thu 28/03/2024

Q&A Special: Musician Bob Geldof | reviews, news & interviews

Q&A Special: Musician Bob Geldof

Q&A Special: Musician Bob Geldof

The sainted musician talks (and talks and talks) about taking on the industry

Bob Geldof only shuts up in the end because a plane he should be on is imminently taking off for India, and he is still in his local South London pub, refusing to let a heavy cold stop him from talking like others drink - with unquenchable relish. He is in passing promoting his new album, How to Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell, a lesson Geldof could have given with conviction during his old band the Boomtown Rats’ pomp between 1977 and 1980, when their first nine singles hit the Top 20, climaxing with consecutive Number Ones “Rat Trap” and “I Don’t Like Mondays”. The way those achievements have been forever dwarfed by his marshalling of global compassion to save countless Ethiopians with Live Aid is something he can live with.

Geldof’s organisation of the Live Aid concerts in London and Philadelphia was pop’s most humbly heroic moment. But most of the 56-year-old’s talk today from beneath his shaggy grey mane is of the teenage musical obsessions that have never left him, the rock’n’roll which let him believe he could change the world. This intimate of leaders from Mandela to Margaret Thatcher will never again be listened to primarily through his preferred medium of music and lyrics. But they are the means by which he’s torn through a lusty life. He talks to theartsdesk.

He does like Mondays: The Boomtown Rats perform at LiveAid

BOB GELDOF: I wanted to be a journalist in school - and I’d never got any exams, and I mean none. And at the career advice test, the guy went through all the questions, and the report came back a week later: “Robert should be a trawlerman.” What?! What the fuck are you talking about? I couldn’t swim, it was freezing fucking cold in the sea of Dublin, I never mentioned fish… “ …Or a journalist.” The truth is you just couldn’t be one, it was entirely a closed shop the unions had locked up. Journalism school I couldn’t get into without qualifications, or a job coming. So I was on my way north to the Arctic Circle to be a gold miner, and I stopped in Vancouver to get my illegal immigration papers.

While I was waiting I got a job at the hippie bookshop, and upstairs was the underground paper. I went up and said I was a visiting journalist. They said, “Do you have any examples of your work?” “Obviously not, I’m on holiday, but send me out to cover some local bands.” I was bored, they didn’t have to pay me, if they didn’t like it, don’t publish it, and I’d take pictures as well. That was it, and within a matter of weeks I was the music editor and persuaded the owner to do half the paper as music, copying Rolling Stone, the underground paper in San Francisco. And I was okay in it, and then I sent NME and Melody Maker my stuff and they started reprinting it. And I really enjoyed it. It turned out I could do it.

But it turned out that, like an old album, I was just moving closer and closer to the centre. Like everyone of my generation, music was the central thing in my life. I was a Mod, I was No 11 in the Irish Blues Appreciation Society. My mate had let me borrow his guitar, and because it was too bothersome to learn other people’s songs, I was noodling around inventing my own words. Then, when I was living in a squat in London I would have empty camera cases and one camera, and go to gigs looking like a photographer so I could blag my way into the Stones at the Roundhouse, and The Who at the Oval - I did the liner notes for that, which was a big moment in my career. I sold those photos to Harvey Goldsmith as posters when I was 17, 18. So I was moving inexorably, while doing shit jobs like digging roads. It was pretty inevitable something was going on.

NICK HASTED: It’s a career path based on chutzpah…

[Laughs.] Yeah, it still is. Blagging, I think we call it…

It sounds like a good life for a young man, to be moving through North America, on the way to a gold mine.

It sounds romantic. I was panicked all the time. Is this going to be your career? Are you literally going to be driving heavy machinery in the Arctic Circle? And to be honest with you, at the time that seemed okay, it seemed adventurous. I was into Robert Service and all those Klondike poems, so that was, in my head, what I was doing. But the truth is, I’d given a limited time. I’d set a financial figure I wanted to achieve, then move on. The general principle was, move on and you’ll find something, somewhere in your life. In my head it was in the wilder geographical regions. It was in the Arctic Circle, it was in a desert. In my head that was attractive. In my head when I was 11, it was always going to be on a banana boat to the Indies. So maybe that’s where the guy got trawlerman from…

Did being in a rock band give you that sense of adventure?

It’s too incremental. You’re not aware of, suddenly, I’m in a rock band touring the world. On a Friday night early in the summer of 1975, I was trying to start an Exchange & Mart-type trade paper, with money saved up from Canada, to make profits to start up the first rock and roll newspaper in Ireland - that was my idea. And that would change Ireland. This manic fucking hubris I have. But I said that on this mimeographed sheet, tongue in cheek as always. And on Saturday, I went to Fitzpatricks, not my normal pub - I didn’t like pubs, I’d go late in the day just to see my mates.

