The streets of West London were thronged and quaking with excitement as we emerged from a heaving Marble Arch tube station. Streams of people trickled through the stationary traffic and onto Park Lane, up to the entrance of Hyde Park. Staff at the Dorchester Hotel stared out of the windows.
The main queue was over a mile long, as we made our way into the coveted and controversial Gold Circle, past the media area with Jonathan Ross’ perspex pod, and towards the gigantic stage.
We were still coming to terms with the enormity of what was about to unfold, when right on cue, 205,000 people erupted as Paul McCartney and U2 launched into ‘Sgt Pepper’ and declared the self-proclaimed ‘greatest, greatest show on earth’ officially open. “Did that really happen?” remarked Bono, as Sir Paul skipped off the stage, before launching into his own set, echoing the sentiments of millions.
The sound and the feeling was immense. Over the next nine hours, some of music’s biggest stars would take their turn on the revolving stage, often separated by harrowing short films highlighting the plight of the people all this was intended to support.
One featured the obscene amounts of money we spend annually on frivolous goods. Another saw a series of celebrities illustrate the death toll, one every three seconds, by clicking their fingers. Another explained how mothers in the third world deal with their children’s cries of hunger and told us how to make soup for an entire family out of boiled leather stripped from an old chair or a cake out of butter, salt and clay.
It was powerful and sobering stuff that left this writer speechless, moved and ashamed.
The show went on. Personal highlights included the deeply soulful rendition of ‘Redemption Song’ by Ms Dynamite, one of the few artists to verbally recognise the West’s debt to post-colonisation Africa, stating ‘if there’s a debt to be paid, it should be us that pays it’; Annie Lennox’s documentary of her time spent in Africa, which was shown on the screens as she belted out a stripped-down and emotive ‘Why?’; and Madonna pulling out on stage an obviously stunned Birhan Woldu who, as an emaciated child with flies crawling over her face, had featured in footage accompanying Live Aid 20 years ago. Now she has survived and, Sir Bob tells us, completed a degree.
Saturday 2 July will be remembered for many reasons. The greatest musical line up of the decade. The vehicle for raising global awareness of the fight against poverty. The entertainment industry getting political in the best way it knows how. But will we be the generation that really makes poverty history? Has Bob Geldof, and consequently the world’s media, created enough awareness to rattle the G8 into attacking poverty with the same fervour its members devote to other aspects of foreign policy? Has this actually made a difference to anything?
They certainly made us feel like it did at Hyde Park. But only time will tell. In the meantime, tick ... tick ... tick ...