Bob Geldof: Getting the Job Done

Saga Magazine - March 2005

The fight for Africa didn't end with Live Aid for ex-Boomtown Rat Bob Geldof. He tells Madeleine Kingsley why his new album, human rights, love and young daughters are making him embrace his fifties. 

Bob Geldof uncoils himself on the sofa of a Soho watering-hole looking, well, like Bob Geldof. Drained, battered, but defiantly cool. He is wearing cream cords topped with a tight-tailored, pin-striped jacket and a spotted cravat. His socks are pale blue, possibly cashmere. That trademark hair is now a steely Merlinesque grey.

His various incarnations the Boomtown Rats, Live Aid and the continuing crusade for Africa have accorded Bob iconic status, but his pedestal is not carved from stone. Although he has been awarded an honorary knighthood and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, he is impatient, opinionated and, when crossed, distinctly curmudgeonly; he could never be everyone's hero. Bob Geldof is just too indelibly rocknroll. His eyes are too expressive for comfort, flashing fervour, irritation and elation by turns. He still swears like the raw youth who navvied on the M25 motorway.

Age (he is 53) has not withered his sharp tongue (my favourite: a young Prince William burst into a Kensington Palace room where Bob and Prince Charles were discussing Africa, and did a double-take at the Geldof look. "He's all dirty! He's got scruffy hair and wet shoes!", the young royal complained. "Shut up, you horrible boy," growled Bob).

The best of Bob is his power-pack energy, his quotable cleverness and direct honesty. Forget idealism, he says, his African crusade is essentially accidental: Looking for someone to do the job, a fallible God knocked on the wrong door and when Geldof answered, thought Never mind, hell do. Probably, Geldof suggests, the BBC radio punters who recently voted him Listeners Lord took the same stance. He's not seduced by ermine: Pop idol, Peer idol? "Part of me thinks the voters just wanted to stop me making music! There's no chance of that, now, at 76, or ever," says Bob, for whom age is irrelevant. "You don't really feel age, or at least I don't think you do.

"Psychologically it's just not an issue. Physically I'm tired at the end of the day and quite glad to be reading in bed by midnight. There's stuff you notice like the skin on your face being less taut and you think 'There it goes.'

"I'm fairly lucky in that I've always looked like shite. If you were a pretty boy pop singer, it would wreck you, growing older. I worried when I was 30 because I'd been a mega rock star and you think Oh f**k, that's over. It's gone. Which didn't happen, as it turned out.

"My forties didn't bother me, except they were sh*t to live through. So when I got to 50 I just thought, Hold on: I'm thin. I've got my hair. I'm well off. I survived, you know. So it was with release that I embraced being 50 and I gave a huge f**k of a party."

Three years on, Bob is forcibly reminded of times when his hair resembled mad, black snakes, the torso was skinnier still and the wealth won from business ventures like the travel agency Deckchair.com and Ten Alps Broadcasting (the advertising and communications group) was still unimagined. His record company has just released the entire Boomtown Rats back catalogue on CD, plus a DVD of long-forgotten live film clips. There, for instance, is baby-faced Bob tearing off his wild striped shirt and mouthing maniacally into the mike as his hit She's so Modern reaches its razzed-up climax, and being mobbed on arrival at Dublin airport; their home-town gig was then banned for fear of violence despite being a sellout.

Remastering the Rats was, for Bob, a bit of an epiphany. "I'd always thought the Rats were good fun, but one of the very nice things about being of Saga age is that I can actually look back and think, When I was younger I was in a great band. It was always a collective thing. Do you seriously think that Bob Geldof without Johnny Fingers, without Garry, Gerry, Simon and Pete is going to do f*****g anything? No way, by myself, though by chance I wrote the songs.

"What is fantastic is that we did it on our own terms and we also helped to change things. By 1975 pop stars had completely lost it. They were concerned about the height of their platforms or their bouffants. They had nothing to say any more." Bob, who infused pub-rock with tough, swaggering glamour, had plenty. "I was really lucky that I came to puberty at a time when music and politics were completely intertwined. When I hit 11 so did the careers of Dylan and the Stones. A year later it was the Who and the Kinks. I wasn't interested in sport, so what interested me was Anti-Apartheid, CND (though I mostly liked the badges) and in my early teens I was working with the homeless at night - bewildered men and lost women. It was just going along to the Simon Community, giving them soup and bread. There were no moral overtones. I enjoyed it."

The Boomtown Rats were political from day one, and Bob their troubadour for the times:"Nobody knew then that in 1975, Irelands population became 50% under 25 years of age. Obviously it was a Zeitgeist moment and I'm glad that the Rats led the charge. Music is still above all else the thing that does it for me. Music is what I must do, business is what I need to do and politics is what I have to do."

Of all the gongs Bob has received, only the Ivor Novello Songwriting Award is displayed above the mantelpiece at his old priory home in Faversham, Kent. His shiny new Lifetime Achievement Award received at the Brit Awards (previously given to Sting and Duran Duran) will surely also take pride of place.

"More than anything else, that's a big deal for me. To be recognised by your musical peers means far more than recognition from anyone outside. It's left me uncool as it is embarrassed, thrilled, glad and proud simultaneously."

His award marks the 20th anniversary year of Live Aid, the Wembley concert which remains inescapably Bobs finest hour. "Live Aid," he says, "came about for a practical political purpose and it's taken all this time for us guys with guitars to see it approach reality." The Commission for Africa has this month presented a key policy report to the G8: a comprehensive, structured plan for the alleviation of poverty on the continent. The G8 Summit in July will be crucial to Africa's immediate economic future.

