Live Aid spurred me into becoming a GOAL volunteer on the ground in Africa
It planted a seed which led me to board a plane to Khartoum in 1986 as a GOAL volunteer, with £10,000 sterling strapped to my waist, necessary hard currency for the agency's running expenses.
The plane landed late at night, and the equatorial heat hit me immediately as I struggled my way across the tarmac, sweating profusely, burdened as I was with a jacket containing a bottle of contraband whiskey.
I wasn't a doctor, a nurse or a logistician. I was on a year's leave of absence from the Irish Press and my brief was to help write donor reports and newspaper articles on GOAL's work and generally to make myself useful.
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By the time I got there in 1986, the great hunger that had swept the horn of Africa in 1984, had abated. Happily ensconced in the GOAL house in Khartoum, I had a false sense that the worst was over as I perused a well-thumbed copy of Bob Geldof's autobiography
Is that it?
The office work of an aid agency reliant on funding from the European Union et al is drudgery of a high order so at any opportunity I accompanied GOAL nurses on their expeditions into the slums around Khartoum where they provided desperately poor people with the only health services available to them.
I was never proficient enough in the art of home brew to become a member of the KGB or the Khartoum Guild of Brewers, set up to circumvent the local ban on alcohol, and which bestowed the blasphemous title Defender of Sharia on whoever offered up the worst beer for tasting.
In those days, a GOAL volunteer got full board and $15 a month. Any traveller's cheques I had were stolen soon after my arrival, so any social outings had to be at someone else's expense. Luckily the GOAL nurses always had plenty of invites to expat parties and would bring me along with them.
I saw Crocodile Dundee in a free screening on the roof of Khartoum's oldest hotel, the Acropole, a home from home for aid workers, journalists and archaeologists, with reliable phones and telex machines, run by George Pagoulatos and his extended Greek family.
Behind reception, they proudly displayed a love letter from Bob Geldof on Band Aid headed notepaper to George and staff in which he makes light of the hotel's lack of material comforts.
Despite the shambolic state of the roads and footpaths, the appalling heat and mosquitos, and the squatter encampments that ringed the more affluent urban centre, Khartoum had a certain other worldly charm.
It lies at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles with a street plan in the shape of a Union Jack. In the evening it was pleasant to walk the tree lined riverbank dotted with kiosks and drink an ice-cold soda.
Khartoum was untouched by war except for the stories brought to the city by refugees fleeing conflict and repression in neighbouring Eritrea and Ethiopia, and the civil war that would give birth to South Sudan.
And then there was Darfur.
A mechanic and I delivered a new vehicle, 1,500 kms across the desert, to the GOAL operation in El Geneina, Darfur, which supported a local midwifery school and provided outreach to remote settlements including refugees along the border with Chad.
It was a hair-raising three-day drive. We stopped at El Daein train station in east Darfur and saw the remains of the wagons where hundreds of Dinkas were burned alive in a massacre carried out a few weeks earlier in March 1987 by a local Arab tribe, the Muraheleen militia.
It was a reminder of how isolated Khartoum was then from the mayhem in other parts of the country.
The Muraheleen became part of the dreaded Janjaweed, a militia armed by the government and held responsible for a death toll possibly as high as 300,000 and the displacement of millions in ethnic cleansing across Darfur some 20 years ago.
They morphed into the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) who fell out with government forces and took the proud, once inviolate city of Khartoum in April 2023 committing war crimes on a scale hard to comprehend and destroying many of Khartoum's institutions including the humble Acropole Hotel which the Pagoulatos family had run for 71 years and where GOAL and other aid agencies collected their mail.
After 50 years or more of warfare, Sudan's ruin now seems complete. The sacking of Khartoum and the withdrawal of all support by the country's biggest aid donor, the US, means that Sudan risks becoming the world's largest hunger crisis in recent history as famine takes hold and 24.6 million people, almost half the population face food insecurity.
Last year the US gave $830 million to keep four million people alive in Sudan.
Withdrawing that funding is a very perverse way to mark the 40th anniversary of Live Aid which helped create the mood music – no pun intended – for George Bush, Tony Blair and other G8 leaders to forgive debt and increase aid to Africa on Live Aid's 20thanniversary.
That seems so long ago.
