Bob Geldof: ‘White saviour complex? It doesn't exist'

Telegraph

17-05-2025

'F--- off!' thunders Bob ­Geldof. 'All your stories about Queen, all your stories about theories. F--- off!'
You need to be in the room to understand just how much energy the man behind Live Aid is putting into the F-bombs that he's presently hurling in my direction. Each one follows a pause for breath to give it the desired explosive force. 'We deal with the reality of the awfulness of this world and what we still allow to happen,' he roars. 'Everything else is redundant. F--- your notions.'
We're at the Shaftesbury Theatre in Covent Garden, surrounded by set-builders and carpenters knocking the Edwardian playhouse into shape for the eight-month run of the Live Aid musical Just for One Day. It's a warm, tranquil morning, but despite watching the film Twisters the night before, I've clearly learnt nothing from Daisy Edgar-Jones's ability to read the specific combination of moisture, wind shear and temperature inversion in the lower atmosphere to predict when a tornado is forming.
For Geldof, the musical couldn't have landed at a more resonant time, as the world finds itself facing 'a great moment of fright and horror'. We don't have the emotional bandwidth, he says, 'to deal with the terror of Russia in Ukraine and the horror of Gaza, and pay attention to the extreme horror of Sudan'. He gets a minimum of 10 emails a day from 'the horror lands' about the reality of life on the ground, while 'America,' he adds, 'immediately, overnight, dismisses its [international development] aid agency, the biggest in the world. The USAID website goes dark because of a sociopathic fool like Elon Musk saying the great weakness of Western civilisation is empathy... No, Elon, you are utterly wrong.' Five million people will be affected by its shuttering, he says, including 'the 2.5 million children in western Sudan who are being starved as an instrument of war'.
Geldof is not the 'Leftie liberal' that people like to think he is, he says, but in the American president and the Tesla boss, 'You've got the strongest man on the planet and the richest person ever on the face of the earth declaring war on the poor­est and most vulnerable. F--- off!'
This is the Geldof many of us remember from the evening of Saturday July 13 1985, when the scruff-bag singer of The Boomtown Rats berated the British television audience that had tuned in to watch the parade of stars performing both ­at Wembley and at the John F Kennedy stadium in ­Philadelphia. 'You've got to get on the phone and take the money out of your pockets. Don't go to the pub tonight. Please. Stay in and give us the money – there are people dying. Now. So give. Me. The money.' That was followed by his angry response to the BBC host attempting to give viewers an address to which they could send money: 'F--- the address! Let's get the numbers.'
This is the Geldof who confronted Margaret Thatcher after an event, at which the then prime ­minister had personally thanked him for his 'leadership', to complain about her failure to lift the VAT on the money raised by Band Aid's Christmas No 1 and to badger her that the government itself could do more to help. (Morrissey once said that the problem with Do They Know It's Christmas? was that the responsibility to save African lives fell on 'some 13-year-old girl in Wigan'.) Both the charity single and the Live Aid concerts were, of course, organised by Geldof and the Ultravox singer Midge Ure to get food and medicines to Ethiopia, where nearly eight million people had been hit by the worst famine in a century, caused by drought and a decade-long civil war.
Those notions? I've just asked the 73-year-old about the idea that the Band Aid project had a profound negative effect on how people saw Africa as a whole, taking a long-term toll on tourism and investment in the region – the ­reason why Ed Sheeran said publicly that, had he been asked, he wouldn't have agreed to his vocals from the 30th anniversary Band Aid single being used in last year's 40th anniversary remix.
I've also tentatively invited ­Geldof to comment on the 'white ­saviour complex' of which he has been accused. 'It doesn't exist,' he says. 'Why are we even talking about it? It's just a notion.' His view is that notions don't save lives, only action does. Yet this notion – that showing a white person rescuing non-white people perpetuates ­colonial stereotypes – is the one that prompted Save the Children to end its child-sponsorship programme, I point out. 'You don't theorise with emergency disasters or humanity,' he says. 'You don't. Spare me all your b-----ks about notions and ­theorising. Save the Children can do what they like, but their job is to save children. The rest is nonsense.'
