Bob Geldof: ‘I never read about myself. I can't stand the stupid f**king things I say'

Irish Times

26-07-2025

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.
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Live Aid at 40: Bob Geldof emerges from this less sanitised version of events seeming somehow more admirable
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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.'
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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?
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Citizens of Boomtown: 'Bob Geldof drove me out of my f***ing mind'
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'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.
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The unsung Irishman behind Live Aid. Not Bono, not Bob, but Paddy
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'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.
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Live Aid spurred me into becoming a GOAL volunteer on the ground in Africa
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'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