'It's not in my nature to shut up'
From the angry punk snarl of The Boomtown Rats to tracks about Paula Yates and Michael Hutchence, Bob Geldof has always articulated his feelings through music. Here, ahead of two Scottish concerts, he opens up to Peter Ross of The Scottish Herald about a life lived in song

A FEW years ago, Bob Geldof organised a poll to find the best-loved word in the English language. It turned out to be serendipity, which the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines as "the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident." This strikes me as apt, serendipitous even, given that Geldof's life has been characterised by his peerless ability to be in the right place at the right time and then to capitalise hugely on his lucky breaks; indeed, even his unlucky breaks, which have not been in short supply, seem to turn out well, eventually.

"Sometimes you just become part of the zeitgeist by accident," he tells me over a late lunch in London's Soho House, "whether it's Africa, whether it's the punk thing, or whether it's family law. Sometimes you just are and there's nothing you can do about it."

He arrives early, neck-craningly tall and slim, a Mies van der Rohe skyscraper in a chocolate-brown pinstriped suit. His hair is a grey shag tumbling into his face. He discusses the agreed length of the interview:"An hour and a half? You'll be bored out of your hole, won't you?" with typical profane grouchiness, but seems in fairly good spirits, even smiling and laughing on occasion, hardly in keeping with his reputation as an arch-grumpus. He orders a ham omelette and talks with his mouth full; for someone who never, ever stops talking, its doubtless the only way he ever manages to eat.

We start by discussing The Boomtown Rats. The most successful band to come out of the punk explosion, they notched up 11 hits between 1977 and 1982, including two number one singles.

Geldof formed the band in Dublin in the summer of 1975. In that year, the majority of the population of Ireland was under 25 years old; he was 24 and felt suffocated. "Ireland was a country of grotesque unemployment, a civil war, a corrupt, criminal government," he says. "Government ministers were gun-running, they were taking backhanders from business to destroy the city of Dublin; they owned the land around which these developers were building. The Church knew all about this and were silent. And meanwhile, the priests were busily abusing the children of their parishioners, and everyone shut up about it. We were living in a republic of silence. But its not in my nature to shut up, y'know?"

Indeed not. In his sleevenotes for the recent Rats best of compilation, Joseph O'Connor writes about watching an interview with Geldof on The Late Late Show in 1977. The singer let rip about how much he despised the Catholic Church, the priests who had taught him at school and his own father. In Seventies Ireland, this was revolutionary stuff. Were you aware, I ask Geldof, that you were doing something groundbreaking?

"No, because I thought I'd only be on telly once. I didn't set out to make a fuss, but Bono has said that he was sitting there with Gavin Friday and those, who were younger than me, and were going 'Yes!' It was the first time they had heard themselves articulated, but actually it was just me."

This point is key to understanding Geldof. When he sang about a very specific and personal urban landscape where "hope bites the dust behind all the closed doors," he was singing his own life, but the songs touched a nerve in Ireland and the UK. He found himself, quite by accident, a spokesman for a generation, and was quick to embrace the influence this offered.

You might assume that this early experience with the Rats gave him the confidence to speak for others when it came to his later campaigning work. In fact, the impulse comes from earlier in his childhood, after his mother's death, when his travelling salesman father would leave him to fend for himself all week, only returning home at the weekends.

"I brought myself up," he recalls. "From about the age of seven, eight, I used to do my own cooking and laundry. Light the fire. There wasn't money around, so there was no telly, and there was no one around to make me do schoolwork, so I'd come home, read and listen to the radio. So politics and music were always the dynamic.

When my dad was home at the weekends, he used to provoke, purposefully, polemical arguments. There was a tension always because he'd just come home for two days and then f**k off, so we all had to try to pretend to be happy families. He'd say things like I mean, he never said actually this but you'd be eating away and he'd go 'Ah, y'know, that fella Hitler, he had a few good ideas.' The next minute, the place would erupt. He'd sit back and me and my two sisters would argue passionately that we didn't f**king believe it at all. That was the way we were. It was fairly explosive."

Geldof had a difficult relationship with his father, who is also called Bob. He had been a chef, working on the Queen Mary, but after the Second World War was reduced to selling towels door to door. Poverty and the sudden death of his wife took their toll, and the Sixties generation gap created a gulf between him and his son.

