They said it was roughly what my reaction would be to Thatcher's death but I don't believe them because they were not singing and dancing.

By the way, its time to put a stop to that stereotype perpetuated by the old Spitting Image song "I've Never Met A Nice South African". During the 80's and 90's I met quite a few South Africans in London and Sydney and they were all fine people. I found it hard to reconcile this with the facts of apartheid until I realised the obvious: the ones I met were the ones who couldn't stand staying in such a place and decided to move out to somewhere a bit more civilised.

I do sometimes wonder if the whole thing might have been ended sooner if the more liberal S.Africans had stayed at home and campaigned instead of avoiding the issue, but I can't really blame them for wanting to get away from it.

Although hardly high art it was fun and catchy. As a good European, I like to keep an ear open for the best of mainland music as once you get beyond the generic Euro-pop there is some interesting stuff out there. (Ojos de Brujo from Spain, Manu Chao from France and Joachim Witt from Germany for example.)

Anyway, back to United Balls. A sample of the lyrics is:

aruba in Kuba
hey
only banana in Ghana.
Samba in Uganda
samba in Uganda -
pogo in Togo
pogo in Togo -
Coca-Cola in Angola
Coca-Cola in Angola.

A good verse to quote as it mentions three of the teams who have qualified from Africa for next year’s World Cup finals in Germany. Only Côte d’Ivoire is missing.

Having known someone from Togo and plenty from Ghana, I know what a big deal it must be for them. You only have to hear reports of the total warfare at Ghana/Côte d’Ivoire matches to know how seriously they take it. It must have been particularly satisfying for Angola to see off Nigeria.

So I bet there is some serious pogo-ing in Togo right now, much more than Coca-Cola being drunk in Angola and a lot more than bananas in Ghana. It may be difficult for the average Angolan to be able to afford to travel to Germany for a football tournament, but there are enough Ghanaians in Britain and Togolese and Ivorians in France to make it a lively place.

And England are through too of course, but I’m not getting my hopes up there.

It appears that the decision to run was clinched when he realised that the shirt number he always had with Milan (9) and the shirt number he had for his country (14) added together made 23 and that the elections this year are for the 23rd president of Liberia.

Can you imagine David Beckham doing that? Adding 9 and 14 together and getting the right answer I mean.

Sorry. Cheap joke that – he might be brighter than he seems, and he appears to be a decent enough bloke – but I couldn’t resist it.

Anyway, as a former African, European and World footballer of the year, he is probably the most famous Liberian, but will that be enough? We will find out in October.

The campaign to get Trevor Brooking to replace Tony Blair starts here!

It was two hours of highlights from a concert held in March this year in Dakar to raise awareness of the ongoing malaria crisis in Africa. For anyone at all interested in African music, the line-up for the show was more impressive than Live Aid and Live 8 put together.

There were Seun Kuti (with a guest appearance from Manu Dibango), Tinariwen, Oumou Sangare, Salif Keita, Youssou N’Dour, Orchestre Baobab, Baaba Maal, and Angelique Kidjo who I was already familiar with, and then a load of others who were all as good – Amazon are going to need extra storage to cope with how my wish list is going to expand now!

There were some documentary bits interspersed throughout. My favourites were at the beginning, showing how the whole things was set up. The first shot was of the football stadium, with a pair of massive vultures perched on the goalposts, and later on when the stage was set up, it was fun to see the frantic activity to try and remove the goalposts which were embedded in concrete right in front of the stage.

The most shocking moment was seeing what Andy Kershaw described as ‘a showcase open sewer’ running right next to the stadium where the concert was held, perfectly illustrating the scale of the problem when trying to combat malaria – with the Roll Back Malaria show happening within yards of a mosquito metropolis.

As for the music, it was just one highlight after another, and not a duff song in the whole two hours. The singer Corneille was a real phenomenon. He is from Rwanda, but settled in Canada after his family were all killed in the 1994 genocide, and this was his first visit back to the continent since then. His style is like an African Craig David. Not entirely my cup of tea, but worth it just to see the crowd reaction. Every female in the place seemed to know all the words to his song and joined in all the way through. There were tears and hysteria like a form of Beatlemania. Suddenly the world seemed smaller seeing the teenagers of Senegal behaving exactly the same as teenagers everywhere.

The climax to the show was Angelique Kidjo singing Malaika with just a single guitar accompaniment. She is starting to look a bit old now, but her voice is as powerful as ever. I find it impossible to hear her singing that song without getting the same goose-pimples I do when Pink Floyd do Comfortably Numb.

