Profile: Bob Geldof has emerged from a spell as tabloid fodder to become again the focus of action on Africa. But his thinking has changed, and the Live 8 event he's organising will be more than a reprise of Live Aid, writes Shane Hegarty.
At the beginning of 2004, Bob Geldof picked up a phone in Addis Ababa and called Tony Blair. "Africa," he told the British prime minister, "is f--ked".
It's 20 years now since Live Aid, since he was famously brusque to another PM. Margaret Thatcher told him that the situation wasn't that simple. He asked her, what is simpler than a person dying.
Back then, he was an outsider. Today, he might still consider himself that - "anti-establishment and anti the anti- establishment", as he once described the Boomtown Rats. Yet he can pick up the phone and call Blair whenever he wants. Perhaps they text each other: CU@G8.
His typically crude geopolitical analysis last year was not entirely accurate, as Geldof admits. Continuing his tour, he saw fledgling democracies and recovering economies. His fear is that both will be strangled by overwhelming debt and economic bias. The result is Live 8, five simultaneous concerts across the world on July 2nd, culminating in a march on the G8 summit meeting being held in Edinburgh four days later. It will be 20 years since Live Aid, the concerts he always promised never to repeat as it would be "a failure of imagination". The public will forgive him this reprise.
Geldof has been all over the papers this week. The concert plans, plenty of St Bob stuff and the occasional columnist wondering if it isn't all just a bit naive.
A decade ago, he was all over the papers too. He and wife Paula Yates were tabloid fixtures, living out the soap opera of their marriage, break-up and custody battles in horrible detail. He was filleted regularly by the press. The St Bob angle was old, the African story dull and Live Aid long over. The fact he was proving to be an astute businessman was hardly a sexy story. In 1992 the Mail on Sunday declared him to be a victim of Live Aid.
"He has fallen into that celebrity black hole where people are famous only for being famous," it claimed. "It seems that we will inevitably hear more of Mr Geldof's persuasive voice. But if he isn't careful it may be as a panellist on Blankety Blank."
It was a wanton underestimation. From the wreckage of his marriage, his life and Yates's suicide, Geldof was to re-emerge as something far more than a mere celebrity.
Out of a custody case, Geldof did more for the issue of fathers' rights than perhaps anyone else could have done at the time. He distilled it into important questions of love and nurture that had previously been seen not just as irrelevant but as almost unsavoury. He became the embodiment of rage against the system. There is no one in the public eye who can express frustration like he can, no one else who can be so terrifyingly articulate.
No one else who looks so like they've been kicked repeatedly, but gotten up every time.
From the moment he began work on Band Aid - with the now largely over-looked Midge Ure - he has been easily caricatured. A doleful, shaggy figure given to being foul-mouthed; phlegmatic but eloquent.
"Even I'm sick of myself, of looking at this mournful, lugubrious face in the mirror," he has admitted. "I'm that quarter-page Oxfam advertisement in the Guardian, always asking for money."
His favourite poet is Keats, and his favourite Keats poem is Ode to Melancholy. His biggest fears are loneliness and poverty. His would not make for a good lonely-hearts ad.
He has mocked the cliche of his life: born into repressed Catholic 1950s Ireland; losing his mother at the age of seven; becoming prematurely independent because of his father's job as a travelling salesman; growing up to let loose on the world all his anger and frustration, yet holding on to all his old fears and insecurities about family and money.
At 53, he has his family now: his partner, French actor Jeanne Marine; his three daughters, Fifi Trixibelle, Peaches Honeyblossom, and Pixie; and Tiger Lily, from Yates's relationship with Michael Hutchence. And media businesses have made him a millionaire several times over.
"There is a constant emptiness," he has said. "The religious right would say it's a God-shaped hole, but it isn't. Those who know my personal story would say it's a mum-shaped hole, but it isn't. There's just this perennial condition of being empty and it can't be filled with money and stuff and things."
That he manages to keep his nose just above caricature is perhaps because his sincerity is so forceful. Blair's seems contrived, as if the only thing he truly believes in is himself. Bono, Geldof's fellow crusader on Africa, too often looks like he's playing the character of "Bono". Maybe it's because Geldof has been proved right often enough. With songs such as Banana Republic, the Boomtown Rats railed against the political kleptocracy years before the tribunals. He has refused to play the misty-eyed emigrant: he is angry at the abandonment of a generation of emigrants to Britain and unapologetic about making a better life for himself away from an Ireland that suffocated him.
Still, he must be used to accusations of hypocrisy and contradiction. Last week, the press revelled in the story of how wristbands for the Make Poverty History campaign, in which he's involved, were being made in sweatshops. Live 8 has been criticised for including only one African musician on the bill.
Geldof, it is also suggested, should be more careful about who he cosies up to. Hugging Vladimir Putin at a G8 summit was not a popular move. Blair and Gordon Brown have formed the Commission for Africa with him and lobbied for a "Marshall Plan" for the continent, yet while the British leader speaks of bringing great change to Africa, he has ignored both his people and his colleagues to bring his country into a devastating war in Iraq. Blair asks that debt be alleviated, but his government continues to license arms sales that further add to the debt of those countries while increasing the power of the regimes that buy them.
Last year, a documentary claimed that much of the $150 million of Live Aid money was channelled through a corrupt Ethiopian government and that aid convoys were diverted into feeding armies. These funds, the film claimed, meant the war continued for a further six years, costing tens of thousands of lives.
Geldof has also been accused by others apart from Thatcher of oversimplifying the issue. These critics say Live Aid created a perception that the Ethiopian famine was caused by climate change, that the significance of war was downplayed, and that while Geldof berates the West, many of Africa's problems are self-inflicted.
The fact that the press calls him Mr Africa (Geldof detests the tag) says much about our own attitudes to the continent. Ask people to name an African leader and they will struggle after Mandela. Geldof may be the West's niggling conscience, existing to shame us into action, but he also allows us to feel good about ourselves occasionally. Once in a while, we are reassured that we are capable of swooping in and coming to the rescue of helpless Africa.
His new book and television series, Geldof in Africa, portrays a traumatised, frightened and frightening continent and reveals Geldof is not so naive as to believe it can be fixed with the swish of a G8 pen. His changed attitude is obvious in the different approach he is taking 20 years on. Live 8 will not be about Geldof asking for your "f--kin' money" but about altering a global mindset. It is as much about policy as it is about charity. Yet at its core is his call for a common humanity to overcome all difficulties; for a return to that "living cliché" that was Feed the World.
"This is the best chance for Africa for a generation," he said on his tour of Africa. "We can't afford to blow it." Thatcher was right when she said it wasn't thatsimple. But you get the impression that while he is on this blighted planet, he'll never let us accept that there is anything more simple than a person dying.
The Geldof File
Who is he?
Singer, campaigner, conscience of the Western middle class, and once declared an "honorary mum" by Bella magazine
Why is he in the news?
Twenty years after Live Aid, a series of concerts and a march are being planned to coincide with the G8 summit in Edinburgh in July
Most appealing quality
His relentless drive against injustice wherever he sees it
Least endearing quality
He's a compelling character, but you probably wouldn't want to be stuck in a lift with him
Most likely to say
"Don't give us yer f***in' money this time"
Least likely to say
"Feed the rich"