Bob Geldof Mark Lawson Talks To...

This programme contains some

Baptised in 1951 in Ireland as Robert Frederick Zenon Geldof,

who reached number one with

His earliest nickname, Bob the Gob, came from his outspoken style.

and Live 8, ten years later,

as part of his campaign against

Boomtown Rats. Although for some,

to David Cameron, Prime Minister

or President Obama, could you?

and I would get Bono to call Obama.

So you have... You have power at that level still? You have access.

And you have access initially through

and I think probably stems from

when that whole celebrity notion

I think, when politicians became confused as to whether they were

or celebrities in their own right.

Where they were appealing in HELLO!

So we sought to use that, really.

But you only have access in as much as that you talk about the thing

You don't go in and start talking

Because you won't be listened to.

And, you know, they are busy people and you have X amount of time.

I've been doing the African issue for, whatever it is, 30 years.

I know from whence I speak.

I certainly know more about

than maybe the leader does,

but he will be surrounded by civil servants who are also expert.

So you have to be on your mettle, you've got to have an agenda,

certain results in the half-hour

power now in their forties, fifties,

it's just the right generation

They are the Live Aid generation.

I mean, most of them remember, presumably, having watched it.

Blair, people forget, was very young in Parliament when Band Aid happened.

But once it became a phenomenon

because numbers are political.

I mean, Thatcher wrote to me and the Liberals wrote to me.

around something that most people

have forgotten about, about whether

And this became...blown up.

And I think it was Neil Kinnock

But what he did do was he went and got all living Prime Ministers

Prime Minister, where he is

Whatever else one might think,

and achievable once you had power.

cos you can look back and say,

"I did that. It can be done."

And that was to our advantage.

Is it true you rang up Blair from Africa and shouted at him? Yes.

But I've rung Blair from many places

He says I do, but, I mean...

I'm fluent enough, but I don't

The other thing I see myself doing

doesn't annoy me. That's just it.

But it's such a great word.

but it is the emphasis on something

it can be humour, it can be whatever.

a great consequence one day.

and I got overwrought and I swore.

People were enraptured with the day.

The romance of it. Which I never quite got until afterwards.

It was a gorgeous day in Britain. Everyone was watching this thing.

here were these great bands,

and they forgot what it was.

And I think that my panic...

I tried to find the word and I just,

It was like a slap, I think.

And especially then, that word was a little more violent, maybe.

Although it's like "Play it again, Sam." You never actually said,

"Give us your fucking money."

at the time, the announcers,

the DJs, were talking about

and that word, at that moment,

seemed to exemplify that urgency.

you've got to get on the phone

and take the money out of your pocket. Don't go to the pub tonight.

you have had many formal proposals,

I have often been asked why I don't.

But no-one... Like at the time of the whole Martin Bell thing,

when there was this call for people

People suggested always to me, "Why don't you go into it?" But why?

it was a single-issue thing.

I thought it was awful, preposterous,

this cockamamie simplicity,

as many people dying as possible.

Two, hunger is only symptomatic of

a singular empirical economic

And given that it's political

and given that it's economic,

the agents of change in our world,

To do that, you need to create a lobby that agrees with you.

And then you have access. So that is the sequence of events. It took us...

I think 2005 was the key moment

when all that effort paid off,

So here, you had a man who was almost contemporary with me and this issue,

who, after this shouting from Africa,

and come and see him. And the

why does this massive continent

Eight miles, that is the gap between

still the richest continent in the world and the poorest.

he was advised not to do it.

I mean, his adviser would say, "What is the upside?" They're very blunt.

Not to me, but just saying,

And my pitch was - we didn't have

2005, Kofi Annan called it the "Rubicon-crossing moment" for Africa.

except they would say to me, "Name one country that succeeded with aid."

So that was achieved, more or less.

What we hadn't thought of was massive

to secure the raw materials to power their economy, which kept us going.

And the fourth thing that brought

increased aid and investment,

the glue, the virtual infrastructure in a continent with no roads,

air or rail was mobile telephony,

So as soon as this got disseminated

like everywhere else where people can talk and trade, bang, take-off.

seven of the ten fastest-growing

at this moment are African.

But some of these situations

and you're jamming with him

"This is just effing weird,"

but I'm lucky that I can do that.

I get to hear and see things I never

you just think it's normal.

You know, at 13, I was doing the anti-apartheid thing in school

and be friendly with Nelson Mandela.

And you kind of have to go...

When we played South Africa,

And then the kids and that, you know,

Another consequence of what

the first Irishman in space.

trying to get around to that, Lawson!

It's only 15 minutes, but how

I do... I don't know what reason, I do really want to see the Earth.

"What are you going to do up there?

It's pointless, in the end,

to play out alternative lives

in your head the scenario...

and I know this is dismissed -

but what is essential to me

playing live and, to be clear,

The need to make music and to make these songs and these records.