The concert was supposed to finish with Algerian superstar Khaled, but the airport officials in Brussels would not let him on the plane because he looked a bit foreign. And I am not making that up.

If this show was available on DVD I would buy it tomorrow and watch it all over again tomorrow night. It really was that good. Maybe it will come out on DVD one day, expanded to include more than one song from each artist.

And who was the British partner for this film? BBC Wales. Yes really. First Dr Who and now this. Its been a good year for BBC Wales.

(The programme is being repeated on Sunday night/Monday morning. Set the video)

I sort of enjoyed his first couple of books, so when I saw this for a pound or two in the remainder shop near work I thought it would be worth buying, but its starting to look as if it wasn’t even worth that meagre outlay.

It started with an overlong and rambling introduction which appeared to have no point whatsoever and consisted mostly of an extended list of unpleasant things the writer has eaten in obscure places. I was very tempted to just stop there and shove the book on the shelf unread.

When I read a couple of his other books they were annoying (Mr Biddlecombe comes across as a very smug know-it-all type) but had some interesting descriptions and let me visit a few places vicariously. They generally followed the normal travel book routine of describing visits to places and throwing in some background information probably gleaned from reference books.

The first couple of chapters of this book seemed to be mostly historical information and very little of his own personal experiences. I might as well read about Skopje and Pristina in an atlas! By now I really was going to give up, but the third chapter on Asuncion was quite amusing so I continued onto the next one about Kigali.

Thats when I really got pissed off. The chapter starts with references to the Rwandan genocide in April to July 1994 when the Hutus killed hundreds of thousands of Tutsis. Biddlecombe told of the quite disgraceful behaviour of the rest of the world in letting this happen, but he saves his worst criticism for Tony Blair, singling him out several times for not doing anything to help.

Peter Biddlecombe always likes to give the impression that he knows everything. Everywhere he goes he will tell you about the history, culture, customs, food, languauge and politics. Maybe he should spend more time at home and brush up on his British politics. Tony Blair was not Prime Minister until 1997 so he was hardly in a position to do anything. Not only that, he was not even the leader of the Labour party until July 1994.

I can’t say whether he would have done anything about Rwanda. I would like to think that he would at least have wanted to. He may have done a few things that some of us in the party are not happy with, but I can’t see how he can be blamed for the lack of UK intervention in something which happened while he was still sitting in Granita with Gordon Brown tossing a coin to see who would be leader of the opposition.

Anyone want to buy a half-read travel book?

In just a few hours we will be up at Hyde Park. We have just been planning our route and decided that walking from Victoria is probably the best option. We will aim to get there early enough that we can walk up Park Lane and see the Pride march coming the other way. (Note to self: must dig out my old Gay Pride whistle)

Should be a good day, even if it wouldn’t be my choice of bands. On the good side everyone is supposed to have a strict 15 minute time limit so I won’t have to put with Annie Lennox for too long. But that does mean Pink Floyd only get a couple of songs. I’m sure the Guardian today listed The Who as an act – something which is not reflected on the Live 8 web site. If they are there (even just the two survivors) it will be a bonus.

I wish we could pic & mix from all the world events. I would have Pink Floyd, The Killers, REM, U2, Scissor Sisters & Snoop Dogg from London, The Cure, Faudel, Muse & Yannick Noah from Paris, Brian Wilson, Die Toten Hosen, Faithless & Green Day from Berlin, Stevie Wonder & Kaiser Chiefs from Philadelphia, Deep Purple from Barrie, Orchestre Baobab & Oumou Sangare from Jo’burg, Pet Shop Boys from Moscow and Angelique Kidjo, Tinariwen and Daara J from the Eden Project + Youssou N’Dour from wherever he is.

I didn’t fancy any of the Italian acts. But I know next to nothing of Italian music. The only names I know are Zucchero and Jovanotti, but I don’t really like them much. I obviously spent too much time seeking out French, German and Spanish music and neglected the Italians, and now I don’t know where to start.

Looking at the site, I see Manu Chao has disappeared. I wonder what happened there. Maybe he is travelling up to Scotland instead to take part in the protests. He does have a history of being involved in G8 demonstrations.

There was a lot of dead time. TV viewers may not have noticed, as these were opportunities to switch back to Jonathan Ross for some interviews, but in the field there was a lot of time spent doing nothing. It is only a combination of it all being for a good cause and being free that prevented a lot of restlessness.

The root of it all must have been the need to dismantle equipment and set up for the next act, combined with the number of acts and the shortness of their sets.

In one way the short sets had advantages. It enabled artists to go out and do their best or most popular songs. It was like seeing a whole day of encores in a way. It also meant that if you didn’t like someone you would not have to put up with them for too long.

