London Live 8

What can we say? This was quite the concert. Unfortunately, we weren't able to get tickets to go down to Hyde park and see it live, but we were able to watch it from one of the big screens in Regent's Park about 15 minutes away. There were 200 thousand people in Hyde park, and about another 60 thousand people watching it on big screens around the UK. Regent's Park was setup very nicely with lots of portable toilets and police, medical and cleaning staff. They do a very good job with event organization in London.

The concert itself was amazing. We were in the park for 12 hours watching the various performers in London and around the world. We even saw a little bit of the Barrie concert, we all yelled when we saw Our Lady Peace come on screen. But they were certainly biased towards the Philadelphia, Berlin and Paris shows.

It was a very powerful concert. There was a great point where we were synced up live with the Philadelphia concert, and Will Smith came on and said hello to all the concerts around the world (that were currently going) and got everyone to snap their fingers every three seconds to symbolize the preventable death of a child in Africa. They panned from city to city watching the millions of people gathered snapping their fingers. It was very effective.

It was pretty chilly in London, we had to were our Jackets, but jumping around helped. For me, highlights were when Paul McCartney and U2 played Sargent Peppers Lonely Heart Club Band together. Also, The Who and Pink Floyd played. This was the first time in 24 years that Pink Floyd played together. They honestly sounded almost exactly as they did on their albums 30+ years ago.

Highlights for Laura were Madonna who put on an amazing performance, she's very good at getting the crowd going. REM and Coldplay were also very good. We both agreed that Snoop Dog was a little out of place, and on for way too long. She thought Anne Lennox was phenomenal.

If anyone has seen the British sitcom "The Office", the guy who was the boss was on stage a little bit doing some improv stand up comedy and was hilarious.

Overall, it was 12 hours well spent, and we hope it is effective in changing public perception and in creating change. For those of you who didn't sign up on the Live 8 petition, you can do it here.

We've been watching parts of the Toronto concert. It looked pretty good considering they only had one week to put it together. To watch the concerts from the various cities you can go here.

You can see all the pictures here.