The dismal politics of Live8 have been discussed here already, I just wanted to throw in my experience of the event itself. I had the opportunity to go along, and being both curious and an REM fan thought I'd check it out.

The first thing was that the site was completely enclosed by a massive fence. This was frustrating on the way in, when people had to que for at least an hour to get through one entrance in a huge boundary, but was even more annoying on the way out. We left early, but was refused exit from most of the marked exits having been told that these would only open at the end. We had to go all the way back to where we came in (in the north of Hyde Park, quite a walk) to get out. It felt very claustrophobic. This kind of crowd control for free events is a relatively new development. At one time there were many free events in London that were open access and attracted huge crowds - Rock against Racism gigs in the 70s, GLC gigs in the 1980s, gay pride up until the mid-1990s. If things got too crowded, people regulated themselves by spreading out over a larger area or going home. Now even free events are ticket only and contained, preventing any of the spontaneous possibilities of loads of people getting together in a park to have a good time. Notting Hill Carnival seems to be next on the hit list, with plans to move the focus to Hyde Park being raised again.

Inside Hyde Park, it felt very much like the crowd were there to be extras for the TV show. The volume was low for a gig/festival, which destroyed any musical atmosphere, and the screens were out of sync with the sound. Bizarrely people only seemed to get animated when there was a camera pointing at them, perhaps because they felt so remote from the event. Every time the camera swept over the crowd people went mad and started cheering.

A gathering of 250,000 people demanding the abolition of poverty would be pretty amazing, even if the politics of the organisers were dubious. But it didn't feel like that - rather it was an assembly of atomised individuals self-consciously taking part (participating is too strong a word) in a media event. We'd only been there half an hour when we heard the couple next to us say - 'we've done it now - lets take some photos to show people we were here, and go home. We can get a t-shirt on the way out'. That summed up the event, along with having one of the richest people in the world, Bill Gates, talking about abolishing poverty from the stage. He got a cheer as a celebrity, with my lone boo seemingly unheard.

Nothing surprizing, but depressing nevertheless.