You can't get away from Band Aid. Newspapers reporting squabbles over who's going to sing the line “Tonight thank god it's them instead of you”, or describing the scenario of Geldof supposedly pleading on bended knees with Kylie Minogue to come and record a line of the song, presumably so they can feature her bottom in the video. Various cable TV channels are showing the Band Aid documentary for the umpteenth time, and BBC News reporters are interviewing Midge Ure who has hilariously tried to imbue the phrase “Band Aid” with hidden meaning by explaining that it was meant to be a metaphor, that it was just a sticking plaster to help deal with an enormous problem. Mm, not just a pun about a band giving aid, then, Midge. He's had 20 years to think that one up.

In discussion with at the weekend, it was established that she hadn't even been born when the first Band Aid single came out. I remember being very much alive at the time, so much so that I remember attending a school assembly where various girls in our year decided to get on stage in the school hall and sing along with the record in a show of solidarity with Geldof and Ure, neither of whom could be bothered to turn up and offer any thanks. For , the Band Aid thing must be as distant and unknown a concept as the Woodstock festival is for me, or, for that matter, The Battle Of Bosworth Field. This makes me feel old. Wizened, in fact.

I don't mean to sound cynical and ungrateful for the time these popstars have taken out to provide us with the means to give £4 or so to charity. But it's just so spectacularly contrived, releasing such a thing exactly 20 years after the original, and pretending that the crisis in Sudan is any more of a reason to tug at the heartstrings of the UK record-buying public than the ones over the years in Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor, Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Palestine, etc, etc, etc. And for it all to become celebrity-spotting fodder for tabloid newspapers makes me feel even more queasy than I did already.

If I wasn't at work today, the temptation to spend it recording my own version of the song while doing various bad impressions of Frank Spencer / Frank Carson / Prince Charles for each line – or even each syllable, before flooding MP3 servers of the world with the final mix and passing it off as the real thing might have been too strong. Thank goodness I am at work, then, I suppose.

Edit: You don't have to buy the record. You can donate direct to Band Aid by writing a cheque made payable to Band Aid Charitable Trust, and sending it to:

Band Aid Charitable Trust
PO Box 5301
London W1A 3WW