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Bob Geldof - The Years Of The Rat

In the first part of a major interview conducted at last year’s Music Show in the RDS, BOB GELDOF talks candidly about life as an illegal immigrant in Canada, how the Boomtown Rats took on official Ireland and then went on to duke it out with the Pistols and The Clash, and what triggered his involvement in Live Aid. Plus, a look back at Bob and the Rats on the cover of Hot Press.

Niall Stokes, 09 Feb 2011

After In The Long Grass, that was the year of the famous Michael Buerk report about the famine in Ethiopia, and that inspired the Band Aid single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’. It must have been very messy trying to put that record together, was it?

In The Long Grass was, I really think, a good record. We had no money, so we did it in Dennis Bovell’s studio in Southern Bridge and you can hear the trains and the subway. And we had one machine and we had to put a guitar note on it every night and we’d tune to that cos the machines kept slowing down. Maybe in adversity everybody rose, but we were really good players by then. Bob Clearmountain – he did some Springsteen and Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’ – he’d hung around the Palladium in New York and had come to the gig, which was frightening ‘cause Lennon was there with Yoko, Mick Jagger was there, Bowie was in the wings, and Andy Warhol with these fucking perverts from Dun Laoghaire! And it was absolutely awful as a gig. But Clearmountain was a kid – so I rang him and he’d just done Born In The USA and I said “Will you mix this”, so he mixed it for free. And I really like that record. But we’d sold out a 42-date tour with that album and sort of between the record coming out and the tour starting in December, I saw the TV. I didn’t know who was interested in us anymore, clearly a big constituency – 42 dates one after the other is big – but then really where is this thing gonna go? And then I see Buerk’s thing, and maybe because I was afraid or whatever it was, but I had Fifi, she was 9 months old, I thought maybe the best years of my life were over. And then I saw this thing, which put all of that nonsense into perspective. Paula was crying. And I was really shocked by it. I thought this requires something of the self rather than a quid in the Oxfam box. But remember my lack of confidence at this point. I didn’t think that if we – the Rats, that is – had done the song that it would have been No. 1. So I thought I’ll try and get the mates I know in rock ‘n’ roll to do a song.



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