Bob Geldof: ‘I’ll be going along in the car, and suddenly, bang, out comes the sadness’

Bob Geldof is staring at a painting in a private meeting room in the Merrion Hotel. It's a dark and gloomy painting of a flood. "She's beseeching the heavens," he says, pointing at a figure in the middle ground. "It's f**kin' Shrewsbury as we speak."

Geldof is a musical icon and a huge cultural figure, the originator of Band Aid and Live Aid and a successful businessman. He's very busy. His recently reformed band, the Boomtown Rats, have a new album, Citizens of Boomtown. Faber has just published his collected lyrics and some accompanying writings as Tales of Boomtown Glory. There's also a new two-part documentary series about the band, also called Citizens of Boomtown, the first part of which aired on RTÉ 1 on Thursday.

Geldof is good at talking. He speaks in thoughtful paragraphs dripping with quotes and allusions. He also says, “you know” and “f**king” a lot and worries sporadically about being “overdramatic”, although any tendency he has to dramatise seems completely appropriate to his highly public, highly consequential and often traumatic life story.

Geldof always had an urge to create things, he says. Even before he had the band he wrote down pieces of poetry and lyrics. “When my auld fella died, I found all these notebooks from a 14-year-old frightened boy.”

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Why was he frightened? “Because things were really crap,” he says. “School [Blackrock College] was shit . . . And then you’d go home and my old man was going f**king nuts because he was spending whatever money he was making on getting me and the two sisters a decent education and I just wasn’t playing ball. I hadn’t been playing ball since the age of 10 and so nowhere was good.

“During the week you come home . . . but there was no one at home. You think that must be great and liberating for a kid . . . but it was f**king miserable. And then I would panic because every weekend we’d get this f**king report card, and the old man would insist on seeing it . . . I got beaten in school for being on the f**king blacklist and then he beat me at home. He didn’t want to. He felt reduced to it.

“So, I had no recourse. I just wrote things.”

He was perfectly primed for a new wave of rock and roll, he says. “Rock and roll suddenly became second generational. It could now articulate the sort of inchoate rage of Little Richard, or the just felt necessity of change of Elvis.”

He talks about “the impertinent lack of deference of the Beatles and the contemptuous insolence of the Rolling Stones. They’re speaking to me, and Dylan is saying, ‘This is about change. It is changing. It is inevitable. It is desirable.’ You’re listening to Radio Luxembourg and the improbable microstate lowers down the golden thread and I grabbed hold of it.

“And I still haven’t let go of it because it’s still how I make sense of the universe. They were proselytising missionaries . . . And that leads you into reading about things that bizarrely you associate with, whether it’s Steinbeck or whether it’s Studs Terkel. It was the music of cultural change and it changed my life.”

Rebels: ‘It’s a middle-class thing’

Why does he think Irish music produced particularly proselytising figures such as Geldof, Sinéad O’Connor and Bono? He says that O’Connor and Bono came later than he did, but he hazards a guess at the answer anyway.

“It’s a middle-class thing,” he says. “Johnny Lennon, Mick Jagger. Pop is straight out of the middle classes. And in terms of Ireland, the rebel heroes are middle class: Grattan, Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet. Patty Pearse wasn’t very far off, starting his own schools. It’s entrepreneurial. There’s probably a sociological reason for it.”

All six of the Boomtown Rats were animated, he says, by “anger and rage”, and politics was always baked into their music. In Tales of Boomtown Glory he likens it to “Trotskyist entryism”.

Unlike the Clash, he says, they revelled in going on Top of the Pops and infiltrating young brains. “You say things in pop, that’s what I learned in the 1960s, and it goes chasing up the charts and suddenly Rat Trap has sold 680,000 singles. That’s 680,000 people saved their pocket money, physically had to get the bus to go to the record shop, went in and got this thing and then they were singing Rat Trap.”

But what turned his personal sadness into a political outlook? When he was very young, he says, he read people like African American writer James Baldwin and South African writer Alan Patton, and “when you read that someone is disenfranchised, dehumanised, beaten up and beaten down, because of something as facile as the colour of their skin, I couldn’t properly get my head around it”.

He could relate to unfairness, he says, because he’d seen evidence in his own life, but because this was so much worse, he felt motivated to remedy it, “to try to stop it”.

Politics: ‘I don’t understand authority’

Unsurprisingly he continued to foment change beyond the band through the Band Aid and Live Aid projects as well as, more recently, becoming an advocate for debt forgiveness and African development alongside organisations and institutions such as the Commission for Africa, the Africa Progress Panel and the One Campaign.

“Dealing with politicians at eye level doesn’t confound me because I have this childish lack of recognition of authority,” he says.

But it’s surely different now that he’s not an underdog. He pauses. “That’s a really good point. I don’t know. I don’t understand authority because there was no authority figure in the house. So I didn’t understand the parameters of what’s allowable.

“So when I went to school, I was a low-threshold pain in the arse. I was consistently annoying so I got consistently whacked. Then it got to be a problem when you came up against an overt authority figure like a policeman. So when I go to meet these people, I’m pretty much like this.” He gestures to his current clothes – leather jacket, jeans. “I do go with the acknowledged respect that they were voted there by millions of people. So I plant that firmly in my head. And I will only talk about that for which I’m there. I won’t go off-piste because you’re very lucky to have the access.”

How would he describe his politics now? “I’ve no idea what they are.”

I make a stab at defining them. I suggest his politics are based on a belief in remedying injustice through the system via socially responsible capitalism (I don’t express it particularly coherently, but he gets the gist). “No. I mean, that might work, but if my mind turns to something else that could work equally in different circumstances, then I do that.”

