THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW:He made his name with the Rats and Band Aid, then made millions from the media. He has been mentioned as a potential president. Could it happen?
A COUPLE OF years ago researchers in the UK showed people some passages of text and asked them to say who they thought had written them. Although all the pieces were from the Bible, more than a quarter of people thought they were from speeches by Bob Geldof. The Blackrock College old boy even looks a bit messianic today, with his long grey hair and wizened features. Once he opens his mouth, though, the effect evaporates. “Look at you: there’s f***in’ nothing on you. I can’t even get into 34in-waist trousers any more, which is pissing me off,” he says as he arranges himself for the photographer. Then he asks, “So has everything totally gone to shit around here? Is it really a total f***-up?” He’s not the Messiah: he’s just a potty-mouthed 59-year-old worried about his waist size.
As mobile phones chorus, people come and go with check-out times and flight numbers. He sits down, stands up and sits down again; asks them questions, weighs up their answers, then asks more questions. “The guitarist in my band says they should just put the word ‘Why?’ on my tombstone, because I’m always going ‘Why is that? Why do we have to do things this way? Why can’t we do it another way instead?’ I’m not good at shutting up. If there is a second when the mind is not fully occupied I go into a state of melancholy; not quite depression, but near enough. Melancholia is my default state. And even a physical thing can trigger it: twilight, for example. I get edgy, nervy and sad. And so I keep pointlessly, manically busy.”
There’s also an irascibility, he admits. Coupled with a burning sense of entrepreneurship, it yields results. In the early days of the internet he tried to book a family holiday online and ended up incandescent with rage at the maze he had to negotiate just to reserve flights and a hotel. Instead of doing what most of us would do, and consider throwing the computer out of the window, he came up with a simplified online travel booking system, called it Deckchair and later sold it for millions. “If nothing is happening I’ll start inventing stuff, and three years down the road you’ve got a f***in’ business that has two dozen, three dozen people in it,” he says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
IT HAS ALWAYSbeen thus. "I remember when I was a teenager and my father wanted me to knuckle down for the Inter at school, so he made me a boarder at Blackrock College. I hated it and had to devise a way to get kicked out of the school as a boarder but still be allowed to stay on as a day pupil," he says.
"So what I did was to import all these copies of Chairman Mao's Little Red Bookfrom China and distribute them around the school. This was a revolutionary, seditious act for the priests, so my father was called in. He was furious: a parent only got called in if the child had done something really bad. When we were brought into the president's office there were two guys in sheepskin coats standing there. At that time in Ireland the only two classes of people who wore sheepskin coats were RTÉ cameramen and members of the Special Branch. The Branch were there because of all this communist literature being smuggled into the country. When my father actually heard what I had done he turned to the president and said, 'For 12 years my son has been in this school, with you making him study your little green book' – the catechism – 'and when he comes to you with a different idea you can't argue with him or combat his ideas.' Then he said to me, 'Come on, Robert, we're leaving,' and we just walked out. I mean, what a cool guy."
His father, also Robert, died last year at the age of 96. "There was all these things I only found out about him later, all these f***in' cool things he did and how he was under the wire about them. He set up his own yacht club because the one in Dún Laoghaire was too posh for him and they wouldn't let Jews in. He wasn't standing for that, so he and his mates set up their own one, and their first president was Jewish. And he was up for me articulating all that stuff about the Catholic Church and the politicians when I used to go on The Late Late Showduring the 1970s and 'offend' people. The only conflict we ever had was about me wanting to be a in a rock'n'roll band. We were in the car once and he turned to me and said sharply, 'What are you doing now, Robert? Have you got a job?' 'Well, Dad, myself and Garry Roberts are going to start a rock'n'roll band' 'Rock'n'roll? Is there any money in that?' 'I don't know, Dad.' 'Bloody hell, Robert, would you ever grow up?' At the fourth ever Boomtown Rats gig, in Moran's hotel, I saw him down at the back of the venue.
