Live 8 warms up as McCartney rocks London – Yahoo! News
LONDON (Reuters) – Paul McCartney and U2’s Bono fired up a huge London crowd with “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” on Saturday for the anti-poverty crusade, Live 8, the biggest music event ever staged.
Starting the show with the familiar lyrics: “It was 20 years ago today,” ex-Beatle McCartney harked straight back to the 1985 Live Aid concerts.
Back then, a new standard in fund-raising was achieved by organizer Bob Geldof to help the victims of Ethiopia’s famine.
This time, Irish rocker Geldof wants up to a million people to attend 10 shows across four continents to pressure world leaders meeting next week to do more to end extreme poverty.
“Mahatma Gandhi freed a continent, Martin Luther King freed a people, Nelson Mandela freed a country. It does work — they will listen,” he told some 200,000 people in London’s Hyde Park.
Bono, another key celebrity campaigner, summed up the message: “We’re not asking you to put your hand in your pockets but we are asking people to put their fist in the air.”
