The way from Peterlee, where Katharina and I are staying with friends to Newcastle’s twin town Gateshead, located South of the river Tyne, takes quite a bit longer than expected and is almost as complicated as predicted by my friend Emma. Eventually and after accidentally crossing and illegally re-crossing the river, we find the Sage and it’s rooftop parking. It’s only about 30 minutes until show time, so we make a dash.

We collect our tickets from the box office and then have some time to take a closer look at the Sage.

It really is quite an awesome building. There are three individual halls within the building, which are “bound together” by a high-risen and rather spectacularly swung corrugated iron roof, held aloft by long poles, with huge glass fronts in-between them. Sir Norman Foster seems to be into a combination of plain, straight lines and wide swinging curves, which go together really well, I think.

With all the windows the building must be flooded with light, we have to assume since winter’s early darkness fell hours before we got here.

The windows of the Sage look out across the river, granting a beautiful view of Newcastle as well as onto the just as spectacular Millennium Foot Bridge presumably also designed by Sir Norman Foster, which is held upright by an erected semi-circle which is not nearly above the actual bridge but way to the side of it. The bridge itself is also in the shape of a semi-circle and somehow these two shapes work together in a way that enables the powers of physics to rise to their full potential and suspend the bridge.

Bob’s playing the biggest of the three halls – Hall 1 –, which is raising several levels high and looks really impressive even from the outside.

Before taking our seats we decide to pay Tina & Ian a visit at their merchandise desk; but they are quite busy and don’t really have the time for a chat. There is a support act today: Julie Fowlis, who no-one ever heard of but while we are here anyway, we might as well cast an eye upon her, so we make our way over to Hall 1 (admiring the posh toilets en route) and find our seats to be almost in front of the mixing desk. Although the venue is said to be sold-out (it isn’t, it turns out, later) most of the seats are still empty.

The inside of Hall 1 is just as impressive and beautiful (in a very modern way) as it is from the outside. The architectural mix of straight lines and wide corves is continued here. The walls are all wooden, surely giving the place a superb acoustic. There are two sets of stalls and the doors are some very cleverly designed “locks” ensuring that people can get in and out even during performances without causing too much interference.

But right now it is time to be interfered by Julie Fowlis – because that is just what she does: Interfering with the joyful and happy mood of the day!

She takes to the stage accompanied by two guys out of which one of them is going to play acoustic guitar while the other is playing some banjo-type instrument. Julie herself is either playing various sizes of Celtic flutes or singing. She is dressed in a very traditional if not old-fashioned black and white dress with lots of totally pointless applications, fringes and stuff. Her long dark hair is neatly parted and tied back in a ponytail which might have been high in fashion about 100 years ago and which does not go along with her black high-heeled f***-me-booths whatsoever. Oh dear me!

“Hello,” she says, almost choking on this one little word. “… em… em… I am awfully…” … stage-fright?!? I wonder. “… awfully glad to be here tonight, having the great… eh-hem… opportunity to play you some of my… ehm-hem… songs!” Herrje!

I already dislike her music without having heard a single tune…

The tunes I get to hear then are Scottish or Irish jigs and reels which admittedly prove to be a lot better and a lot more entertaining than the rest of her act but which still totally fail to grab me.

Between songs, Julie – still a bundle of nerves – is informing the audience of the contents of her songs, which are in Irish or Scottish, or Whateverish only.

The songs, admittedly, are rather well played and the lyrics to some of them must be rather funny as they are tongue twisters rather than proper lyrics, so the songs are about farmers spraying manure onto their fields and things like that.

However, I can’t get past the stage of thinking that this performance is nothing but pathetic.

We have to wait about half an hour before the start of Bob Geldof’s show, giving us another chance to marvel at the beauty of the venue.

One of the two or three sentences Ian managed to get across to us while we were at his merchandise booth earlier, was about Bob’s flu having gotten worse and about how they even had to get a doctor in in order to ensure tonight’s performance.

Now, as Bob and his band walk onto the stage we immediately get aware of what Ian had been referring to. Bob is holding a mug of steaming hot liquid. “Normally I am professional enough to launch straight into the set,” he takes to the microphone, quite possibly referring to Julie F., “but tonight I will have to apologize. I’ve come down with the terminal flu and we had to get the doctor in this afternoon. So now I’m on some steroids and stuff and I don’t know how far I will be able to take this show. We’ve had to cancel some of the songs on the original set list as they were in a key, which would be too high for me to sing tonight, and I’m not sure about how I will be able to cope with the remaining songs either. We shall see…”

And so we do.

For the first few songs of tonight’s set list you can really tell that Bob is struggling – both with his voice and also with his health in general – he really seems to be pretty unfit. But gradually the medications seem to be kicking in and before long Bob seems to be flying high as a kite. Seriously! He seems to be coping with all the high notes as well as all the longs notes, he seems to be enjoying the show and he is as talkative as can be.

He’s pushing the audience to its limits by telling them about the fantastic reception he got at yesterday’s concert in Hull, this provoking the people of Newcastle and Gateshead to prove them losers.

