Bob Geldof and His Work
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Happy New Year!

And remember that because of fans and supporters like you, 30,000 children won't needlessly die of poverty every single day.

In 2006, let us continue to hold the G8 responsible to its agreements. God bless you all.

Live 8 DVD Update

EXCLUSIVE Announcement: Disc 4 Tracklisting

At last we are able to confirm the full tracklisting for the 4th disc on the forthcoming official Live 8 DVD. Its a pretty eclectic mix we have to say, but then thats what Live 8 was all about. Where else would you see Shakira and Audioslave on the same disc. Bringing together the highlights from the Tokyo, Paris and Scottish shows as well as the big guns from London, its a superb addition to an already amazing DVD!

DISC 4 EXTRAS

EDINBURGH CONCERT

The Walk to Edinburgh - Highland Fling
The Proclaimers - I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)
Wet Wet Wet - Love Is All Around
1 Giant Leap - My Culture
George Clooney
Annie Lennox - Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves
Bono
Nelson Mandela
Bob Geldof - The Great Song Of Indifference
The Thrills - Santa Cruz (You're Not That Far)
Herbert Gronemeyer & Claudia Schiffer
Midge Ure & Eddie Izzard - Vienna
Texas - Say What You Want
Katherine Jenkins - Nessun Dorma
Travis - Why Does It Always Rain On Me?
James Brown - I Got You (I Feel Good)
James Brown & Will Young - Papa's Got A Brand New Bag
Bob Geldof, Bono, Midge Ure
Murrayfield crowd - Flower Of Scotland
McFly - All About You (Live 8 Tokyo)
Good Charlotte - Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous (Live 8 Tokyo)
Dreams Come True - Love Love Love (Live 8 Tokyo)
Bjork - All Is Full Of Love (Live 8 Tokyo)
Tim McGraw - Live Like You Were Dying (Live 8 Roma)
Faith Hill - Breathe (Live 8 Roma)
Shakira - Whenever, Wherever (Live 8 Paris)
Audioslave - Black Hole Sun (Live 8 Berlin)
Audioslave - Like A Stone (Live 8 Berlin)
"Who Are You?" Film - The Who
"Why Does It Always Rain On Me?" film - Travis

Ricky Gervais - Enjoy the day

Backstage at Hyde Park
Pink Floyd rehearsal and interview footage

SPECIAL thanks to http://www.live8livedvd.com, via http://www.brain-damage.co.uk.

Could It Be True?

Debt Wiped Out For World's Poorest

Monday September 26, 11:44 AM

Financial leaders have finally agreed to wipe out £22.5bn worth of debts for the world's poorest countries.The International Monetary Fund and World Bank have agreed to the deal drafted by G8 leaders which followed worldwide protests earlier in the year. "From concert stadiums to high-profile summits, people from rich and poor countries alike have been moved by the suffering we see in so many parts or the world," World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz said.

"They have demanded action, and with this debt relief agreement they have it."

The decisions now go to the executive boards of the two institutions, where they are expected to be approved.

There has been concern that cancelling the repayments for the 18 poorest countries would compromise the World Bank's ability to continue lending to others.

However, the G8 has issued a written pledge to cover the full cost.

The pledge came despite fears for the health of the world economy in the face of rising energy costs.

Oxfam estimates poor countries spend £50m a day on debt repayments, diverting precious resources away from critical social and development needs.

09.25.05

DATA REACTION TO IMF-WORLD BANK DEBT CANCELLATION DEAL

DATA REACTION TO IMF-WORLD BANK DEBT CANCELLATION DEAL

Under pressure from global campaigners and in keeping with the G8 debt cancellation proposal, the World Bank and IMF have agreed to 100% debt cancellation for up to 38 of the world's poorest countries. Upon implementation, this deal will free up to $1.5 billion annually for some of the world's poorest countries to spend on the healthcare and education of their people.

REACTION FROM BONO, U2 LEAD SINGER AND CO-FOUNDER OF DATA:

"It's been a long road and it doesn't end here, but it's worth stopping to acknowledge what this means. This means that the greatest protest movement since anti apartheid in the 80s and civil rights in the 60s has prevailed with a combination of common sense and relentlessness. The politicians have had to listen. Their consciences have been pricked from every imaginable corner - by the church, student groups, the NGO community, musicians, movie stars and soccer moms.

This is a great day for the poorest people on the planet, who up to now have been misspending what little resources they have paying back ancient loans to rich countries instead of educating and caring for their own. This is not a charity issue, this is a justice issue. It is a cruel world indeed that imprisons the grandchildren for their grandparents' dealings with loan sharks.

