Live 8 and the Live Music

So I spent most of the day on Saturday watching the "Live 8" concert. I also spent a fair amount of time watching the Glastonbury festival. The Glastonbury festival is one of England's largest popular music festivals. It is a weekend long, thousands of people come and camp, and it always rains (kind of like Wimbledon).

I love watching live music. It brings together so many elements that are fascinating to me. I love watching how the stage is set up, the different mics, speakers, mixers, amplifiers, guitars, and gear that are used. I love seeing how the musicians present themselves on stage. All of the posturing to look cool, some trying way too hard to get the crowd going, some looking way too miserable, or angry.

Most of all I love to see how well they can perform their music live. Nothing puts me off more than a band who gets up to play, and then has a backing track playing with all kinds of prerecorded instruments and sound effects and backing vocals. If I want to listen to a recording, I'll put on the CD. I don't expect the band to sound exactly like the album (especially with today's heavily produced music), in fact I look forward to hearing a different live rendition of the songs.

I actually really enjoyed some of the bands. Paul McCartney played "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" with U2 which was really cool (especially the four French horn players who played the horn part). McCartney said that he had never performed the song live before.

Coldplay put on a great show as always, although Chris Martin (the lead singer, and usually piano player) made several mistakes while playing guitar and once had to start a song over again. I do expect more from a full time professional band, but it does make me feel a little better about myself. I make that kind of mistake all the time, but at best I practice my music for an hour a night.

Usually, I am completely opposed to anything that resembles pop music, but there were a couple of bands that I really liked. One of them was a British band called Razorlight. They have really good songs, good vocals, and great sounding guitars. The downside was that the lead singer did this "Jim Morrison" kind of a thing where he stripped his shirt off (nothing like a pale, flabby English boy in tight white jeans) and ran around in the crowd. Another guy who was really good was Craig David. He is an R&B singer who had only an acoustic guitar player backing him (no convoluted thumping rhythm track). The Acoustic guitar player was amazing and the vocals were spot on.

One last confession. I saw Will Smith playing at the Philly concert and I really liked it. He was doing "Summer Summer Summer Summer Time", and I got a little nostalgic for the old American summer. For the first time I realized that Monday was the fourth of July, and I would be working.