To be honest, I think that these all-seated venues Bob is playing on this tour don’t really help in creating a rock concert mood…

Albeit tonight’s audience being quite a bit younger than those who came to the gig in Hull, we’re still talking an average ago of approximately late 40s to early 50s and once they get the chance to sit down and snuggle comfortably into their sears, that’s it as far as audience participation in concerned.

But then again Bob does not seem to be too keen on audience participation to begin with as is to be interpreted by several of the announcements he is making in-between songs.

Unlike yesterday’s gig in Hull when the light show display consisted of a mere number of coloured light bulbs being switched on and off, tonight’s light show is totally in-line with the grandness of the Sage as a whole.

The backdrop behind the stage is a giant white piece of cloth hung up in a slight curve (just like the rest of the venue!) on which the lights are projected. There are at least three dozens of gobo lights hung below the ceiling (which at a price of approximately € 10.000,- (ca. £ 7.000,-) a piece give a rough idea of the total costs of this venue!) and they are used to their full capacity.

The light technician, who does not seem to be Geldof’s own but “belonging” to the venue, is doing a hell of a great job, creating one beautiful design of colours and shapes after the other. Quite often he is using the technique of merging different colours, like having the lower part of the backdrop lit in a bright dark red and the top in a light blue, making the two colours flow into each other somewhere half way up and thus creating the design of a gay sunset, with the band in front of this artificial sunset lit in a still different colour.

Only once is he a little bit “off” when he’s choosing a couple of gobo screens looking like some kind of out-of-focus flowers – since he’s using two of them, they manage to look like Les Grande Tetons – giant tits! :)

Other than that the lights are really fabulous. Later I am to learn that sound technician Sean passed a tape of last night’s Hull show on to the Sage’s light technician who spent the whole day listening to it in order to tune his lights to the songs. Well done, mate!

I can understand how people might consider concert lights to be a mere extra and to be of no significance whatsoever but to me they are important and as much a part of the show as the music and the musicians. Almost, anyway.

Tonight’s set list is much like yesterday’s with the set starting off with a number of traditionals (in the sense of songs which were included in most of Bob’s sets over the last 10 or 15 years) like The Great Song Of Indifference, Love Or Something, and Walking Back To Happiness followed by a bunch of “unknown favourites”: Songs he wrote a reasonably long time ago but which were not included in all that many set lists, like In The Pouring Rain, My Hippy Angle and A Sex Thing and then one of the few totally new songs, the truly beautiful because utterly melodic Harvest Moon.

Before playing My Hippy Angle Bob tells the audience about the video they shot for this song, which is an adaptation of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Amsterdam hotel lie-in session with the only alternation being that in this case it’s Bob and Paula sharing the bed.

Unlike last night I do not take a note of the specific order of the songs on the set list so I can only look at Hull’s choice of songs in order to know what was played and I am sure to get the order wrong, too, but then… never mind, hm?

Bob then is playing several songs of his latest and – according to himself – best album Sex, Age & Death: Mudslide, Pale White Girls, the haunting Birthday Suit, which luckily lost some of its crying-factor since having more instruments added to it. To my personal great pleasure they are also playing the awesome, wonderful Scream In Vain, not failing to recount the story to go with the song either.

And then, of course, there’s the almost obligatory selection of Boomtown Rats classic material, which – judging by the average sell-by date of the audience – is the reason most of them came here tonight: Someone’s Looking At You, Joey’s On The Street Again, Mary Of The 4 th Form the wonderful Diamond Smiles and, of course (I Don’t Like) Mondays and Rat Trap.

Tonight, however, there is another new song included in the set. It is called Life Is The Hardest Thing and its chorus is a beautiful singing of harmonies of the single word life by almost everyone in the band, before launching into an easy-to-remember-and-sing-along chorus. I have no idea why this song did not make it onto the initial album it was recorded for (Deep In The Heart Of Nowhere). It is dead beautiful!

During the time the concert lasts, Bob’s “artificial” (because based on medication!) health seems to be improving by the minute. He’s all smiles and all talks. At the same time Katharina and I, having seen more than one of Bob’s shows, can tell that it really must be the drugs kicking in, as some of Bob’s actions and reactions are not what they normally would be like.

There is a point when he is cracking up laughing – I can’t even remember what about, so it can’t have been all that funny, can it?! – and during one of the last songs at least one if not two of his guitar strings snap, making him literally jump from being spooked by it.

However it is a great show and a very professional performance, too! Having left the Sage and standing in the streets of wintry Newcastle Katharina and I feel nature catching up on us again: We’re famished! “Time for another Greasy Spoon!”

Just around the corner we find what we are looking for: A very noisy, very greasy chipper place, filled with scarcely dressed “big” girls, their drunken boy-friends and a waitress shouting out the numbers of ready-to-be-picked-up orders as if she was a merchant on Hamburg’s notorious Fischmarkt. Hoorah!

We’re ordering fries (Katharina) and a burger (me) and discuss the events and outcomes of the evening while hauling our teeth into the indeed very greasy offerings in front of us before making our way back to nightly and calm Peterlee, referred to as Rabbit Hatch County earlier tonight!