Channel Live

We're still caatching up on our sleep from the homeland adventchah, and mostly lolling around the house. So, rather than queue up for fish with the concerned Slopers up at Prospect Park, we've been watching Live 8. We've been watching it much more than we'd planned, in fact. We were watching it live from a bunch of places through the Aol Stream.

We saw some Green Day, who got the mood right, a bit of REM, who are always strangely ungripping in concert, caught a snatch of Bowie playing "Heroes", which was good, and a bunch of fluff like Dido, Coldplay, Destiny's Child, and The Children.

And now Pink Floyd are playing "Wish You Were Here", which has no relevance to poverty, little to the fact they've reformed, and everything to do with a crazy, acid-wrecked recluse living in Cambridge. They were playing "Money" when it started, which was pressing the right socio-political buttons, but it's over. In facct we're so slow at typing they've moved on to "Comfortably Numb". Bugger. Still it's got the Scissor Sisters acolytes moving, or it would iif they weren't so stoned and their faux-hawks soo unstable.

Since we a teenage Floyder long after they split up, the sight of Roger Waters and Dave Gilmour sharing a stage isn't that dissonant. Certainly the sound isn't hugely different from the anodyne noises of either the The Wall as recreated by Roger Waters, or Delecate Sound of Thunder. Gilmour looks shiny, is dresssed in a rather boring fashion, and Waters looks likea grimmer Bill Maher, open-necked shirt and flowing gray hair. The lights are boring.

Whhat gets us is that Pink Floyd used to make deeply ambiguous statements about the value of rock star pomposity, and their claim to moral, let alone, political, authority. They made them in a hugely ponderous fashion, and then made the Final Cut a Waters-penned anti-Thatcher diatribe. But we hoped they were more cynical.

Do we think that Live 8 got the tone right? Was this raising awareness just going to raise Floyd album sales? Probably, although if debt relief is the only political idea moving through the heads of the grockles this week, then that's probably no bad thing. And it's a truism that a small number of idiots can swing large elections. But we're still deeply amused at the exercise, and commend you to head on up instead to the Rub, which Ninjuno Nougermment suggests you rock tonite. If we weren't to be fed by cutesome, we might agree.