The next injustice to be torn down is the bullying tactics at the WTO. The same people that brought about the progress today will be out on the streets again to prevent December's meeting from becoming the fiasco insiders predict."

REACTION FROM BOB GELDOF, LIVE 8 ORGANISER:

"This debt deal will benefit tens of millions of the poorest people on the planet. This, as we have always said, is only a beginning, but, what a beginning. The deal should be implemented without delay with no strings attached save that countries use the money transparently to tackle poverty, hunger, disease and illiteracy.

We now, of course, must move forward on implementing the doubling of aid to Africa as agreed, deepening and widening this debt deal to include more countries and most immediately working to secure a breakthrough on trade justice in Hong Kong.

Today, however, let us in particular congratulate the non-G8 countries, some of whom had legitimate national concerns over this deal and yet put them aside in the interests of the poorest people on the planet. Let us also congratulate Gordon Brown for his tireless efforts driving this forward.

And finally, let us congratulate everyone who has campaigned this year and who turned out for Live 8 to focus the world's attention and drive this plan through the process at such a speed. This stuff works."

REACTION FROM OLIVER BUSTON, DATA EUROPEAN DIRECTOR:

"This debt deal is a significant step forward for some of the poorest people on the planet. It should be implemented immediately and the only condition should be that the new funds are used transparently to tackle poverty.

Debt cancellation should also be considered for other poor countries, such as Kenya, where it is needed to accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. Those goals will only be reached if rich countries urgently deliver on the commitments they have made to increase aid by $50 billion and if there is a breakthrough on trade justice at the Hong Kong WTO meeting in December.

This debt deal is a victory and momentum builder for the millions of people around the world who have campaigned for debt cancellation, more and better aid and trade reform this year, including nearly two million Americans as part of the ONE campaign."

Click here to download DATA reaction

"I Hope This Will Be The Biggest Selling DVD Of All Time."

THE GREATEST SHOWS ON EARTH TO BE RELEASED ON DVD

EMI are proud to announce the DVD release of Live 8
7 November 2005 (8 November 2005 - US)

Live 8 DVD

"It was twenty years ago today", sang Paul McCartney and Bono as they opened Live 8 on July 2nd 2005. "Some of you were here twenty years ago, some of you were not even born.
I want to show you why we started this long, long walk to justice", went on to say Sir Bob Geldof. Here at last is the Live8 DVD. A four disc boxset, jam packed with never to be repeated performances by Elton John, Coldplay, Richard Ashcroft, Pink Floyd, Madonna, Robbie Williams, U2, Annie Lennox and many more.

"I hope this will be the biggest selling DVD of all time. It deserves to be. More importantly perhaps, it should be, for it will help us achieve our goal of changing the lives of the extreme poor for the better and making our generation the one that helped end the disgrace of poverty."
Says Live 8 organiser Sir Bob Geldof.

Money raised from sales of the Live 8 DVD will go to the Band Aid Trust for the relief of hunger and poverty in Africa.

Live 8 was held on 2 July 2005. Nine simultaneous, free concerts starring the cream of international rock and pop artists were staged in London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Tokyo, Moscow, Toronto, Johannesburg and Philadelphia. The concerts acted as a starting point for The Long Walk To Justice in support of the Make Poverty History and Global Call To Action campaigns and was timed to focus attention on the critical decisions made by the G8 summit four days later.

The much-anticipated 4 DVD release of the Live 8 concerts was fully announced today, giving full detail of the tracklisting and extra features, and additional international single discs, concentrating on individual shows, were also announced.

There is fantastic news for Pink Floyd fans, as the headline-making reunion with Roger Waters is included in full on the main set.

What makes the release particularly important (apart from the proceeds going to charity), and interesting, is that they are also including footage of the Floyd's rehearsals for the concert!

As yet, we don't know the extent of the footage, or which rehearsals are included - either the dress rehearsals in Hyde Park, or the main rehearsals in the North London studios they used for three days prior to the show.

We're just waiting for the PR company handling the release to confirm this to us - but we are sure they've been deluged with enquiries since they put out the announcement!

