Bob Geldof: "The London crowds were suspicious of us because we could fucking play. The only band who’d sit and chat with us were the Pistols"

One of the great things about interviewing Bob Geldof is that you never, ever know where the conversation is going to take you.

Right now we’re in communist-era Bucharest after a question about The Boomtown Rats’ recent visit to Serbia’s EXIT festival reminds their leader of the band’s 1970s (mis)adventures behind the Iron Curtain.

“Romania was absolutely fucking awful,” Bob groans. “We did three nights in the Lenin Hall. The front rows were reserved for the party faithful and their families who sat there in their badly tailored suits looking glum. When we went on, half the audience got up and started giving it large and the other half, who were secret police, started smashing them with batons.

“I was in adrenaline-pumping Bobby Boomtown mode at that point, so I stopped the gig and shouted, ‘It’s called dancing, not revolution!’ The mic’s grabbed from me, I wrestle it back and ‘bam!’, hit somebody with it who unfortunately turned out to be the cop in charge.

“We got dragged off stage and into the dressing-room where this guy was freaking out with rage. I had my wits about me, though. Ceausescu was always trying to cosy up to the West so he could say to the Russians, ‘I’ve got my own thing going on.’ So I screamed back at him, ‘Put me on a plane now! I’m gonna go home and tell the whole world about Romania and how you treat people!’ And he was like, ‘You get back on that stage immediately!’

“Afterwards a kid invited us to his family’s house. The next day he was in hospital, beaten to a pulp by the Securitate. It was really heavy.”

After a side-trip to visit Vlad Dragul’s grave in Transylvania – “To reassure you, he’s still buried in the ground there,” Bob deadpans – the Rats rolled into East Berlin.

BANGED UP IN BERLIN

“That was even worse than Bucharest,” he says. “Johnny Fingers (the Rats keyboard-player) got lifted by these classic John Le Carré goons – more badly fitting suits, black trench coats, pork pie hats. We were watching the changing of the guard when they grabbed Fingers and pinned his arms behind his back. We were like, ‘What the fuck’s going on? We’ve got a gig to do’ but no one listened. We went to the cop shop where they’d stuck him in this tiny bare room with a naked bulb. Johnny was shitting himself as these two guys asked, ‘Why are you wearing pyjamas?’ He goes, ‘Because that’s what I wear’ and they’re like, ‘Over here, if people wear pyjamas in the streets they’re mad, and we put them in insane asylums.’ He was that close to being slung into a fucking East German mental hospital.”

The Boomtown Rats. L-R: Pete Briquette, Gerry Cott, Johnny Fingers,
Bob Geldof, Simon Crowe and Gary Roberts.

Geldof may have become better known in many parts of the world for his Band Aid exploits – more of which anon – and bringing us groundbreaking ‘90s TV shows like Hotel Babylon, The Big Breakfast and The Word, but it still says ‘Musician’ under profession in his passport and Bob is devoting as much of himself as he can to celebrating the Rats’ 50th birthday.

Along with a punishing tour schedule which also stopped off in August at All Together Now – “Geldof well and truly rolled back the years as he delivered a marvellous performance, full of vim and vigour,” was the Hot Press verdict – they’ve released a The First 50 Years: Songs Of Boomtown Glory retrospective.

It includes the rapid-fire burst of hits (‘Lookin’ After No 1’, ‘Mary Of The Fourth Form’, ‘She’s So Modern’, ‘Rat Trap’, ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ et al) they scored in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s which, despite their self-professed R&B roots, found them co-opted into a punk movement that managed to spark as much outrage then as Kneecap are doing now.

Asked whether he considers Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvaí to be his spiritual heirs, Bob shoots back, “I don’t agree with all of their politics – the divergence for me is nationalism – but that’s not to say they shouldn’t be able to express themselves however they want. Everything else about them – the music, the way they’ve normalised the use of Irish, the attitude – I love.

“The only available language our generation had to articulate the deep, deep, deep societal, economic and moral corruption in Ireland was rock ‘n’ roll. I thought influencers and interrupters on social media had usurped that role but thankfully not.

“What thrills me about Kneecap,” Bob continues, “is that people are still getting upset by a bunch of herberts larging it and carrying on. That’s exactly what rock ‘n’ roll is there to do: Elvis, Little Richard, the Sex Pistols… Kneecap. Music is meant to shake things up.”

Geldof also feels an affinity with Fontaines D.C. who, like the Rats, couldn’t be from anywhere else but Dublin.

“Yeah, of course, I get where they’re coming from. Plus Fontaines are mates with my kids, so I hear from them what’s going on with the band.

