Bob Geldof Interview

The word came through from Bob Geldof ’s people on the Thursday: “I want to talk to Hot Press!” He also asked whether we could stick him on the cover, to mark the 40th anniversary of the formation of The Boomtown Rats.
Mr. G can be accused of lots of things, but being slow at coming forward isn’t one of them. His persuasiveness, the fact that he gives exceedingly good quote and our shared history means that 72-hours later I’m having my ear comprehensively bent by Bob, who’s just back from wowing a Norwegian festival audience with those self-same Rats. While there are no preconditions or assurances sought or given about the line of questioning, Geldof is clearly in the mood for talking music rather than the stuff that makes lurid tabloid head- lines. You don’t have to be a trained psychologist to work out that the Rats being back in full-on gig mode is partially a reaction to the April 2014 death of his beloved daughter, Peaches.
“Being on stage is entirely cathartic, it clears your head,” he proffered a couple of months later when coaxed onto the ITV breakfast sofa by Lorraine Kelly. “I just get on a stage and go mad. When I come off-stage, I’m physically exhausted and mentally clear. I can sleep.”
His face is more lined and the hair greyer than when I last met him a decade ago in a King’s Road cafe, where he scandalised the blue rinse ladies who lunch by talking very loudly about his teenage penchant for masturbating – check out the hot- press.com archive! – but Bob’s enthusiasm remains as boyish and infectious as ever.
“The moment the fake snakeskin suit goes on, I’m Bobby Boomtown,” laughs Geldof, who’s Electric Picnic-bound next month with his bandmates. “That snotty, arrogant little shit lives again. I know it's kind of pathetic, but I love it. I was adamant that the Rats getting back together couldn’t just be about nostalgia. I don’t need the cash, lucky old me. If it’s not alive, if there isn’t a vividness in my head, forget it. But when we got together the pow- er of the band hit me like a brick again. Lyrically, it’s all still relevant. Some clown has just killed people in a school – why would I change a word of ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’? Given what we’ve been through with the banks, why would I change one fucking word of ‘Banana Republic’? With Google harvesting your personal data, why would I change one fuck- ing word of ‘Someone’s Looking At You’?”
Punk revisionism would have you believe that 1976 and ‘77 were all about the Pistols and The Clash, but right there in the spiky-haired mix were The Boomtown Rats, who scandalised as many people in Ireland as Rotten’s mob did in Blighty.
“The look and the music were different, but attitude-wise we were kicking against a lot of the same things as the Sex Pistols,” he proffers.
“The hopelessness of being young in England was mirrored by the hopelessness of being young in Ireland, plus we had a civil war in the country! Euphemistically we called it ‘The Troubles’ like it was a small headache that could be dealt with, but in fact 3,200 people were being murdered and the killers were being supported by the government in the south, who morally and economically were entirely corrupt. It was an odd, southern-Italian type of politics. They were zoning areas to favoured nations. The church was entirely corrupt too. They were also complicit in this murder because, if not actively supporting the killers, they were largely si- lent about it. We knew there were priests and nuns serially abusing kids. The impunity of the police – they’d beat the shit out of you and generally do what they liked.
"All that stuff on ‘Banana Republic’ – the church, Haughey’s government, the murderers in the North – it was all fucking true. I can’t stress to you how awful it was; we were kept in this puerile infantilism by the church, the government and big business. Someone had to start talking about this claustrophobia of silence, this suppression.”
My memories of Ireland in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s are all in black and white. It was like God had forgotten to give us a colour button.
“It wasn’t even black and white, it was a dreadful midnight coal brown,” Bob almost shivers. “There was a lack of a future. I’d just come back from Can- ada because they’d kicked me out, and immediate- ly remembered what had made me want to leave in the first place. Where you got a glimpse of a real country and of real people was, bizarrely enough, on the Late Late Show. Gay Byrne didn’t push for- ward the social agenda, but he allowed the venting to happen. Our first time on with Gaybo was very confrontational. After we’d played ‘Looking After Number One’, he said to us: ‘Do you honestly think that racket’s going to get you anywhere?’ I stared at him and went, ‘I’m telling you, we’ll be back in a year and we’ll be number one'. It then kicked off in the audience with Gay conducting it brilliantly: ‘Hold on, hold on, let him have his say... deluded as he may be because that’s the mature and construc- tive thing to do'. The last half of the sentence being implied rather than spoken! There were nuns in the front-rows abusing me and other people telling them to shut the fuck up. And then you had a trapeze act or something come on. Twink perhaps. The next day I was preached against in the church: ‘God bless that poor old soul on the television last night and his father watching him'. Our plan – ‘Throw the grenade into the room, retire and see what happens when the smoke clears’ – had worked! We weren’t the arbitrators of change but we were an indication that it was coming.”
The Rats must have felt like kids in the sweet- shop when pursuing a record deal they moved to London in 1976.
