Bob Almighty

Sunday October 12, 2003
The Observer

Musician, Third World campaigner, millionaire businessman and now Britain's favourite 'mum'... pinning down Bob the Gob can be tricky. But behind Geldof's relentless drive is a palpable fear of poverty and loneliness, as Barbara Ellen discovers.

On Geldof's specialist subjects, be it Third World debt, the injustice of family law, or the socio-political temperature of his native Ireland in the mid-70s, he is capable of spewing out endless facts, figures, quotes, arguments and counter-arguments in obsessive detail at astonishing speed without so much as drawing breath. Geldof is not boring on his chosen topics (he has such force and charisma he could never be tedious), it is just that he's unstoppable. If you try to interrupt, as you must if the interview is going to be about anything other than the vagaries of African economic infrastructure, then it is a bit like trying to put out a chip-pan fire with neat petroleum. Geldof listens impatiently to your interjection, kills it with a one-liner or a spray of 'Fucks', then goes back to his original diatribe more fired-up than ever.

It's not like I didn't know what I was letting myself in for. I'd encountered Geldof before when he, Bono, and other Drop the Debt activists met the Pope in Italy in 1999. After an agreeable interview with the U2 front man (Geldof calls himself and Bono 'the Laurel and Hardy of the Third World'), I hung around to ask what I considered to be a pertinent question about the 'passive racism' that might lurk behind Western apathy towards Third World suffering. The ensuing explosion must have been heard in nearby Sicily - Geldof bellowing at me about 'absurd cynicism', 'typical fucking journalists' and other such pleasantries. If Alex Ferguson's temper is a hair dryer then Bob Geldof's is an expletive-strewn blow torch and I staggered away suitably singed.

Wary of provoking another outburst, I don't mention our previous encounter to Geldof when he shambles into the room at London's Soho House (what's the point, he probably shouts at hacks all the time?) Geldof is carrying a guitar and looking characteristically dishevelled in a pale crumpled suit, tufts of hair sticking out at right angles. (It's strangely comforting that, after all these years, and despite being a millionaire several times over, Geldof still manages to give the impression that he sleeps in a skip with a family of badgers.) The first thing he does is lay a phone on the table in front of him which is to go off sporadically throughout the interview.

'Everything is 24-7,' he says, pointing at the phone. 'It could be the kids calling, it could be the drummer, it could be my sister. There's five messages - two are political, two are business, I'm here doing this, and I was playing Brussels last night.' He sounds busy - maybe too busy?

'Yeah, but if I wasn't constantly having to change my head into this or that gear I'd get bored very quickly. I'm afraid of boredom because I get into all this emptiness. But I'm also exhausted by activity. So I'm all the time tired and all the time frantic not to get bored and fall into that other condition.' He smiles wryly. 'It's not ideal.'

We are here to talk about Geldof's first band, the Boomtown Rats, who are releasing a compilation CD of their old material, but really we could be talking about anything. Geldof is a Russian doll of a public figure. Every time you think you've worked him out another 'Bob' pops out. There's the musician who still doggedly records and performs as a solo artist, doing respectably abroad but barely registering on the pop radar here (he swears he couldn't care less). The Third World activist who also supported the relatives of the Omagh bomb victims. The successful businessman who made serious money selling Planet 24 (originator of the Big Breakfast) and online travel company Deckchair.com. And the media personality who will soon be seen on television ranting grumpily about the corrupting effects of teen magazines on young girls such as his daughters.

There is also Geldof the Super-Parent (voted one of the nation's Best Mums in one poll). Fifi (20), Peaches (14), Pixie (12) and Tiger Lily (7), Paula Yates and Michael Hutchence's daughter, all live with him and his girlfriend, French actress Jeanne Marine, in their Battersea home. True to form, he does nothing but grumble about his situation. 'I live with all these females and not one of them can cook. And I live with a French woman - I thought I was getting the whole Gallic deal.' That's a very laddish thing to say. 'Living in a house with loads of women maybe your masculinity gets exaggerated. It's Custer's last stand.' It must be nice really. 'It's not nice, it's tiresome,' says Geldof, trying rather unsuccessfully to stay angry. 'I'm so sick of the female sensibility. I know they have to be on the phone all the time but do they have to have all these lipsticks and bottles everywhere? And the smells! Why can't women smell of something that isn't a smell?'

