Saturday, July 09, 2005
Edinburgh Rock
To Murrayfield, where on Wednesday the last of the Live 8 gigs designed to change, if not the world, then at least the profile of certain high priority artists took place. We had planned on doing this piece on Thursday but, y'know, we didn't. In fact we didn't originally plan on covering this event at all and went to the pub instead, a plan which would have met with success had it not been for the fact that they were showing it on the telly there. So here, for your delectation, are a few thoughts about the gig, though we would like you to bear in mind that by the end of the event we were quite drunk, so we apologise if our views become somewhat random, incoherent, or make reference to things that never actually happened.
- The Proclaimers, who were first on stage, turned up, performed 500 Miles (I'm Gonna Be) and promptly buggered off, leading us to the conclusion that gigs in general would be a lot better if the bands turned up, did their hit before promptly buggering off.
- Jamie Cullum is a cunt. Even more so when he wraps a saltire around himself before draping it across his piano.
- And we're very disappointed with Natasha Bedingfield, not only did she exert the poor judgement of turning up to duet with Jamie Cullum on his painfully tuneless cover of The Beatles' All You Need is Love in the first place, she then proceeded to allow him to ruin These Words by allowing him to do his plinky plonk nonsense all over it. We'd be having words with her about that if it wasn't for the fact that we're no longer able to contact her for legal reasons.
- Wet Wet Wet turned up to perform their first number one and the second Beatles cover of the night, With a Little Help From My Friends. They did, however, fail to point out the fact that the only reason that this got to number one was due to the massive sales boost it recieved thanks to Billy Bragg covering She's Leaving Home on the AA side. Ahem.
- McFly. All About You. Yawn. We went to get peanuts at this point.
- Davina McCall turned up with what we assume was 20 odd random kids, rather than her extended family. She encouraged the audience to get out their mobiles and text their name to the Make Poverty History petition, instantly leading to 20,000 entries for Maxwell on the list.
- A performance by One Giant Leap allowed Will Young to demonstrate his new ringworm influenced hairstyle, while also being pretty damned good and the sort of thing that should really have been happening at the 'proper' gig.
- Sugababes did a pretty weak version of Stronger. Heidi showed that it wasn't just the boys who could have dodgy haircuts, sporting a particularly rubbish do herself. Poor Heidi.
- Bono, unable to resist a photo opportunity if his life depended upon it, then took to the stage clutching a briefcase to mutter some nonsense about how he doesn't play golf. He made great play about the fact that he'd been up at Gleneagles that afternoon and that the case contained all the names of the people who wanted to make poverty history and, as such, was a mandate for change. Surely if that was actually the case, rather than just being a slightly cheap prop, he'd have been better off leaving it up there with them.
- Annie Lennox. More peanuts. Though she did give quite good speech at the end of her set: if she can avoid singing and stick to the old talking we might, well not warm to her, but at least be slightly less ice cube like when she's on the telly.
- Bob Geldof defied expectations by not, for possibly the first time in his life, performing I Don't Like Mondays at a public gathering, instead giving us Rat Trap. He then went and blew his brief jump in our estimations by claiming that The Thrills were the best band in the world and expecting us to believe him.
- For the record, The Thrills aren't the best band in the world. Even if they were the only band in the world, people would still refuse to give them that accolade, reasoning that there would surely be something better around the corner.
- And around the corner was, ummm, Eddie Izzard and Midge Ure doing Vienna in the pouring rain.
- Chris Evans led the crowd in a Radio Ga Ga sing-a-long with handclaps. Bouyed by the success of this, he then attempted to get the crowd to do the fingerclick every 3 seconds. This was, apparently, a crowd who had no concept of how long 3 seconds actually was.
- Feeder did Buck Rodgers, Embrace did Ashes, we did the pub quiz machine.
- Looking a lot happier than at Live 8, Youssou N'Dour teamed up with Neneh Cherry to do a storming version of Seven Seconds. It's amazing to what heights he can soar when he doesn't have the deadweight of Dido dragging him down.
- Apparently, according to the review we're using as a memory jogger at any rate, Ronan Keating turned up to do Rollercoaster, while Beverly Knight did Angels with Guy Chambers on the piano. We personally have no recollection of this, which means it either wasn't televised, or we were a lot drunker than we thought we were.
- Speaking of the telly coverage, Edith Bowman proved herself to be a worse presenter than Jo Whiley, which is a rather impressive feat. She's possibly the only person in the world who gets genuinely excited by the prospect of interviewing Dougie from Travis.
- With every passing year, Sharleen Spiteri from Texas looks more and more like the Clyde shipyard worker she was in a previous life.
- Katherine Jenkins - we forget whether she wore a nice dress or not - did Nessun Dorma, which didn't prove to be much of a mass sing-a-long.
- Snow Patrol and Travis were reasurringly mediocre, but the crowd seemed to enjoy themselves. Travis were particularly chuffed, as they often are when such a moment occurs, to be performing Why Does it Always Rain on Me to an audience who had just been rained on. If they did that after we'd just experienced a soaking, they'd soon be making friends with the wrong end of our umbrella, that's for sure.
- The Corrs did Breathless which, seeing as it's easily their best song, was a good thing. Bono then reluctantly joined them on stage for Stars Go Blue, by which we mean he had to be held back from physically throwing Andrea to the ground and wrestling her mic from her.
- Bono, Midge and Bob then came on stage to lead the crowd in a brief rendition of Flower of Scotland, before standing with arms raised as they celebrated what they'd hopefully achieved that week. Midge made the schoolboy error of not standing in the middle, thus allowing picture editors to easily crop him out of any shots of this.
- And finally, James Brown, who really was excellent, despite the fact there's something incredibly wrong, yet oh so right, about him demanding to know from one of his young girl singers whether she knew that he was, in fact, a sex machine, James stormed the stage. His claims to be the "Hardest working man in show business" are, however, somewhat thrown into doubt when his technique mainly seems to consist of him starting a song, sitting out the middle bit at the back of the stage while someone else takes over - Will Young in the case of Papa's Got a Brand New Bag - before coming back to finish it, this can be forgiven though, when you consider his age. We're also quite pleased to see that, despite the trousers being of a red sparkly kind, James follows the genetic coding of all old men everywhere by having a waistband that lies somewhere near the nipple area. Godfather of Soul, we salute you.
