Check out (RED)Wire music launch party today for U2′s cover of Greg Lake’s ‘ I believe in Father Christmas’.

(RED)Wire is (RED)’s new digital music magazine designed to help eliminate AIDS in Africa.

“Do the maths,” says Bono. “It costs about $5 a week to pay for the two pills a day it takes to keep someone with HIV alive.”

And, talking about the work the band has been doing on their new album Bono reveals, yes, here it comes, ‘The Edge is on fire’:

“World music this is not,” he says, though U2 fans will “feel the difference”. Polyrhythmic is the word he chooses with a self-deprecating laugh. “U2 in dancefloor shock. Normally when you play a U2 tune, it clears the dancefloor. And that may not be true of this. There’s some trance influences. But there’s some very hardcore guitar coming out of The Edge. Real molten metal. It’s not like anything we’ve ever done before, and we don’t think it sounds like anything anyone else has done either.”

U2log.com predicts the album will come out sounding just like U2, just the way we like it.

Read more and find out about Bono’s number one in Ghana…

As atu2.com reported last week, Daniel Lanois was recently spotted hanging out with the band in a Dublin studio. We can confirm this and add the news that Lanois is not alone… his old friend ‘Ben O’Rian’ has come along for the ride. Allegedly.

Meanwhile, Fez-based blog ‘The View from Fez’ is trying to catch up with Bono.

U2 Singer Moves Merchandise Traffic

“Since U2 singer Bono announced the RED campaign to raise money to benefit the Global Fund to Fight AIDS on The Oprah Show, 66.3 percent of people registering to join the RED Web site clicked through to merchandise partners’ Web sites, according to a metrics company.”

Put on your RED shoes and dance. American Express, Converse, Gap and Giorgio Armani announce the first RED products to generate revenue stream for the Global Fund.

• Watch a video of the press conference

The campaign, an economic initiative designed to deliver a sustainable flow of private sector money to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, was launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday.

So if you fancy Emporio Armani RED greyish Wraparound glasses, a RED Amex card, a RED terra cotta GAP t-shirt (made in Africa), or a pair of funky RED black Chuck Taylor Converse All Stars, you can put your name on the waiting list on the RED site:

• ‘Join Red’ website

But leading NGO’s think the venture could prove counterproductive:

• Times Online: Bono out of tune with poverty campaigners

Popbitch doesn’t mention which charity, but U2 fans will recognise these items would be part of the Red campaign to heighten AIDS awareness as mentioned here on U2log.com in the past.

Bono and Alicia first performed the song ‘together’ in New York City at a fundraiser for the charity in early November. Bono sang via satellite.

Contributions to Keep A Child Alive go directly to children and families in desperate need of AIDS medicines.

By the way, Bono’s trailing behind J.K. Rowling in Time’s ‘Person of the year’ poll. Can’t have that now, can we? Get cracking.