Pop Stars Vs Global Warming

14 July 2007

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If attention was the benchmark, Live Earth was never going to be anything but a resounding success. And the two billion who watched were sure to have been entertained.

With a few notably lacklustre exceptions, the standard of performances were every bit as you would expect from such a cherry-picked bunch.

At Wembley the venue was truly rocked to its foundations. Brit band Kasabian really began pushing the boat out with a bravura performance, with their hit 'LSF' seeming to vibrate every seat in the house.

Coming after a lazy-looking performance from Genesis and perfectly decent turns from Razorlight, Snow Patrol, David Gray and Damien Rice, they reminded everyone what works best in stadiums - rock. Loud rock. The sort that gets perfectly respectable people lurching around in abandon to its insistent aural assault.

Loud rock is what was needed to shake the torpor induced by painfully ineloquent philosophical musings from at least half of the acts on show with regard to the state of the planet. Particularly, as between acts the crowd were suffering mini-lectures from Gerard Butler on energy saving lightbulbs and Thandie Newton suggesting that being environmentally-friendly was up there with "being hung like a warlord" when it comes to attracting the ladies. No-one present will ever be able to look at Al Gore quite the same way again.

By the time you got to Geri Halliwell introducing Duran Duran the whole message was beginning to stick in the craw, so Ginger Spice duly tried to choke us on it. She began: "Hi, how are you? Can you believe I'm getting back together with the Spice Girls? What am I doing, right?"

Not welcomed as rapturously as she had been anticipating, she got to the issue at hand: "I hadn't thought about climate change until I became a mother and what with all this freaky weather I can't really ignore it, can you? No."

As almost everyone gawped at her in disbelief, the Metallica fans in the audience looked ready to try a new method of escaping a weather-based apocalypse - the ritual sacrifice of a redheaded pop star.

She continued nonetheless, but by then the sensible members of the audience could be seen humming to themselves with fingers firmly placed in ears.

Luckily, their heroes were to come to the rescue later.

After Duran Duran whimpered their way through a set including the conveniently titled 'Planet Earth', the Red Hot Chili Peppers began their cathartic destruction of the contemplative tone of the day with a long instrumental intro. Antony Kiedis bound on to the stage just as the excitement was reaching a crescendo to launch into 'Don't Stop'.

Lead guitarist Flea was as uncompromisingly wired as usual, and even managed to offer his own alternative to the faux-inspirational platitudes offered up by almost every other celebrity and performer on show. Looking ready to launch into something eloquent and profound Flea proclaimed: "I have something to say. It'll probably be the most important thing you ever hear," before pausing for the gravity of the situation to sink in and adding: "But I can't remember it. Maybe next time."

Metallica's raw roar then blew away any residue of indifference by ripping through 'Sad But True', 'Nothing Else Matters' and 'Enter Sandman'. By the time they hit the well-known riff of the latter their was just no room left outside their wall of noise to contemplate such things as celebrity hypocrisy.

After a resurrected Spinal Tap kept things as irreverent as one would expect from the spoof band of were subject of the cult mockumentary 'This Is Spinal Tap', James Blunt popped up to try and dampen the mood. Strangely, he eschewed a performance of by far his biggest hit, 'Beautiful', in order to drain Cat Stevens' 'Wild World' of all subtlety and meaning.

The best acts kept their mouths mostly shut on the issue of the day. The Beastie Boys resolutely said very little that made any sense, and instead tried to burst 70,000 eardrums with a startlingly loud rendition of 'Intergalactic'.

In contrast, The Black Eyed Peas ruined their otherwise enjoyable set with an inane "song written specially" in response to seeing Al Gore's Oscar winning documentary on global warming 'An Inconvenient Truth'.

This gave us the chance to marvel at Will. i. am's superlative rhyming skills as he sang "the world is dying, if they say it's going to be all right then people are lying". Truly poetic. Let's hope Al liked it - Will emailed it to him personally.

The best was left until second from last. The Foo Fighters even got some in the press pen out of their seats and onto their feet, a truly awesome feat in itself.

Dave Grohl growled and rasped his way through 'Best of You', 'My Hero', 'All My Life' and 'Everlong' with limitless energy.

So inspiring was their performance that their record sales have reportedly shot up more than 1000 per cent since Sunday (07.07.07), rather blowing a hole in the theory that all of Live Earth's heroes had nothing to gain from the experience but the warm glow created by saving the planet.

