Keith Urban | Take It Easy

Last week I played a set of songs from the London concert for Live 8 – it’s here if you missed it – and said that I would also be playing a selection from other concerts around the world for the event. So here we are. There is no particular order to these: they are just songs I enjoyed from the various concerts to give you a feel for what took place. And I managed to find two which show the international co-operation for these shows, as they are British acts playing in another country.

Let’s start with one of those:

That was, of course, The Kaiser Chiefs with I Predict A Riot opening the US show which, like the Live Aid show twenty years previously, was held in Philadelphia. This time it took place in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with a densely packed audience stretched out for a mile along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Estimates vary as to the crowd size, and of course the numbers will have changed during the duration, but it is reasonable to accept that around 1m may have attended at some point. I wonder what the view was like from the back?

My second tune is also from the US show, by a guy who has both US and Australian citizenship, and seems to have brought along one of his movie star wife’s friends to do his intro:

Keith Urban, with Days Go By, beginning the evening segment of the show, which is why I think Naomi Watts gave her little speech to remind everyone what the point of the whole thing was. And Keith put on a lively performance of one of my favourites of his songs.

If asked to name famous French rock musicians those of my generation would probably have managed one: Johnny Hallyday. For the French Live 8 concert, one of the performers was his son, David Hallyday, who has also enjoyed a good career in music. This is him doing a version of a big Seventies hit:

In case you don’t know it, that was My Sharona, which was the debut single for The Knack in June 1979, and made #1 in the US, Australia and Canada, and #6 in the UK. David Hallyday has released thirteen albums from 1988 up to this year, but I don’t pretend to know much about them. He is also an actor and amateur sports car racer, and has taken part several times in the Le Mans 24 Hour Race. With a background like that I just had to include him! And in case you are wondering, that big house in the background is the Palace of Versailles – I hope the inhabitants didn’t mind the intrusion!

I said at the beginning that I would be playing two songs by British acts playing elsewhere. This is the second of those:

Following the lead of Ricky Wilson of The Kaiser Chiefs: “more cowbell.” That was of course Roxy Music playing Love Is The Drug in the German show, which was held in Berlin. Given that the song was first released thirty years earlier Bryan Ferry still looks remarkably youthful, though some of the original band members seem to have been replaced by gorgeous young women. Typical of his style! In keeping with the multi-cultural theme of the day, this show also included many visitors from elsewhere: several from the UK, Green Day, Brian Wilson, a-ha, and you can thank me for not inflicting Chris de Burgh on you: yes, he did THAT one!

I’m going back across the pond for three more to close this set. First, one from Canada:

I have played Great Big Sea before, but not often. They are a Canadian band – now retired – whose repertoire contained a lot of folk-based songs and sea shanties, like Donkey Riding. I love their music, and will even forgive them for getting a big hit in Canada with an inferior copy of Oysterband’s When I’m Up! Everything about them was fun, as this video shows. And if the main vocalist in the black shirt looked a little familiar, that may be because you have seen him on TV. He is Alan Doyle, an actor who has appeared in several of the excellent TV shows from Canada that we have enjoyed here: Murdoch Mysteries, Republic of Doyle, Hudson & Rex among them.

Another Canadian native for you now, who also played at the Canadian show, which was held in Barrie, Ontario. You may well recognise him, and he brought his then-wife along to help him out:

Neil and Pegi Young with Four Strong Winds, a song for which he is well known but, unusually for him, didn’t write: that honour is due to another Canadian folk musician, Ian Tyson. It is a lovely song, originally recorded by Neil for his 1978 album Comes a Time. Nicolette Larson did the harmony vocal on that record, but I think Pegi does a great job with it here.

I wanted to close these songs with one which was the final one on the day. There don’t appear to have been the mass singalongs of Live Aid, but this was how the US concert finished, according to Wikipedia’s list. I think you might recognise him:

Superstition is one of Stevie Wonder’s signature tunes, so I think it was a good way to round off his set – as I am also doing. There were so many great performances across the Live 8 shows that I have barely touched the surface, but I hope I’ve given you a taste of them.

And one final thing before I leave you today. Part of the shows was a synchronised finger clicking, at three second intervals, to highlight the fact that every three seconds a child dies somewhere in the world. The concerts were staged to support efforts to reduce poverty, especially in Africa, and this is a poignant way to be reminded of that: