From the archive: Major and minor stars showing their concern

A h, the Eighties. Those innocent days when charities were emblems of selflessness and celebrities, rather than being permanently switched on, came out occasionally – like stars – to save the world.

Soon after Bob Geldof and Midge Ure did their Band Aid thing in the UK with Do They Know It's Christmas?, Irish musicians got together to record a salvation anthem of their own. Penned by Paul Cleary of The Blades, Show Some Concern bumped Phil Collins's Easy Lover out of the Number One singles spot for a couple of weeks in March 1985, before being itself bumped out by the truly dreadful We Are The World.

Our photo shows the assembled music heads giving the Concern recording plenty of welly at Windmill Lane. And what heads: we’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, 80s hair simply cannot be beaten for comic effect.

As for the faces, some have survived in the music business, some haven’t. The Sligo band Those Nervous Animals clearly weren’t all that nervous – they’re still on the go. The new wave band Auto da Fe weren’t so lucky; they broke up, and singer Gay Woods returned to the British folk act Steeleye Span.

How many of these songsters can we put names to nowadays? “Irish music stars, major and minor, filled the Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin,” reads the rather cruel caption. Well, we’re not prepared to adjudicate on that one.

But we can see Twink, Mary Black, Maxi, Flo McSweeney, Linda Martin. After that, it gets trickier. We can’t locate Christy Moore or Freddie White, though they definitely took part. Maybe you can identify Ray Lynam, Red Hurley, Johnny Duhan and others.

The song itself is, of course, still doing the rounds on the interweb. It didn’t solve the problems of Africa once and for all – did we really, even in more innocent times, think it was that easy? – but as charity anthems go, it’s pretty presentable even now.