Here's the full announcement, with the tracklisting of the four discs:

THE GREATEST SHOWS ON EARTH TO BE RELEASED ON DVD
EMI are proud to announce the DVD release of Live 8 on 7th November 2005 (8th November - USA)

Live 8 - One Day One Concert One World

Live 8 DVD - international single discs

TRACKLISTING - Disc 1

TRACKLISTING - Disc 2

TRACKLISTING - Disc 3

Pink Floyd - Speak To Me
Pink Floyd - Breathe
Pink Floyd - Money
Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
Pink Floyd - Comfortably Numb

TRACKLISTING - Disc 4 - EXTRAS

Pink Floyd rehearsal

DVD SPECIFICATIONS:

http://www.brain-damage.co.uk

http://www.live8livedvd.com/

Feed The World

I recently bought Live Aid whilst on my vacation to mainland USA. I have since returned, and watched it all yesterday. What in incredible event, laid out very well on the four disc DVD set.

I'd like to point out that AOL Music is still rebroadcasting Live 8, which I had figured would have ended before my return. This is good news because you can still watch, and bad news simply because I was wrong.

Lastly, I'd like to point out that I appreciate the number of hits I have received since I left. "I thank you all."

OUT NOW!
The Official Live8 Book
published on 1st August 2005 by Random House/Century

With a foreword by Bob Geldof and over 300 colour photographs, this is the only official Live8 book to be published, and charts one of the most momentous days the world has seen in decades. For every copy sold ?5 will go to Live8.

From Geldof's initial reluctance to stage another Band Aid event to the lead up to the concerts around the world and the day itself, this book is a unique record of an extraordinary day witnessed by over 85% of the world's population.

The book will also contain backstage images, exclusive photographs from the concerts around the world, reflections and quotes from the many performers.

Live 8 includes text and pictures reminding us exactly what the day was about and what is now required in the battle towards making poverty history. Includes reflections on the outcome of the landmark G8 summit in Edinburgh.

Price £15.99 - CLICK here to order your copies.

Three days ago, in the late bright afternoon, I wandered across the scissor-mown lawns at Gleneagles. I found a little clearing amongst some trees and hunched down. Overhead the humming bird helicopters clattered and thumped in the evening air as the world's most powerful people left what the Secretary General of the United Nations called the most successful and important G8 Summit for Africa there has ever been.

They couldn't see or hear me and I didn't really understand it, but I began to sob. I felt weird, empty. I don't know? it was over. It was over.

Because of this thing - this concert, event, lobby, protest, gathering, moment. Because of you. And the bands. And the crews and technicians and thousands of people who made this thing that was Live 8. Because of all this, the men in those helicopters had just written a cheque to double aid to $50 billion for the poor of Africa over the next few years. Unbelievable.

I thought, 'Now we have to make sure they cash it', and we will. We will get them to spend the money, we will name the corrupt who try to take one percent of it and we will speed up the 100% debt cancellation for the poorest countries that was also confirmed at Gleneagles.

I think I cried because I was never sure it was going to work. That billions of us could force the men in charge to move. I was worried that they would remain forever remote, unreachable in the isolated vacuum of their national power. But it did work. In the end there were just too many of us.

In other places in this book you will see what it was all about and what it means for the future of the poorest and weakest people in our world. You already know how we roared on behalf of those who were mute, how we moved power for the powerless, how we walked that long walk for many who cannot even crawl and how billions of us stood up for the beaten down and put-upon.

We were lead there by our bands, by musicians who articulate us better than we can ourselves. They talk a language understood by all humanity, and they have lead us on this long 20 year journey from Live Aid. In their music is the sum of our longing for universal decency. They communicate dismay and disgust at the daily carnival of dying that parades across our TV screens. In the nightly pornography of poverty hundreds of thousands die annually simply because they are too poor to stay alive.

What a glorious, magnificent day. What a rejection of the defeat of cynicism, I thought as I watched the TV monitor side stage showing me four continents, nine countries and their greatest artists, nine cities and their greatest sites, millions physically present and thousands of millions spiritually there as we watched this one concert, one moment, one idea winding itself around what was truly one world that afternoon. And then I got a bizarre tickling sensation, thinking just maybe this is going to work.

Three days ago, crouched down among the chopper beaten trees of Gleneagles I was shocked that 'the plan' had indeed worked. The Commission for Africa on which I worked was no longer just a theory for the reconstruction of a continents economic life and, as a result, a better life for its inhabitants, it was a paid up reality.

The long walk. Over. The Summit . Over. The concert? The concert plays out daily in my head. The magnificent bands. The brilliant young Turks and the ageless greats. I know them - they are not like what you read. They are not the mean-spirited midgets those tiny thorns of tabloid spite would have you believe. I know them as they appeared on that stage. They are great. And they are good.