“In the linear scheme of things, you have Van’s fusing of blues and soul with a Celtic lyricism using a Yeats-ian language. That really did effect rock ‘n’ roll. ‘Joey’s On The Street Again’ from the first Rats album was me literally copying and trying to understand what Van was doing.

“Then,” Bob continues, “Philo injected it with his own sense of romanticism. The Rats, U2, Shane and Sinéad had their goes. To me, Fontaines D.C. are a continuation of that.”

DR. FEELGOOD FACTOR

It was being played Dr. Feelgood’s Down By The Jetty album in 1975 by their manager Fachtna Ó Ceallaigh that made Bob and the rest of the Rats realise what needed to be done.

“Dr. Feelgood were our north star,” Bob notes. “I remember hearing the line, ‘Standing watching the towers burning at the break of day’ and thinking, ‘Fuck me, that’s beautiful! They’ve made Canvey Island sound as romantic as Clarksdale, Mississippi!’ That was the moment when I realised we could write about the place we knew.

“I also loved the photograph on the front of the album. The scowling at the camera and the too-tight suits, which bizarrely were made for the Feelgoods by my son-in-law’s mother.”

Dr Feelgood - Down By The Jetty

Another album which Geldof devoured back then was Bob Marley’s Catch A Fire, which explains the reggae vibe on the Rat’s scathing critique of ‘80s official Ireland, ‘Banana Republic’.

After some emergency haircutting – Geldof also had a moustache which succumbed to the razor – the Rats started their fabled residency in Moran’s Hotel, which quickly went from a curious few to queues snaking all the way up Gardiner Street.

“I’ve repressed it Stalinisticaly but, yeah, there was a moustache,” he sheepishly admits. “But let’s not forget that Joe Strummer was a fucking commune-living hippie three weeks before joining The Clash!

“Anyway, we sorted the hair out, started the residency and found there were a hundred or so kids not into anodyne country rock or turgid showband left-overs that dug these boys from Dún Laoghaire who pumped Can through the P.A. before coming on and playing very loud, very fast.”

With London once again the rock ‘n’ roll place to be, the Rats moved over at the start of ’77 and, after rejecting Richard Branson’s Virgin Records, signed to the fledgling Ensign label.

Bob takes a deep breath as he prepares to tell us what they found on the other side of the Irish Sea.

BLITZKRIEG BOB

“Inflation in the UK was 27%,” he resumes. “There’s no point in working. Your wages are meaningless. The richest city in the world declares bankruptcy. It took a brilliant boy like Lydon to say, ‘There’s no future in England’s dreaming.’ It’s such a great aphorism.

“The London crowds were suspicious of us because we could fucking play. The only band who’d sit and chat with us were the Pistols. I’m still great mates with Steve Jones and Paul Cook.

“Our first gig was in a school with Talking Heads and The Ramones who, of course, blew us both off stage. I walked into the dressing-room to say ‘hello’ to them and Joey had his head over a bowl of steam with a towel. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ And he goes, ‘Hey, man, you gotta inhale.’ Every night before a gig I inhale steam because of Joey Ramone. It’s almost a sacrament, you know?”

Bob has an interesting theory about Maggie Thatcher, whose tenure as British prime minister started in 1979.

“In many ways, Margaret Thatcher is simply Johnny Rotten in drag,” he suggests. “She swiped at the squirearchy, she swiped at her own party with her handbag. She swiped at the opposition, the unions, the monarchy – any institution that was in the way of her programme was to be laid to waste. It was punk politics.”

GIVE ‘EM ENOUGH DOPE

The UK punk uprising was fuelled by cheap amphetamine sulphate. Did the Rats indulge?

“Do you know uncool we were?!” Bob laughs. “The only drug the band – apart from me – did was dope. I’d nearly killed myself on hashish so I didn’t partake. When it got huge for the Rats, we’d book an extra hotel room which we called The Swamp. The lobby and the bar would be full of screaming kids, so we needed somewhere after a gig to get together and come down. I couldn’t go because they’d all be smoking joints and I’d freak out. I’d be trembling, you know? So I’d go to bed which was a fucking pisser.”

Unlike the aforementioned Pistols and The Clash, the Rats didn’t have a Situationist manifesto or want to run guerilla-style round Knightsbridge with Sten guns.

“I couldn’t understand why you’d be in a band and not need to get into the top five,” Bob resumes. “The Clash didn’t want to be on Top Of The Pops but we did. Our first television was with Marc Bolan, who’d been reduced to an afternoon kids’ show. But it was still a chance to be seen by millions of people who didn’t have a fucking clue who we were.

