number one. But soon X fm DJ Eddy Temple-Morris and Wall of Sound records’ Mark Jones caught on, coming up with the idea of recording a new version for charity.
Temple-Morris told the BBC: “We’re going to plug everybody in. We’re going to have a drum kit with a few drummers, some bass players, some guitarists.
“I don’t know what the noise will be. I imagine there will be the tweak of a leather jacket, a cough, a snigger, a muffled laugh. You’ll hear whatever happens in that room at the time. That’s the performance.”
Proceeds from the single will be going to five different charities, including Calm, which helps suicidal young men, and the British Tinnitus Association.
Jon Morter, who started the Rage Against The Machine campaign last year, came out in support of the single, saying: “If any xmas number one campaign is going to work, it’ll be the John cage 4’33” one.”
The Facebook campaign page currently has over 60,000 supporters.