“It didn’t look or smell like a sweet shop because it was six or seven week’s into the dustman’s strike and there was putrefying rubbish piled up every- where. There was also a cultural Taliban at the time, led by people like the NME’s Nick Kent. The orthodoxy of the punks drove me nuts. Everyone had to look a certain way and behave a certain way and say the things that were the official gestalt at the time.
"I’m good friends now with Mick Jones and Paul Simonon because we went through that whole thing together, but in ‘76 I really didn’t like The Clash. To me, they were talking old hat, absolutely standard left-wing politics. The Clash for me were just a set-up. They were set up by Bernie, who was Malcolm McLaren’s assistant, who thought, ‘I can do this better'. Their first gig was in front of journalists with Bernie telling them what to write. As I said at the time, which got me into terrible trouble, they were like a new wave Bay City-fuck- ing-Rollers.
“The band we got on best with were the Pistols – I guess maybe because John was essentially Irish and they didn’t give a fuck,” he ventures. “They’d been banned from appearing live on Top Of The Pops, so we tried to pass Paul Cook off as one of the Rats when we went on to do ‘She’s So Modern’.
They twigged it just after rehearsals. They said, ‘He’s from the Sex Pistols, he’s not going on’, so we went, ‘Fuck off then, neither are we!’ Johnny was instinctively a brilliant speaker. He was just so clever and coruscating with what he said. Entirely natural. We were in Macroom together. A lot of his family come from there, and it was so interesting to see him in that context, with his Uncle Joe.”
Unlike Strummer who desperately tried to hide the fact that he was the son of a wealthy Somerset diplomat, Johnny Rotten was the real work- ing-class London deal.
“The Lydons were Dickensian poor. Their flat in Finchley was un-fucking-real. I worked with the Simon Community in Dublin when I was 15, 16, 17, but this was another level. Here was this kid with rickets, who looked like something out of Oliver Twist. From this came the invented, emblematic character that shook the British establishment to its fucking foundations.”
Lydon was also smart enough to know when the punk game was up, and reinvent himself with Public Image Ltd.
“Only to a point he did,” Geldof reckons. “Because of Malcolm’s constant stirring, there was always a volatility within the Pistols. I remember once going with them to Exeter University and Sid, who was a fucking twat and just so thick, said something which made Steve Jones walk over and smack him in the face... boof! Afterwards Sid and Nancy lurched up to the van destroyed and they slammed the door on them. Malcolm was shouting, ‘Fack off! Make your own way home'. It was nasty.”
The Rats, meanwhile, had a much more convivial day out on Canvey Island.
“It was a pilgrimage to see where Dr. Feelgood, our north star, were from,” Geldof enthuses. "My two big rock ‘n’ roll moments were seeing the Rolling Stones in the Adelphi Cinema in Dublin in 1965 – I wanted to be them, that gang – and (Rats manager) Fachtna O’Kelly playing me Down By The Jetty in mono by the Feelgoods. I remember vividly hearing the line, ‘Standing watching the towers burning at the break of day’ and thinking, ‘Fuck me, that’s beautiful! This is how you make rhythm and blues as romantic by talking about Canvey Island as by talking about Clarksdale, Mississippi.’ We were the children, the offspring of Dr. Feelgood. Thankfully, in '75/'76, there were a hundred or so kids not into anodyne country rock or turgid showband left-overs that dug these boys from Dun Laoghaire who pumped Can through the P.A. before coming on and played very loud, very fast. Next thing there were queues up Gardiner Street, for fuck's sake, which I'd never seen for a local band.”
The Boomtown Rats’ first gigs in Britain, after they’d rejected an offer from Richard Branson’s Virgin Records in order to sign for Ensign, were with Talking Heads and The Ramones.
“We’d also turned down Stiff and John Peel, who’d been playing us and offered to release an EP of Rats demos on his own label. Anyway, we played in Slough and three comprehensive school gymnasi- ums at four o’clock in the afternoon with Talking Heads and The Ramones. Here were all these kids with mullets and Showaddywaddy t-shirts getting off double Physics for the afternoon and just staring at us. It rapidly became clear that you could never follow The Ramones, who playing fast and essentially being a cartoon, the kids loved.
"We were quite cartoonish and played reason- ably fast so we got away with it, but these 14, 15-year-olds just couldn’t get their heads around the Talking Heads being all arty and singing, ‘When my love stands next to your love'. It was an interest- ing period. At one end you had the Pistols, full of attitude with their loud, bollocky music, and at the other you had a considered, brilliant songwriter but with the same attitude, Elvis Costello. We were somewhere in the middle with Blondie and The Stranglers.
“Interestingly, and I say this as a matter of his- torical interest rather than boasting, in the Sounds and NME polls at the time I was Best Singer, second was David Bowie, third was Freddie Mercury, fourth was Johnny Rotten. The Rats weren’t the hippest band, but we had a lot of fans and sold a lot of records – unapologetically so.”
Fast forward three years and with the aforemen- tioned ‘Rat Trap’ ending John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John’s seven weeks atop the UK chart with ‘Summer Nights’ from Grease, it was time to head to the States.
