Once, Bob Geldof was the acceptable face of punk. Despite the studied aggression of early Boomtown Rats hits like Looking After Number One, he remained a curiously unthreatening entertainer. More Top of the Pops than Anarchy in the UK. Seeing his show at Hull's New Theatre reminds you how events have come full circle. Geldof has been more wounded in his personal life than perhaps any of his 1977 contemporaries.

 He can now pour more rage into a song than poor old John Lydon can probably muster during an entire show. So why does he ritually perform works written in the aftermath of the horrors he experienced in the late 1990s? "Quite frankly, I haven't got a clue," he tells his audience. He rounds off a back-to-back session of his most personal and darkest work with an old favourite, I Don't Like Mondays. There you have the secret of Geldof's continued success: his charisma and showmanship. He is well aware that many have come to hear the Boomtown Rats' back catalogue, and Rat Trap, Mary of the Fourth Form and others are duly delivered. But he also artfully slides in a good portion of his underrated post-Rats career - throwing in a crowd pleaser every now and then. Although grey-haired, Bob Geldof has lost none of his old energy, and holds court on stage for more than two hours, plus encores. He takes a breather by explaining how he came to write his best-known songs. Of the Rats, he has surprisingly fond memories, only realising what a "cool" band he had been in after the bust-up got him off the music industry treadmill. On being one of the 20th-century's greatest charity workers, he says nothing, other than it was an era "when the entire population expected me to save the whole f****ing universe when I would rather have been playing a few tunes in Hull". Although he responds to fewer requests than promised in his blarney, no-one goes home disappointed other than someone who repeatedly requested Looking After Number One. "I just don't feel like doing it," Geldof responds simply. Who can blame him? And at the end of the performance, we know we have met a man rather than listened to a jukebox.