“He was happy enough when I was digging roads in England or working in the abattoir in Ringsend – these were jobs to him – but he was confused by rock’n’roll. It was only after he died that I found out from someone that when he was asked about my success with the Rats he said, ‘Talent is a funny thing: you don’t see it,’ and then he said about me – and this is brilliant – ‘What you really must understand about Robert, and it took me a while, is that he doesn’t care what other people think about him.’ ”
Geldof chuckles at the accuracy of his father’s assessment, then adds, “I think my dad viewed himself as a failure for a long time but then realised he wasn’t. Yes, he was embarrassed walking down the street with me – because I never washed, had hair down my back and wore weird clothes – but his thing always was, ‘I don’t care: he’s my son.’ ”
ROBERT GELDOF JNRcertainly didn't care what anyone thought about When Harvey Met Bob, the recent TV drama about the lead-up to the Live Aid concerts of 1985. "I didn't see it; I didn't watch, read or listen to anything about it. I have no interest in it," he says. "They did give me the script beforehand, and I just said, 'What the f*** are you making this for?' and they said, 'Oh, come on, Bob, it's a great story.' And I said, 'Maybe it is, but this script isn't the story.' Look, I never went to Channel 4 with Live Aid [as depicted in the film]. The BBC were there from the word go. I never went to Paul McCartney to dig f***in' beetroots. Come on, give me a break. Harvey Goldstein is not slim and good looking: he's fat and bald and shouts a lot. I don't put a hoody over my head and shrink away. I don't speak like that – and there's enough telly of me to know that. It's all b*****ks. My life is episodic enough: do people have to fictionalise it further? I didn't stop it because they said people really wanted to see it. But there's a thing in the script where they have Harvey saying to me, 'Why are you doing all this?' and they give the wrong answer. The answer, the real answer, should have been: 'Because I must. Because I have no choice.' "
Geldof believed that getting Do They Know It's Christmas?out as a single meant his job was done and he could return to breathing some life back into the fading Boomtown Rats. "What really happened is that the record was a phenomenon and the journalists insisted I go to Africa to keep the story going – and for the photo op. And once I saw what was going on in Africa I got caught up in it. I saw that more was necessary, and I couldn't let the ball drop knowing full well that I could take it further," he says.
“Everything I saw – the ill health, lack of education, famine and corruption – I knew was just symptoms of poverty. It was a singular, empirical and economic situation that could be resolved if you attacked the underlying structures, which are political and economic. I wanted to create a political lobby for change because that’s what I understood rock’n’roll to be. For most people Live Aid was a cultural event; for me it was a political event.
"I only got the cultural part when I walked onstage with the Rats at Wembley, because until that very moment I had been deep into the organisational continuum of it all. You can see me still taking my jacket off as I walked onstage, because the minute before I had been on the phones – and suddenly, Jesus, the noise. I remember going, 'This . . . Me . . . Now . . . Stop . . . Take it in . . . This is never going to happen to you again, dude.' I had the comfort of being with my mates and the comfort of knowing the song" – I Don't Like Mondays– "so well, except I really thought I might f*** it up, because my throat went dry and my back was hurting. When you're singing you're always thinking of the words ahead, and I knew the line 'And the lesson today is how to die' was coming up. Totally impromptu, I paused after the line, and I'm thinking, People in Vladivostok and people in Tierra del Fuego are watching this. I've done this."
HE REMAINS IMMENSELYproud of how this Dublin band conquered the UK charts. "It was funny, but just the other day I listened to our first album in the car. I really whacked it up loud and thought to myself, We were a great band. The ambition and drive in that record: absolutely nothing was going to stop these six people. Yes, we were a bunch of Herberts who formed in a pub in Glasthule, but we made a racket. A glorious racket."
The St Bob, Sir Bob, charity Bob, millionaire businessman Bob and tragic Bob are media add-ons for him. "If you put a poster up on the street that says "Tonight: Bob Geldof" people will go, 'But doing what?' So that's the confusion." He will be singer Bob for the next few months, with the release of easily his best solo album, the archly titled How to Compose Popular Songs that Will Sell. "The impulse in music occurs rarely to me, because I'm overwhelmed by the empirical: politics, business, the family. I'm very involved with the web; Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web, I sit on his board," he says. "That's interesting to me, but it crowds out this impulse to music, so to escape from all this empiricism I go and do gigs, which are so deeply satisfying for me. I get lost in them, really lost, literally lost. I can't describe to you the feeling I get of floating free when performing . . .
“And this impulse to music can’t be gainsaid; that only makes it stronger. It’s a vulgar metaphor, but it’s like I’m sitting here now with you and I realise I really need to go for a piss. That’s what it’s like with music for me: the impulse must be recognised and the catharsis must happen. Writing songs is how I frame my experiences. I have all these opportunities to speak my mind – TV, radio – and if I want to write about economics for the FT or the Economist they will take the piece. But at the same time as the need to speak my mind there’s also a need to sing my heart, and this is the part that will not be refused. So in answer to the question of why this album, and why now, it’s because when I framed the last eight years of my life it turned out that it was okay, you know? I feel like I’m back from the front. Things are pretty good for me now, and that’s because of Jeanne,” he says, referring to Jeanne Marine, his French partner.
On one of the songs he sings his autobiography to a cod-trad backing. “In the year of ’75 I sang myself alive . . . And in the year of ’85 we watched millions starve and die . . . And in the year of ’95 I lost my faithless wife, for she left me for another whom I once had thought my brother . . . And in the year ’05, with a beautiful new wife . . .” Why the jokey musical backing to such a personal narrative? Why the reference to the “faithless” Paula Yates, and did he really see Michael Hutchence, the INXS singer, as a brother? “Music is the means whereby I can articulate the otherwise unsayable. With that song I somehow started off with the year ’65, when nothing was really happening for me, but when I got to ’75 I realised that was when the Rats started and that was when I stopped being Robert and became just Bob. Then I got to ’85 and that was Live Aid; then I got to ’95 and that was the whole, you know . . . [in 1995 Yates left him for Hutchence]. All this stuff follows me, and I’m expected to talk about it. The music in that song, by the way, is from the old feis ceoils and those empty, draughty halls.”