As are you. At home. In the parks or street or stadia or squares of the world on 2^nd July 2005. This was the day we pulled it off. This was the day the powerful were powerless. When they bent in the force of our noisy gale. When we drowned out their endless No's by our boundless Yes. Where the promise of 20 years ago was realised. Everything that rock 'n' roll and had ever been about to me, or seemed to suggest or vaguely promised was made real on that beautiful day.

We should never need another event like it. But if we do, new generations know what must be done and they will not fail. The power of this wild music to call us to gather 'bout the electronic hearth of the TV or PC screen will continue. But will it, can it ever be expressed with such power, such elegance, passion and joy as on the summers day last week?

My phone rang. I'd had it on 'loudspeaker' for weeks because it was constantly in use and I feared imminent brain cancer, ear rot, overheated temples or whatever. Now with the helicopter noise I couldn't hear. I put it on 'normal' and tried to listen. I had to go. I wiped my eyes and stopped myself being shaky. Didn't want to look silly.

That's it for me, I thought, as I clambered into our mini van. On the ground the riot police and machine gunned army waved us past the great security fences. Overhead the choppers thundered away across the glens carrying the men you had made listen.

I will never forget that day. Neither will you. Neither must you. Tell your children you were there. That you watched. That you changed the world. You and your mates. All 3.8 billion of them. And when they say why? Tell them that you couldn't stand it. It wasn't fair. It wasn't right. A great injustice was being done. Tell them you were not powerless. Tell them that the bands played and you danced and sang and laughed and in so doing you allowed others you would never see or meet to do the same some day in the future.

We played our hearts out. 'And we played real good for free.' Thanks for everything.

Bob Geldof

God bless you, Bob.

Live 8

On July 2, 2005, Bob Geldof held Live 8. "This is not Live Aid 2," he declared. Instead of wanting money, he asked people to watch and learn about the G8 summit to voice support in duobling more and better aid, as well as canceling debt. There were a total of nine simultaneous concerts - Hyde Park, London, England; Palais de Versailles, Paris, France; Siegessaule, Berlin, Germany; Circus Maximus, Rome, Italy; Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA; Park Place, Barrie, Canada; Makuhari Messe, Tokyo, Japan; Mary Fitzgerald Square, Newton, Johannesburg, South Africa; and Red Square, Moscow, Russia.While a lot of footage was not shown, highlighting performers included: Annie Lennox, Sir Bob Geldof, Coldplay, Dido with Youssou N'Dour, Sir Elton John, Joss Stone, Keane, The Killers, Madonna, Mariah Carey, Sir Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd (reunion), REM, Snoop Dogg, Snow Patrol, Sting, U2, The Who, Velvet Revolver, The Cure, Sheryl Crow, a-ha, Audioslave, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Green Day, Duran Duran, Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, Alicia Keys, Black Eyed Peas, Bon Jovi, Dave Matthews Band, Def Leppard, Destiny's Child (reunion), Jay-Z and Linkin Park, Maroon 5, P Diddy, Sarah McLachlan, Stevie Wonder, Toby Keith, Barenaked Ladies, Bryan Adams, DMC, Deep Purple, Motley Crue, Simple Plan, Bjork, and Good Charlotte. In total, over 150 artists/bands performed, making it the largest concert ever. Over 200,000 people were at London. An estimated 1 million were at Philadelphia. And yet with all of this, VH1 and MTV's coverage were exactly the same. That was saddening because the coverage was very bad. They cut away from The Who's "We Won't Get Fooled Again." They desecrated Pink Floyd. After reuniting from almost a quarter century of lawsuits and anger, the band came together to steal the show. It was the only act to have every song shown. During possibly their last performance, they played possibly their last song together, "Comfortably Numb" from The Wall, the epitomal rock song of our time. The last solo of Pink Floyd (David Gilmour) was cut out for a Bad News Bears advertisement. Viacom owns the rights to the new Bad News Bears, as well as MTV and VH1. One man started an auction on eBay to legally change his name to MTV Sucks if enough money was raised. An online protest is still in effect. In light of the anger, MTV and VH1 decided to reair the event. Each channel took five hours of mostly different coverage, and showed it uninterupted for a consecutive ten hour period. I missed this, as I was at a youth gathering in Seattle. But, most performances are available for free at AOL Music (right here): http://music.aol.com/live_8_concert/home/london_ondemand.adp.

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Debt Wiped Out For World's Poorest

THE GREATEST SHOWS ON EARTH TO BE RELEASED ON DVD

EMI are proud to announce the DVD release of Live 8 7 November 2005 (8 November 2005 - US)

EMI are proud to announce the DVD release of Live 8
7 November 2005 (8 November 2005 - US)