Friday I was trying to do a paper, Saturday I was in a band. So it was as accidental as all that

So I was bored, walked down about seven, in the long evenings, you know, it was light. And I walked in and there was Gerry Roberts and Johnny Moylett, who lived fairly close and I knew vaguely. I sat down and they were talking about starting a band. On Monday, Gerry and I went into Dublin and Temple Bar and he bought a Telecaster. And I was boring them with my experiences in Canada, about what makes a local band. You have to be a star, even if the person next door’s known you since you were two years old, the next day he comes around for a bowl of sugar, you tell him to fuck off. And if he looks at you agog, you tell him you are now a star.

So Friday I was trying to do a paper, Saturday I was in a band. So it was as accidental as all that. And then it turned out that we were okay. And then the next minute it’s a job, and you’re worried about, are we selling more than The Clash? And can I write any more songs, and what way are we going to go? So it ceases to be instinctive or intuitive and becomes a bit of a drag.

1977_The_Boomtown_Rats_Chalkie_DaviesWhat kind of band were the Boomtown Rats when you started?

[Bassist] Pete [Briquette] had got his hair swept back, looking spivvy - rock’n’roll, [Essex pub rock band] the Kursaal Flyers, only we’d never seen the Kursaal Flyers. That’s what we were. Fuck all this starry stuff, in the pub, loud noisy songs you wrote yourself, that’s us. And then getting fed up with that, because actually it looked a bit like long hair and checked shirts. We were very much influenced by American stuff, because the Pistols and Clash we’d never heard of in 1975.

Presumably you’d heard [Canvey Island r’n’b greats] Dr Feelgood’s records, but not seen them?

A friend of mine was a columnist on the Evening Herald. And everyone in the Rats was going, "Let’s do this, that, let’s do a Bowie song…" So we all agreed that this was chaotic. So what is it we all like? Well, we were all Sixties kids, so we all liked rhythm’n’blues. And so, early r’n’b, thanks very much. And once we’d settled on that, my journalist friend said, “Come round and listen to some records.” So he played me [Dr Feelgood’s debut] Down by the Jetty. Fucking completely blew me away. If you could fucking completely crystallise what I wanted to do - write about your place, your friends, your situation, in an r’n’b style. Not only that, it was highly literate - “Standing watch the towers burning at the break of day”. Fuck off, that bastard. We could never be as brilliant as that.

And then he played me Bob Marley’s Catch a Fire. And what is this, you know? And I borrowed that and played it to the band, who also got it. We couldn’t do reggae - we tried, down the pub we started doing “Trenchtown Rock”. Very hard for us to understand on the bass and drums, which is what it is, but we got it ultimately. I guess we sounded like calypso or something at the beginning. But clearly, what this guy [Marley] was doing was so wonderful, and this patois - I’m a lyrics guy, so “Ain’t got no birth cert-fit-i-cate on me now”, I was pissing myself laughing, and just thought, without sounding like a complete cunt, this is Joycean. It gives a whole new sense, and you’re also saying to the cop, fuck off, you know? And if you put together the both of them into a whole new thing, then you’d got it, that’s what we set out to do.

It sounds like a blazing afternoon - could you not wait to get back and tell the others?

We learned each track instantly, of the Feelgoods. And then I started writing all those ones that are sub-Feelgoods, and the Stones, Muddy Waters, Lemon Jefferson at a push. I was fucking right in there. And then also, the name of the Rats comes from Woody Guthrie, ‘cause Dylan got me into that and I love that music. So there was a good basis for taking off.

And in 1975 we did a tiny, tiny room in Moran’s Hotel, much smaller than this, and we got sheets of fake plastic brick and we’d sit down and spray “The Rats” on it, and then we’d get wallpaper backing in long strips, and put a backing along the top, and hang it at the front of this little dias which was the stage, with a piece of string tied to the bass drum. And on this we’d project very weird, discordant images, very horrible, with odd music by Can. And we’d sneak on from the side, and Gary would start playing a Feelgoods thing, and Simon would lean over with his penknife and cut the cord, and the screen would drop, and there we’d be. And there’s only 50 people, but we were full-on.

