azz:
So, erm, I'm not very impressed.
Things that have annoyed me thus far:
- Incredibly amateurish production of the TV coverage. Inserts cut short, presenters shown when they clearly weren't expecting to be, the crowd being completely inaudible, the music mix sounding pretty nasty (and being visibly out of sync with the pictures on DTT), bad Moiré effects with the background video screen meaning that they're now avoiding wide shots of the stage.
- Frankly uninspiring performances by most of the artists.
- A great selection of the most annoying presenters the BBC have to offer. Sorry, this isn't a comedy show; would it have hurt to have a serious presenter or two?
- Wheeling Bill Gates out. Sorry, you don't get to claim to be ethical and to be promoting the cause of world poverty and then wheel out one of the world's richest men who's working hard to strengthen intellectual property law (and is thus indirectly killing people in Africa).
- Seeing a whole bunch of celebrities claim that they're really interested in this stuff, when they obviously don't have the slightest clue what they're talking about. (I mean, they could at least sound convincing, but no...)
I really hope Pink Floyd don't suck when they appear.
(Me, a grumpy old man? Never...)
- Oh, yeah. Comedians introducing acts in extremely bad taste. It's not funny.
OK, Travis are doing a pretty good set, though.
"What else can get a crowd going like a song about a serial killer?" -- quite...
Hm, Annie Lennox doing "Sweet Dreams" -- bodged sound mix meaning that the guitar part is coming out much louder than the synth during the intro riff, which actually sounds quite good...
The DTT subtitles have some great typos. Earlier we were told that "Pink employed" will be playing later, and currently the Black-Eyed Peas are encouraging the audience to "put your lands in the air".
Grr. And now they've switched to BBC1, DTT viewers get a big annoying "Press Red" barrier covering the top corner of the picture.
A-Ha became "Ha Ha" on the subtitles, and NEK became "Neck".
And what does Jonathan Ross mean, "apparently [the Dave Matthews Band] are very big in the States"? They're pretty "big" here too...
OK, whoever thought up that shot just now where they panned down from the sunset deserves a round of applause.
Oh, that's who Velvet Revolver are!
I was wondering why a band I'd never heard of was getting billed with a load I had, but it turns out to be most of Guns'N'Roses under a different name...
And they're excellent too (in an 80s arena rock sort of way). Pity their CD's copy-protected, else it would have just gone on my wishlist.
- Ugh, the DTT broadcast looks horrible when there's any sort of fast action (for example, drumming) on screen -- they must have wound the bitrate down for some reason...
"If you're looking for the news, we've moved it over to BBC2 because we're running a little bit late."
Hm. The subtitlers just rendered "the magnificent bosom" as "the magnificent bomb".
Well, The Who were well worth waiting for. :)
Pink Floyd I'm a bit less convinced about. They've really gone downhill in the last eleven years (i.e. since Pulse)...
It was nice to see them play again, but they weren't up to their old standard. Particularly the vocals...
(Also: how could they not do Another Brick In The Wall? It's only their best-known song, and the one that works best with a crowd...)
(And it'd have been easier to sing than Breathe, which really isn't very interesting outside of its concept-album setting.)
(And perhaps it would have been better not to put them immediately after The Who, who if anything actually sound better now than they did in the 70s.)
(Although, to be fair, The Who have replaced a couple of members since then.)
I have some difficultly in taking Paul McCartney saying, quite politely, "Do you want to rock some more?" very seriously.
Hm, a crowd of people waving their mobile phones back and forth. Things have changed.
azz: That's a remarkably neat bit of kit.