Bob Geldof

Bob Geldof: To Sir, With Love

Sylvie Simmons

“I find there’s much more maturity in the music business than I ever found in the political world.”

Bob Geldof is back.

Not that he’s ever been away, really, since Band Aid hurled the man who’s done more for stubble than Miami Vice, more for noses than Pete Townshend and more for Sainthood than the Pope and Bono put together, into the public arena. We’ve been used to seeing the tall, gangly Irishman with the sharp tongue and the sharp brain (and the not-quite-sosharp fashion sense) hobnobbing with royalty, lecturing politicians, glowering at heads of state, negotiating with African leaders ... but it’s been a hell of a long time since we’ve seen the real Bob: not Saint Bob, not Sir Bob KBE, but Bob Geldof, pop singer. And here he is, doing interviews (hates the things, however good a talker he is) posing for music mag covers, TV Guide covers, heck even Cosmopolitan’s cover, and they never have fellas on their cover (except Boy George, and no one could tell the difference anyway). All this just to let us know that he’s back with a new album, Deep In The Heart Of Nowhere. A solo album, this one. Before he became Saint Sir Bob, loved by all, he was Bob the Boomtown Rats singer, loved by a pitiful few since their last big hit in 1982. And despite their appearance on Live Aid, despite their famous frontman, despite being one of the most consistently interesting, entertaining and downright musical bands to have survived new wave, Bob couldn’t get them a record deal. Hard to believe when you see some of the rubbish they sign these days, but anyway, the Rats are off doing their thing and Bob who stood up to—gulp—Margaret Thatcher?

“I was afraid—still am afraid—that people might not accept me as a pop singer anymore,” says Bob. ‘‘That people will think it’s silly that I want to do pop music at all. And I won’t be able to behave like”—here he does a little jig which could be Irish—‘‘these pop stars on TV with that certain attitude. / can’t really go on and start jumping around or anything because people know me too well.” I mean, just picture him in the middle of Africa or the United Nations or something, doing a little pop star dance. Silly, right? Right.

‘‘So all those things I’m quite nervous about. But I need this to be a success—not just financially, but mostly for the good of myself. Pop singing is what I do.”

It’s almost hard remembering that the man out there battling for good sense and decency and justice and stuff was a pop singer, that the whole Aid business started with ‘‘Do They Know It’s Christmas” (originally written for the Boomtown Rats and rewritten with pal Midge Ure before it was sung by the celebrated cast of thousands), a pop song. If you read Bob’s bloody good autobiography, Is That It?, you wouldn’t be in the least surprised that he got into pop music in the first place. It’s the almost classic tale of a misunderstood kid, beaten at school by priests, beaten at home by his father, left alone when his mother died ... with a fertile imagination and nowhere else to direct it. But now that he’s spent the past two years in an entirely different sort of world—negotiating with politicians and heads of government, organizing projects and doling out money on which millions of lives literally depend—won’t pop music seem a bit puerile or childish?

“I disagree,” says Bob. ‘‘I find the music industry absolutely sane after meeting the likes of those you named. As for being puerile, I find there’s much more maturity in the music business than I ever found in the political world. Pop music people don’t attempt to get votes, so they’re more likely to say the things they actually feel and believe in, so there’s probably more honesty in pop music, too.

‘‘And I find pop music people to be highly intelligent. I dislike that attitude of ‘Oh, they’re silly.’ Pop music people have a quality which a lot of other people don’t have: desperation, and it’s a quality I like, because it makes them unpredictable and I like unpredictability.

‘‘As for me going back to this job after doing that stuff, well, it’s what I get satisfaction from. People might think that’s trite and silly, getting satisfaction out of writing a pop song, but unfortunately that’s the way it is.

“I was afraid— still am afraid —that people might not accept! me as a pop singer anymore.”

‘‘It’s just a physical feeling when you write a really good song. At the end of it you go, ‘That’s good.’ And I never once felt a sense of achievement or a sense of satisfaction out of any of that other stuff in the last two years.

“I understand what you’re saying, that one is critically important and the other isn’t important at all, and you’re right, it isn’t—except to me. This is my job. Years ago I chose to be a pop singer. Without wanting to sound too much like John Wayne, it’s what I’ve got to do.”

But the job he had before Band Aid was actually fronting the Rats. Why not go back to that?

‘‘I had a lot of difficulty in getting new contracts, because they said the Rats were finished. We hadn’t sold records for a couple of years, we were old-fashioned, and basically, weren’t hip. But we definitely were hip. That was always the biggest struggle of my life,” he shrugs, ‘‘trying to be cool.

