Last night’s benefit concert for the victims of the Haiti earthquake wasn’t the music industry’s fastest response to the disaster. For that, we must cede grudging respect to Simon Cowell’s reinvention of Everybody Hurts . This hastily organised show, featuring Paul Weller, Mr Hudson, Seasick Steve, Futureheads and KT Tunstall, no doubt appealed to music fans resistant to Cowell’s pan-celebrity pop fondue who wanted to empty their pockets into the donation buckets. An altogether different kind of charity was needed to deal with the sight of The Humans (featuring Toyah Willcox and her husband Robert Fripp) playing a succession of songs so uniformly awful that the applause they elicited stemmed from the realisation that mere silence would simply heighten the sense of communal embarrassment. The fast-moving nature of this benefit meant that necessity begat invention. On the face of it, an acoustic set by the angular Tyneside art-poppers The Futureheads didn’t show promise,...