Bob Geldof has done something rarely expected of him – he’s made a new album of songs. Alan Corr meets the former boomtown rat on his return to ruin town to talk music and the meaning of life. In that order
“Are you waiting for me man?” Bob Geldof is standing in front of me a boutique Dublin hotel. He's he’s already taken in his surroundings in a sweep of the room and now he’s impatient to just get on with the interview. Dressed in a long black coat down well below his knees, his hair is a steel grey straggle and he has a battered handsomeness that belies his 59 years.
He still exudes the same world weary but menacing stare he’s had since he first pounced from our septic isle in the late seventies with the immortal rock `n’ roll cri de guerre of “I want to get rich, get famous and get laid.” Geldof wanted to be Johnny Rotten and while the spirit of 76 still courses through his old punk veins, he has long been more famous for his work in Africa and his drop the debt campaigning.
But Bob is not here to talk about any of that. He calls it “the stuff” and it’s always got in the way when Geldof wants to talk about his first passion (not that he’s not passionate about “the stuff”) - music. Geldof has a new album out. It’s called How to Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell by Bob Geldof 58 and a Half. That’s quite a mouthful but then again everything Bob Geldof says is quite a mouthful; I could remark upon the weather and he would launch into a lecture about our temperate maritime climate and its affect on the Irish psyche.
So nothing has changed really. He’s still impatient to the point of crankiness and articulate to the point of sophistry, still grinding out his words with the conviction of a man who believes that he, and no one else, is utterly correct on everything. Geldof orders a sparkling water (“Hey, let’s go crazy”) and I casually ask what his girlfriend of many years, French actress Jeanne Marine, makes of his new album. “It doesn’t matter what she thinks,” he says. “Of course she’s going to say she likes it. It’s part of the iterations of it – taking bits out of songs and putting them back and then saying what do you think of this 63rd mix?”
Are you always this dispassionate about your music? “I’m not at all dispassionate about my music,” he sulks. “You asked me what she thinks of it and it doesn’t matter because she’s gonna say she loves it because she’s my missus. My daughters are much more interested in my music now than when they were kids because back then they were either disinterested or embarrassed because it’s their dad. I play it to them in the car and I bollock it up really loud and I turn around admiringly at myself and point at the CD player and they say, `get a grip!’”
It is very strange to be talking to Geldof about his new album though. “Music?” you might ask, “Isn’t that something he used to do years ago and wasn’t he not very good at it?” Well, yes but whisper it, Geldof’s new album is quite good in a lopsided and playful way. It starts with a neat lift of a song by The Lovin’ Spoonful and ends with a hugely autobiographical tune called Here’s to You which is a kind of Podge and Rodge meets an episode of Father Ted at a dance in Brennan’s Barn.
In between there’s plenty of wit and humour but importantly, Geldof finally seems to have a degree of contentment. Bob is out of practise when it comes to discussing his songs. He’s better at giving Sarkozy one in the ear (after Bob stoops down very low naturally) about Third World Debt. “Just as much as people find it difficult to accept that I do music, I find it very difficult to try and sell it or to try and persuade people to listen,” he says. “I get every opportunity to crap on about whatever’s in my head - speeches, radio, telly, writing in the papers - I can do it and people will accept it. The problem is I can always speak my mind but I’m not allowed to sing my heart . . . it’s completely arty farty! There is an impulse to music that goes away and comes back at inappropriate times.”
His “impulse to music” first struck him one morning in Cork when he was ten years old. “I remember clearly the first time I heard Elvis. It was in a drawing room in Cork at about eleven in the morning,” he says. “There I was stuck and things were not good, bleak, and I was by myself in the house, there was no money and the place was freezing and we had no telly and into this came Radio Luxembourg and these young boys and girls singing about change. That’s exactly what electrified me. There were other planets and universes outside planet Ireland. In the seventies when it was again a zero economy and the state had failed once again to provide any offering to its young, the first thing you hear me say in a song is the world owes me a living. I wrote that in 75.