Cos the process of the songs

It doesn't stop, it goes on.

People are interested in you, but you are a very famous musician

But that doesn't bother you?

it probably does bother me.

I understand, as I constantly say,

that the brand is bigger than

nobody knows what they do, really.

we chucked out all the oldies,

the music I'm doing, even though

it was playlisted on Radio 2, the biggest station in the country,

they playlisted it because they

Does it sell records any more? No.

What was the number one sales

My first number one, to get there,

When you go back and do something

is that strange? Is it a sort of

that you're recreating something

I've said that I'm doing it

The age thing is significant

passed between us doing anything.

it only gets to 89 in the charts.

I am much more interested in that

I said, "Let's give it a go."

and it was very weird, but charming.

and, I promise you now, not trying to sell the gigs or anything,

that random group of individuals.

You know... Like, if I took the technicians and you here

Put another guy in, something else.

And, of course, that's what made

I'm going to mention a few of the descriptions often used about you.

people say. Do you accept that? No.

I don't think I'm arrogant.

because there is a lot of rubbish

he was broke when Live Aid started

"and now he's very wealthy.

"You do the math," they say.

And they are all astonishing,

and we should settle it for people.

You are rich because you sold

another very successful one,

which is "planet" backwards.

And that's why you're wealthy. I also have other companies.

I've got this educational technology

Also...do lots of other things

Wrote the book, which bailed me out of being broke after Live Aid.

I mean, that is why I got offered

And I couldn't do that because it was using what had happened to me.

not least being...ten years, our records weren't selling.

pick up the record contract.

So I was offered a solo contract,

So after two years of doing this thing, you know, I was out of cash.

And the Rats hadn't made money

where you are being offered all these silly things that would have,

in my view, abused that thing.

So the only legitimate way...

the curiosity about this person

And thirdly, make some money from it.

So I got 100 grand, I think,

Like, it must be pretty wild,

Well, I don't hang with them,

and it's interesting I'm with them. And I know I'm wealthy, but I forget.

I know this sounds weird to people and, "Lucky you," you know,

the genteel sort of poverty

It's not poverty as you see it in

but there was no money. And...

And I can't escape that panic

and employing people and, you know,

I'm very afraid of is loneliness,

because that was it at the beginning.

no more than I'm consciously aware that I'm with some mega politician.

I wrote in the margin of your book

It was astonishing to me. With the notable exception of your father,

you have the early death of

You're sitting eating a sandwich

by a train in front of you.

A brother-in-law. Much later, Paula.

You have been stalked by it, really.

when people scrutinised the Rats'

That all the time, there's reference to it, which I hadn't noticed.

What you've just said to me,

I've thought about, not recently,

I don't want this adventure

Engaged all the time, and gradually, as his world became narrower,

Part of me hopes this bloody rocket

relationship with your dad?

is that the parent who survives

When I started beginning to be

..I was opting out of everything.

And I was more interested in stuff that was happening...

I mean, I was reading a lot,

do homework, so I just read.

And I was reading Steinbeck,

Studs Terkel, the brilliant

which I took the name Boomtown Rats.

And Dickens. I had a bout of pleurisy

You know, it was a very thin world,

The potential for being a kid

where there is no rock 'n' roll circuit, where the bands are thin,

pale imitations of funky grooves

with names like Nightbus, Supply

And suddenly, into this world

famously to people in my generation -

microstation on the planet,

talking of other universes, other

You know their names - Jagger, Townshend, Lennon, Dylan, et cetera.

You know, I just ferociously

inchoately felt and wanted to say.

the inevitability of change,

Don't forget, Mick and Keith

You know, being disempowered, put down, beaten up, beaten down,

because of something as preposterous as the colour of your skin.

I just simply couldn't get it.

I had never seen someone of a different colour in Ireland anyway,

so perhaps it was easy for me.

you become enraged with this.

And I had a mate, Mick Foley. And the two of us listened to the blues

and tried to play harmonica,

He's now one of the editors of

And so, you know, right-on,

not characters from Dickens,

men who had lost their lives

And it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, it shouldn't be that way.

So when the Rats became exactly that, that platform, that rhetoric,

of course you are going to write

Of course you are going to look around and write Banana Republic.

be in America and an event happens

and you write I Don't Like Mondays.

And the chilling thing is, as I said, I could write them yesterday.

ours more spectacularly than most.

# Banana Republic

# Sufferin' in the screamin' sea

# The black and blue uniforms

The reason you're on your own

your father was away, he was a salesman, so he was doing that.

Your mother had died suddenly.

There is a memoir by the writer

who lost his mother in similar circumstances, and he describes

suddenly becoming aware as a child of adults crying in the house.

And you had a similar experience,

I was the boy and the third child,

on the night my mum died, I remember

she gave me a cuddle, sitting in the bay window of the house.

and there is this hubbub downstairs.

and he sits at the side of the bed.

