The complete turnaround was starting to think, if the people whose job is to change the world, politicians, are clearly so incapable of doing it, then probably it does revolve around ordinary people, or perhaps not quite so ordinary people, deciding to do something.We hatched this plan for Little Pieces from Big Stars, where we generated our first principle: everything you did had to be great on its own, regardless of the fact it was for charity. I think it was then I lost any final hope that you could expect from politicians any visionary approach to dealing with the future. The other thing I felt was disgust at the response to refugees - in the first two years of war Germany had taken something like 200,000; we'd taken 49.Worst of all was when it became clear the Western powers knew about the concentration camps in Yugoslavia, just as they did about the ones in Germany. At the same time I thought, here we are, the international community with weapons that could flatten the earth 70 times over and there's a couple of fascist Yugoslavs sticking two fingers up at the world and laughing.

And that's when we started doing things that were really difficult ...At that time I still swallowed the line, oh Bosnia's so complicated, it's been going on for 1,200 years. I thought, my God, is it this easy? That was what hooked me, I suppose. It took no effort on our part really, and the response we got back was so amazing, we'd really made a big difference to people's lives. I had a couple of battery-operated keyboards, boxes of percussion stuff for kids, things to rattle and bang, and other people gave guitar strings, really insignificant things And a lot of CDs, about 250, for the radio station.

Anthea and I collected instruments and CDs for people under siege in East Mostar, because Bill and David said they had nothing to play and no electricity. Eventually they decided that the film had become an alibi for giving them transit in and out of the country.And I thought, why not? I grew up with this notion that one must serve art beyond anything else, and I thought, why not do it the other way around, why not take advantage of your position as an artist and make that serve something else?The very first thing we did for WarChild was just before Christmas 1993. They'd been in Yugoslavia making a film, and people would say, `Oh can you post these letters?' or `Can you bring me some spectacles when you come back?' And they found themselves wearing fatter and fatter overcoats to carry more stuff back and forth. Because they were people who were drawn into this because nobody else was going to do it. I was thinking along these lines more and more as the Bosnian thing started up. Anthea, my wife, came home one day having been to Bop for Bosnia, a group of celebrities getting together to raise some money, and she was impressed by Bill Leeson and David Wilson, the two people running this charity WarChild, and subsequently I was too.