I’m at my best when people are most disappointed in me

Reading interviews with you right through the Rats' career, with all the hubris and self-aggrandisement, there’s a lot of self-deprecation as well…

There was no self-aggrandising except for a purpose. I understood who and what we were, I understood the flaws, but if nobody would point out the virtues as well then I would. In this period, I wanted to upset the apple cart and the complacency of local bands - and transliterating to Dublin the complacency of local London bands that the pub scene there had completely blown out of the water. So that’s where we were coming from, and making fun of the whole thing. It was the time of “Clapton is God”. And there was no real Irish rock scene, there were a couple of journalists’ columns, there was a show-band magazine - and to annoy them, I had a white T-shirt where I spray-painted “Geldof is God”. Now it would be one thing for the others to wear it, that would be funny. For you to wear it yourself, really is a red rag to a bull. So I would wear it, and they went fucking apoplectic. Of course, for the people who liked us, they instantly got the joke.

And then, feminism was very new then, and very po-faced, you know. And our friend was a graphic artist, and, taking our cue from Andy Warhol’s Interview, we had a poster of these beautiful legs in rubber stockings, dead tight and shiny, in nine-inch heels - Venus in Furs was what I was thinking of. And that said, in Interview typeface, “Rats, Moran’s Hotel, Saturday…” And of course the women in the students union who were all now madly feminist - and there were no rock’n’roll posters, that’s the other thing - they went around with purple felt-tip, writing “SEXIST”. I was thrilled, hoping this would happen, because I could then come out and say, “They’re my legs,” which they were. So you had everyone hating you, and I was very comfortable with that. I’m at my best when people are most disappointed in me.

Does it give you energy?

That’s actually very true. That pause there was like - “Hold on, is that what that is?” Possibly. And also I never shut up. So if you look at all those interviews, it’s “Bob the Gob”, “Modest Bob”, because I was being immodest. Actually, I wasn’t, because I was saying, “Look, I know it’s not the [punk] thing, but it is specific, it is a point of view, you have to understand it comes not from The Clash or the Pistols or Canvey Island, it comes from an Irish sensibility - though heavily informed by what the Feelgoods were doing and others like that, because we were crazy on pub rock. [Joe Strummer’s pre-Clash pub rock band] The 101’ers, that would be our thing. When I was reading about pub rock, and saw Eddie and the Hot Rods and heard the Feelgoods, that’s when everything became entirely focused. That’s where we should be. And post that pub rock Rats, when we got to London during punk in 1976, we’re beginning to be something else.

The Boomtown Rats perform the first single 'Looking After No 1'

It became very nasty, the punk scene. And there was a confusion about where we fitted. We clearly weren’t the slightly atavistic roar of the Sex Pistols, or the considered political demagoguery of The Clash. It was something else, and we were a bit suspiciously skilled in our playing. And that’s because we’d had a year before we even turned up. Plus we weren’t Londoners. And don’t underestimate that; as I’ve said before, there were no punks from Derbyshire, so far as I know. We all lived in Chessington, in a house, removed from the scene. Those who were very friendly and didn’t give a fuck about that were the Pistols, because Johnny [Rotten] was a paddy. So when we’d meet them, we’d chat, and Malcolm [McLaren] was always very helpful and nice. But the others weren’t. Very snobby towards us, and not including us in the thing. So you’re kind of on your own.

None of us liked the spitting, apart from The Damned who encouraged it, because they were bonkers

But when your crowd showed up, they didn’t get the differential. So we played with Talking Heads and the Ramones at schools in the afternoon, and we were really friendly with them. And suddenly we were getting a name, just after [Boomtown Rats’ debut, Top 20 1977 single] “Lookin’ After No 1” came out. And it had got very violent. And it’s weird now, but this was seen as real, and to be admired by the Mick Farrens of the journalistic world. And what people forget now - it might seem odd, but this was hugely driven by the music press, by the journalists themselves. By Farren, Nick Kent, Charles Shaar Murray - Lester Bangs was their model. So Mick Farren was in a shit anarchist band called the Pink Fairies, Nick Kent thought violence was cool, picking up their cue I’m sure from the 1968 stuff. And there was this spitting thing. None of us liked the spitting, apart from The Damned who encouraged it, because they were bonkers. And they came from the [militant, absurdist hippie] Yippie type, I thought, even though they weren’t aware of that. But there was now a split, where it became weird. Punks, what were they? Suddenly they were in with the skinheads, who were hiving off and confusing what they were with the punk thing.