Geldof's most recent high-profile crusade is to highlight the anti-father prejudice of the family courts. When he and Paula Yates originally split he lost custody of the children, and even though he fought successfully (at great expense) to get them back, his shock and disgust with the system rages on. Geldof has written about his experiences and views extensively in a 30-page report entitled: The Real Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name: A Sometimes Coherent Rant, recently abridged for a national newspaper. When we discuss it, I'm with him all the way about fathers loving their children just as much as mothers, but he loses me a bit when he starts claiming that women are so unwilling to concede their 'power' in the domestic arena that we belittle male attempts to vacuum.

'Oh, I can see you're just going to argue,' he says crossly. Doesn't he think that he's simply reacting to his own unusual circumstances - after all, he is mothering and fathering? 'I'm not mothering, I'm fathering, I'm a man!' But in his situation, he must worry about what's lacking - all the single parents I've ever met do. Geldof sighs explosively: 'You provide what you can and you don't worry about it. There's so much crap talked about bringing up a child. A fucking moron could do it. Morons do bring up their children. It's just endless love, endless patience, that's it.'

Since Geldof's newspaper article was printed there have been outbreaks of dad-militancy with sit-ins in family courts. Love him or hate him, agree or disagree, no one could deny that Geldof is good at getting results. Whatever cause he happens to be fighting for, he is the world's most effective troublemaker. But why does he always get involved in these crusades? Geldof just says that when he sees something he thinks could be changed he considers it his duty to do anything in his power to flag it up. But why is he so driven? Well, he says, that may have something to do with him having had a bit of a rough time of it as a child. 'But don't quote me on that,' he groans. 'It will just look self-pitying and self-aggrandising.'

Bob Geldof was born in 1951. His mother died of a brain haemorrhage when he was seven and he was brought up in Dun Loaghaire, outside Dublin, by his father, a travelling salesman, who was away a lot. The Geldofs were poor and Bob had to fend for himself. 'From an early age, I was independent,' he says. 'I'd come home at night and there was no one there. I'd make the tea and do the shopping and get the coal and light the fire. There was no TV because we didn't have the money, no phone so I couldn't be interrupted. I'd just listen to Radio Luxembourg and read. That's why I grew up scruffy. An eight-year-old boy doesn't iron his shorts or give a fuck about his hair.' Geldof has since talked often of how 'poverty and loneliness' are his greatest fears, but, in retrospect, does he think his bad start may have given him the self-assurance of the self-made? 'No,' he says bluntly. 'It didn't give me anything. I felt panicked, lonely and afraid all the time.'

After school proved to be a wash-out, Geldof set up local CND and anti-apartheid groups and worked with the homeless and prostitutes, picking up jobs as a factory hand and a labourer along the way. Geldof talks long and passionately about the Ireland of the mid-70s - the poverty, the church, the young, over-educated, under-stimulated population, the indigenous music traditions of which he felt no desire to be part. 'Ireland in 1975 was another universe - Planet Ireland. It was so claustrophobic. It manifested itself within me as breathlessness, asthma quite literally. When I'd leave Ireland it would disappear.'

On one trip to Canada Geldof bluffed his way into running a music paper which he managed to turn around before he was deported. Back in Dublin, he went to work in an abattoir (the inspiration for 'Rat Trap') and formed a band, first called the Nightlife Thugs and then the Boomtown Rats (after a Woody Guthrie reference).

At their first gig, in front of about 30 people, he was so nervous he wore a hat, coat, and scarf and stood with his back to the audience until he realised that they were applauding. 'This clapping thing and people dancing was the first approbation I'd had for anything, anything at all.' Better was to come that night with what Geldof warmly remembers as 'my first rock'n'roll shag'.

