on sunday i went down to london to see rage against the machine play their 'victory concert' in finsbury park. if you don't know much of the back story of this you can read a little about it on wikipedia. basically last christmas a facebook campaign was started to get rage's killing in the name song to number one in the singles charts, primarily to topple the monopoly that simon cowell's x-factor has had on christmas number ones in previous years. when the band heard about this they promised to donate 100% of the proceeds to the homeless charity shelter as well as play a free thank you gig in the uk if they made it to number one. the facebook campaign gained momentum and despite the song not being physically released (you could only download it as an album track online) compared to the heavily promoted x-factor offering the rage song made it to the top.

i was lucky enough to get my hands on a free ticket and i'll be posting more shots from the gig in the next few days/weeks. this one was taken just before the encore. they blasted out joe mcelderry's the climb (the x-factor competitor) while flashing quotes on the big screen, a few of which i've included on the left of the shot. there was a lot of cocky and arrogant put-downs and predictions from joe and simon cowell before the raw stats of the number of purchases and the YOU Made History salute. the band then came back on stage and the crowd went ape-shit as they rattled out the victorious anthem.

here's the original

on sunday i went down to london to see rage against the machine play their 'victory concert' in finsbury park. if you don't know much of the back story of this you can read a little about it on wikipedia. basically last christmas a facebook campaign was started to get rage's killing in the name song to number one in the singles charts, primarily to topple the monopoly that simon cowell's x-factor has had on christmas number ones in previous years. when the band heard about this they promised to donate 100% of the proceeds to the homeless charity shelter as well as play a free thank you gig in the uk if they made it to number one. the facebook campaign gained momentum and despite the song not being physically released (you could only download it as an album track online) compared to the heavily promoted x-factor offering the rage song made it to the top.

i was lucky enough to get my hands on a free ticket and i'll be posting more shots from the gig in the next few days/weeks. this one was taken just before the encore. they blasted out joe mcelderry's the climb (the x-factor competitor) while flashing quotes on the big screen, a few of which i've included on the left of the shot. there was a lot of cocky and arrogant put-downs and predictions from joe and simon cowell before the raw stats of the number of purchases and the YOU Made History salute. the band then came back on stage and the crowd went ape-shit as they rattled out the victorious anthem.

here's the original