SIMON COWELL’S HAITI SINGLE FAILS TO DELIVER

We were very excited when we first heard that Simon Cowell was putting together a group of the world’s biggest stars to record a charity single for the victims of the Haiti earthquake. A little less so when we saw the final roundup, which appears to be positively C list.

We were thinking Madonna, Britney, Justin, maybe Springsteen. Instead we get Robbie Williams, Kylie, Susan Boyle, Leona and Cheryl Cole. Admittedly international stars like Mariah Carey and Bon Jovi have appeared on the record, but given their recent poor selling albums it can’t have taken much to get them on board.

We were most shocked by the inclusion of Cheryl Cole. While the death of 100,000 Haitians may strike her as a great promotional opportunity from which to launch her US career, we feel that the project would have better served its objectives (i.e. raised the maximum amount of cash for the earthquake victims) had it involved truly global stars. Will the lucrative US audience really respond to a record featuring so many acts they’ve never heard of?

Showbiz legends Celine Dion and Barbra Streisand seems to have recognised this failure and, to ensure the people of Haiti don’t suffer as a result, have teamed with some WORLD famous stars including Kanye West, Miley Cyrus and Nicole Scherzinger to record a new version of We Are the World – 25 years since it was originally recorded to raise money for African aid.

Let’s hope it goes down a storm and raises the sort of cash the Cowell record is incapable of achieving.