Very interesting: this is the second time in less than a month that I am officially invited by the organisers to joing an event as an officiel blogger ;) The first event was about 2 weeks ago in Zaragoza, at Innovate Europe! 05. Today, I attended the live 8 concert in Versailles near Paris.
In a nutshell, Live 8, is a series of 8 concerts happening simultaneously around 8 large cities in the world, organised by Bob Gelfolf, the same guy who organized the LiveAid concert more than 20 years ago. This is meant to be a protest against extreme povertys etc.
Live8 don't want our money, but just our voice. Hence, if you feel concerned, please sign up the online petition on the official site. More than 3m French people had signed up this afternoon. These results will be conveyed to the G8 Summit happening this week in Edimburgh, Scotland.
More information on the official website.
Now back to the concert: we got there about 4h45, about 15min before the concert was due. I guess it started earlier, as someone later mentionned a live concert since 15h. Nokia was kind enough to invite me to the evnet, and gave me passes to sit among a few hundred happy fews. Tens of thousands of other people enjoyed the event standing.
The sun was shining, and after a few hours, all the ladies sitting next to me had turned acute red. Luckily, my wife was invited by AOL (one of the 5 sponsors), and we got 2 baseball cups.
On a sidenote: very interestingly, I only saw 5 sponsors, and I guess 4 of them were media:
- M6 for the TV medium
- NRJ for radio
- AOL France for the Internet (broadcasting live all 8 concerts on its portals)
- Bouygues Telecom (mobile phone company)
- and Nokia
The concert was uneven, with - should I say? - rather average stars, singing 1 or 2 songs. One of the most surprising thing is that at times there were up top 15 min wait time between artists. Is it always like this ? I'm watching the show again on TV now, and you really can't tell there were so many breaks. I luckily had brought some very interesting material to read... Book finished on the train back from there.
All in all, I hope the event served its purpose. On my side, I guess this was the last time I attended a gigantic musical concert (several hundred thousand people showed up). I'm getting old for that kind of music...
PS: all my pictures are up on Flickr. I used the tag live8 that other people seem to be using too.