I can remember a very right-wing band called Skrewdriver were at this gig at the Music Machine in Camden [now Koko] that year, and Skrewdriver looked liked punks, but they had bovver boots. And I don’t think there were very many at this gig. And the stage of the Music Machine was about 17 feet off the ground. And you had to be wary. This was being filmed, this gig, and suddenly a guy goes up the long, long stairs at the side of the stage, obviously we didn’t have security, he walks onto the stage, past Garry [Roberts], who sort of looks at this guy. People had got on stage before - girls had got up and kissed you. And he just came over and did, one-two, left-right, and smacked me on my face - I don’t know where, probably my nose. And I went flying. What I was thinking was, fuck, I’m going to go over the 17 feet. And I bumped into one of the cameramen filming, and he broke my fall, but I nearly knocked him over. The others, you can see in the film, they just stare, like this, they just look at the guy who walks off stage swaggering. So the song dribbles to a halt. And I just went up then and went straight into “Lookin’ After No 1” - “I don’t want to be like you/ I don’t want to think like you/ I don’t want to talk like you, I’m going to be like me”. So it was a big moment. I got up and I went like this [smears face] with the back of my hand, and smeared it [the blood] across my face. I mean it hurt. And that was our first NME cover. Which shows you how pathetic it was. I said, “Is it meant to be like this? It’s not meant to be like this, is it?” And I think the NME called it "The Summer of Hate". I think that was the headline. And what the fuck’s going on out there? That was it. Something was wrong.

But you were charged with adrenalin?

I was, and you can see it - like a rage. I say something, and I’ve got the soundtrack on the day - and the band play with such power. [Drummer] Simon [Crowe] just got fffffzzzzzzcchh, just a sense of fucking rage. And afterwards, we got the cunt. So don’t worry about it! [Laughs.]

1978_June_Bob_Geldof_Phil_Lynott_Richard_ChangYou were very close to [Thin Lizzy’s] Phil Lynott in those days, weren’t you?

Whenever I think about Phil I just fucking miss him so much. Really miss him. He was fucking brilliant. He was such a laugh. And in my mind, one of the great rock stars - just a proper, fuck-off, gold-plated, bona fide rock star. I was never that. I couldn’t carry it off, it was too much bollocks. I didn’t believe in it. And he completely believed in it. It wasn’t what I wanted at the beginning anyway, you know, it wasn’t what we were about. I remember going onstage at the Liverpool Empire when we were now becoming very grand and big, and this was where The Beatles had played, and I walked out and I was thinking, fuck me… And the screaming, just screaming. And I just said, “Stop that, will you? I’m not very good, [keyboardist Johnny] Fingers is cute, but - stop it!” [Imitates redoubled girls’ screeching] Aahhh! It just made it worse. We were that end of things. Phil would have fucking loved it. And all that stupid bollocks - [putting on soft-voiced Irish accent]: “Is there anybody out there with a bit of Irish in them? Anybody out there like a bit more? Hur-hur-hur!” He thought that was hilarious, every night!

And the mirror on the guitar was so naff, you know - but, brilliant, because he believed it. So he carried it off, until it began to dip. He was fascinated by punk, he got it straight away, the rawness of this new thing, and he tried to be part of it with us. So we’d go around his place, and it was drug city. Endless coke. And we were going to write a song for a movie called That Summer - this was 1978. It was getting late, and he’d bought a new video camera. He literally had to put it into a supermarket wire-mesh trolley, because the equipment was so big. And he decided he’d make a video of our new single, “She’s So Modern”. So me and Chalky White, we stood behind his fucking sofa - and I’ve got this footage at home - he put on “She’s So Modern” on the record player, and me and Chalky went, “She’s so…” And you can hear him going, “Hur-hur-hur…” He goes, “Roight, now let’s do this one…” And then you hear, snnnfff… And then the night wore on. I didn’t know what lines we were doing, and he clearly had given me a line of smack. We sat on two stools to write this song - it’s now about two or three in the morning, and we’re off our heads. And so we start writing this Beach Boys pastiche, because the film was called That Summer. The words were [sings it]: “It came a little late, man/ But now it’s here it’s great, man/ I can hardly wait/ Because this summer’s here at last”. It was fucking terrible. And we thought it was a work of genius, before I fell off the fucking stool, and literally crawled up to the loo and started to tremble and throw up.

The Boomtown Rats play 'She's So Modern' on Top of the Pops

And the next thing that bugged us was, none of us ever earned any money doing gigs, we were all on fuck-all money every week, even though he was having hits. And so he said, “Let’s form a group called The Greedy Bastards.” So it was me and Philip, Paul [Cook] and Steve [Jones] from the Pistols, and I think Fingers from the Rats did one or two. We’d do a couple of Lizzy songs, a couple of Rats, a couple of Pistols, and then anything we liked, and we’d get cash, and we divvied it up. We played the Electric Ballroom, and were thrilled that we got a couple of hundred quid each. But that was great fun, whereas the rest was career, and that wasn’t fun. It wasn’t for me, anyway.