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Irish Daily Mirror
12 hours ago
- Irish Daily Mirror
Bob Geldof in furious Gaza rant as he shouts 'shut up' in live interview
Sir Bob Geldof has revealed that footage of malnourished youngsters in Gaza "enrages" him whilst condemning the UK Government for failing to take sufficient action. The Band Aid founder accused Israel's administration of "lying" about the absence of "no famine caused by Israel", declaring: "They're dangling food in front of starving, panicked, exhausted mothers." During an impassioned Sky News interview, an incensed Sir Bob questioned how Britain could develop a cutting-edge supercomputer this month whilst infants in Gaza were forced to survive on mere teaspoons of salt and minimal water supplies, demanding: "Shut up. What have we become that we can do this miracle and perpetuate this agony?". He also criticised the UK administration, claiming they had achieved "not enough". Sir Bob dismissed the idea that recognising Palestinian statehood - something Keir Starmer faces mounting pressure to do - would make any "difference" to the humanitarian crisis, reports the Mirror. Palestinian Yezen Abu Ful, 2, whose health has deteriorated due to lack of access to food and nutritional supplements. (Image: Anadolu via Getty Images) A charity organization distributed food to Palestinians facing severe difficulties accessing basic necessities due to Israel's ongoing blockade and military operations in the Gaza Strip on July 24, 2025. (Image: Anadolu via Getty Images) He urged Labour MPs to cease signing correspondence calling for recognition, branding it a form of "virtue signalling" at this stage, stating: "Enough. Guys, focus on the issue to hand." The political activist emphasised that the most urgent matter is to prevent starving mothers and infants from being exploited as "instruments of war". Regarding the Israel-Hamas conflict, he stated: "I'm really not interested in what either of these sides are saying. When you target infants and children, when their wounds are no longer capable of healing, when breastfeeding mothers can no longer do this, then everything goes out the window." Sir Bob expressed his views on the situation in Gaza, suggesting that Israelis who disagree with their government's actions should take direct action: "What's unfair is what's happening to these babies.... What's unfair is that one hour from the hunger, people are sitting down to their unthreatened dinners to turn on the next Netflix show." He boldly proposed a solution for Israeli protesters: "So if Israelis want to protest, get in your cars. This is very bold stuff, I know, sorry about that. Get in your car, stuff your cars full of food and drive through that border and let your own army stop you." Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest news from the Irish Mirror direct to your inbox: Sign up here.
Irish Times
2 days ago
- Irish Times
Bob Geldof: ‘I never read about myself. I can't stand the stupid f**king things I say'
Bob Geldof has yet to sit down to Live Aid at 40 , the BBC's gripping and expletive-filled account of how he wrangled some of the world's biggest pop stars into appearing at the era-defining 1985 charity concerts at Wembley in London and in Philadelphia . 'I never watch anything that I'm in. I never read anything about myself. I can't stand the stupid f**king things I say. I can't stand looking at my crap hair and all that sort of stuff. But I know about it and the response has been amazing. I was in Britain on the 'anniversary day',' he says, referring to Live Aid's 40th 'birthday' on July 13th. 'Even calling it the 'anniversary day' is weird to me.' Live Aid at 40 portrayed Geldof in a largely laudatory light. There were quibbles about the lyrics of the 1984 Band Aid single, Do They Know It's Christmas? Ethiopian politicians were offended by the song's title, explaining that, with their rich history of Christianity, they were perfectly aware of the birth of Jesus. [ Live Aid at 40: Bob Geldof emerges from this less sanitised version of events seeming somehow more admirable Opens in new window ] But the film's wider message was that Geldof had done something extraordinary by cajoling music's brightest lights – most famously Freddie Mercury and Queen – into coming together to raise millions for the victims of the Ethiopian Famine. He is pleased the documentary was well received, and that the anniversary hoopla has refocused attention on the plight of so many in Africa today. 'The nicest thing I read was that the greatest achievement of Live Aid was, in this world of indifference, [it] put poverty in Africa back on the agenda 40 years later.' READ MORE Geldof (73) has a reputation as a garrulous interviewer and someone prone to going off on a tangent. However, he is chatty and considered when talking to The Irish Times ahead of a performance next weekend by his group the Boomtown Rats in Co Waterford. It's possible we've caught him at a good moment. He's out on the road, leading the band on a 50th anniversary tour and playing to packed houses (a new compilation record, The First 50 Years: Songs of Boomtown Glory, follows in September). Though Live Aid and his campaigning have arguably eclipsed the Boomtown Rats' melodic punk pop, music is still his first love – and on stage, he burns with the same anger that has been a defining quality of his band since they played their debut concert on the campus of