CHARITY CASES

The tight terms and conditions tucked away in the broadcaster's contracts for Live 8 were a curious concept, an awareness raiser strictly controlling how much of that awareness raising event could be shown. Surely if the idea was to promote awareness, rather than limiting what could be shown, the idea would be to encourage as much use to be made of the material as possible?

Unless, of course, the focus was less on public matters, and much more on protecting the inevitable DVD box set.

Bob's popped up to give a quote:

“I hope this will be the biggest selling DVD of all time. It deserves to be. More importantly perhaps, it should be, for it will help us achieve our goal of changing the lives of the extreme poor for the better and making our generation the one that helped end the disgrace of poverty.”

Ah... so, unlike the event, this is intended to be a fund-raiser for Africa, is it? Um... not entirely:

A generous royalty from the sales of the Live 8 DVD is set to go to the Band Aid Trust for the relief of hunger and poverty in Africa.

In other words, this isn't one of yer bleedin' heart lot-of-good-work-for-charity items; it's a commercial release which will be making a donation to charity as part of the overhead.

But at least it'll be a fitting document of the day as it was, then? Erm... no:

Crispin Murray, Live 8’s audio producer, confirmed that the DVD due on sale on November 28 had made use of the Auto-Tune technique: “We are just setting out to make the artists sound as good as they can.” Some of the artists who performed during the biggest live concert in the world have been to a west London studio to assist Murray in “tweaking” their sound in the mixing room, but this did not involve re-recording vocals.

Jill Sinclair, executive in charge of producing the DVD, said: “It will be different to the live broadcast and it will be better but in terms of rewriting history, we aren’t doing that. We are cleaning history up.”

So, as far as making poverty history went, it might have been a bit of a flop with Bob and Bono bungling the most important bit over the golf course at Gleneagles, but they're at least making bum notes history. Because if Bono was caught being offkey, you wouldn't want to turn up the home cinema system up loud enough to drown out the cries of the starving in Niger, would you?

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