“We were clearly focused on being the toppermost of the poppermost,” he says using a phrase coined during the Fab Four’s heyday by John Lennon. “Sting told me that he knew The Police had to up their game when he saw The Boomtown Rats sprayed everywhere on the London Underground and me up a ladder in Tuffnell Park, apparently, writing our name across some beer poster.”

Let’s hope the statute of limitations has run out. Such careerist behaviour went down like a lead balloon with punk’s self-appointed gatekeepers.

“I horrified Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons and the rest of the NME mob by saying, ‘I want to get rich and famous and laid’, which was very antithetical to punk. ‘I’ve been broke my entire life and, you know what, it fucking sucks!’ Then I’d be like, ‘Did you ever try to get laid in 1970s Ireland? Especially if you’re not very good looking and you’re working in an abattoir? You don’t fucking have a chance. I want to get fucked!’

“It caused a lot of kickback within the punk community but it also got us sufficiently noticed that when our debut single, ‘Lookin’ After Number 1’, came out it went Top 20 in the UK.”

And succeeded in Bob getting his jollies.

“We’d been scuzzing around with the bottom feeders in London, so thought, ‘Let’s give it a go up North’ where they fucking loved us,” he smiles. “One of our first gigs outside of the capital was a pub in Clitheroe in Yorkshire. There were 12 people there… and I pulled. The owner of the B&B we were staying in bangs on the door and says: ‘Open up, I know she’s in there.’ I’m like, ‘Fuck off, this is a private room.’ There are only two pieces of furniture, the bed and a wardrobe, so she bundles herself into the latter. He comes in, looks under the bed, nothing. He opens the wardrobe, sees the girl standing there and goes, ‘Right, that’s five shillings extra!’”

LOOKING AFTER NO. 1

After staying in some other seriously dodgy digs, the success of ‘Lookin’ After No.1’ meant that the Rats and their crew were able to move into an otherwise rodent-free house next to Chessington Zoo.

“There were camels looking over the fucking fence and lions next to them roaring. There was a ballroom in the house where we could rehearse. I remember still being there when ‘Rat Trap’ got to No. 1.”

Half-written by Geldof before the band moved to London, the ‘Just down past the gasworks, by the meat factory door’ line references the slaughterhouse job he took in 1974, when he returned home penniless to Dublin from Canada.

Can Bob remember where he was when news came through of it ending Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta’s twelve weeks at No. 1 with ‘You’re The One That I Want’?

Bob Geldof by Bernard Farrell 1978

“I woke up in Chessington with Paula (Yates) beside me,” Bob recalls. “Fachtna Ó Ceallaigh came in and said, ‘You’re number one!’ This after us entering at No. 9 and gradually working our way up. We had a big bottle of champagne sent down to us that afternoon. The call came for us to do Top Of The Pops. I went and got my suit from a kid called Steve Strange, in a shop called PX. He was opening a club called Blitz which I went down to with Bowie, and met the Kemps and the other New Romantic kids.

“Anyway, as we were getting ready to go to the Top Of The Pops studios, we thought, ‘Hey, why don’t we tear up photos of John Travolta at the start for a laugh?’ It wasn’t meant to be any sort of grand statement.

“On the back of ‘Rat Trap’, Tonic For The Troops ends up winning Album of the Year. We’re sat at the table, I get a tap on the shoulder, look round and it’s Paul McCartney with Linda. He says (adopts Macca accent) ‘Yeah, great, well done, lads.’ We’re like, ‘Thank you Sir Mr. McCartney The Beatle.’ He goes, ‘Who wrote that ‘Me And Howard Hughes’ tune?’ I said, ‘I did’ and he goes, ‘That’s a good one, la!’ It literally doesn’t get any better than that.”

‘Me And Howard Hughes’ being just one of the lesser-remembered songs – we’ve also had ‘Joey’s On The Street Again’, ‘(I Never Loved) Eva Braun’, ‘Dave’ and ‘Drag Me Down’ on ‘repeat’ in HP Central – which makes the Songs Of Boomtown Glory retrospective such a glorious journey of rediscovery.

The two-disc collection also features newer tracks like ‘K.I.S.S.’ and ‘Trash Glam Baby’ from 2020’s Citizens Of Boomtown, which Bob lets it be known is the album he wants buried in the coffin with him.

Watching him tear that picture of John Travolta up on TOTP and taking notes was Sinéad O’Connor.

“Sinéad, who was a big Rats fan, sees this and come her moment decides to tear up a picture of the Pope,” Bob sighs. “Afterwards she says to me, ‘I only did it because you tore up John Travolta’ and I’m like, ‘Sinéad, please, there’s a difference between the death of disco and the death of the Catholic ummah, you know? There really is.’