Bolton Street Institute of Technology in 1975. His rage came from his experience as a young man coming of age in the near-theocracy that was 1970s Ireland. He wasn't the only one to bristle under the dead hand of the Church – but he spoke out about it where others refused to. That need to lash out was the driving force behind the Boomtown Rats' first single, Rat Trap – inspired by his experience working in an abattoir in Dublin and observing how Catholicism and a life of narrowed horizons had beaten down and hollowed out his colleagues. He was only getting started. He and his band were more or less blacklisted from Ireland after Geldof went on The Late Late Show in 1977 and denounced 'medieval-minded clerics and corrupt politicians'. He also had a go at some nuns heckling from the audience – telling them they had 'an easy life with no material worries in return for which they gave themselves body and soul to the church'. The appearance caused a furore – even the unflappable Gay Byrne looked shocked. The Boomtown Rats would not play again in Ireland until 1980. It was a price he was happy to pay – a point he made clear in the 2020 documentary Citizens of Boomtown, released along with a well-reviewed comeback album of the same name. Bob Geldof: 'I have more or less the exact same opinion as everybody else on the disgrace, the horror of Palestine.' Photograph: Chris Hoare/New York Times Geldof performs with The Boomtown Rats at Leixlip Castle in 1980. Photograph: Paddy Whelan 'There was certainly a focused anger with me,' he says today. 'Perhaps less so with some of the others [in the band]. An inchoate undetermined rage was definitely the fuel. If there was this society that was just stuck, and there didn't seem to be any way that it could unstick itself, we would just go – along with hundreds and thousands of others. But in our going we articulated, I think, that rage – either literally in the songs or in the sound we made.' Decades on, a new generation of Irish musicians has taken up the baton – most prominently the Belfast-Derry rap trio Kneecap and Dublin/Mayo indie band Fontaines DC, who have advocated fiercely on behalf of Gaza. Does he see something of himself and the Boomtown Rats in those artists? [ Citizens of Boomtown: 'Bob Geldof drove me out of my f***ing mind' Opens in new window ] 'As I said, rock'n roll is essentially an articulation of the hitherto inexpressible. If there's something bothering you and you're inherently musical it will find its way. And it is something that seems to catch the zeitgeist. That's why these things become popular. The attitude of Fontaines and Kneecap ... there's a direct line back to Little Richard. It's corny and obvious but it's true.' The distinction, he believes, is that music is no longer at the centre of the culture of protest. It isn't that bands today care any less than their predecessors or that their fans are any less invested. But society no longer looks to music for answers in the way it once did. 'The difference is that ... this is contentious, but why not? I think that rock'n'roll as the spine of the culture was a 50-year phenomenon,' he says. 'In my lifetime rock'n roll was the arbiter of the social dialogue. The role of music has been taken by social media. Pop was our social media.' Everything changed in the early 21st century, he believes. The internet assumed dominance, and music became just another art form rather than a lightning rod for dissent and challenging the status quo. Bob Geldof and Darren Beale of The Boomtown Rats on stage at the Exit Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia, earlier this month. Photograph:'The year 2004 was when Google first made a profit. And 2004 was when this new thing appeared called Facebook. From that point on [music reverted to being] like music in the 1920s, '30s, '40s. Brilliant artists, brilliant writers, wonderful music. Fantastic songs. 'That doesn't mean music has lost all meaning. Just that it is no longer a pillar of social protest. You will always remember the feeling when you first kissed a girl, first kissed a boy. That will always be there,' he continues. '[But] it's been taken over by social media. Social media will take what a band has to say and amplify it. But then again social media is not a broad technology, it is an isolationist technology. So it has less impact. And while these bands make great music and they are fantastic bands, I'm not sure it will have the resonances that pop once had.' Geldof grew up in Dún Laoghaire, Dublin. His mother died of a brain haemorrhage when he was seven, and he was raised by his father, who managed restaurants around Dublin. The singer later attributed what The Irish Times once described as his 'premature independence' and habit of pushing back against the status quo to the absence of a mother and his father's long working hours. Having left Ireland and taken on various jobs in Cambridgeshire and Canada, he returned home and founded the Boomtown Rats in 1975. After one of their early gigs, a woman walked up and asked if she could sleep with him – an exchange he had never imagined possible in 1970s Ireland. At that moment, he understood that being a rock star could change his life. Relocating to London, the band had huge success with singles such as I Don't Like Mondays. The country myself and the Rats left was a very closed society, which ultimately led to a highly degenerate political body — Bob Geldof Geldof