Bob Geldof Jr grew up brutalised, poor, ashamed of being poor, and lonely. He was beaten at school and beaten at home. Music saved him. The Who, Bob Dylan, the Stones they kept him alive, he says.

Having eventually formed his own band, Geldof moved to London in 1976. The following year he met Paula Yates, newly arrived from school in Oxford, and just turned 18. She saw Geldof on TV and, liking what she saw, wangled her way into the launch party for the Rats debut single, Looking After Number One.

"She was absolutely so beautiful," he recalls. "I thought she was like a hippy, really. She had all these lace skirts, one on top of the other, with a very loose off-the-shoulder white lace thing. But y'know, there I was, I'd just pitched up in London and I was getting shagged left, right and centre, never having gotten shagged in Ireland before, so I wasn't going to hitch up instantly with someone, even though I was mad for her."

They eventually got together and remained so right through Geldof's rise to fame. In 1978, The Boomtown Rats had their first number one Rat Trap. "We're back at home, we've got two days off, I'm lying in bed with Paula," Geldof recalls. "We all share a big house outside London in Chessington. It must have been 10am. The manager bursts in and goes 'Get up!' I say 'Why?' He goes 'F**king number one!' And I really almost cried, y'know? I couldn't believe it. It was like you see in a movie. I leapt out of bed. I only had my undies on. We were all in the hall, all these wives and transitory girlfriends and the road crew, and we just ran out in the garden and went mad. But what happened was ten minutes later I went 'F**k! Now what?' Cos that's it, its all over. Number one is number one, top of the world, ma. It's downhill after that. So that was very Geldof ten minutes and then 'F**k'!"

In fact, the Rats were to have a second number one, I Don't Like Mondays, but the point is that Geldof had a taste of real success and liked it. "When nothing you've ever done has been approved of, mass public approbation is like a balm." He recalls feeling this as early as the Rats' first gig, Halloween night, 1975, when as he puts it "the noise of clapping filtered through his panic.

"I feel very natural and at home being involved in this thing, and being looked at," he says. "I don't want to analyse it too much, but it is, I guess, because of the approbation. I still feel completely calm going out on stage. It's because I know what I do is good. So you feel a certain security within yourself because of that."

THE BOOMTOWN Rats released their final album in 1985, the same year as the Live Aid concert. Suddenly he was Saint Bob, saviour of the universe, which he wasn't happy about. "The Rats went on tour. Highly successful. We sold out every night, 40 dates, but they were only interested in Mr f**king Band Aid. It was almost as if they had forgotten this band who they had been buying in vast quantities for ten years."

Geldof went solo. In the Nineties he made millions via business ventures, including Planet 24 television, which gave us The Big Breakfast, and Deckchair.com, his online holiday company. He has since sold both and now runs Ten Alps, an advertising and communications group.

In 1995, Paula Yates left Geldof for the rock star Michael Hutchence, with whom she had a child, Tiger Lily. It was the start of what Geldof calls "the long dark years of the soul." He suffered a psychological and physical collapse, and considered suicide.

Hutchence died in November, 1997, the coroner concluding that he took his own life by hanging. Yates died of a heroin overdose in September, 2000. Geldof subsequently adopted Tiger Lily, raising her with his own three daughters and Tiger's sisters: Fifi, Peaches and Pixie.

Gradually, his faculties began to return, and his need to listen to music. Work began on what would become 2001's Sex, Age & Death album, a no-holds-barred travelogue through the scorched earth of Geldof's emotional landscape. There were songs about Yates and Hutchence, the latter asking "So why put a noose around your neck?"

At the time, Geldof described the album as the beginning of understanding what happened in his life during those years. Is he now any closer to understanding and being reconciled?

"No, I don't think I can reconcile myself, which doesn't imply bitterness and hatred," he says, referring specifically to the split with Yates. "I don't understand why it happened. That's the truth. Objectively, I can get it. There's maybe lots of reasons. But what happened subsequently was unnecessary. Millions of people, unfortunately, fall apart, but this was so extreme. I never understood why it had to be like that.

"The point was that the totality of the pain and ugliness and emptiness was so huge that it enveloped me and I could find no way around it to get on with my life. It was just this amorphous thing, and I couldn't find a way to scale over it, crawl under it, get around it. It was just everywhere. What the record did was put a shape to that experience and make it understandable.

