Just a few short weeks before Bob Geldof’s life was to once again change unimaginably he was looking forward to an untarnished summer of being reunited with his band mates at Wychwood Festival.
It was a time when he was able to say “I have got four girls from 30 to 17,” without a pause to collect himself, without having to change tense.
He was preparing to perform 35 and 36 year-old hits that somehow seem every bit as relevant today as when they first spilled from Bob’s fingers back in the 70s.
And despite the tragedy of his daughter’s death, the showman will go on in Cheltenham because there is no alternative that will change what has happened.
But it is impossible to listen to the interview where Bob holds forth in his typical unrestrained way, unself-conscious and unself-censored, peppered with wit and expletives alike, and not be reminded of how he used that emotional eloquence to eulogise his daughter, Peaches....
Bob often has apocryphal statements attributed to him. Probably the most famous being that in his heartfelt plea to get viewers to donate during Live Aid he yelled at them to “give us your fucking money”. He didn’t but they did anyway.
However, he holds his hands up to having stated that he joined a rock band “to get rich, to get famous and to get laid.”
“I did say that, yeah. I had been poor. It’s shit. It still is. I was in Catholic Ireland, I couldn’t get shagged. Then suddenly you are in the band and wahay!
“As for fame, what I said at the time was I wanted it to give me a platform for the things that bothered me.”
Quite a lot of things bothered Bob. So determined was this son of a former travelling salesman to vent them that he caused uproar on Irish television when he and his fellow Rats appeared back on The Late Late Show with Gay Byrne show in 1977 – a bunch of angry punks ready to kick glam rock in its glittery crotch, musically speaking.
“I thought it would be the one and only time I would ever be on telly so this is it. It is like the first time you are on a plane as a kid. You think you’ll never be on a plane again, so you save the serviette and keep the little carton of salt.
“The last thing I ever do on telly is try and sell our records. I talk about everything under the sun but that.
“Suddenly in the middle of Mud and Showaddywaddy, all that sort of thing, out come us lot, bollocking out this glorious racket.
“Gay Byrne talks to us and I am not having any of it. And this argument erupts with the audience and me, you know. It all goes bonkers. I was just venting my rage and frustration against everything, basically.”
The Catholic Church, the priests who had taught him at Blackrock College in Dublin and even his own widowed father, an absentee dad because of his work, were subjected to his ire.
Author Joseph O’Connor, brother of singer Sinead, who also attended Blackrock, recalled sneaking out to watch it at a friend’s house.
“Almost everything he said was greeted with horrified gasps and massed tongue-clickings from the audience, and wild cheers from my friends and myself,” he wrote in Banana Republic: Reflections On A Suburban Irish Childhood
“Geldof’s pungent cocktail of motormouth arrogance, unwise trousers and disrespect for authority really did appeal to me.”
Bob’s friend and fellow philanthropist Bono was another awed teenager who felt this was “a happening”.
“He was at home with Gavin Friday (the singer/songwriter and Bono’s childhood friend),” reveals Bob. “He was about 16/17 and he was going ‘yeeessss. Finally!’ Something they recognised as theirs, you know?”
It is that spirit of revolution, the voice from the margins speaking up for the overlooked and angry that is missing from music today, according to Bob.
“I don’t hear the spirit of the age in the music I hear on radio today,” he says.
“I have got four girls from 30 to 17. Even if I don’t hear the music myself, there is a whole load of music they listen to that I get exposed to. Generally I listen to the alternative stations because I want to hear what’s new, not that I am trying to be ‘cool dad’.
“Where’s that singular voice that marks the moment, you know?
“When we all hear it we recognise it. The minute you heard Kurt Cobain you understood that here was a singular voice with a singular point of view and, for whatever reason, it struck you as being genuine and real.
“Pop is a very powerful living thing. I can’t hear it very much, certainly not on Radio One which seems to have lost its way again. Given that it is at the epicentre of culture for the young, something needs to be done to shake it up.
“There needs to be another wave of people who just go ‘you aren’t in any way articulating what it feels like to be alive now so out you go’. That is what should happen.”
It is not inconceivable that teenagers of today could find a meaning for them in the songs of The Boomtown Rats.
Certainly at the gigs they have been playing since he reunited with three of the Rats – Pete Briquette, Simon Crowe and Garry Roberts, though without the pyjama wearing keyboardist Johnnie Fingers or guitarist Gerry Cott – there have been a fair number of children of former punks in the audience.