ON HIS FIRSTappearance on The Late Late Show, in 1977, he said to Gay Byrne that he felt it was time for someone like him to speak out and that he was all about "the denunciation of nationalism, of medieval-minded clerics and corrupt politicians". His comments were widely criticised and allegedly led to the banning of a big outdoor Boomtown Rats concert.
Thirty-four years later does he feel vindicated? “No, not at all. The overwhelming feeling I have is one of sadness for the country – and of anger for the incompetence beyond measure, the sheer stupidity and the clear venality which has Ireland where it is now. I’ve been through debt crises both personally and with whole counties. Just as the glut of money in the ’70s led to a debt crisis in Africa, so the glut of free money here led to the property bubble. And there was a silence, a complicity of silence, about what was going on. There should have been controls, and without question there was a compact between the merchant class, the bankers and the politicians, but they were all making hay. Where were the oversight people? Where were the regulators? Where were they? That’s their function. They failed. They should be ashamed.
“And that complicity, that incompetence, that venality has always been there. It started with Haughey, and I don’t care if he was a great politician: that smirking, knowing corruption was present then. That old, very Irish knowing-wink, cute-hoor approach. With Haughey it was the redesignation of land, the acceptance of certain types of funding to the party, the running of guns to abet murderers – and f*** allegedly, it was the running of guns to murderers. And it was the knowing acquiescence of the Church. And to see the emigrant queues again after all that hubris, all the vulgarity. People have been betrayed. Certain individuals out there should be in prison.”
As passionate and engaged as he remains about his native country, he has finally ruled out the idea of putting himself forward as a presidential candidate. “It was put to me seriously. It was suggested to me by people who are serious people,” he says. “But, doing that job, you have to represent not just the people but the entire ethos, entity, culture and history of the country. It really is quite profound. Am I really prepared for that? My question is always, ‘Can I still go on tour? Can I still make records?’ So the answer is no, because it’s too narrow for someone like me. I do think the last two incumbents have done an amazingly good job. I’m with Bono on this one; he says the living quarters would be too small for him.”
What goes unsaid is that Geldof doesn't need the personal and professional upheaval. "The great thing about being my age is that most of my peers are in positions of authority, so access and action become easier. In London you can have a business, political or media idea and by six o'clock that evening you will know if that idea will fly or not. And exploring that is very exciting," he says. "Personally, my 50s have been my happiest decade. The emotional wars subside. You're young enough to be still involved and interested in the new, and old enough to know how to gets things done. I don't really do nostalgia, and I find myself obliged to forget a lot of things about the past because they were just too horrendous. One of the songs on the new album, Silly Pretty Thing, I wrote on a boat at 3am. I was thinking of all that has happened to me and realised that tonight, at least, I'm in love with life. And that's unusual for me."
Curriculum vitae
BornRobert Frederick Zenon Geldof, in Dublin, on October 5th, 1951.
Early careerAfter Blackrock College he emigrated to Canada, to work as a music journalist, but was deported for having no working visa. After returning to Dublin in 1975 he formed The Boomtown Rats with Garry Roberts, Simon Crowe, Gerry Cott, Pete Briquette and Johnnie Fingers. In 1978 they had their first UK number-one single, Rat Trap.
Band AidWhile promoting the band's sixth album, In the Long Grass, in 1984, his girlfriend (and later wife), Paula Yates, told him about a BBC news report on famine in Ethiopia. He gathered together a roomful of pop stars for the Do They Know It's Christmas?single, which he wrote with Midge Ure, and the next year organised the two Live Aid concerts.
MediaAfter leaving the Boomtown Rats, in 1986, he embarked on a media-business career, in 1992 setting up Planet 24, which produced the Channel 4 show The Big Breakfast.
Personal lifeGeldof and Yates had three children: Fifi, Peaches and Pixie. In 1995 Yates left him for Michael Hutchence, the INXS singer. After Hutchence died by suicide, in 1997, and Yates died of an accidental overdose, in 2000, Geldof and his French partner, Jeanne Marine, won custody of the couple's daughter, Tiger Lily. The family live in Battersea, in south London.
Live 8In 2005 he organised a series of concerts to raise awareness of Third World debt. Freeman of Dublin In 2006 he brought his family to Dublin to see him receive the Freedom of the City of Dublin.
How to Compose Popular Songs that Will Sellis on Mercury Records
