Which singer replaced Prince on ‘We Are the World’?
If you thought Band Aid had aged like milk, just try to stomach the USA for Africa follow-up across the Atlantic.
Admittedly, it’s all very easy now to scoff at the Various Artists charity single from the 2020s’ cultural vantage. Cost of living continues to gnaw as wealth concentrates in ever fewer hands, and a liberal clique pleading for the working class to fork out cash to slap a plaster on the systemic failure they handsomely sit atop triggers a gag reflex after decades of tawdry Comic Relief singles.
But, shifting aside cynical fatigue as best we can, it’s hard to deny a genuinely well-meaning air to 1984’s Band Aid’s musical efforts to raise money for the day’s Ethiopian Famine. White Saviour complexes, yes, scant long-term structural solutions for sure, but ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ and the Live Aid Wembley takeover was a new concept from a less coarsened era that pulled in plenty of honourable Red Wedge types with Paul Weller, Heaven 17, and the miners-supporting George Michael.
But the Band Aid effort suddenly sparked a slew of grim imitation acts eager to get in on the charity game. To be fair, Artists United Against Apartheid’s ‘Sun City’s a banger, and made sense with the musical boycott of South Africa underway in 1985, but that year’s Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie’s philanthropy double-up resulted in the ghastly saccharine ‘We Are the World’ star-studded studio wincer.
The two managed to draw in some of music’s biggest names for the USA for Africa get together, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and most of the Jacksons, among the glittering cavalcade of music stars, and boasting Quincy Jones in the producer’s chair. Among the red carpet roll-call was Minneapolis maestro Prince, who pulled out at the last minute despite Richie’s best efforts to bring him to the studio.
So, who replaced Prince?
Try as he might, Prince steadfastly refused to join USA for Africa’s main single to all kinds of speculation, with reports that he insisted on recording his vocals separately, to merely thinking little of the song itself. Who was to step into Prince’s high-heeled ankle boots?
While not as enduring in pop stature, Huey Lewis and the News were absolutely massive in 1985, the previous years’ Sports enjoying mega sales and topping the Billboard 200. Yet despite his MTV stardom, Lewis was still awe-struck by the musical heavyweights laying down their tracks beside him, nervously stepping behind the mic to sing Prince’s original lines.
“It was unbelievable,” Lewis reflected on Questlove Supreme in 2020. “You don’t get to meet all those people in a lifetime or a career. And Ray Charles was there! I couldn’t even introduce myself to Ray Charles. I just hung back and watched him. I’m just totally in awe of Ray Charles… I couldn’t stop my leg from shaking, I was so nervous.”
Lewis managed to nab a prominent spot on ‘We Are the World’, crooning in after Jackson and before Cyndi Lauper lets in a vocal belter, blending in perfectly well with the rest of USA for Africa’s earnestness. While Prince may have kept a little of his street cred, he still whipped up the exclusive ‘4 the Tears in Your Eyes’ for the We Are the World album.