How did we get here? I had, of course, been intending to begin this piece with: 'It's 12 noon in ­London, 7am in Philadelphia, and around the world it's time for Live Aid!' Admittedly, I've asked Geldof if he recognises himself in any of the pithy epithets supplied by former collaborators at the end of the 2005 documentary Live Aid Rem­embered: 'Brave' (Bono); 'brash' (Midge Ure); 'cantankerous' (Chrissie Hynde); 'outrageous' (Sting); 'rude' (Gary Kemp); 'a f---ing lunatic' (Elton John); or 'c---' (several people). 'C---,' he shoots back.
I've also plugged him for stories about that day. For instance, did he really not want Queen, one of the most widely remembered highlights, on the line-up at all? 'Not that,' he says. 'I just wasn't that pushed whether they showed or not.' He recalls how the promoter Harvey Goldsmith told him to call them, 'And I said, 'Seriously, Queen?' You know, 'Why? We don't need them.' If you want one word why punk existed,' he adds, 'the word is Queen. They were emblematic of what was viewed in 1976 as overblown pantomime rock.'
The Boomtown Rats, of course, were blown on course by punk's musical detonation, threatening the Top 10 in the summer of 1977 with a breakneck debut that has gained a retrospective irony – Lookin' After No 1. The chart-toppers Rat Trap and I Don't Like Mondays followed in consecutive years.
Geldof did, however, call Roger Taylor, the Queen drummer, 'who was very upfront. They supported it, but it wasn't hugely their thing. And, eventually, Freddie came on the line. I just said, 'But, dude, you're match-fit.'' Queen were coming off the back of a world tour, whereas many bands, such as The Who, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath (with their original singer Ozzy Osbourne), were reuniting just for the concert. Paul McCartney hadn't played for six years, he stresses.
'Fred replied, 'I'm thinking of making a solo album,' which is usually a hint that the band is going to break up or be set aside for a while. So I just finally said, 'OK. But Fred, if ever there was a stage built for you, this is it.' And he said, 'What do you mean by that?' And I said, 'Well, darling, the world.' There was this pause, and then he said, 'I think I know where you're coming from.''
Four decades on, Geldof had his own misgivings about Just for One Day, which premiered at the Old Vic last February. 'Literally from the start, when Jamie Wilson, the producer, came to see me with John O'Farrell and Luke Sheppard, the writer and director, I just thought it was a s--- idea,' Geldof begins.
'I read the script, and I hated it. It was about my life... not about Live Aid at all. That's a separate issue. And I was sort of angry about that, that I was kind of, I thought, being used.' He knew O'Farrell from his writing: Things Can Only Get Better: Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter, 1979-1997 and novels such as The Man Who Forgot His Wife. So they talked, at length. Geldof says he is obliged as chairman of the Band Aid Trust to look at every opportunity to raise money, 'or I'd have dismissed it out of hand and never wanted to see them again'. But from then on, he says, the script got stronger and stronger, although he and the Trust 'were still very much against it, until Jamie said, 'just come to a workshop''.
Geldof was absolutely blown away by what he saw. 'Watching the actors work was extraordinary,' he says. 'These people were off at 3 pm and 4 pm to [perform in shows such as] Hamilton and The Devil Wears Prada and all the rest, and they'd be back in there at 8.30am limbering up. They'd have to learn new lines daily, new arrangements, new harmonies, new dance steps. Craige [Els], who plays the character of Bob, was mortified, as he had to impersonate my accent in front of me. But when Craige was nine,' he adds, 'his granny made him stand on the kitchen table in Liverpool and do impressions of me, so it was almost destiny.'
Some changes have been made since the original premiere but, Geldof notes, 'I'd make suggestions to O'Farrell, and he'd say, 'Oh, that's quite interesting. I'll give it to Luke.' And Luke would say, 'I'll come back to that, Bob.' But neither O'Farrell thought it was interesting, nor Luke ever came back to me. So my input has been extremely limited.'