What were Phil’s special qualities? It sounds like there was no side to him…

None. No side at all, no guile. A really, really funny man - purposefully, knowingly funny. He was an adventurer. He was a great writer. I think his songs are fantastic. I don’t like the early ones, where he’s groping towards it. But he purposefully, in the Irish mode, set out to be literate. Where he really hits home, having written one of the great anthems with “The Boys Are Back in Town”, you can clearly see the imagery in the song - “that chick who came up…” - he’s telling a story to you. It’s very much in a mode. “Cowboy Song” is beautiful, all those. I just wished - just wait, Phil, just don’t die, just wait. It’ll come around to you. You’re just too good, and you had Guns’n’Roses and all these bands who came later and just said, “It’s Lizzy.” It’s that lyricism in the music - the beautiful melody in the twin guitar lines [he sings the “Boys…” riff], all that musical lyricism, and the lyrics making hard rock music fucking brilliant. If he’d just held on. It’s just a dip. Keep the leather pants on and just stay there. But no.

Thin Lizzy perform 'The Boys Are Back in Town' at Sydney Opera House, 1978

So the fact of Lizzy’s commercial dip just made him sink?

He did. And even though punks were scorched earth, he wasn’t included in that, if you look at the polls at the time - I’ve got a great Record Mirror cover of us, because we’re voted Best Album, joint, we [the Rats] were Best Single, I was Best Singer, he was No 2. There’s a picture of the both of us. And I was freaked out when he came down to see us. He always checked out the opposition. They’d had “Jailbreak”, huge. And then he comes to see us. And he gave us so much help. He said, “Why don’t you come and support us on our first tour?” And I couldn’t do that, because I didn’t have money. But he, him and their managers, got us into Phonogram for our first deals.

He did that for a lot of Irish bands, didn’t he?

Yes, he did. Even though they were potential rivals. He then befriended us, gave us great advice. He should’ve hung on. The stuff that they could have made would’ve been fantastic, and they’d be huge now.

What was his importance to Irish music? Because it seemed like he would hardly have fitted into Ireland at all, the way it was then.

It was a breakout. They never really broke out, and Van went down into singer-songwriter Irish mysticism. He thought he’d go into Irish romanticism. We were Irish reality. I was singing about people like you, I would name places, not legendary stuff like this romantic nonsense but the reality of now. I didn’t want any of that cod-bollocks. And as Phil moved then onto the Jailbreak album, he married that into a sensibility. I thought they were OK, the early Lizzy albums. They’re alright. They’re too convoluted. They’re quite arty. The first album opens with a long spoken poem. What? And then Jailbreak was the breakthrough, and “The Boys Are Back in Town”, and then they’re off and running. Once they’ve done that, then you go, “Wow. An Irish band can break through.” That was the big thing. It never bothered me - I always thought that we could break through…

As a man, did he fit into Ireland then?

Totally. He entirely viewed himself as Irish. You know, the old Black Irish thing. He goes, “Yeah, but I’m black.” And I said, “You even look like me a bit. You’re as black as fucking I am.” He said, “Ah, you know, it gives you an outsider’s view…” “You’re an outsider anyway, you come from fucking Crumlin...” He was totally Irish, in every sense. He couldn’t be more Irish. That roguish quality, the glint in the eye, the craic, having a laugh, but taking what he did very seriously - taking time on it.

Was he viewed and loved in Ireland in that way?

Totally loved, yeah. He was a proper star.

The Boomtown Rats perform 'Mary of the 4th Form' on Top of the Pops


How were things changing for the Rats by 1978?

We’re completely, purposely moving away from punk. It sounds like punk, but it didn’t really to me, it sounded like fast rhythm’n’blues. So “Lookin’ After No 1” was to me “The Heart of the City” by Nick Lowe, except talking about my life, our lives, in Ireland. “Mary of the 4th Form” was about a girl I knew in Dublin, “Lookin’ After No 1” is about having no opportunity living in Dublin, 1975. “She’s So Modern” was an attempt to talk about now we live in London in 1976 and all these girls I know - Chrissie Hynde, Paula Yates, the new writer Julie Burchill - you know, I’m writing about all these girls on the scene, “she’s so 20th-century”. I wrote that on the Tube. And so suddenly I’m writing about here and now, and the people I know, purposefully to break the Top 10, but also, where the fuck do we go with this? Because we were getting dissed by the punks for being neither one thing nor another. You know, we were suspiciously skilled at our instruments, but that’s because we’d been playing for a year in Ireland, so we pitched up here fully formed, not amateurish at all, having a couple of hundred gigs under our belt. Just sidestepped in.