And he just said, "Your mum died last night," and he started crying.

And, of course, you're six,

And forever doesn't mean much.

And anyway, your mum is just

my mother again. I wasn't...

I didn't go to the funeral. Kids didn't in those days, I suppose.

You were taken to the cinema.

Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.

I knew there was something up.

I wasn't told she was being buried.

..a weirdness about the adults

like I was this tender little thing.

One of the reasons perhaps bands, it is so difficult for them

thrown together accidentally.

Quite randomly. That was certainly the case with the Rats, wasn't it?

One day, beautiful spring evening,

a different pub, Fitzgerald's, which

one from just down the road, Garry,

and one the brother of a mate of mine, Johnnie. And I was...

His older brother was my mate. And they were sitting there.

George Harrison, I'd written about.

And they said, "We were actually thinking of starting a band."

And I said, "Well, with what?"

And Garry said, "I've got a guitar."

And Johnnie said, "I've got

know, did blues things at parties.

instruments?" "Don't know."

and the stylistics, nothing.

"You have got to talk about

And Garry said, "You should be

He calls me the next day and he says, you know, "Let's go into town

He also bought a Meazzi amp.

Now, you may not know this esoteric machine, but the great thing

And his mother told us to shut up and, you know, to stop that racket,

You must have been pleased with

which sounds like, you know,

some wild, Hollywood thing.

want to shag on my dad's bed.

Where was my bedroom? I don't know.

and I was just going to take

We were on the floor and she was smoking, and the fag drifted off.

I came back to this blazing inferno.

My dad was away, and... He was in Spain, wasn't he? He was, yeah.

So I thought, "I've got to face up to this." So I went to the airport.

So we were in the car going back

and then we talked the holiday chat.

He said, "So what have you been

As we were driving towards this

"So, you remember the house?"

'remember'?" So that was it.

I was sad because a lot of his photos

Music is very big on categorisation, partly because of record stores

which, for younger viewers,

But New Wave, punk, all that stuff,

we started a year before that sort of exploded in the UK. That idea.

I was aware that there was a pressing demand for change, especially through

the New Musical Express and writers

He wrote something about "All aboard the Titanic," or something.

writing for the NME, don't forget.

And I completely agreed with this.

I thought it was going to be

the absolute kings of this.

You had Kilburn And The High Roads, which later became Ian Dury.

who was superseded, unfortunately,

What did it mean to us, you know, limousines, bouffants and mansions?

And we come to England in '76.

And we got confused with that.

Cos we looked like this, but at the time, because of the Feelgoods,

But we were younger than them.

faster than them. For some reason,

trying to jump on this bandwagon.

There was a cultural Taliban saying,

And, you know, I am contrarian

This lot are against that orthodoxy,

just as institutionalised as

There was a disparity between the

I vividly remember people walking around singing I Don't Like Mondays

as if it was about not having French

rather than actually shooting large numbers of your classmates.

the thing about Mondays was...

against somebody shooting someone.

It was this sort of amorality that I encountered in America.

This sort of wild moral vacuum

Bret Easton Ellis is best about it in

And I think that came a year later. I am not sure if it was a year before.

I certainly remember reading that.

And I obviously don't have his skill, but it was this oddness about it.

And also, the fact that on the plane over, I had been reading about

these new things called computers and that they had invented a system of,

you know, making them very powerful

And that was made of silicon.

The silicon chip inside the brain.

And I thought, that's literally what

# The silicon chip inside her head

# And Daddy doesn't understand it

There was a chap called Steve Jobs

and play in his front lawn,

And, you know, I said, "A barbecue on a front lawn? With his mates

"building one of these things? No."

And I said, "No, we don't do

But all that was going on, so when

we'd done a song about a kid

who disappeared in Dublin who used

Hopeless. So we'd done this.

So here's this ghetto lager...

His dad worked up in Belfast

But an intense sense of music. And Van grows up listening to

But Van, being incredibly curious

of this great hinterland of another culture, and goes to investigate,

And comes up with this Yeats-ian

that he embues with the blues

and creates a whole new type of music, which influences Springsteen,

who clearly acknowledges it,

who picked up on Van but tried to marry it with Irish mythic stuff,

cos he was an outsider, he was the only black guy in Ireland,

basically, and tried to say, "I'm one of you..." I think.

I'll write about this kid, you know,

in this sort of...I'll describe

they never knew the words -

just the sense of it...make it

The fact that it went to number one was bizarre, because it was

John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John

"The traps have been sprung

behind all the closed doors.

from its scab-crusted sores.

and crying in the high-rise blocks.

"It's a rat trap." You know, how does that beat John Travolta

# You've been caught in a rat trap

# You've been caught in a rat trap. #

over your children's names.

