04-08-2025
Bob Geldof glows with awkward-customer energy as Boomtown Rats play All Together Now 2025
The Boomtown Rats
Something Kind of Wonderful stage, Sunday
★★★★☆
It has been a year of anniversaries for
Bob Geldof
and The Boomtown Rats. Half a century has elapsed since Geldof and bandmates emerged, spluttering and snarling, from the Dublin punk scene. But 2025 is also the 40th anniversary of Live Aid, the moment Geldof the frontman with the crazy hair was replaced in the public imagination by sweary St Bob of telethon immortality.
Both sides of the singer are on show during The Boomtown Rats' agreeably splenetic Sunday-afternoon set at
All Together Now
. The hits arrive at a steady clip, starting with Rat Trap, a neurotic slide tackle of a tune informed by Geldof's experience working in a Dublin slaughterhouse during the dead-end 1970s.
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Bob Geldof: 'I never read about myself. I can't stand the stupid f**king things I say'
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Looking professorially grey at the age of 73, Geldof glows with awkward-customer energy. His voice isn't what it was, and there are stretches when he rasps rather than sings – while his body language is that of a stick insect with a few things to get off its chest.
The songs – including the beautifully bittersweet Someone's Looking at You, from 1979 – are evergreen, however, even if the rockabilly epic (She's Gonna) Do You In is stretched to snapping point. 'This is the Pink Floyd bit – it goes on for f**king ages,' Geldof explains.
All Together Now 2025: Bob Geldof, Doc O'Connor and Pete Briquette of The Boomtown Rats onstage on Sunday. Photograph: Kieran Frost/Redferns
The singer recently spoke out against
Israel's action
in
Gaza
. He repeats the message at All Together Now, pausing during I Don't Like Mondays' 'the lesson today is how to die' beat to talk about the women and children dying in
Palestine
and about those giving their lives on the
frontline in Ukraine
. As he talks the video screens show the Palestine flag.
Fifty years in, Geldof is still an expert at big gestures and at combining pop and protest to theatrical effect. These rats have some scurrying left in them yet.