entered a relationship with TV presenter Paula Yates . They had three daughters and eventually tied the knot, though the marriage fell apart after Yates embarked on an affair with Michael Hutchence of INXS, with whom she had another daughter. Hutchence died by suicide in 1997. Yates suffered a fatal heroin overdose in 2000. In April 2014 there was further tragedy when Geldof and Yates's 25-year-old daughter Peaches died , also of a drug overdose. In a statement, Geldof said the family was 'beyond pain'. Geldof is widely admired, but he is not above criticism. After Live Aid, he was accused of encouraging a White Saviour attitude towards Africa. The naysayers have included Ed Sheeran who said last year that his vocals were added to a new remix of Do They Know It's Christmas? without his permission. His contribution was taken from a 2014 version of the song, and Sheeran said that, were he asked to participate today, he would decline. He quoted an Instagram post by singer Fuse ODG, who said undertakings such as Live Aid 'perpetuate damaging stereotypes that stifle Africa's economic growth, tourism and investment, ultimately … destroying its dignity, pride and identity'. Geldof and Paula Yates in 1979. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images Live Aid: Geldof and fellow musicians on stage at Wembley in 1985. Photograph: BBC/Brook Lapping/Mirrorpix/Getty Geldof, along with his contemporary Bono, has also been attacked for staying 'quiet' about Gaza. Last year, singer Mary Coughlan said: 'We all saved the world when Bob and Bono were talking about saving the world, and I couldn't understand what was different about this situation in Gaza. Why would they would be so quiet about it?' 'Well of course I have opinions, like anybody,' he says of Gaza, adding that, as a trustee of the Band Aid Charitable Trust, his work with Africa is his primary focus. 'Whether I like it or not, I am associated with Africa. I've spent 40 years … Every day, I wake to at least 10 Band Aid emails about the latest situation. [The charity is] still building hospitals or … dealing with children Sudan. Or dealing with the ruined bodies of gang-raped women … And trying to give them some semblance of a future life. That's what I wake to every morning and have done for 40 years,' says Geldof. 'So you'll forgive me when I speak I stay focused on that where I know from whence I speak. I can literally do something about that. I have obviously more or less the exact same opinion as everybody else on the disgrace, the horror of Palestine. And, as you know, the answer to the issue of Palestine – it's not as if it's unresolvable. It is a two-state solution. And one way or the other that will ultimately occur. ' He points out that in 1984, nobody was taking a public stand about the famine in Ethiopia. He was the first musician with a platform to do so. Today, there is a chorus of voices about Gaza. 'There was an opportunity to give a focus point,' he said of Live Aid. 'There are plenty of focus points with regard to Palestine. But nothing is going to happen there until the wanton killing is stopped.' What about the argument that Ireland and Britain have flipped positions since Geldof was an angry young man? Once hidebound by religion, the Republic has blossomed into a poster child for progressive values – or so we like to tell ourselves. Meanwhile it has become voguish to paint post-Brexit UK as a wasteland of hollowed-out town centres and red-faced men in Wetherspoons complaining about refugees. [ The unsung Irishman behind Live Aid. Not Bono, not Bob, but Paddy Opens in new window ] 'I'd be wary of the starting point with regards to Britain ... It's a dynamic and creative country. Regardless of what you think, it's still the seventh biggest economy on the planet. In Ireland's case, it is transformative. I come back to what I always thought the country could be. That is not to say I don't know very well indeed the contemporary issues. I follow it rigorously and avidly. My family are in Ireland. I'm back all the time. I follow the politics etc. Having said that, the country myself and the Rats left [was] a very closed society, which ultimately led to a highly degenerate political body.' Bono makes an interesting point in the Live Aid documentary about he and Geldof, being Irish, having a folk memory of the Famine. Geldof wasn't aware of Bono's comments – as he says, he didn't watch the series. But he does wonder if being Irish did help put a fire under him. In one scene in the BBC film, he browbeats Margaret Thatcher into essentially removing VAT from Do They Know It's Christmas? He looks her straight in the eyes and talks without fear or deference – something it's hard to imagine even the most ardent English punk rocker doing. [ Live Aid spurred me into becoming a GOAL volunteer on the ground in Africa Opens in new window ] 'One of my pet theories is that punk is largely the product of the first generation of the Windrush people [ie migrants to Britain from the Caribbean] and the first generation of the 1950s mass migration out of Ireland. I don't think it's an accident you had Elvis Costello, Shane MacGowan, George O'Dowd [aka Boy George], Johnny Lydon, Morrissey, Johnny Marr, the Gallagher brothers. A very antsy attitude. Then you had the actual Irish like us. Some of us were friends some of us weren't – rivals or whatever. I always got on really well with Johnny. We always seemed to get on well with each other. Did it make a difference with Live Aid? I don't think anyone was surprised it came out of the Irish community.' The Boomtown Rats play All Together Now at Curraghmore Estate, Co Waterford, over the August bank holiday weekend. The First 50 Years: Songs of Boomtown Glory is released September 19th