album-a-tonic-for-the-troopsWe couldn’t compete with the Pistols, nor with the committed political gestalt of The Clash. So to get away from all that, I thought, I’ve gotta go more the song thing, and less of the raw emotion rock thing, less of the black and white. And so, if you look at the difference in the covers of the first and second album [The Boomtown Rats and Tonic for the Troops], Tonic is colourful. So purposefully, we went down the route saying, “Take this thing forever into the charts, with the same sensibility that drove the first record, overtly distancing yourself from punk, but with style and content.” That was it. But we couldn’t keep doing Fine Art of Surfacing [including Number One hit “I Don’t Like Mondays”] and stuff, and we were getting so killed for just doing singles - they weren’t listening to what we were doing, we weren’t being taken seriously. So around Mondo Bongo [1980], we said, "Let’s go back, let’s stop doing the highly constructed songs, back to a rhythmic thing, back to where we were three albums ago." Mondo Bongo was a failure, it didn’t work.

The video of 'Banana Republic'


There’s an interview with you in 1982 in Hong Kong towards the end of that period…

And what was I saying?

You were saying that having wanted to get that success, in getting it, there was an emptiness in the pit of your stomach.

I think that’s true. But it’s the cliché, isn’t it? I think that’s true of everyone. You imagine what it would be like to have this affirmation of the self, and then it turns out it’s not. You imagine if I just had that - if I just had adoration and money, then I’m not a cunt. And that just isn’t true. I was also very tired. I was doing every fucking interview. I talked our way into the charts, talked our way up the charts, because they wouldn’t give us… obviously on mass radio, we were more than acceptable. Then I had to talk journalists into it, saying, “Look, I know we’re in the charts, I know we’re on fucking Dave Lee Travis. But listen…” But my entire thing has always been, get inside and change it. So as I’ve said subsequently, some people stand outside the tent pissing in, some stand inside the tent pissing out: I stand inside the tent and piss. And that’s always what I’ve done. So if you want to change, you must engage with the agents of change. And in the political world, the agents of change are politicians, and in the pop world the agent of change is the charts. So how do you get in the charts? You get played. And that way, the music stops being Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta and becomes this other thing.

Naturally we weren’t the only ones pounding at the gate but we did it in different ways, that made us of course deeply suspicious, the fact I never shut up talking. And then I had to explain what I was about and what we were about, then I had to do the songs, then I had to be the front man. It just got to be, enough already, it’s all too much of a… and like you’ve heard from a million bands, it ceases to be fun. And that’s when the discipline of the unit must kick in. Which is where you get the Rolling Stones or the U2s or the Durans. You have to discipline yourself to get through all that, to deal with individuals who’ve suddenly resurfaced within the unit of the band, and say their life is better with this girl now rather than the gang, and that’s where the emotional locus of my life is, and I don’t want to be away from home too much, and I’m getting browned off with you anyway, and you have to sit down and negotiate all that, and say, “Hold on, if we do the solo album, it’ll be a stiff, because nobody’s interested. So the strength is in this thing.” And we started going through the down period I just discussed with Lynott. Because there are new kids on the block, with something new to say for that moment. And so it was all just too much of a fucking struggle at that point.

2001_Tom_SheehanWhen you got home at night in those days, were you just feeling shattered, or even depressed by the whole thing? (Picture right by Tom Sheehan)

All of that: shattered and depressed and flat - where was the fun? And I was dragging myself through the days. I still think we were making good songs. I thought “Dave” was a very good song, “A Hold of Me” was good, I thought that big Bowie-esque song “Never in a Million Years” was a complete smash, and so did everyone else, but the audience had moved away. Unlike Phil Lynott I wasn’t interested in the star thing. I could get up the next day and not put on leather clothes, I didn’t give a fuck about limousines. But I thought the best part of my life was over. Wow, that was a fucking ride.

Was making the Band Aid single part of that situation?

Again, this was part of what I just said, rather than your get out of jail free card. In that mood - I mean, you must remember what the songs had been about, what I had been writing about. “Someone’s Looking at You”, I’d just come back from Trafalgar Square, the Greenpeace rallies - “You saw me there at the Square/ When I was shooting my mouth off at saving some fish”. And then I questioned myself - can that be construed as a radical move or some liberal’s wish? You know, it’s so hot outside I can’t think. So all the time it’s wheels within wheels - for fuck’s sake, you know.

Because there’s no one to temper your opinion at all, you learn dogmatism

When I worked in Vancouver, I went with Carol Robson on the first Greenpeace boat, rushing out against the Japanese whalers when I was a kid, so that was always my thing. I did the Amnesty stuff with Sting and Midge, always those sorts of things. So this comes along, and people think it’s out of the blue, absolutely not. But because I was exhausted trying to make the song “Dave” work, because I was flat, because I was worried, I knew that whatever I did was not going to make a penny. And because Paula was doing The Tube, I knew these new guys, [Gary] Kemp, Sting, Le Bon, Midge. Paula would say, “Come down for the weekend.” And so they’d be exhausted, and I understood what that was, every second - some of them used to fall asleep on the floor, a wooden floor just like this one and sleep for hours. So when this came along, it was self-evident that if I got all these guys I knew, plus guys that were up and coming that I liked, and Irish - namely U2 - then we’d do this, and I’d be out by Christmas.

