LIVE 8 entry passes and wristbands represent an immutable caste system. The best ones made queues and bag searchers history. The one for untouchables meant you hung around like something just arrived in a container from Moldova.

But finally we all found our gate in the steel fence and were allowed to be part of it. And out front of the stage, under the leaden sky, there were 200,000 people, which if you’re in the business of cheap comparisons is two weeks’ worth of preventable African deaths.

There were 500 microphones but just one message: alcohol was available only to the VIPs. For a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne they’d have got 10p change from £100, which luckily will send an African child to school for a couple of days.

They estimated that 150,000 litres of water were drunk; that is the amount used in a day by Banjul, capital of the Gambia, but without the added river blindness parasite. There were 175 catering vans; the food is the usual hideous, toxic, slimy gloop and gristle in a bun. Hyde Park was undoubtedly the one place in the world that was eating worse than Somalia.

The obvious big difference between Live 8 today and Live Aid 20 years ago was that then music was about a single generation but today it spills out across the ages. Here there were people who have only the wrinkliest idea who Pink Floyd were and those who couldn’t tell you if Snow Patrol was an ice-cream or a 4x4 Chelsea chariot.

There were the old superstadium megarockers who can’t hear unless they have at least one hand in the air like a satellite dish. Then there were the clubbers for whon loud rhythmic noises make them bounce up and down like those wind up toys they sell on street corners.

And there are those who have only ever known celebrity red ropes and think that VIP is just what they print on tickets like a kite mark. They all seemed to be hanging round the champagne bar complaining about the noise, asking each other what they were doing for the summer and trying to lig dinner at Nobu on their mobiles.

And there are the veterans of a thousand concerts who bore blankets for cold weather, umbrellas for the rain and a picnic in case the sun comes out. As Coldplay sang Bitter Sweet Symphony with Richard Ashcroft, Hyde Park rose up and sang along. We all loved this.

The atmosphere ebbed and surged — a reminder that a lot of modern pop music is introverted and uncertain, frankly a bit depressed. In 20 years the huge hand-clapping anthems have changed into being quieter, finger-wagging, with more questions than answers.

The most surreal change from 20 years ago was the crowd cheering Bill Gates. Global business has gone from being the well of the problem to the source of the answers. There was a sense of not just being somewhere important but of doing something important.

As the screens beamed in pictures from around the world we got a frisson of being connected not just to everyone but to everyone good. And even though Hyde Park is as flat as the Malawi stock market, it felt like the clear air of the moral high ground. As each city was announced, there was a fraternal cheer and a distant echo except for Paris, which came with an understated Gallic silence and was greeted with ironic laughter.

Over and over, people in the crowd spoke of the astonishing miracle of getting this together, of all of us being here, not just in London but around the world. And for an industry that is famously the definition of ego-riven flakiness to put this on in so little time, not once, but twice in 20 years. How come, 200,000 people thought all at once, the eight richest and most powerful countries in the world can’t import a banana.

The day before the show I spoke to Nick Mason, drummer of Pink Floyd. Why are you doing it, I asked. “You know,” he said, “there’s just a hint.”

If there is just a hint, a glimmer, an outside chance that just perhaps, maybe, we might change the world a tiny, tiny bit and if the option is staying home and watching Big Brother highlights, then you better do it.

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