“Sinéad would come round here to the house in her Muslim togs, sit on the floor, make a rollie and say, ‘Do you mind if I turn on the telly. Can I have a cup of tea?’

“I’d go up most days to St. Pat’s when she wasn’t well and say, ‘Is Sinéad or whatever she’s calling herself today receiving visitors?’ and they’d go, ‘She doesn’t want to see you.’ I said, ‘Okay, tell her I’ll wait beside the bus stop for half-an-hour.’ I’d be stood there and get a ‘Howaya’ and she’d either kick off, or give me a big hug and a kiss.”

Bob Geldof and Sinead O'Connor at the Virgin Media Dublin International Film Festival World Premiere of Citizens of Boomtown at Cineworld, Dublin. Photo: Brian McEvoy

Bob recalls the phone ringing in the middle of the night and Sinéad being on the other end of the line.

“She’d call and say, ‘I’m in New York, it’s fucking brilliant, I’m on telly, I’ve got a new manager, I’m buying a new flat.’ Silence for weeks and then, ‘I’m in Tennessee. You know that shrink on the telly, Dr. Phil? I’m here with him.’ A few weeks later: ‘I’m in a B&B in Chicago, do you know anybody here?’ I’d give her the numbers of solid people who were offering to take care of her but she never rang them. It was fucking mayhem. Her poor family.

“She was magnificent, though,” he sighs. “I loved Sinéad to fucking bits.”

POISONED BY THESE FUCKERS

August found Bob trending on Irish social media as it was reported that he was seeking the Fianna Fáil nomination to run in the Presidential election.

Not something you’d have predicted in 1981 when the Rats had just eviscerated FF Taoiseach Charlie Haughey on ‘Banana Republic’.

“This was an establishment way out of touch with what was being felt at the time in Ireland, so I wrote about everything that was going on,” he says. “You have to parse that song. ‘I wonder, do you wonder/ Sleeping with your whore.’ Charlie Haughey is sleeping with his mistress (social diarist, Terry Keane) while extolling family values – and allegedly paying for and shipping guns to the North to be used by the killers. The businessmen knew all of this but were protecting their government contracts. The church remained utterly silent, too busy presumably abusing their parishioners’ children. The moral spine of the country was silent apart from a few brave priests who tried to make things work. It was fucking awful, it stank!

“‘Sharing beds with history is like licking a running sore.’ History is available to all, especially the highest bidder and she will do whatever the bidder wants.

“‘Forty shades of green, yeah / Sixty shades of red / Heroes are going cheap these days/Price: a bullet in the head/ Banana republic / Septic isle.’ The country’s been poisoned by these fuckers.

“Then, ‘I’ll take you and I’ll lead you / Up the garden path / Let me stand aside here/ And watch you pass / You’re striking up ‘A Soldier’s Song’ / I know that song / It begs too many questions / And answers to Banana Republic’. The bile’s really starting to rise now.

“Then it’s riffing on Junior Murvin’s ‘Police & Thieves’: ‘The black and blue uniforms / Police and priests / The purple and the pinstripe / Mutely shake their heads / A silence shrieking volumes / A violence worse than they condemn / They stab you in the back / Laugh in to your face / Glad to see the place again / Pity nothing’s changed.’ It’s full of despair and rage.”

Getting back to the Áras, what exactly went down?

“I was at All Together Now, which I really loved, and someone came up to me – as they do a lot – and said, ‘Are you going to run?’” he explains. “I was like, ‘It’s the Rats’ 50th, we’ve got a tour and all that.’ And they said, ‘Would you not be interested?’ I went, ‘Look, 50 years of the Rats, 40 years of Band Aid, yeah, I’d be up for something new, interesting and useful. Bang, the hare starts running!

“A few days later, serious friends of mine rang and said, ‘We think you should give this a go.’ I said, ‘I really don’t have time to do the council dog and pony; I’m on the promo trail, we’re wall to wall with festivals in Europe.’ They said, ‘We’ve looked at your schedule and if you were to get the party nomination, you could do the race. Will you take a call with the Taoiseach?’ I said, ‘Of course I will, whatever’.

“But what was I going to say to Micheál? If by some miracle I won the presidency, what would I do with it? Three things occurred to me which I think Ireland is going to have great difficulty with in President Bob’s term. First and foremost is the potential union of the island. It’s more likely to happen in 20 years than 10, but there’s going to have to be a total constitutional rewrite. It’s going to take a long while for the Republic to get its head around it economically. You can go, ‘Emotionally I’d like that to happen’ but how do we pay for this? What we now know about Ireland is that when it comes to referenda, people really get serious about it and properly debate with each other.