"It's all happening now," Bob says, "because the generation who were there the day Live Aid put Africa at the top of the agenda finally have the levers of power. Blair plays guitar and was in a rock band. For a brief period in 1976 he and I shared the worst haircut in Britain." Bob is in constant touch with Blair and Brown as his focus sharpens on Britain's potential for progress, heading the G8 and taking presidency of the EU this year.

"Without question we will be the most influential country in global affairs for a period of six months this year. If we come out of the G8 having achieved something for the weakest, voiceless, most put-upon people in the planet, that would not be a bad use of political influence."

The African imperative means frequent absences from home. Bob, who lives with Jeanne Marine, a French actress, has explained this carefully to his daughters but,' they still guilt-trip me. They understand, but they throw it back at me when they want to make me feel like sh*t."

Fifi, 20, has been working at MTV, Peaches, 15, who writes and sings in a school band ("she's good!") is making her mark as a teen columnist and Pixie, 14, also has a fledgling media career. Bob has also adopted Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, the eight-year-old daughter of his former wife Paula Yates and INXS frontman Michael Hutchence. Does the hands-on father who cooks for three vegetarians and three carnivores feel his upbringing is paying off? "F**k no! You never see that as a parent. You just see that you are to blame for everything that goes wrong."

But there are, he says, "no words for the joy of fatherhood. That is why it's talked of in such clichés. The girls are a complete joy and I love their passion. They argue with me like mad and I love that too. One of them is sort of sardonic and dry, driving her sister beyond exasperation. One is more taciturn, accepting what goes on with a shrug. The little one is just really funny and cute, and very wise actually." New Year found the family together on the ski slopes. Bob and slalom did not bond: "The word is, 'Paddy don't ski!'" sighs Bob. "I cant stand. It hurts. Its cold. The clothes are f*****g ridiculous. I'm sweating inside and I'm freezing outside. My legs are breaking. I'm halfway up a mountain. What the f**k am I doing?"

Seeing 2005 in with his daughters, aged between 20 and eight, "that's what" and marvelling that they enjoyed a party with him. "Bizarrely, they are not embarrassed by me. They couldn't give a toss and all their mates joined in. I would have been absolutely mortified if that had been my Dad dancing. Teenagers are still teenagers and adults are adults, but the two worlds are no longer totally incomprehensible to either."

It doesn't take a psychoanalyst to see that Bobs sensitivity to loss and suffering date from the night his mother died of a sudden brain haemorrhage. He was seven, sleeping after a family picnic of dressed crabs and choc ices. In the same year his sister Cleo was diagnosed with incurable leukemia only to recover, amazingly, after a visit to Lourdes. At 11 Bob himself saw Lourdes on a school trip: "I realised, for the first time, something that would be confirmed to me in my teens and later as an adult in Africa. Mankind at its most desperate is often at its best."

This message rang hollow when the life Bob finds as extreme as a soap opera turned to ashes 10 years ago. He lost Paula Yates once to Michael Hutchence and then, with hideously public finality, to a drugs overdose after Hutchence's suicide. Bob, left howling in the void, thought he would never play again. But new-mood songs, those raw and tender tracks of his 2002 album Sex Age and Death, brought their own redemption.

"They helped me articulate the unsayable," he says. One particular wry, sweet ballad 10.15 (named after the Eurostar departure time to Paris) signposted his revival. It was a romantic and sexual merci to Jeanne Marine whom he'd met over dinner with friends in Paris: "Jeanne saved my soul again last night. She told me I was beautiful ..." Jeanne, 39, was herself raised by a wise young stepmother and holds the fort while Bob is travelling.

Given his genetic heritage, Bob's life could run and run. Pushing 90, his father drove round Croatia last year. An aunt is 96 and an uncle 92. But Bob does not count on longevity: "My Mum died at 40, so, on balance, I may only have 10 years left. I don't think Ill make it much beyond my seventies because too many hard things have happened and you feel them hit."

There is no personal trainer in Bob's life, no low-fat diet on the family refrigerator. Appearing on TV alongside Vidal Sassoon, he was mystified by the celebrity crimpers pride in performing four billion push-ups every day. "Why would anyone do that?" Bob demands. He eats what he likes ("Too f*****g right") and keeps neither secretary nor office. As for e-mail, "Spare me! They hold you up so much."

The closest he gets to a desk is in a Kings Road café. Here he holds meetings by the hissing cappuccino machine and jokes that he can watch beautiful girls from a nearby model agency walk by. "If you don't want to answer your letters you bin them. Others I follow up by phone, or scrawl a note to post across the road." He records engagements in last years pocket Musicians Diary and asks to be reminded of high-level meetings the day before. "Number 10 will ring and say 'Are you coming in, Bob?' Maybe it sounds like a mess to other people. But it works for me."

Is Geldof finally leading the life he's always wanted? "Well I am lucky with my band now they are beyond good. I was lucky with Paula and I'm lucky now with Jeanne. I never think of myself as lucky, but when you consider it, that's it, you know. I am. But I cant really say this is the life I've wanted because I've never imagined a life for me.

"Things come out of the blue that are unanticipated, unlooked for neither dreamt of nor ambitiously sought after. It's precisely as Keats wrote, you only get what you view with indifference: Fame, like a wayward girl, will still be coy/ To those who woo her with too slavish knees.

"I have a very low boredom threshold. I'm Irish through and through, so I've got the words to communicate with people and therefore they may listen. I can write those words down. My Dad was a salesman selling towels. I sell tunes and ideas. Its all very comprehensible, you know."

He sold tunes and ideas? Could that be a fitting epitaph? "Alan, our keyboard player, says he'll pay to have a single word inscribed on my headstone 'Why?' because I keep on saying it. Maybe it really doesn't matter so long as my last coherent thought is, 'That was interesting.'"