Extra.ie
4 days ago
- Extra.ie
Bob Geldof Issues Impassioned Plea to the People of Israel about Imposed Starvation in Gaza
Responding to the appallingly grim pictures taken in Gaza of starving children, and published by the Express and the BBC today, in a moving statement, the Irish singer – and founder of Band Aid and Live Aid – asks the people of Israel: 'Have you become so inured to the similar images of your own historic horror that you cannot feel or see anything anymore?' Bob Geldof has made an extraordinary, impassioned plea to the people of Israel to end the starvation and killing of Palestinians. The founder of Band Aid and Live Aid was asked by the Express newspaper to respond to pictures published by them, and by the BBC today, of skeletal, starving children, who have been denied aid by the Israeli government and army. 'What has happened to the Israeli people?' Geldof asks. The question is all the more powerful, coming from a man who has long been active in Holocaust Memorial activities and events. Bob Geldof is a Founding Patron of the British Holocaust Museums Aegis Trust for Genocide Studies. He was among those who gave the inaugural address in Westminster Hall, for the first National Holocaust Day Memorial in the UK. The lead singer with the hugely successful Irish rock outfit The Boomtown Rats also received the Lyndon Baines Johnson Moral Courage Medal from the Houston Holocaust Museum of the United States of America. 'Whatever the titanic enormity of your own past and current suffering, what has happened to you,' he asks of the Israeli people, 'that you should allow this for even one fraction of a second? That you should create and perpetuate the suffering of this tiny little speck of humanity?' The shocking images of starving children in so many ways speak for themselves, as the effects of the genocide – now widely accepted as being perpetrated against the Palestinian people – are shown in all of their appalling barbarity. 'Your government and your army seem to be out of control,' Geldof insists. 'Every word from their mouths is a distortion of reality and the truth. Why do you, the sovereign state of Israel, tolerate and permit this? Why do you force people into helpless ghettoes and then purposely starve them? Or seemingly randomly shoot them as they approach for the scant food you dangle in front of their starving bodies?' It is one of the most powerful indictments yet of a policy that has seen people die in their tens of thousands – and which has now extended to the use of starvation as a tactic – not just of war, but of a thinly veiled campaign to steal the land and 'ethnically cleanse' the Gaza strip of Palestinians. 'It is simply no longer possible,' Geldof charges, 'to blame the current rhetoric or actions of your Prime Minister, the extremists in your government, the policies of that government or the actions of your military on the disgusting, barbarous and murderous events of Oct 7. You are way, way past that now. 'Whatever your war aim once was and however justifiable you felt that to be, at what point did the aim become the deliberate starvation of a terrified, tormented, traumatised population?' he asks. All over the world, there is an increasing awareness of the inescapable truth that what is taking place in Gaza – what is being done there by the Israeli army in the name of the people of Israel – is utterly beyond the pale, and must be stopped. But the political response is sadly, desperately, behind that of ordinary people. 'Has hatred consumed you such that extravagant evil is the permissible norm?' the Irish rock hero asks. 'Has revenge so curdled your moral sense that all pain, all terror, all agony appears as victory? Has a false and foul sense of destiny enabled an equally delusional notion of national prerogative and right?' There is, of course, a solution to the madness. It is staring the world in the face – and yet so many politicians and leaders are being mealy-mouthed in the face of the horrors. In a tone that is reminiscent of his pleas in 1984, when he responded to the famine in Ethiopia by launching the Band Aid single 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' – which went in ti become one of the biggest selling singles of all time, he now has this to say. 'Feed the children of Gaza and they're tormented, terrified, broken, and panicked mothers,' Geldof pleads. 'Do it tonight before you settle into your unthreatened dinners and the latest Netflix soap and your heavily censored news reports and online feeds. There is no argument in the world, no war aim, no imagined future that justifies this photograph and it's abysmal and shameful, disgusting truth.' Geldof emphasises finally how impossible it is to believe that the people who themselves suffered the monumental, murderous atrocities of the holocaust should now be responsible for such an appalling degradation of an entire people: the Palestinian people. 'I am incredulous that it is you Israelis that are doing this,' he concludes. 'how? How did you get to here guys? How did it ever get to be so base? Shame on you.' • The full text of Bob Geldof's statement can be viewed on
