Paul McCartney and U2's Bono fired up a huge London crowd with "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" on Saturday for the anti-poverty crusade, Live 8, the biggest music event ever staged. Starting the show with the familiar lyrics: "It was 20 years ago today," ex-Beatle McCartney harked straight back to the 1985 Live Aid concerts.
Back then, a new standard in fund-raising was achieved by organiser Bob Geldof to help the victims of Ethiopia's famine. This time, Irish rocker Geldof wants up to a million people to attend 10 shows across four continents to pressure world leaders meeting next week to do more to end extreme poverty.
"Mahatma Gandhi freed a continent, Martin Luther King freed a people, Nelson Mandela freed a country. It does work - they will listen," he told some 200,000 people in London's Hyde Park.Bono, another key celebrity campaigner, summed up the message: "We're not asking you to put your hand in your pockets but we are asking people to put their fist in the air."
Leaders of the Group of Eight industrialised nations meet near Edinburgh on July 6-8, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair has Africa and poverty high on the agenda.Tokyo kicked off Live 8 earlier in the day, with Icelandic star Bjork helping fill a 10,000-capacity venue at short notice.
The diminutive star expressed the sense of helplessness she felt in the face of Africa's extreme poverty."I look at the news, I see people starving, I am crying. I'm a total mess," she told reporters afterwards.
"You try to think how you're going to break through this cobweb of problems and bureaucracy and how on Earth anybody is going to make any change."
Live 8 was also under way in Rome and in Berlin, where up to 100,000 people gathered around the Brandenburg Gate. But in Johannesburg a crowd of only 3-4,000 had shown up early on, well short of the 40,000 organisers had expected.
Pop legends, including Madonna, The Who, Stevie Wonder and a re-formed Pink Floyd, are taking part in the concerts.
But Geldof has been criticised for largely excluding African artists.
Musician Peter Gabriel stepped in with a separate, smaller gig for African performers, and Johannesburg was added to the list of venues, but that has not been enough to prevent Geldof's detractors from accusing him of "cultural apartheid".
Some aid workers and Africans also worry that the Live 8 initiatives will only serve to bolster corrupt regimes, while scepticism persists that rock stars can change anything.
The lack of publicity in Japan, the world's second largest aid donor, restricted the size of the audience early on, but fans at the Tokyo concert said they sympathised with its aims.
Live 8 is costing around 25 million pounds ($45 million) to stage, a price worth paying, Geldof would argue, after recent successes including a $40 billion debt forgiveness deal and US pledges to double aid to Africa.