"So now, instead of this amorphous, infinite agony, it was contained within this rectangular shape." He makes the shape of a CD case with his hands. "And I found an available slot in my brain to put it in." He mimes putting the CD in his head. "It pulses away there and sometimes it becomes intense and it pops out, but I can visualise it now. I can pull it out and say 'I know you, you f**k; I know what you are, get back in there.' It's contained.

"It will never go away. It just will never go away. I mean, I lived with this person who I was in love with for 20 years, and she the same and then she wasn't. That's understandable of course, but beyond that, why? There's loads of reasons, but anyone who went through that sort of thing will ask themselves that. People say 'Hey, you get on with it, but you don't. You're utterly changed. It's a cliché, but you're very bruised."

Sex, Age & Death concludes with 10.15, a love song to Geldof's partner, the French actress Jeanne Marine, who now lives with him in London. "What happened in that song is that you've been rejected by the woman you love," he says, "and like anyone who has been rejected, you begin to inhabit a world of incredible ugliness, indeed you feel ugly. You look in the mirror, and see the bags and crap hair and you think 'No one will ever love me again.' The realisation of that loss is utterly profound.

"This is what you're going through. So anyway, here's this beautiful girl at this dinner I'm at in Paris, where I escape for relative anonymity. She can't speak English and I can't speak French, and she smiles at me, and I react like the classic whipped dog: you recoil from any act of kindness. But the inability to speak each others language was perfect. I required calm, beauty and silence and she provided them all. Silence does'nt necessarily mean not talking, it just means a point where you can be quiet within."

Geldof and Marine began seeing each other in Paris. "At that point," he says "I didn't like women. Which is probably natural. But she did very girl things. She told me that I was beautiful and that I made her come a lot. Girls understand about male pride. What she was doing was making me whole again, saying 'You're alright.' She was putting together the fragmented pieces that she found sprinkled on the carpet floor."

Despite their intimate nature, Geldof plays songs from the Sex, Age & Death album when he gives concerts, and will be doing so at his forthcoming dates in Scotland. "Performing them is Shite. Its not a catharsis. It makes me feel really miserable. The songs are Polaroid photographs of an emotional moment. Some of the words just tell you exactly what's going on. If the past is another country, its not one which I wish to revisit, yet every night that's what I do. I think its because there's a compulsion to perform that makes the song finished. You can write it, you can record it, you can rehearse it, but it doesn't exist until its performed and objective ears hear it."

We talk about the future. No, Geldof has not written any new material since Sex, Age & Death, although he is making a lot of notes, a sure sign that an album is on its way. No, he has no plans to have more children, but "if it happens, it happens. I mean, we have four. It's a lot. I know I was born a Catholic Paddy, but I don't necessarily want to adhere completely to the traditional 95 children thing."

Recently, he has become a figurehead for the fathers' rights movement. Having gone through a custody battle, which he eventually won, Geldof is adamant that the law must move away from the received wisdom that women are innately better qualified to raise children. Last year, he published an article on this subject. It provoked a huge debate, and this seems to be another of those moments when, having spoken entirely from his own experience, he finds himself surfing the zeitgeist.

Geldof's relationship with his own father, who is 88, is now much improved. Having been widowed himself, was his father able to offer comfort when Yates died? "Not when she died, when she left. The importance of family hit me for the first time. I had never really felt that I needed family before, but they were amazing.

"The poor old fella, all he could do was cook me my favourite meal. Then I had to tell them what was happening. My sisters were amazing. They were incredibly strong and I did derive strength from them. They articulated real anger at what was happening."

Geldof seems to be more driven than ever, as if making up for that period when he could barely function. Two days before our interview he had a meeting with Tony Blair, at which he persuaded the Prime Minister to author an age-defining report into the future relationship between Europe and Africa; by the time you read this, he will have met the constitutional affairs minister Lord Filkin to discuss fathers' rights.

He once said that he wished his life could be less extreme; 30 years on from the release of his debut single, almost 20 years on from Live Aid; nearly ten since the end of his marriage, has it become so?

He shakes his head. "It's pretty extreme when you're trying to bring up four kids, when you've got various projects on the go, and politically things are more intense. I don't plan these things, they happen. So I don't think my life has become any less improbable. Do I need things to be so constant? I don't think I need it, but I don't know at this point if I'd recognise any other way of living. And that's the truth."

A quiet life for serendipitous Bob Geldof? Chance would be a fine thing.