The original video of 'Do They Know It's Christmas? (Feed the World)'

I always thought Live Aid was the greatest punk thing that happened - you saw something that was wrong, and wouldn’t accept the limitations of yourself.

Not the limitations of the self; what I wouldn’t accept, it goes pre-punk, you know. Go back now to when you’re 11, 12, 13. And in my life that was shite. There was this big old cold house, I was by myself - I mean, no parents around. And so you’re listening to this one radio station that is telling you, through its avatars - Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Pete Townsend - whispering seductive siren voices of other possibilities, other universes. That things not only do change, they can change, and change must be sought after and fought for. The world is not immune to it. That indeed you must go and change it, and it’s possible. So that’s what I picked up from that, and I still do. And I make no apologies for the fact that I view the world through the rhetoric of rock’n’roll, indeed I frame my references through that, so fuck off, I don’t care.

So when I saw this thing, my experience was that you can use this small little minor art form, because Woody Guthrie used it, Bob Dylan used it, Mick Jagger, John Lennon did, so it wasn’t a considered thing. It just was, of course you can do it. Because you bring yourself up, you learn independence, and you learn organisation. What else does a little boy do, except get his shopping and cook his meals, so you learn that. And also of course because there’s no one to temper your opinion at all, you learn dogmatism. But that’s not great, because you tend to see things in black and white, and incrementalism is alien to your nature. It’s something I’ve had to pretend to learn. And so I thought I’d do this, I’d draw attention to it, thank you very much, goodbye.

Was this that other thing you needed to re-energise you?

I didn’t know that. At the time of Band Aid, we’d sold out a 42-date tour of Britain. This is when everyone says the Rats were over. They weren’t fucking over. We’d sold out quickly 42 dates, of big theatres. Hello? I had to put the album in abeyance, because I didn’t want people to think I was conflating the two and using this. So we had to stop the album, which wasn’t great, because the people in the 42 dates would have bought that, in October, to set themselves up for the tour. So maybe we were going to be an albums band. Clearly people still liked us. But at this point I was looking forward to the gigs. And you see, at this point, I had no idea that this [Band Aid] would work.

But once you were in the middle of it, having been so flat…

boomtownrats69494Well, it’s not flat. I was really trying hard. I mean, I’d flown to New York. We made the album in Dennis Bovell’s studio in Southwark, and there was one tape machine and you could hear the tubes going. And so it was fucking awful conditions. But the band, playing now for 10 years, were really great. And I thought the songs were good. And they’d begun to write quite a lot, finally, you know. But Bob Clearmountain, who was a big fan of the Rats - he used to be one of the kids hanging round the stage door in the Palladium in New York and he’d ask us to get him in - he’d now become this massive producer/engineer - Bowie’s Let’s Dance, Bruce Springsteen, Darkness on the Edge of Town. This was Clearmountain, this kid. So I rang Bob and said, “Bob, can you do me a favour” - for free, basically. And he said, “Yee-ah, come over.” So I took Freddie Laker’s People’s Airline, went into Electric Lady [studio], and Bob mixed In the Long Grass (pictured above) over two, three days for free - I mean, amazing. So I thought we had a fucking winner here. So by no means had I given up. That’s my great regret, that I bought afterwards that we were over, that I didn’t fight that. But we kept being told we were shite, it’s over. And I was so tired of the struggle. And our manager had gone, and I was tired of doing that. The record company weren’t interested in us. But I was going to keep going, there was no question of that.

Were you derailed by Band Aid?

I was. And then I go to Africa. I quickly understand that, much to my dismay, the money on that is meaningless in effect. But I also understood that things like hunger and ill health and lack of education are simply symptoms of a singular, empirical economic condition, which is poverty. And while we can deal with the symptoms of this condition with something like Band Aid, the structures of this condition are political and economic. I’d always understood that stuff, you know. And this thing, I suddenly understand, is, yes, a cultural event, but more importantly a political lobby. That’s what I understood.