Madonna, the colossally famous queen of pop, has seen her record sales grow 420 percent. Anyone who witnessed her performance can be fairly sure that figure will have been dwarfed by the expansion of her evidently quite rampant ego.

She blessed us all with a song penned especially for the day, ordering us all to save the world. It may have been more realistic for her just to request we offset her gigantic carbon footprint, which experts have worked out is roughly equivalent to that of 14,000 Malawi people.

Or maybe she could have vowed to give up one of her five homes in London alone, which it could be suggested may not all be strictly necessary. Or perhaps sacrifice one of her two decidedly un-eco-friendly Range Rovers, or vow not to wing round her mammoth world tours on a private jet.

Alternatively, she could refrain from pumping £2.1 million of her personal fortune into oil companies such as BP and Alcoa. But no, she chose to sing us a song about how we had it within 'our' grasp to change the world.

The song, 'Hey You', may have had more of a chance of getting its message across if it wasn't so excruciatingly awful it didn't bare listening to.

"Hey you, Don't you give up, it's not so bad. There's still a chance for us," she sang, as her listeners began to hope the world would end within the next thirty seconds.

The chorus ended: "Poets and prophets would envy what we do. This could be good, hey you."

This was clearly disingenuous, it being obvious that Madonna likes to project herself as both a poet and a prophet, and quite probably something close to a living deity as well.

But she hadn't finished with the motivational pep talk. Before launching into 'Ray of light' she decided to scream "make some noise, motherf***ers" at a bemused and mildly insulted crowd.

When Gore was asked if he had persuaded Madonna to stop using private jets, he said: "Well, I appreciate and respect her as an artist and as a person, and there are many artists who are offsetting their role in contributing to the CO2 build-up, and I understand that."

He could have conserved a useful amount of energy by just saying "no".

Madonna was not the only performer whose credentials suggest they are of a less-than green hue. Johnny Borrell, for example, led Razorlight straight out of Wembley and onto a tour bus to the airport in order to fly off to T in the Park in Scotland. The ozone layer won't have been harmed though, because Johnny assured everyone that they would be planting trees to compensate. Phew!

Luckily, all rock stars are not hypocrites; some refused to play. The Arctic Monkeys must have been one of the biggest UK targets for concert organisers, especially given their name's convenient connection to melting ice caps. Refreshingly, they pointed out that they fly a lot and "use enough power for 10 houses just for stage lighting," before politely declining.

Muse frontman Matt Bellamy called it the concerts "private jets for climate change," while Radiohead took a rain-check despite being renowned for their 'green' crusading.

The man who hit the nail on the head, however, was the original mammoth concert organiser himself, Bob Geldof. His scathing summation, pre-event, was that without any firm commitments from politicians the whole thing was pointless and futile.

The event organisers insist the whole thing was carbon neutral. They tried their best with stage back drops made of tires, energy saving lights and recycling bins but, of course, the end result was that Live Earth was about as neutral a Formula One car in fifth gear.

But that's not the point. Had the concert persuaded the world to change its ways it would have been worth all the rock stars polluting the skies and the litter strewn across stadiums worldwide. Thousands of people texted in to sign up to seven pledges, which included such abstract, vague commitments as demanding that your country sign up to a treaty to cut carbon emissions, and a promise to "demand" that your government cease the "construction of any new generating facility that burns coal without the capacity to safely trap and store the C02".

The notable lack of any mass protests and placard waving outside parliament since speaks volumes.

The people who went to Wembley were there to be entertained. Sure, they cheered when the stars made calls for change, but not half as loudly as they did when they shut up and began to play.

When British actor Terrence Stamp took to the stage before Madonna to deliver a sombre speech demanding that we realise the gravity of the situation, it was made abundantly clear what everyone was there for. As Stamp spoke in the dark - all non-essential lights dimmed as a symbolic gesture - he was almost drowned out by the sound of 70,000 people rustling in their seats and shuffling on their feet, willing him to get to the bit where he left and Madonna appeared. The idea that these people left with their day-to-day behaviour transformed is ludicrous.

In the battle of pop vs climate change, it would seem they both came out winners.

Ultimately, the main legacy of Live Earth will be the shifting of a few more albums for the acts on show - lets just hope all those extra customers recycle their receipts.

By Robbie McIntyre.

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