Live8 Highs and Lows

- Madge. Never been that big a fan, but her live act has always been in a class of its own.
- Robby was nevertheless the only one that made us briefly regret not actually being there. I must be getting old - he may even be growing on me.
- Loose canine: Someone forgot to tell Snoop Dog to go easy on the motherfuckin' lyrics.
- 'Go West': The Petshop Boys closing the gig behind St Basil's in Moscow.
- Those guitar-totin' Tuaregs Tinariwen over at the Eden Project. (Where was Manu Chao?)
- Ricky Gervais' thanks for voting out Saskia gag.
- Elton John. You'd have to assume that his annual expenditure on shoes exceeds certain African nations' healthcare budgets.
- Dido was saved by Youssou N'Dour. Her voice has the archetypal studio-scale timbre. At one point she seemed to be attempting an impersonation of Shakira. (The real thing was over in Paris but sadly we missed her.)
- It's a shame the BBC assumes that the concerts in Paris and Rome would be of lesser interest to us than Philadelphia and Berlin. Rome was actually the biggest of the lot.
- Mariah Carey should surely not have attempted to fit into a dress like the one she wore on the cover of her eponymous debut album in 1990.
- George Michael looks increasingly like someone doing a bad impersonation of himself.
- A-HA in Berlin. Morten Harket has done a better job of fending off old father Time than Simon Le Bon. (Destiny's Child also looked like the years are catching them up fast. )
- Bill Gates' strode on stage as if to announce the launch of a fab new software tool from Microsoft that squeezes camels through the eyes of needles.

Hats off to Bob Geldof for his PR masterstroke of producing the very alive, very beautiful and very academically successful young woman that had been filmed with just minutes to live sometime during the original Ethiopian famine.

V reckons Bob looks like he's spent the last 20 years up in the attic.