Madonna To Pointlessly Headline Live Earth At Wembley

Live Earth Concerts UK Wembley London Madonna Climate Change Al GoreClimate change is possibly the single biggest threat to life on Earth at the moment, and something really substantial is needed to tackle the problem once and for all, so thank God that scientists have finally found the cure - it's Razorlight.

Razorlight are just one of the groups who'll be playing the UK leg of the global Live Earth concerts at Wembley Stadium in July, along with Madonna, Snow Patrol, Damien Rice, James Blunt, Keane, David Gray and all sorts of other bands hoping to raise awareness about climate change by all flying to London in carbon-spewing planes in order to consume vast amounts of electricity lighting and amplifying themselves for the benefit of tens of thousands of fans who'll also drive their gas-guzzling cars to London for the occasion, not to mention the billions of viewers at home who'll be urged to leave their televisions on all day just to see a bunch of sappy bands play turgid songs. We can't wait.

As much as Live 8 was a pointless exercise in self-promotion for a bunch of elderly bands with one eye on their CD sales, at least we could sort of see the point in it - at heart it was a free event to guilt the world's politicians, gathered at Gleneagles, into dropping third world debt with what basically amounted to a mass demonstration. True, it was a mass demonstration that The Stereophonics took part in - which sort of numbed the power of the message somewhat - but it was a demonstration nonetheless.

But Live Earth is a trickier proposition to comprehend. Back in February, after being buoyed by the success of his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore announced the Live Earth concerts - a series of concerts around the world that would try and, uh, guilt, um, the sun, into, er, not melting the polar ice caps as fast as it has been. Or something. Anyway, today the initial line-up for the Wembley leg of Live Earth was announced, as BBC News reports:

Madonna, Genesis, James Blunt and the Red Hot Chili Peppers will be among the headliners at the London show of the global series of Live Earth concerts. They will be joined at Wembley Stadium by groups including Foo Fighters, Duran Duran, Snow Patrol and Razorlight. Live Earth will take place on 7 July across seven continents, as a way of highlighting climate change. The diverse line-up include rap group The Beastie Boys, singer-songwriters David Gray and Damien Rice, and R&B pianist John Legend. Black Eyed Peas, Bloc Party, Corinne Bailey Rae, Keane and Paolo Nutini complete the bill so far.

Tickets for Live Earth will be chosen via a lottery system that opens on Friday at noon. Each Live Earth ticket will costs £55, of which proceeds will be given to the Alliance For Climate Protection, The Climate Group and Stop Climate Chaos, who promise to use the funds to send people onto TV shows in order to hector the public about how bad it is to leave their TV sets on standby with even more crushing regularity than normal.

Seriously, unless the money spent on Live Earth tickets gets stapled together and is used to cover up the hole in the ozone layer, it's hard to see what the point of the concerts actually is. If the politically showboating Live Earth organisers stopped massaging their own egos for long enough, they'd see that staging the concerts actually will actually do the environment more harm than good.

But at least we can't fault the Live Earth performers - it's good to know that the people reminding us to save the environment include a man who owns his own mountain, a woman who throws away toilet seats every time she does a shit and a boy who keeps jetting backwards and forwards to America to spend time with his weird-toothed girlfriend.

Stuart Heritage

Comments

Hide the following 6 comments

Give Them A little Credit..

10.04.2007 23:34

Live Earth is a going to be a huge fundraiser and may well help us move towards catastrophe in the future provided the money does actually find its way into the charities and turned efficiently into the relevant resources.

The acts that are going to be on stage at this event are motivated. You can hear it in the music they produce. OK so yes there are a few dinosaurs but so what? They all live in Hollywood anyway.

Benevalent

Madonna is

11.04.2007 00:06

She's an ugly fur hagg as it is, what do you expect from her.

Yuchy

more Earth for your money

11.04.2007 01:48

live Earth, please, save the world... more dams, more agrifuels, more gmos, more nuclear, more BP solar batteries, more sustainable ikea forests. all in the spirit of that reclaim the streets thing... hey gore... did you hear about RTS? madona's wrinky dink!

ever got s feeling u've been cheated?

more anticapitalist comments like those above.

fffffffff

more money

hack it

11.04.2007 03:21

so needs to be hacked/jammed/subverted in some way...

woooo

Give us a little credit

11.04.2007 11:08

So a bunch of mega-rich corporate sell-outs and their entourages are going to jet-set into Wembley, and about 60,000 tasteless morons are going to drive there to fawn over their commitment to the earth. Help me out, are they trying to cause climate change or protest it ?

The message isn't meaningful if it is self-contradictory. Now there is an argument that nuclear power will be required to fight climate change. Let us concede that dubious assertion for a moment - why not wait until all the hypocrites have arrived and then nuke Wembley ? Not living downwind I can't see a downside.

orca

Assessment

12.04.2007 14:15

Sometimes it is counterproductive to critisise people for their money. It safeguards them against constant control and intrusion and gives them the opportunity and privacy to do anything at all. An environmentalist is checked for his electricity bill, and we see a type of control occurring by for instance housing corporations which are the first to take advantage of his ideas, leaving or putting occupants in the cold to save energy and money. This phenomenon we see for instance take place in the Netherlands. Also insurance companies are quick to acknowledge the danger of global warming and assess the risks of floods, as is now happening in London. As long as anything can be measured in money it becomes real to the public who are the first victims of its assessment.
Someone who buys vegetables in the shop is checked if he doesn't have too many flowers in his garden where he could grow vegetables instead, a surgeon if instead of the delicate and expensive knives he uses for surgery has no ordinary kitchen knives at home and a media reporter if he has no pigeons to bring the news.
Revolutions often became colourless, regressive and even repressive by this type of reasoning: no flowers or greens.
That people with some quality are constantly checked in this way may exactly be one of the reasons why they go into retreat and why there are few politicians left with some integrity, and the ones left are reactionary. Nobody else wants to take any responsibilty.

Jaap den Haan