Did you expect or even invite

which I loved - she was the one

She'd say all these things...

came along, I just wanted to say,

"Thanks. Never said it to you before,

but of course when we did it,

Well, is the Trixibelle bit,

is from Tennessee Williams,

I mean, he's clearly taking the piss.

He's doing all those things,

Paula loved all those dresses

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof thing...

And we were driving up Shaftesbury

and there was Tennessee Williams

So we just stopped, said, "Do you want a lift?" He said, "Yeah."

So we went off with Tennessee Williams in the thing, in the van,

"Fifi Trixibelle, it's such a strange name." And she said,

I took Fifi to ballet class when

galumphing around the place,

lady beside me, and she said,

"I love the name of your daughter." I said, "Thanks very much."

And I said, "What about these two -

And she said, "We had a terrible

"and I got fed up after six months of calling them Baby One and Two,

"and so, I was making jelly

But that happened afterwards.

She's called Little Pixie after Little Richard...first, and...

Yeah. And then Pixie Frou-frou

I mean, I took a Polaroid of her

And it was a difficult birth. And she

And Paula said, "She's an odd

like a Pixie," trying to be nice!

And... She was like a little pixie.

Peaches came out and she was like...

you know, classic English complexion.

Peaches and cream. Peaches.

"Why, Peaches Honeyblossom, you come right down here right now!"

And frankly, they can all fuck off.

the break-up of the marriage,

I remember talking to you around

front pages, paparazzi, all of that.

Is there any way of dealing with that, or do you just have

and just hope you're standing

So I'll go back now to a point

about that sense of loss seems

"Well, cumulatively, my dad,

all those things all the..."

"..all the mass death I saw in Africa..." You see, the thing is,

Mark, I have seen things that people shouldn't ever have to see.

So it's only when you access

that it bothers you, really.

you know, Paula leaving me...

and I go ahead and do that.

And, you know, you spend 20 years together and you create this family,

and she had, as some people know,

This bizarre, mad background,

we both have a thing about,

but literally, just what happened to,

but you can't comprehend it,

And, couldn't function at all.

And, er...so it was not good, it was not easy. And then...

Someone's taking care of me, but I'm steered, bizarrely,

into the path of this other

who hasn't a clue who I am in France.

and Live Aid uniquely in the planet.

I mean, she wasn't fooling,

and she's going like this today even, "I must look at it sometime."

sorry boring people about this stuff,

this ruined man, and I really cannot

I mean, you saw me at some point

Because what was happening over

..madness. I mean, genuine madness, what was happening over there,

so, you know, I'm freaking out

she's no notion of the English press.

You know, and we've heard over the last three years about the behaviour.

I can trump all of it, believe me.

And forget phone hacking of mobiles,

They rented the house opposite

and just had lenses in there.

Literally followed to France,

They may as well have had News of the World written on their shirts.

Were you hacked? Yeah. Yeah.

No. Um...because I don't have the sort of mobile that could be hacked.

but I was certainly bugged,

And other journalists who waited outside told me who was doing it.

That's how I know. The phone was

And, er...then the other journalists

and my mate got into the car

and then I slammed to a halt and he pulled in in front of the guy

So into this walks this girl

I don't want to get through this.

Yeah, I did think that, yeah.

Not heaving sobs, but just tears.

I'd been crying in my sleep.

And, um...a friend of mine,

I had great boy friends, men friends,

Johnny McGuire, Howard Angel,

Um...Charlie and Waheed from Planet.

Um...and Phil was kind of staying

and he said, "If you ever want to record anything, I'm here."

And, um...so they were trying

to sort of handle this thing.

And I really didn't understand

that it was a physical pain. I didn't understand that, but it's physical.

The doctor said, "Take these,"

because that's part of being human.

But it was so extreme, like,

my hair was turning white anyway,

but it was now accelerating, I lost,

But I was very ill, as well.

And, um...Keeping your end up.

And, er...So I just thought, I'm not going to do this any more now.

The pros and cons of being alive.

you won't feel this, you won't have

you won't see these people, you won't do this, this. Long list.

..frankly, that wasn't enough.

So I called my mate Pat and he just said, "You stay where you are now.

"Don't move. You stay where you are."

and pain and...all the rest of it.

Funny, I've been quoting throughout

Are we going to get another volume?

Because of some of the things

It was the 2005 G8 and the BBC

And frankly, it's not that gripping.

Um...and...I think it's lived

Um...I've tried, I think most

as the poet said, you know.

you should be in this world.

You know, I take the road less

when you get back from Space.

I hope I'm made an honorary colonel

# You've been caught in a rat trap

# You've been caught in a rat trap

# You've been caught in a rat trap

# You've been caught in a rat trap

# You've been caught in a rat trap

# Did the whole world know your name?

# You've been caught in a rat trap

# You've been caught in a rat trap. #

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