Bob Geldof is on the road again, joining the long list of ageing rockers who just can't hang up their guitars. Ed Power takes a sideways glance at a latter-day saint
Dimming rock stars often make for wretched human beings. Warped and distended by fame, they shrivel into embittered parodies of themselves. Years under the spotlight have exacerbated their most tiresome qualities - impulsiveness, exhibitionism, combustible egocentricity. Now, floundering in obscurity, they must learn anew a skill most of us take for granted: how to exist in drab anonymity.
It is a chore which former Boomtown Rats frontman Bob Geldof continues to embrace with heartening chutzpah. Unlike so many of his peers - the rancorous former starlets and greying lead guitarists raging as the world yawns at an umpteenth comeback project - the surly Dubliner, who this week launched a fundraising campaign on behalf of the Omagh bomb victims, has gleefully taken a wrecking ball to his public persona.
Imprisoned in saintly caricature since Live Aid, Blackrock College-educated Geldof reinvented himself as a ruthless capitalist, building up the innovative Planet 24 production company. Responsible for irreverent hits such as The Big Breakfast and Don't Forget Your Toothbrush, Planet 24 became the most sought after independent producer in Britain. When Geldof sold his share in 1999, he walked away with an estimated £5 million.
Dubbed a rock 'n' roll Mother Teresa after ex-wife Paula Yates took a fatal heroin overdose and Geldof adopted her daughter by debauched INXS singer Michael Hutchence, he promptly recorded last year's bitter solo album, Sex Age and Death, an ill-tempered rumination on mortality (Geldof recently turned 50), that directs its vitriol at Yates. It seems Geldof just couldn't care a fig whether we love or loathe him.
So why did cynics snort at his typically brusque turn at this week's London press conference on behalf of the families of the Omagh victims, who are attempting to raise money for a civil action against the alleged perpetrators of the atrocity?
Describing the 1998 bombing as "Ireland's September 11th" and likening the dissident republicans behind it to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network, Geldof beseeched the public to contribute to the €1 million fighting fund for a civil court action sought by the bereaved. He said the Omagh families had been forgotten, their plight cold-shouldered by the Irish establishment.
Detractors muttered that, in the wake of modest record sales and ahead of a heavily hyped homecoming tour, which begins this weekend, he needed the exposure. Oh please! Does anyone seriously believe that Geldof is even remotely bothered about public opinion?
With Band Aid he cashed in the last of the underground kudos earned with the Boomtown Rats - significant, if rarely applauded, players in the post-punk explosion of the late 1970s.
On Live Aid he hammed up that infamous unkempt-paddy shtick, knowing the expletive-ridden routine would play well on TV and soften those tempted to scoff at the sight of millionaire rock stars urging the masses to come to the rescue of starving Africa.
In 1986 he penned the coruscating autobiography Is That It?, a breathless revenge letter against anybody who had rubbed him the wrong way. For a living saint, Geldof raised a devilish racket.
The messy disintegration of his 19-year marriage to Yates pushed Geldof closer to the brink. Trudging into middle-age, he found himself usurped by Michael Hutchence, poster boy frontman INXS. Geldof later admitted contemplating suicide.
In the bitter divorce battle that ensued, he won custody of the couple's three children, the infamously monikered Fifi, Peaches and Pixie. As Yates and Hutchence dallied in full glare of the gutter press, Geldof maintained a dignified reclusiveness.
But his self-control wavered at the death. In 1997 he received a late night telephone call from Hutchence. They exchanged terse words. Hours later the Australian hung himself. Three years on, Yates, alone and widely scorned as the epitome of irresponsible motherhood, embarked upon a two-day heroin binge and suffered a fatal heart seizure. Geldof stepped in, undertaking to raise Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, her daughter by Hutchence. The tabloids salivated. Despite his best endeavours, sainthood had yet again sniffed him out and bestowed a halo.
Geldof's readiness to take up the fight for the Omagh families sets him apart from a rock 'n' roll firmament which too often adopts chic causes to cultivate its anti-establishment credentials. Thus Bono courts the Naomi Klein set, delivering anti-capitalist tirades even as his bank balance eclipses the average Third World state's GDP. Dance star Moby lectures us on renewable energy sources while his pine-scented trip-hop soundtracks car commercials. Sting frolics with Amazonian tribesmen.
Unruffled by the vagaries of fashion, Geldof just gets on with making a difference. His salvation has been to recognize that there is more to life than guitars and rebellion.