Bob Geldof: ‘If I was 15 I would organise a boycott of everything Musk’
In his intimate new one-man show An Evening with Bob Geldof,the 73-year-old activist rocker doesn't hide the fact anger is his "default emotional condition".
Before bringing his brand new solo show An Evening with Bob Geldof to New Zealand later this month, the Irish music icon is delivering his first-ever performances across the ditch.
Onstage in Australia recently, Geldof found himself feeling his full spectrum - which could be“bananas” with excitement about singing his old songs or “enraged” while speaking about his father’s physical abuse.
“Anger is the animus for me, it's my default emotional condition. I get angry about things. With age, I suppose you learn to use it as a fuel,” he tells Saturday Morning.
Bob Geldof was just 33 when he produced Live Aid, which was broadcast to an estimated 1.9 billion people.
TEG Dainty
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Geldof was a 13-year-old Dublin schoolboy when he organised his first protest - against apartheid.
If he was a teenager now, a “fun and disruptive” online campaign to take down tech mogul-turned-presidential advisor Elon Musk would be top of his list.
After forming in Dublin in 1975, The Boomtown Rats had their biggest hit with 'I Don't Like Mondays'.
Fin Costello/Redferns
The anti-establishment messages of The Boomtown Rats - the punk band Geldof formed in 1975 - were a “perfect” match for Ireland at the time, he says, but by 1984 he says the hits were no longer flowing.
Watching the news one day and feeling a bit down, a story about the Ethiopian famine crisis put Geldof’s own problems into “stark perspective” and he got to work wrangling other musicians to raise money.
With Midge Ure, Geldof wrote a song called ‘Do They Know It's Christmas?’ which the supergroup Band Aid released as a charity single.
The following July, Geldof produced Live Aid - two massive simultaneous concerts in Philadelphia (where the line-up included Crosby Stills & Nash, The Beach Boys and Madonna) and London (where the line-up included U2, Queen, Elton John and David Bowie).
Bowie had cried when Geldof showed him a “horrific” video of some malnourished children in Ethiopia, he says, and Live Aid’s “big moment” came when he stopped singing to introduce the video to the crowd.
“Of course the great artist, the great showman, knew exactly what he was doing.”
Forty years after Live Aid, Geldof says a misquote from a BBC interview on the day still follows him around - even getting a mention in the Canadian Bowie-inspired musical Just For One Day.
Although it became “enshrined in the mythology” that he had said ‘Give me your f—ing money’ on air, what Geldof actually said - after the BBC DJ started reading out a postal address for donations - was ‘F— the address’.
Either way, the F-word seemed to “thrill” BBC listeners.
“The perceived obscenity of the word was like a sort of slap, I suppose, and loads of money poured in at that point.”
“Weird moments tipped the balance. Within a week of the concert, we had in today's money around US$480 million.”
Bob Geldof (with then-wife Paula Yates) received an honorary knighthood (KBE) for his charity work in 1986.
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In An Evening with Bob Geldof - which was partly inspired by the solo shows of his friends Bono and Bruce Springsteen - Geldof performs acoustic versions of Boomtown Rats hits and shares prewritten stories about his life in no particular order.
Onstage he likes to keep things flexible enough to “wing off on something” when he senses the audience is into it.
“Time loops about itself anyway and you become aware of these bizarre coincidences and happenstances in your life that you wouldn't otherwise have been aware of.”
“I keep changing every night so it’s kind of fraught with potential mishaps but so far so good.”
To Kiwis coming to Geldof’s Wellington and Auckland shows, Geldof has two recommendations - get to the venue early and see the film that plays beforehand and plan for an “all-nighter”.
In Melbourne, Geldof commanded the stage for over 3.5 hours and his Sydneyside were entertained for a full four hours.
“Bring your sleeping bags.”
Bob Geldof presents An Evening With Bob Geldof at Auckland’s Bruce Mason Centre on 28 March and Wellington’s St James Theatre on 29 March.
