Sunday, July 08, 2007

Live Earth Wembley


I was there with my mate Mike!.. (who you'll recall from such wedding performances as "Under Milkwood"). I flew down especially to be at the London concert. Now, before anyone shouts "hypocrite!", I offset my carbon miles by donating to Oxfam and GetUp and soon in the not too distant future I'll point to a group of trees and say "we should plant more of those"... There's been some criticism about the Live Earth concerts because of the private jets to ferry rock stars and the amount of energy required to put on the lighting show. Bob Geldof summed it by saying: "Everybody's known about [it] for years. We're all fucking conscious of global warming".

If you're already on the global warming hydrogen fueled solar panelled bus, there wasn't much to be gained from the preaching that went on via crappy films and cartoons between artists and the didactic warbling of the artists themselves. I was there for the concert and the excitement of being at Wembley stadium and for no other reason than that. It was awesome. When else am I going to see Madonna, Metallica and Spinal Tap all on the same day?

The concert was like getting a tasting plate at a restaurant -each artist only did four or five songs. The Foo Fighters, Metallica and the Beastie Boys were all madmen and the stadium was electric during their performances. But it was Madonna who did it for me. She was all class. This video does not do the performance justice, but here it is anyway...she's a bit like a girl version of Iggy Pop - cavorting sinew....


The Abba rift in this song is genius.

Also genius is the band Nunatak, who made Live Earth truly global by making sure there was a concert on every continent. Nunatak are a bunch of scientists on Antartica.

Can I end this entry on three points:

1. The Live Earth pledge: we've been asked to pledge something we're going to do for climate change. I'm already doing the canvas bag thing, the light bulb thing, the turn your telly really off as opposed to sort of standby off thing and the public transport to work thing. So, from now on, I'm going to take a reusable lunch box to work to use at the local tuck shop instead of the polystyrene one they give me. That's the little thing. The big thing, and I'm going to have to think about whether its feasible, is to see about following my friend Rachael Robert's lead and get an Environment House for my local suburb of Partick. That's a mammoth commitment, so I need to think about it.

2. The Logistics: Can I just say that the logistics of Wembley stadium are truly wondrous. 80,000 people leave the stadium at the same time and we basically just walked down the path at a steady pace and onto the tube at Wembley Park.

3. Resource Security: When the Australian Government says the term "resource security" why does it mean oil and not water??????

2 comments:

Anonymous said...
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ali b said...

if you were wondering what the comment was... it was a Mexican selling t-shirts! What cheek! Hope they were organic cotton though :)