• Submitted by: admin
• Arts and Culture
• Music
• 11 / 24 / 2006

By Pascal Wyse

Buy this album and £2 goes to Artists' Project Earth, which uses the arts to raise awareness of global warming issues and provide disaster relief. What you get in return goes from the sublime to the ridiculous, as pop stars perform their hits with the Buena Vista Social Club.

Chris Martin singing Clocks is so impervious to a Cuban twist, it's like dancing the salsa with a wheelie bin. Unlikely as it sounds, Arctic Monkeys' Dancing Shoes takes to a steamy lating dance step - so wrong it's great.

But there's something for everyone: Kaiser Chiefs, U2, Dido, Jack Johnson, Radiohead. And, of course, Sting, who translates Fragile as Fragilidad and does a great impression of himself singing in Spanish. Generally, the more you let the Cubans do, the better.

Ibrahim Ferrer's As Time Goes By will be treasured, since it turned out to be his final recording before he died - and Coco Freeman makes himself so at home on U2's I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, you wonder who hell the guy with the big reverb is on the chorus. Oh yeah, it's Bono.