“Where we royally fucked things up!” Geldof chuckles. “Our first American gig was in San Diego where this convention of major market radio station programmers was taking places. I was sup- posed to schmooze these cunts with their mullets and satin jackets bearing the legends ‘Boston’, ‘For- eigner’... all the shit we viscerally hated. The record company had decided that the name Boomtown Rats was too negative, too disgusting, so the word went out to call us ‘The Boomers’.
"We were each assigned a top DJ to ride with us in a limousine to the gig, where we’d blow these guys away and the next day be given a place on the playlist next to Journey or whoever. I hated this and, full of cocksure confidence, went on stage and said to the actual paying customers in the audi- ence, ‘What do you think of American radio? Lights up, for the first and only time in your lives you can directly and in person address the people who determine what you hear'. They all turned round and said, ‘You fucking suck, man!’ which did not impress the satin jacket-wearers one little bit.”
U2 did an altogether better job of endearing themselves to US radio when they followed the Rats over a couple of years later.
“Bono clearly understood how America worked, whereas I went in thinking the sensibility there was shit and that we’d change it. U2’s tack was to accommodate it, but at the same time influence it with what they were doing, which worked fucking brilliantly. The universality of U2’s music worked in their favour too, which wasn’t true of the Rats’ music. Ours was very specifically geographically located. That said, the reviews of the first album were ecstatic in the States. Rolling Stone said, ‘This is the new Who’. You had people going on in their stupid DJ accent about how ‘Rat Trap’ sounded like an Irish Springsteen and I was going, ‘No, I was try-ing to copy Van Morrison and frankly so was Bruce!’ When I said it there’d be mass booing because you couldn’t be even remotely negative about Bruce. The contrary nature of me meant that I’d just tack-le it head on, and to the rest of the band’s credit they never once said, ‘Bob, shut the fuck up'.
“We had this new thing called ‘a video’ for ‘Rat Trap’,” he continues. “I said to the guy at Colombia Records: ‘This visually represents and articulates the band better than us going to a hundred TV stations and miming to our track'. He took the tape, held it in his hand and like some stinking fucking turd dropped it into the waste paper basket. He said, ‘Let’s just go the usual route, Bob'. We’d had five massive hits in Europe, including coming in on the back of a number one. Part of the resistance in my head was that, ‘Just like everybody else they’re going to fall prostrate at our feet, aren’t they?’ When they didn’t I thought, ‘Fuck it, let’s go somewhere we’re appreciated'.
”A real moment for me in May was a Fox News report on the Same Sex Marriage ‘Yes’ vote that started with the anchor saying, “Over now to pro-gressive Ireland.” When the Rats were starting out 40-years ago that would have been an oxymoron, but now we’re seen as a bastion of enlightenment. Well, by some people...“
I was so thrilled by that because the result was so overwhelming,” Geldof beams. “There was al-ways this profound maturity that was flummoxed constantly by the church and the State. We were not allowed to be what we actually were at that period. We were kept in this infantilism consti-tutionally. The constitution giving primacy to a State religion is nonsense. The patriarchy of that religion – Father O’Malley, Father Murphy – all this invented language like the ‘eucharistic congress’. What the fuck are you talking about? What does that mean? Who invented the word ‘fidelity’? But we just accepted this, this was part of the rhetoric. When you began to question it, you began to be abused. So the Rats were banned from playing in our own country.
”In an episode straight out of Father Ted, the Rats lined-up a brace of Leopardstown Racecourse headliners in 1980 using the same tent that The Pope had conducted his Phoenix Park mass in the previous year. When the local authority succeeded in tying them up in legal red tape, the band decid-ed to go the guerrilla gig route with a show in the privately-owned Leixlip Castle, which despite its last minute nature attracted over 20,000 fans.“
RTÉ announced at midnight that anyone with a ticket for the cancelled Leopardstown gigs could go to Leixlip that day. We expected 100 people, but woke up the next morning to see the whole of the quays swimming with kids who’d hitchhiked their way to Dublin. The sound was awful, there were gougers at the front having knife-fights because the security from the local rugby had scarpered, but nevertheless we looked at the crowd before going on and thought, ‘Vindictation!’ We’d proved that you can be young, you can be Irish, you can beat the fucking English at their own game, you can beat John Travolta and this disco shit. It was immense for us."
Is life good for Bob Geldof at the moment?“Like always, some of it’s good,” he says after a telling pause. “What matters at this precise moment in time is that the band’s good. At our Isle of Wight comeback gig there were 14-year-old kids, obviously mandated by their fucking parents, shouting: ‘She’s so 21st Century, she’s so 1970!’ That gladdened my heart. On my passport it says ‘mu-sician’. I’ve done other stuff quite successfully, but nothing matches the buzz of being in a shit-hot band with your mates. Somebody has just brought out a DVD of us live in Germany in 1978; it’s fucking excellent! It was never an accident, which is good to know in your old age!”