‘‘Their thinking was, ‘Bob Geldof is the one with the name, he writes most of the songs, we’ll have him,’ but I didn’t want to do that.” So his plan was to do the solo album to keep the companies happy, carrying on with the Rats in the meantime, writing songs with them, and making a band album soon afterwards. But the others had had enough; they’d written their own songs while all this was going on and wanted to take a chance with something new. ‘‘Which,” says Bob, ‘‘is vafid and legitimate, but it pissed me off! Because the whole thing about being a band was sharing things, and there was pride and vanity involved too. I was tired of people telling us we were crap when we were never crap; we were always a good band.”

The last time they played together was at Bob Geldof and Paula Yates’s wedding. The second wedding. The one in their home in the country just outside London with Chrissie Hynde, Midge Ure, Simon LeBon and Bowie pretending to be choirboys/girls. The real wedding, the one they kept denying, took place a couple of months earlier at the Little Church On The Prairie in Las Vegas, with Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox of Eurythmics and Bob and Paula’s little daughter Fifi as witnesses. It was no big mystery, according to Bob; he’d proposed to gorgeous TV personality Paula on the Trans-Siberian Express four years ago. They just never got around to making it official, and as they happened to have a weekend to spare—and Caesar’s Palace happened to have the bridal suite vacant—they tied the knot.

No time for a honeymoon though; it was back to L.A. and work. There’s only two things to do in Los Angeles, according to Bob, and that’s to work or to drink. Seeing that he doesn’t drink much—“I get a crippling headache by the second drink!”—he got down to work, with Dave Stewart, and then with producer Rupert Hine. A lot of stars were in town at the time for the Amnesty International benefit concert (Bob and Dave among them), and all offered to come down and play and help out. ‘‘That was a nice thing to happen to you,” Bob admits, but he didn’t want people to think he was doing a Band Aid for his own pocket. So the famous guest list on the album was restricted to Annie, Dave and Clem Eurythmics, Alison Moyet, Brian Setzer, Midge Ure and Eric Clapton.

Getting musicians was easy; writing songs was another matter.

‘‘The biggest problem was my mind was completely blank when I thought about making a record. I thought maybe I wanted to write ‘Yummy-yummy-yum, love will come’ things, and maybe people were looking for this gravity and integrity from me.” And it’s a problem writing anything that you truly feel when the things that have affected you most the last couple of years have to do with starving children, and you’re falling over yourself not to be exploitative. ‘‘I went out of my way not to write anything like that—about dying children, for example. There are certain atmospheres on the album that could have only come from things that have happened to me these last two years. Then again, there are songs that are purely fictional and have nothing to do with it at all.”

Bob says he wanted to put out an untitled album with no identifying factors, just a white label, so that people could decide if they liked it on their own merits, not buy it because they think it’d help them to get to heaven or something. At the moment, he admits, people are ‘‘interested and sympathetic” towards him—quite the opposite from the preBand Aid years when the press took every opportunity to attack him for the same big mouth, outspoken views and failure to toe the line that made his fund-raising such a success. Not to mention the book . ..

‘‘I was honestly shocked and stunned by that,” Bob says of its record-breaking sales. ‘‘I did it simply to pay off debts— last Christmas I was in a pretty perilous financial state; it wasn’t simply that I was broke, I also lost a lot of money and I was at the end of my tether. But once I started I couldn’t just do something cheap and cynical—I wanted it to be as honest as possible.”

There’s some who might think he was too honest, what with the graphically funny descriptions of his fledgling sex life and medal-winning bouts of self-abuse. They even put a warning sticker on the cover!

‘‘I remember being on a plane,” laughs Bob, ‘‘and seeing six people reading it, and they kept looking at me. They’d get to some of the, uh, significant parts, the adolescent period or something, and they’d keep looking over!

‘‘People think they know me intimately because they’ve seen me so often on TV, and seen me pretty emotionally naked— which is a thing we usually tend to disguise. Over the last two years I think it’s pretty obvious the sort of person I am, and the book only reinforces that. It wasn’t an attempt at glamorizing my life. It was an attempt to deflate, to a large extent, the cult of personality and any canonization that was going on.” He’s not a saint, he says, just an ‘‘awkward bugger.”

Since Band Aid, some people have tried to lure him away into the movie world (he just turned down a good one, deciding to concentrate on ‘‘music to the exclusion of everything else at the moment”) and others have tried to lure him into politics (‘‘but I’m not interested, I’d be one of 600 people in there and subject to party whips and I’d be lectured to if I said anything, and it would be like being back at school!”), but he’s sticking with music. Band Aid is bubbling over quite nicely by itself now; the fundraising events have stopped, but money is still coming in. And Bob goes to the weekly meetings to help decide how it’s spent.

As for the chances of another Live Aid; ‘‘Extremely negligible. Live Aid was more than a pop concert. In fact the last thing it was was a pop concert. I don’t want to sound pompous, but my feeling about it was that it was a global event. It worked on so many levels, and I don’t think it could work again. I think it can only happen once in a generation, that emotional quality, that feeling of participation and doing something. No, the whole thing was rather special.”