Geldof the storyteller is very much in evidence here. He's a ­natural, but the flow is long-form and hard to divert. The answer to a single question can run up to 10 minutes. I've read and listened to a lot of his interviews and the results can be amazing, although you can never be certain which Bob you'll get on a particular day. If you get nostalgic Bob, as the original Live Aid hosts Mark Ellen and David Hepworth did in 2021, the Irishman runs long on marvellous tales of rock 'n' roll past: how his Cliff and the Shadows-loving sister took him as a boy to see the Beatles, the Stones and Bob Dylan in Dublin in the early 1960s; and how he later came to have George Harrison's denim jacket, with the sweet packet the Beatle had signed for him that day in November 1963 tucked proudly into its top pocket.
By then, Geldof had already lost his mother, Evelyn, who died of a cerebral haemorrhage when he was seven years old, leaving him to be raised by his father, a travelling salesman. The sense of a life shaped by tragedy reared up when Geldof took a sudden reflective turn on an Australian podcast recently, telling its host how nothing in his life 'seems to happen in the minor key. There's a band, and it goes huge; you have a political idea, and it goes huge; you have a marriage, and it's all over the papers; and then the marriage, you know, falls apart, and the consequences are Shakespearean... It is tragic to the end... the people involved, some didn't make it, and I almost didn't make it through, either.' At the far end of that tragedy, he said, he came to the understanding that 'life without love is completely meaningless'.
We know what happened. ­Geldof's marriage to the television ­presenter Paula Yates, whom he'd been with since 1976, when she was 17 and he was 25, and with whom he'd had three daughters (Fifi, Peaches and Pixie), ended in 1995 when she embarked on a relationship with the INXS singer Michael Hutchence, who died by suicide in 1997. Yates would die from a heroin overdose three years later, aged 41.
Geldof adopted their daughter Tiger Lily and brought up all the girls together. Peaches, 'the wildest, funniest, cleverest, wittiest and the most bonkers of all of us', as he would later describe her, died of a heroin overdose in 2014, aged 25.
Geldof doesn't want to talk about his remark, 'I almost didn't make it through'. He does chat about his second wife, the French actress Jeanne Marine's recent birthday party in Paris – 'It was her 60th birthday, our 30th year together, our 10th wed­ding anniversary, all in one day.'
But today I've got Live Aid Bob in the room with me and everything else is dealt with pithily. He once col­lected an award from Russell Brand with the remark 'What a ­c---'. Did he know something we didn't? 'I just thought he was a prat, you know, his whole shtick is nonsense.'
He's suggested that rock 'n' roll reached the end of its 50-year life cycle with Live 8 in 2005. 'It's '55 to '05,' he says. 'In my view, the last great rock 'n' roll bands were Nirvana, Oasis, Blur and Arctic Monkeys.' People still listen to music, of course, 'but has it got the same impact? Not to my mind.'
His own big hits were narrative-driven mini-epics, did he never think of writing a rock opera? No, he insists. 'I thought that The Who took a complete wrong turn with Tommy and Quadro­phenia.' The Boomtown Rats put out a decent album in 2020 – check out the single Trash Glam Baby – and are going on tour this year.
Did the big idea he had in 1984 swal­low everything else, including his musical career? He takes a deep breath. 'Yes,' he says, suddenly wist­ful. It's what people have associated him with ever since. 'Much like today – 'Tell me about Pink Floyd! Tell me about Queen!'' Yet he'd still have done something after seeing Michael Buerk's news report on the famine – only, if he'd been a plumber, it would have been with his plumber mates. But he'd been in rock long enough to meet some of his heroes, and most of the new pop stars regularly slept on his floor, 'because Paula was the host of the go-to rock 'n' roll show of the 1980s [The Tube], we knew these people as friends'.
And, he adds, 'Forty years after I said on Simon Bates [radio show] that every penny you give me will go to the people who need it most, it has. That's all that matters. And if we can get it to those starving children, if we can build the school and the hospital and the dam and the wells, then all of this is worth it.'