“The job of the artist is to articulate what society is thinking before society says it and when they hear it, they say - that’s it! You needed someone like Johnny Rotten, articulate, deeply funny and scabrous to say it and what they were demanding was a sweeping change and it happened, it came three years later with a woman with a handbag.” By the time Thatcher was in power, Geldof’s time was slipping away and Bono’s crusade was about to begin. Geldof didn’t know the U2 singer that well back then but they are now, as Geldof says, “The Laurel and Hardy of Third World debt.”
Hasn’t Bono lost it of late though? “No he’s not lost it! Are you kidding? I think U2 are much too clever, much too honest as a unit for them ever to be dinosaurs,” he says. “They ask, are we, in the words of the deathless Floyd song, comfortably numb? As people, they haven’t lost it. Bono is, they all are, just as ambitious as they ever were which is odd. They made a specific effort not to be idiots. It’s odd to me that people like George Michael and Elton John are obsessed with the charts when the charts are meaningless.”
Despite the fact that he’s “out of practise” Geldof has just spent twenty minutes solid talking about music. Would he rather have a Grammy or a Nobel Prize? “I have a Grammy.” Have you? I say in total surprise. “Yeah, I’m been nominated for the other thing about six hundred and f***ing eighty thousand times. I got a Grammy for USA for Africa.” But that was with loads of other people. “Yeah, but I’ve got one! Look I’ll be really honest with you - at this point in time, both a Grammy and a Nobel Prize are essentially meaningless. If you had asked me when I was in the Rats I’d have bitten your hand off for a Grammy. What I’ve got now is the impulse to music and the impulse to music is to frame what I’ve been through for the past few years. The way I describe it as a self-addressed postcard from my psyche.”
The new album certainly captures a happier (if that is not too strong a word for it) Geldof than the Geldof of 2002. Back then he had released an album called Sex, Age and Death (which handily initialised the word sad) and he was a shambling wreck of humanity. He’s lost Paula Yates to his one time friend Michael Hutchence and both were to later die tragically. “At that time I could not move from the loss, it was overwhelming,” Geldof says. “The pain of just not understanding any of it, none of it! Just what?!!! I mean what?!! I mean over and over and over and over and over and over and over again in my head. My feelings about that time is that it’s like a memory stick, it’s rectangular, it fits into a slot in my head and it pushes forward every now and then and I recognise it and I can take it out like you would out of your camera and I say I know you, now get back into that place where you’re meant to be.”
His own father, Robert, passed away last August aged 96 and his sister Cleo also passed two months later. There is one song on the album that will always remind him of both of them. It’s called Mary Says and sadly it is not an update on Mary of The Fourth Form, the Rat’s hit from 1978. The Mary in that song was one Mary Preece who went on to be Bertie Ahern’s PA. “The odd thing about that song is that I played it to my dad because I always did play my albums to him and he said, yeah not bad and Cleo said “you sound nice for a change. That’s my favourite one.” And of course there’s a line on that song that says “everybody’s always saying goodbye.” When I sing it or hear it it makes me think of Dad and Cleo.”
Before I go, and at the risk of my tape recorder blowing up, I ask Geldof just how much trouble Ireland is in. “We’re f***ed is the answer,” he says. “Ireland has been ruined by one of the most grotesque betrayals by a political and business class that I’ve ever seen but I believe the media are part of it because they failed to really say anything aside from a few columnists who were saying. One of the few benefits of age is that sometimes you’re proved right. There’s a song where I sing “the purple and the pinstripe” and that’s the businessman and the priest. They were up to it, they were up to it and they were so up to it over the past ten years of grotesque incompetence and unbelievable stupidity and a great deal of venality.”
“Here,” he suddnely says to a passing gentleman, who I guess is in his travelling party. “Can you change my flight tomorrow? Tell the boiler.” The boiler? I ask. Is this how you refer to Jeanne, this beautiful flower of French womanhood? “Yeah.” Geldof says and fixes me with a mischievous grin. So what does she call you? The grin turns to a fill blown laugh and he says, “Geezer.”
How to Write Popular Songs That Will Sell is out now on Mercury Records