Tax

I ask him about his 8 Miles private equity fund, designed to invest in and develop African businesses. 8 Miles has been criticised for domiciling some subsidiaries in low-tax Mauritius.

“If we are to get an investment from the African Development Bank, we must use a tax vehicle in Africa. So there’s no choice. So you know, what’s your end object? Is it to create jobs in Africa? I’m sick of f**king saying that it’s not just aid, it’s trade and aid.”

He says aid can help stabilise societies but that those countries’ governments must then stimulate an economy, and trade is necessary for people there to flourish.

But the criticism is that by paying the tax in Mauritius at a lower rate you’re avoiding paying tax into some of the countries in which 8 Miles is operating. He disagrees with this analysis.

Tax is being paid, he says. “It’s that you don’t pay it double. Why pay it twice? So some countries have a double taxation treaty with [other] African states. Other countries say ‘No, you’ve got to pay tax,’ in which case you do. It’s nothing to do with us. It’s to do with the function of the organisation. It’s not that we’re not paying tax [there]. It’s that we’re not required to, so money can be spent further in investment. Or if you do require us to [pay the tax], we do.”

I don’t ask more about this.

Brexit: ‘Britain is a viral society’

I do ask about his high-profile anti-Brexit intervention, floating a boat up the Thames to counter a Brexit-promoting flotilla headed by Nigel Farage. "They're allowing this f**k to come up the river with his lies," he says. "Putting one over on these fishermen who're going to get f**ked one way or another, so I do what I've done all my life, that I did when I organised a march against the South African rugby team when I was 13, you just f**king make the gesture and not let yourself down. It's also hilarious."

He sounds more sad than angry about Brexit. “It’s a sickening mistake, to me,” he says. “But that’s what they decided. It’s very much in the historical narrative of Britain.”

He sums up Britain’s attitude to Europe. “So, you know, hegemony builds up in Europe, it doesn’t matter who the f**k it is, Albion Perfide will beat up the potential hegemony, restructure Europe to suit itself and then withdraw to its island fastness. They’ll say, ‘Guys spare me, your f**king big idea – Napoleon, Philip the second, Kaiser, Czar – forget it. We don’t want to know about a United Europe. Not interested!’

“The problem is the rest of the world isn’t available for being beaten up any more . . . The logic of Britain no longer pertains because the logic of Britain is Empire.”

This said, he worries that Britain’s Brexit thinking will spread beyond its own borders. “Britain is a highly dynamic, creative society with an extraordinary history, a viral society before that term was even invented. So, if there’s a political or cultural idea in Britain, it usually happens 10 years before the rest of Europe. That’s the danger. Thatcher happened 10 years before the rest of Europe. The Sex Pistols happened 10 years before the rest of Europe. I hope this doesn’t preface an unravelling of the great adventure.”

Ireland: ‘The advances are immeasurable’

How does he view the Ireland of today compared with the country he once denigrated in his songs? “Oh, it’s a completely and utterly different country. When I sing Banana Republic, I don’t sing that about Ireland any more, I sing it for the abyss of political infantilism that is the American republic.

“If I sing Mondays, it’s about last week’s school massacre . . . The social advances are immeasurable. I know that they’re just a commonplace for contemporary Irish people, but are you f**king kidding me? Equal rights, same-sex marriage, gays, women, contraception, divorce? F**k off!” Thirty years ago, he would not have thought such progress possible.

Does he feel like he was part of that change? “Yes! Because when I kicked off about it on the Late Late Show [in the 1970s] all hell broke loose.”

Grief: ‘I keep my head down so no one sees it’

Geldof has experienced huge levels of personal grief over the years. He lost his mother at a very young age. His ex-wife, Paula Yates, died of an accidental drug overdose shortly after the death of her boyfriend, Michael Hutchence (Geldof adopted their daughter Tiger Lily).

Then, in 2014, his daughter Peaches died of an unintentional overdose. I ask if music helps in his grief and mention that I’ve found singing helpful in difficult times. He asks: “Do you find that you sing a song one night and it’s just too much for you, just too much and you want it to quickly end because it’s conjured up everything? Your soul is too full to make it to the end almost?”

Does this happen to him? It does, he says. “I turn away from the crowd and I keep my head down so no one sees it . . . I’m thinking of a particular song, I’m not going to do it now because everybody will be staring at me from now on when I do this f**king song.

“But there’s a brief instrumental passage, and I’m dancing with the person who’s conjured up and I, literally, dance with them. I literally dance with them again. And that gets difficult. But the only way is I dance her off the stage and get back to the job, you know?”

Was that an intentional attempt to write about loss? “No,” he says. “That’s another thing, the prescience of some of the songs appals me . . . It [could be written] 10 years before and suddenly I’m jarred by the reality of what I’m singing . . .

“I’m not spiritual at all, but your brain is constantly picking up clues and memes and assembling them. Where does it come from? I don’t know, but it feels true. So your senses are on red alert to everything and your subconscious will vomit up the sounds that the foreconscious grabs at and manipulates the tongue around.”

He talks a little about living with grief. “I keep frantically busy. I keep talking. I just keep talking. Just dance to the end of time, just keep going, because otherwise the head is too crowded and too open.”

Sometimes, he says, he’s overcome by sadness and when that happens he doesn’t resist it. “When you’re singing or writing, the head must be open to it all, to let it all happen. And I’ll be going along in the car, you know when you’re on automatic, and suddenly, bang, out it comes. And I let it exhaust itself and I just weep myself out and then say, ‘Okay, I’m good again. I’m clean now.’ And that’s what I do.”

Bob Geldof will appear in conversation with Niall Stokes as part of the International Literature Festival Dublin at Liberty Hall on May 16th