Can the starving children of Africa save our has-been pop stars yet again?

Brendan O’Neill in Spiked Online:

It isn’t often that Peter Hitchens, the usually dry, sometimes irate man of letters, makes me laugh. But he did on Sunday, with a newspaper column headlined: ‘Can the starving children of Africa save our has-been pop stars yet again?’

Hitchens’ witty conceit was that Live 8 – an international music-fest fronted by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to ‘raise awareness’ about the Make Poverty History campaign, a kind of belated sequel to their 1985 effort, Live Aid – was more about feeding pop egos than feeding the world. Once again, he wrote, ‘the hungry, terrorised children of Africa’ are being called upon ‘to help rescue the sagging reputations of that needy and deprived group of balding, clapped-out rock stars who still long for the crowds that once listened to them’ (1). Ouch.

More here.