LIVE 8— WHAT A DIFFERENCE
A DAY MADE

One Final Question
SIR BOB GELDOF
A year on from Live 8, he’s still making the world listen

Sir Bob, tell us about Live 8— What a Difference a Day Made...

It’s an hour-long film to mark the anniversary of Live 8 and it cuts between all ten of the concerts from around the world. There are two issues behind it. I want to inform people about what actually happened, because I don’t think there’s a lot of knowledge about that. The second thing is that during the day the BBC didn’t show a lot of the films that were shown at the event.
It wasn’t just a music fest. Because you put so many concerts on simultaneously around the world, you’ve got to try and do films that show everyone what’s going on, what it’s about, why we’re focusing on eight men in a room [the 2005 G8 Summit at Gleneagles]. This wasn’t a cultural event — it was a political device.

It turns out three billion people watched Live 8 worldwide last year — do you wish now that you’d brushed your hair?

Erm, [giggling] no. Because I was wearing a hat.

What’s your fondest Live 8 memory?

The performances stand out, sure. But when we brought on Birhan the girl we saw 20 years ago at Live Aid with ten minutes to live, who really made the whole f***ing world get on the phone and give money — and then finding her now, this perfect exemplar of human potential:
alive, thriving, gorgeous, brilliant, who’d just completed her agricultural exams in a village in northern Ethiopia. . . Finding that girl, bringing her out, that was the polar moment of Live 8. I’m serious when I say this — if all the effort of the past 20 years was just her, then it would have been worth it.

Looking back a year on — was it worth all the hassle?

Yes, it was. I felt we’d succeeded straight after Gleneagles. I was very tired, because it had been a long, long road to get people to understand the structure of the poverty in Africa. But how do you get it implemented?
Initially, I wasn’t interested in doing a concert—we’d done that; it could not be bigger; it could not be more successful. As far as the issues went, here in the UK the place was hopping. We’d even got a bit bored of Geldof c****ing on about the G8...
Uh-huh.
but elsewhere they didn’t give a toss — not the punters, but the
politicians. How do you get Berlin and Rome and Washington off their a***s? They all had terrible economic problems themselves. Bono and Richard Curtis were saying, “There’s no heat. There’s no heat.” The concert was the thing that would make the politicians sit up. Suddenly, they were focusing very clearly on it. You can make poverty history — that’s literally empirical; it’s not some sort of idealistic b******s. That was the whole point.
Politicians aren’t great at keeping promises. How have they done?
First you have to understand that the issues we did this for were debt and aid. Debt’s the really good news — they agreed to cancel the unpayable debt of the world’s poorest continent.
As we speak, a year later, 20 countries have had their debts cancelled. What does that mean? In Tanzania, 1.5 million children are education. It’s a vast percentage, in one single stroke of a pen. When these promises are kept, five million people, who would otherwise be dead, will live; 21 million children will be in schools; and right now 290 million people are free of debt slavery for the first time. As a direct result of last year.
On aid, the leaders agreed to double aid to Africa by 2010. They really didn’t want to, which is why your question is very valid. But they signed up. Are they going to do it? We’re very worried about Italy, because we just don’t see how they’re going to do it. But the motivation’s there. I spoke to [Italian PM] Romano Prodi before the election and he said that he’d do it. The Germans: when Angela Merkel was elected, she said she’d follow the Gleneagles commitment. This promise must be kept; and we will ensure that it is.

You have world leaders on speed-dial?

I can ask for phone conversations. Sometimes it comes, and sometimes the development minister will speak to you — which is often far better. With [Tony] Blair it’s not difficult, because he shares our concerns.

Five days after Live 8, the G8 leaders met. If you bumped into all of them in the pub today, what would you say?

That’s a good question. The thing I’d say is: “Not fast enough.” We don’t want to have to cajole and bludgeon our way towards 2010. It’s viable now.

One final question: given that you do so much good in the world, why are you such a grumpy old sod sometimes?

It’s not sometimes. You never get anything done if you’re not grumpy. All this good work stuff is just a desperate attempt to make myself “ungrumpy”. When it’s sorted, I won’t be grumpy any more.
Bob Geldof was talking to Benji Wilson

(sorry could not get the pic copied as well, but full transcript)
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