“The other identity on the island needs to be catered for, so possibly a parliament in Belfast rather like there is in Wales and Scotland. That’s a deeply interesting moment to be part of your country’s history and to help get it over the line.”

LURCHING TO THE FAR-RIGHT

Okay, that’s Irish reunification sorted. What next?

“Secondly, Europe is in a tragic mess. It’s moot as to whether it survives at all. France, where I’ve spent a good deal of time, are at almost Greek levels of insolvency. Their health service is fabulous, their transport is fabulous but they don’t want to pay for it. So France borrows and the interest payments are fucking unsustainable. So it’ll lead to Le Pen.

“Then there’s Germany where the AfD are much further right than Le Pen. They’re equal with the Christian Democrats and will probably make gains in the local elections. They’re fascists.

“The Slavic nations lean to Putin. He’s the go-to guy. He’s a fucking thug. That’s what he is, okay? And he needs to be stopped. Right now. If that means sending troops to Ukraine, send the troops.

“If Europe doesn’t survive, Ireland on so many levels is in serious trouble.”

The third thing that occurred to Bob as he weighed up an Áras run is just as depressing.

“Without question, Trump is going to target pharma and then what happens to us?” he ponders. “When Europe starts fining Google and the others they’ll be crawling up his arms saying, ‘Mr. President, it’s not fair, we’re an American company.’ He’s going to slam down on Europe. His thing will be to repatriate. So no American tech companies in Dublin Docklands.

“Anyway, I have that call with Michéal Martin and say, ‘I’ll cut to the chase Taoiseach, what would the party feel about nominating Bob Geldof?’ He goes, ‘They’d feel fine but I’ve already chosen Jim Gavin.’ And that was that.”

As somebody who’s addressed American gun control – or lack thereof – before in his music, what does Bob make of the Charlie Kirk assassination?

“You have a continent awash with weapons,” he says. “I wrote about it. It’s called ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ which is an anti-violence song. It’s not the answer to anything to kill someone, it just isn’t. There are arguments to be made. The mechanisms for making them are still there, thank god. You can be screamed down these days but poco o apoco you keep making them, hoping the pendulum swings back from where it is at the moment. Democracy is hard as fuck and must be fought for every single day. It is also, without any shadow of a doubt, the most radical and revolutionary form of politics that exists. Which is why the autocrats tremble and also why they will ultimately fail.”

STARVATION IN SUDAN

While you hear precious little about them these days in the media, Band Aid remains as active as ever.

“People don’t have the bandwidth to deal with the cost of living, identity politics, Gaza and Ukraine – yet alone Sudan which is a horror show,” Bob rues. “Right now, they’re rounding up women and gang raping them in front of their husbands and children. Right now, two million children are being purposefully starved as an instrument of war. Three days ago Band Aid signed off on £750,000 for UNCHR. Why? Because Trump has stopped funding them. So we have to step a tiny bit into the gap to help these panicked, exhausted mothers and women with their broken, fractured minds and bodies. I wake up to twelve of these things, minimum, every single morning. But people just cannot take another thing on board.”

Let us finish with another of Bob’s epic Boomtown Rats road stories.

“After two nights in a hockey stadium in Delhi, we flew down to Bangalore for a third Indian gig,” he concludes. “The promoter was a guy called Vikram Singh, who opened up this suitcase which was full of cash. He said, ‘Take what you want’. We were like, ‘Really?’ He said, ‘Yeah, it’s fucking worthless’ – but even so we stuffed our pockets. We went to soundcheck and there was this tiny little platform in a huge field. I said, ‘Can we have some fucking lights?’ He went, ‘They’re coming’ and I see this guy on a bicycle with fairy lights wrapped around the handlebars. Behind us was a Bollywood poster of the Rats Indian-ised. We had jet black hair, olive skin, almond eyes, were fatter and all had Marlboro fags in our hands.

“Come the show, it’s packed but no one actually knows us, so we go into ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’, ‘Ziggy Stardust’, ‘Satisfaction’, ‘Stir It Up’. The place is going fucking nuts thinking they’re our songs and we do nothing to disavow them of the notion. Twenty-four months prior to this I’d been in a dole queue in Dún Laoghaire. I just thought, ‘Fucking hell, how extraordinary is this?’ I’ve been able to make a life out of music, which is amazing.”

• The First 50 Years: Songs Of Boomtown Glory is out now on Universal