Bob Geldof once said he wanted to get ‘rich, famous and laid’. Here’s how that worked out for him

Even at 73, he remains very recognisably Sir Bob Geldof. You can’t mistake the skinny rock star intensity, the untamed hair – mostly salt rather than pepper these days – and the deceptively soft brogue that still owes much more to County Dublin than England’s Home Counties where he makes his home now.

There’s the Boomtown Rats, of course, but for those of us of a certain era, Geldof is inextricably linked with his activism: the supergroup Band Aid and its 1984 mega-single Do They Know It’s Christmas?

We’re deep into what has been a hugely entertaining lunch at Crown Sydney’s a’Mare (risotto for me, cotoletta Milanese for Geldof) when I wonder how he stays positive in the face of the rolling tragedy that seems to be humanity’s lot.

“Me? Positive?” he responds, voice raising a touch. “It’s rage! It’s always been rage. Anger is the animus. It’s quixotic, literally. Show me a windmill and I’m likely to tilt at it. It’s all I know how to do.”

Geldof has been taking aim at windmills since his earliest days in Dun Laoghaire, a few kilometres south of Dublin. He was just six when his mother died, leaving him with few recollections.

“I’ve got a jigsaw puzzle memory if I’m bothered to piece it together,” he says. “And it’s Proustian by definition. So, lipstick on a fag butt, lipstick on a teacup, velvet gloves up the elbow, her legs moving as she sewed the Singer sewing machine. I must’ve been underneath it. That’s what I remember. And you piece together a sensibility from that. If you need it.

“I don’t need it.”

Times were tough in 1950s and ’60s Ireland and Geldof’s father was forced to go on the road selling towels, a job that took him away from the family home Monday to Friday. “The Irish didn’t know there was such thing as washing up until 1976,” he says. “So it was kind of thin gruel.”

As a result, the young Geldof got to do much as he pleased.

“I was left to my own devices,” he says, then immediately clarifies he is not expecting sympathy. “It sounds like you’re playing the fiddle if I f---ing go on about it. But I did my own cooking and shit like that and had to shop for shit and come home and make the fire because it was f---ing freezing. But much as that’s pitiful, that was my norm. So you’re kind of going, ‘F---ing hell it’s freezing, I’m not going to bother my arse making the fire’, so I’d light the gas oven and I stick my feet in. And then I make whatever food was there.”

The upside of those tough years, however, was a forced self-reliance that would ultimately grow into the take-no-prisoners belligerence that has characterised his career as a performer and activist.

“You have no choice but to be independent, there literally is no choice. You have rapidly forming opinions from what you’re reading and listening to, but you become dogmatic. You tend to see things in black and white. There’s no one to temper your opinion.

“I am pretty organised, though I look a mess, which is also a function of that eight-year-old boy. The last thing he’s thinking about is changing his socks or getting his hair cut. But he has a tidy mind.”

Ultimately, Geldof’s ticket out of Dun Laoghaire was to be rock ’n’ roll, which first entered his world via Radio Luxembourg.

“Suddenly, there were these young boys and girls called Mick and Keith and Paul and John and Pete and Bob describing whole other universes of possibility,” he says. “They were arguing for change and the inevitability of change, and it seems to me they were using the vernacular of rock ’n’ roll itself.”

The Boomtown Rats (named after Woody Guthrie’s gang in Oklahoma) was the vehicle by which Geldof made his escape to London. Initially the manager, he soon became lead singer.

Punk-inflected hits including I Don’t Like Mondays and Rat Trap followed and Geldof, with his “Bob the Gob” willingness to say exactly what he was thinking, swiftly became a star.

The catalyst for all his charity work would come in October 1984 when Geldof, then a new father to Fifi Trixibelle with partner Paula Yates, watched a BBC news report on the devastating famine in Ethiopia.

Geldof says his visceral reaction to Michael Buerk’s report has to be understood in the context of the 1980s “greed is good” culture (although it was to be another three years before Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko made that particular era-defining pronouncement in the movie Wall Street).

“There was a vulgarity to this new-money thing,” he says. “I didn’t mind it. But, dude, you are 18 driving around in a Porsche with red braces. You look like a c---. But fair enough, fair dues to you. The Big Bang in the city was coming and all of these things were coming to a fore because of Thatcher’s economic policies, etc. And that’s swirling around in my head.

“Then I turned on the six o’clock news and saw this horror. It puts your personal problems into a horrific perspective.”

He put in a call to his mate Midge Ure, whose band Ultravox was riding high in the charts.

‘I can’t handle the stupid f---ing things I say.’

Bob Geldof

“I said, had he seen it, and he hadn’t so I described he said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said, I want to record a song and get it out before Christmas. We make a hundred grand, give it to Oxfam and I’m done. He said, ‘OK I’m in. What’s the song?’ And I said, ‘Well I don’t have one, but maybe we could do a Dylan one.’ He said, ‘F--- off, we’ll write one’. I said, ‘OK’.”

The rest, at least if you were around in the 1980s, is history – Do They Know It’s Christmas/Band Aid begat Live Aid, which led to USA for Africa and We Are the World and a string of subsequent massive charity efforts.

From then on, as the Boomtown Rats’ rather brutal Wikipedia entry notes, “the band’s fame and notability” were “overshadowed by the charity work of frontman Bob Geldof”.

Forty years on, the 1980s feels like another country. Food insecurity, famine and war are as prevalent as ever in Africa, not to mention the wars in Ukraine and Palestine. I ask whether something like Band Aid could ever happen again, or has our collective compassion been drained by the daily horrors?

“I think there is a sense of despair that nothing we can do will make any difference. But actually, you’re wrong. There’s nothing we can do about Palestine and Ukraine, nothing as individuals. But you still have agency. Individuals are not powerless in the face of monstrosity. They really aren’t.”

In parallel with his music career, both solo and with the Boomtown Rats, Geldof has continued to advocate at the highest levels for action on global poverty, leveraging celebrity to get access to world leaders and mega-rich donors. But he has learnt to tone down the anger and outrage (he once famously exhorted viewers to “give us your f---ing money” on live TV) in the interests of getting things done.

“It’s incrementalism, and it still drives me nuts,” he says. “But I’ll go in with eight things I want knowing they could probably do two, but they’ll definitely give me one, which is the one I want.”

Inevitably, fame has brought him his fair – and unfair – share of critics, tagging him “Saint Bob” and worse. There has been an intense, prurient interest in the tragedies that have dogged his personal life: the death of his former wife Paula and, later, their daughter, Peaches.

In 1977, he told a journalist that what he wanted out of music was to get “rich, famous and laid”. How has that worked out?

“I’m here to tell you that being rich is better than being poor. I came from Catholic Ireland in the ’60s and ’70s so you might as well forget about getting f---ing laid. So I wanted to try that and that worked out. And then I wanted to be famous so I could use the platform to talk about things that bothered me. And I’ve done that.”

But, still, isn’t it weird to know everyone has an opinion about you?

“I imagine it would be almost impossible to live if you bothered what people think about you,” he says. “I’ve never tried to be coy in interviews. It is what it is and you can interpret it either way. If I come on the radio, I turn myself off. If I see myself on television it goes off. I can’t handle the stupid f---ing things I say.”

An Evening with Bob Geldof, Songs and Stories from an Extraordinary Life plays at Darling Harbour Theatre at ICC in Sydney on March 15 before touring Australia.

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