“I loved seeing 14 year-old girls whose parents had clearly drilled our records into them, leaping up and down and singing ‘She’s so 20th century. She is so 1970s (from She’s So Modern off their second album, A Tonic For the Troops). You’re going ‘Dude, you weren’t even born in the 20th century’.”
He says they were lured back because of “money and vanity”.
“We were offered the Isle of Wight Festival. I had been there when I was a kid. It was huge. The Who, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Leonard Cohen. To have been there and on that actual stage, if you are in rock and roll it’s pretty good.”
He also admits he was curious to hear the songs again – Looking After No 1, Mary of The 4th Form, Rat Trap (the first song by an Irish band to reach number one in the UK) and the nihilistic anthem I Don’t Like Mondays – by the men who made them.
“I didn’t realise how powerful a noise this random group of individuals who came together as kids 40 years ago made.
“You are all of the same level of ineptitude, you are shite, basically. But you gradually get better together only you are not aware of it.
“Occasionally I will hear some of our old tracks and I’ll think ‘God, that’s great’.”
He had no need to relearn the lyrics, they were embedded in his psyche and he discovered they remained just as pertinent and powerful today.
“I could have written 92 per cent of those songs yesterday,” he says. “We occurred at a time – 75/76 – when there was a generation who, having left school and been promised whatever, ended up with nothing because the economy’s appalling.
“Singing those songs in the middle of another recession seemed completely valid to me and I wouldn’t change a word. They’re completely contemporaneous.
“So being on the stage and doing that (again) wasn’t in the least bit nostalgic or embarrassing. I genuinely meant it when I sang it. That same animus that made me write it in the first place was present.”
But he is not the same angry young man who lurched from the dole queue in Dún Laoghaire onto the rock scene and found himself in Barbados 18 months later with a beautiful girl on his arm and an album at number two in the charts.
He has been reinvented as a champion of the poor, an impassioned activist, a father, a grandfather, a knight in letters if not in title and, at 62, the possessor of a bus pass.
“I said to them I am not going to jump around like a twat like I did when I was a kid but, fuck me, when they started playing, there I was, jumping around like a twat.
“It was ungainly when I was young and embarrassing when you’re older but there was nothing I could do about it because that is what that music makes me want to do.
“It turns out that Bobby Boomtown, that character, hadn’t disappeared. He was actually pretty close to the surface and I didn’t need much to access him.”
But he had prepared himself in case he wasn’t able to act the part. He thought he could at least look it.
“I thought I needed some sort of key to get back into this guy. I thought ‘I need a snakeskin suit, that’s what I need’.
“So I went down to Brick Lane and saw Mr Battu and he said ‘Yeah yeah. We can do you a snake skin suit’. Actually it is not, it is cowskin, they just print snakeskin on.
“So I said ‘Yes, that’s it. That’s me larging it at these mega festivals’ But it worked.”
The Boomtown Rats are playing Wychwood Festival at the end of this month and they will be back in Birmingham again in October.
However, fans shouldn’t anticipate that they will go on endlessly rolling like the Stones, putting out new material and expecting the faithful to lap it up just as eagerly as the old.
“I don’t need to do it and I wouldn’t do it unless I really enjoyed myself.
“I was very surprised at the reaction last year to the band coming back. All the gigs sold out, the reviews were fantastic.
“It was a re-evaluation of the songs that we had and they turned out to be really good, though I say so myself.
“We wrote a couple of new ones for the Best Of album (released in 2004) but we don’t do them because that is not what people want.
“You go and see The Stones and you want Honky Tonk Woman, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Brown Sugar. You don’t want to hear Mick saying ‘here is one off our new album’.
“People say ‘it must have been great, You were rock stars and doing stadiums’.
“Yeah but it wasn’t that enjoyable, you know? It becomes a job. The first time you go on telly you can’t believe it, then you do 59 tellies and you are indifferent.
“If the Rats went on and on, that would happen. But it is not going on and on.
“While we are enjoying it, while the band is rocking like it is then absolutely.
“We have all lived lives in the intervening 29 years. Those lives were humdrum or mundane or interesting or whatever.
“But, as it turned out, that one thing we did over a 10 year period turned out to be really good.
“So yeah, this is great. Best fun I have had in ages.”
* Wychwood Festival takes place at Cheltenham Racecourse from May 30 – June 1. The Boomtown Rats, The Stranglers, The Levellers will headline and limited day and weekend tickets are available from www.wychwoodfestival.com