'One of the girls from the audience came up to me and said: "You're so beautiful, I want to fuck you."' Geldof laughs. 'I'd read about this kind of thing in Forum. Girls coming up and wanting to shag you and I thought, yeah right, girls don't do that, you know. They certainly didn't do it in my life and they certainly didn't do it in Catholic Ireland, 1975. And that was the first time I'd had one of those shags that was meaningless from her point of view and mine. She was far more in control, of course. I thought I would have to pretend to take it further, but she wasn't interested at all.'

You were her scalp, her trophy?

'Yeah, but fine, I loved it. I'd be a notch on a bed post anytime. I just loved the way girls were looking at me differently. Before, I was just this geezer. It wasn't particularly easy to get shagged. And there's no way you can turn it down at that age.' He grins wickedly. 'I thought, I'm going to go for this because it feels so great, it feels so right.'

When the Rats moved to London at the height of punk, their penchant for tunes and hooks, as well as Geldof's famous declaration that he wanted to 'get rich, get famous, and get laid' jarred with the purist sensibilities of the time. Geldof describes the Rats as 'perennial outsiders, anti-establishment and anti the anti-establishment. The way I saw it, if a Volkswagen and a limousine came to the door I'd take the limousine because it probably wouldn't happen again.'

The Rats compilation features hits like 'I Don't Like Mondays', 'Rat Trap' and 'She's So Modern', as well as later lesser-known material such as 'Dave' and 'Never in a Million Years'. In the course of their career, they garnered Grammys and Ivor Novello awards, as well as first New Wave number one and first Irish number one. They appear to be remembered fondly - writer Joseph O'Connor, brother of Sinead, has written a moving essay on how much hope and inspiration the Rats gave him when he was growing up in repressive 70s Ireland. However, Geldof seems strangely ambivalent about his old band. He will happily tell you how thrilled he was to have 'I Don't Like Mondays' name-checked on an episode of The West Wing ('It entered the culture!'), but when I ask him why they decided to release a compilation now, he shrugs defensively and says: 'Was there a screaming public demand for it? Probably not. But there is growing interest in the bands of 1976 and actually we were one of them.' In retrospect, he says, he is proud of the Rats. 'They survived their moment.'

Why is he only proud of them in retrospect? Does Geldof have a musical inferiority complex? He doesn't say so directly, but there's a telling moment when he describes the period during which the Rats got big enough to attract some of his all-time heroes to their shows - including John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger. 'It was weird and it's still weird. You end up getting into conversation - political things, arty things, whatever, but I keep having to remind myself who it is I'm talking to. The fan is huge within me when I meet these people. I truly admire them because they're fucking amazing artists and... well,' Geldof laughs brutally. 'I'm not.'

When the Rats split, Geldof felt confused, directionless and panicky. However, his charity event, Live Aid, in 1985, raising more than £100m for the drought victims of Ethiopia, raised his profile more than his music ever did. Geldof received a knighthood, narrowly missed out on the Nobel Peace Prize and became an international folk hero overnight. Who could forget his less-than-subtle fundraising cry ('Give us yer fucking money!') or the way he contradicted Margaret Thatcher twice to her face on live television?

Geldof is still incensed about the Third-World debt. The way he sees it, if a third of the debt can be cancelled, as it has, then what's the sudden moral and ethical problem with the other two-thirds? However, on a recent trip to Ethiopia, he took the unfashionable step of praising President Bush and Tony Blair for being 'relatively pro-active'. 'You're going to think I'm off my trolley when I say this, but the Bush administration is the most radical in a positive sense since Kennedy. Clinton was a good guy but he did fuck all.' Over the years, Geldof has hobnobbed with many world leaders, but there's still a part of him that feels uncomfortable about being complicit with government. Any government. 'I might actually agree with a lot of what they're saying but, being a Paddy, I find it an almost national obligation to oppose.'

He puts down a lot of his influence to being around the same age as leaders like Bush and Blair, who would have watched Live Aid. 'Would I have the political access were I a 25-year-old? Probably not.' He smiles. 'The fact that Blair likes some bands that I think are fairly lame - like Genesis - doesn't alter the fact that there's a mutuality of experience. We did share the two worst haircuts in Britain in 1976.' Does he feel his age? 'Yes I do. I don't feel 21, I feel 51. It doesn't feel particularly odd.' When he turned 50, Geldof went off to have his prostate checked because he kept reading he should. ('Fucking finger up the arse, I can do without that again.') Apart from that, he isn't finding ageing difficult and actually welcomes the idea of death as a form of oblivion, saying sadly, 'I once told a teacher that when I grew up I wanted to be surrounded by beauty, but I don't think I ever achieved that for myself. There's been horror and ugliness all over my life.'