You still have energy, you still have things to do, but as that generation passes from authority, your voice will be less heard

And so that’s the Thatcher moment, where I really begin to start that as a lobby. There’s a picture of us together in 1985. I’m talking to her now and she’s saying, “Yes, but Mr Geldof we can’t just give them…” And I’m being deferential, my head is lowered. She won’t look at me, so I’m going with it. And I’m certainly nice and with a smile I’m saying, “Yes, but Prime Minister, there’s nothing as simple as dying.” And this is on telly. And she then turns on me, and fixes me with those laser eyes. I look at her like that, and I move close to her, and I look down on her, because I’m much taller, and it was theatre, and I knew it at that moment. Subsequently at the lunch, she has her back to me like this, and she turns round and says, “Come and see me at [No] 10.”

So about three nights later I go in and I speak to her in the flat at 11 at night over a whiskey. And then it begins, the long struggle to create a lobby out of this. To make the argument that the Eighties cannot just be about kids wearing red braces and driving Porsches. That’s great - except you look like a cunt. But it cannot just be about that. And this idea of the Eighties of more - you have to ask, more of what? And if the answer is more of everything, then for what, to what end? I’ve no problem with it, but to what end? And then this alien spaceship in the middle of this "greed is good" - greed is not good, greed is stupid - in the middle of this whole idea, lands this spaceship called Live Aid. And it has this massive resonance because the miners are striking, it’s the end of their life. She’s trying to de-industrialise Britain and make a modern economy, because capitalism and labour has moved east, so we can’t compete. People are going, “Wa-hey!” And others are going, “Fuck me, what do we do?” Into that confusion comes this one thing which says, it can be different.

Would you talk to anyone if you knew it would do good?

Yes. Because I said at the time, I’d shake hands with the devil on my left and the devil on my right to get to the people I need to. So get inside the tent and piss.

DSC_7043bbwOn your new album, there’s a song, “Here’s to You”, that makes sense as you get older…

Yes that’s exactly what it is. I was with a bunch of friends - old, old friends, and we were all together in Turkey. And we’d been out late - three in the morning we got back. And someone had a guitar and I just did that - “Here’s to you and all my friends”. Because they’re so cool. So yeah, it’s very simple.

And that sentiment just grows as you get older, doesn’t it?

It does. And it’s also a clear understanding, finally, that, yes, I’m in love with life tonight. So that’s what it was about, you know, the words pop out. So let it rain. Fuck, you know, all the shit coming at you, I love life.

Do you like this age you’re at?

Yes. Jeanne [Marine, his long-time partner] stays out of things, and she’s beautiful in every sense. All that nervousness, what do I do and where am I going? It doesn’t matter any more, because you’ve done it and been there. I mean there are lots of things to do still. But my generation are in positions of authority, so it’s easier to get all the things done. You struggle at 20 to get people to listen. Now you’ve got a track record, they’ll go along with you a lot of the time. Failure is nothing to you. So what if that didn’t work, go on to the next thing. Your emotional life, your family life, the things that have grown up - even if you’ve no idea what’s coming down the track now, you feel like you’ve been through as much as you can handle, and it’s all upside after that. And you think, well, you still have energy, you still have things to do, but as that generation passes from authority, your voice will be less heard, it’ll be less easy to get things done. But also, maybe you don’t want to. I mean, I’m no way complacent; I’m all the time… ahh, you know? It’s so different to [previous album] Sex, Age and Death, in fact it’s a million miles away. Someone online said it was a celebration of the heart, which was a nice way to put it. Finally I got there, you know. I mean, “To Live and Love” can’t be clearer, that’s all there is, and “life without love is meaningless”. That’s true

  • Find Bob Geldof’s new album How to Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell (Mercury) on Amazon

Comments

A lot of people are now questioning the effectiveness (after 3 decades) of this whole culture of touchy feely, BBC endorsed, celebrity 'feel good' charity work. Who does it REALLY benefit to have these hugely important social, economic and geopolitical issue reduced to dumbed down and cathartic mass entertainment events where we are encouraged to feel we are affecting 'change' just by waving our hands in the air, buying a 'charidy' single and listening to A, B and C-list celebs perform pop songs in Hyde Park and shout "Are you ready to save the f***ing world?!!!!" According to this documentary (below), 1985's Band Aid/ Live Aid helped to inadvertently facilitate a program of ethic cleansing in Ethiopia, Birhan Waldo (the starving girl who had minutes to live and was allegedly saved by Live Aid and appeared on stage at Live8 20 years later) was actually rescued by another charity and a Canadian journalist 10 months before the Live Aid concerts were held and the whole political message of the Make Poverty History campaign was totally watered down at every stage by the insipid Live8 concerts and general celeb/ public self congratulation. It would appear that for 30 years it's been win-win for everybody involved.... well everyone except the poor and starving of course! The illusion of celebrity endorsed charity (except) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aT7JC9U6lVA Or watch the full length documentary here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW0WJ_xULXU

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