Extra Live 8 tickets snapped up
Thousands of extra tickets to watch the Live 8 concert in London have been snapped up in less than two hours. Music fans camped out in cities across the UK to bag the extra 55,000 tickets which went up for grabs at 1500 BST. Holders of the additional tickets will be able to watch Saturday’s concert on giant screens in Hyde Park.
Stars such as Madonna, Robbie Williams and Coldplay are headlining the show, which aims to highlight global poverty and Third-world debt. Scores of people began queuing for the tickets outside venues in London, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Manchester, Oxford and Southampton on Tuesday. The successful ticket-holders will join about 150,000 people who won tickets to the concert itself following a text message competition.
Live 8 spokesman Bernard Doherty said: “We had an enormous reaction. It was the only way to distribute the tickets fairly. Bob (Geldof) says it was the only way to do it and the good British public has done it in an orderly way. “All 55,000 have been snapped up within two hours.” Doherty added: “We would like to say, please do not pass on or sell the tickets. It is not in the spirit of Live 8. They are non-transferable.”
The concert is one of 10 Live 8 gigs taking place around the world on Saturday – one in each of the G8 nations, one in South Africa and a smaller gig in Cornwall. The concerts have been timed to coincide with the G8 summit of world leaders in Scotland on 6 July and will call for more aid for Africa, debt cancellation and fairer trade. A further concert will take place on 6 July in Edinburgh as the summit begins.
Saturday’s concerts will kick off in Tokyo in the east and end in Philadelphia and near Toronto in the west, taking in Johannesburg, Paris, Berlin, Rome, London and Moscow on the way.
From BBC News