The disadvantages were that nobody really got a chance to stretch themselves in time slots which were as short as five minutes, and that shorter sets lead to proportionately more time spent on the logistics of getting the next band ready. Just do the maths. If it takes 10 minutes to revolve the stage and be ready for another act, and each act performed for 10 minutes then 50% of the time would be dead time. If, on the other hand acts all played for 20 minutes then only 33% of the time would be dead. Extend it to 30 minutes for each act and the dead time goes down to 25%.

Having fewer artists would have helped. But another idea would be to have a ‘house band’ or a band acting in that capacity. They could do some of their own songs then have guests come on to play with them – like the Freddie Mercury tribute concert or The Last Waltz, or like Coldplay did with Richard Ashcroft. You could leave one band on for an hour and have several guest artists do a song or two in the middle of it.

Singers like Dido, Annie Lennox and Sting could have performed their songs with a house band.

Having a taller stage would have helped a lot too. What is the point of having a stage ‘the height of 5 double decker buses’ if the artists are still performing a couple of metres above the ground level in a flat field?

Apart from the onstage frustrations, the rest of the organisation was very impressive. I saw no police in the enclosure at all, with any enforcement carried out by stewards. The toilets were reasonable (although I only visited them near the beginning).

The range of facilities was not bad, and not particularly over-priced compared to the rest of London. Ice creams and teas were no more than they are outside. Given the nature of the event it might have been better to have more fair trade products instead of a Tetley Tea wagon but I’m sure there were practical reasons for that.

Obviously the choice of artists is personal. You can’t really say that one band is better than another in any objective terms. You could criticise the inclusion of Annie Lennox and Sting as being for sentimental reasons rather than any relevance to today, but then Sting put on a good show that we would have missed if I had been in charge. Likewise UB40, who I think performed well even though I would have left them off. But how anyone can justify bothering to set up the stage for a band to play a single song, as The Killers did, is beyond me.

Overall the mixture worked well. I hope a lot of people were as pleasantly surprised by Snoop Dogg as I was by UB40. I doubt if Velvet Revolver or Mariah Carey won over any new fans – if anything I was put off Velvet Revolver. I had been looking forward to seeing them, but was greatly disappointed.

If anything I think the organisers were far too pre-occupied with making the London show the biggest concert, with the largest audience, widest variety and biggest line-up of stars on paper to think about the practical implications for the average punter in the park.

Thats what you get from having the event organised by idealists, but then if Bob Geldof was not such an idealist it would never have happened in the first place!

But I think the majority of the audience were at least aware and sympathetic. I can’t imagine anyone being totally opposed to the ideas. Some might have reasoned arguments about whether aid or debt relief will work, but I can’t imagine anyone actually being happy with the idea of such a large proportion of the world being in extreme poverty.

Did it work? The aim of the event was supposed to be to raise awareness, and I guess it has done that. Live 8 has been mentioned in all the media for weeks and is hardly ever mentioned with the issues of poverty being raised too, so awareness in the public must be higher. I imagine that world leaders are aware of the problems and do not need their awareness raised, but maybe they needed to be aware of how many of their constituents feel strongly about the issues. Maybe there is another awareness too. Taking the US as an example, how many people there really know how little their country does in relation to others? Do they know what the general public in other countries think of them as a result? Are they happy with that?

Bob Geldof has been criticised for taking a simplistic attitude towards the problems of Africa, but at the end of the day he is someone who, having seen the results of famine could not bear to do nothing. You cannot fault his motives, his determination and his single-mindedness about it all.

There can be no harm in having more of the public aware of the issues and having an opinion on them.

The biggest problem was the big screens. They are a great idea for large shows, and you might expect a slight synching problem, but these were at least a whole second in front of the sound, which made them almost unwatchable. I wonder if the ones in the other section of the park were any better?

You would see a singer open his mouth then after he had finished you would hear the words.

I was still amazed at the way a band could be playing live in Berlin or the US and the whole sound and vision could be relayed to a field in London at full volume and full depth. An aspect of modern comunications it is easy to take for granted.

Mobile phone reception was very poor – probably the result of having far too many people in one cell for many of them to get a channel. This was a bit of a problem for those of us trying to check up on the kids.

My favourite bit of kit was this:

I don’t know what I would do with it, but wouldn’t it be great to have one of those! Jayne thinks I was obsessed with it, but I couldn’t help worrying about the man who was stuck up there. He must have gone up there at midday and had to stay there for at leat 12 hours. I bet he was happy every time the end time got delayed again! Anyone with a practical mind also has to wonder about the toilet arrangements for him…