Back in March I posted a review of Live Aid, the iconic concert from 1985 that united people from around the world to support the victims of the famine in Ethiopia, to coincide with this year’s musical at the Old Vic that celebrated the occasion.
For a long time it seemed like such an event would never happen again, but 20 years later Bob Geldof and Midge Ure got together once more to organise Live 8. Ten concerts were held worldwide on 2 July 2005, viewed by 3 billion people, plus a final one on 6 July, to put pressure on the leaders of the countries attending the G8 summit to take stronger action to make poverty history. There had also been a 20th anniversary version of Do They Know It’s Christmas? the previous December as well.
Of course, how much of a difference the event actually made will always be up for debate, but it certainly changed things to an extent, with some commitments made with regards to increasing African aid and cancelling debts. But there will always be much more that politicians can and should be doing, and a discussion on that side of things is far beyond my expertise or the scope of this post, so I won’t be going into that here.
In any case, the concerts featured a huge variety of artists, and whilst I felt it was much more of a mixed bag compared to Live Aid, it was still a lot of fun. I had also been far too young to see Live Aid when it took place, which meant I only got to watch it when it was released on DVD many years later, whereas I was able to see Live 8 when it was actually broadcast, as I recalled in my journal at the time.
I also bought the DVD box set of Live 8 that was released in November that year, presenting a wide selection of tracks, and that’s what I’m going to review in this post, along with some online videos that fill in the gaps. I’ve also created Youtube playlists for the UK concerts and the rest of the world, with lots of performances from the official Live 8 Youtube channel (where they’ve uploaded quite a few that were omitted from the DVD set), plus a selection of other clips. I’ve linked to a lot of the videos during this post as well.
So without further ado, and as a sequel to my earlier Live Aid post, I hope you enjoy this run-through of the different concerts and my thoughts on some of the performances!
Continue reading “Live 8 Review”
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