Geldof was devastated when Paula Yates divorced him for INXS frontman Michael Hutchence. In 1997, Hutchence was found hanged in a Sydney hotel room, possibly as the result of a solitary sexual game, the same night he'd had a row on the phone with Geldof about access. Yates died of a heroin overdose a year later. Without a moment's hesitation, Geldof scooped up Tiger Lily and took her home to be brought up with her sisters, displaying a brusque kindness that always makes me feel like bursting into tears (Geldof scoffs at the idea that anyone would have acted differently). He says now that throughout everything the children have been a constant comfort and anchor. 'When the horror was at its worst you want to go to a grey remote area of the world and howl into the void, but you can't because you have other responsibilities greater than your pain.'

When Yates first left, Geldof would look into the mirror and cry, thinking that he was ugly and no one would ever love him again. Male friends kept an eye on him, and Pete Briquette, the Rats guitarist who had stayed on for Geldof's solo work, got him writing again. The result was 2001's Sex Age and Death, with the song 'One for Me', which was about Yates. 'Mutton dressed up on a Sunday plate/ Teenage clothes in see-through sizes/You don't even need to get your clothes off any more. You're a bit old for that stuff anyway.' Another song, 'Inside Your Head', was about Hutchence: 'You got a life and left me for dead/So why put a noose around your neck?'

It's his right to write these lyrics, but should he have published them? Geldof says that he was simply trying to 'articulate the unsayable' and that anyway he wrote the songs before Yates died. Still, Sex Age and Death remains uneasy listening, particularly, one imagines, for the children he cares for. Didn't he think of editing it? 'No,' he says forcefully. 'Because then I would be a traitor to myself. Bizarre as it is even to me, I'm an artist and I had to go with what came out.' Geldof considers for a long moment. 'It might sound disingenuous, but I didn't really imagine anybody else listening to it. It just wasn't in my head. When it came to performing the songs and talking about them, I was embarrassed, to be honest.'

Are his children as driven as he is? Geldof smiles ruefully: 'Some of them are. We certainly argue constantly. And because of the conditions of their lives they probably will be driven. Things have been very hard and should not have happened to any child. Different, but just as bad as mine unfortunately. I wish it were otherwise.' But his own demons, those fears of poverty and loneliness - he's rich, surrounded by people, surely he can relax a bit now. 'No,' he says. 'Poverty and loneliness are still my greatest fears. I can be alone and not be lonely. I can feel lonely when I'm not alone. There is a constant emptiness. The religious right would say it's a God-shaped hole, but it isn't. Those who know my personal story would say it's a mum-shaped hole, but it isn't. There's just this perennial condition of being empty and it can't be filled with money and stuff and things.'

What can it be filled with? 'Performing music,' says Geldof. 'It's always been my emotional release. What do I love about it? It's psychologically fulfilling, physically exhausting, financially rewarding, everything I ever wanted. You leave the stage and sleep the sleep of the just, which doesn't happen to me very often.' He pauses. 'And that's true most of the time, but especially when things have been at their darkest.'

Geldof explains that, even now, he hasn't come to terms with a lot of things. 'Time does not heal, it only accommodates.' He doesn't seek peace of mind. 'That's a neurotic pursuit, people who practise yoga and lock themselves away on mountain fasts and in caves and shit - it's a pathological condition!' Nor does he consider himself to be a survivor. 'It's just a life. A soap opera, it really is. It all just happens to you and you have no control over what comes next.' That sounds like he believes in predestination. 'No,' he says thoughtfully. 'It's random, it's chaos and it's fantastic that it's that. You can only control it by saying it doesn't matter.' And with that, the very busy Bob Geldof reaches for his phone. 'Let's just see who's been ringing...'