Interview: Sir Bob Geldof

BOB Geldof is reeling off the lyrics to one of the Boomtown Rats’ most famous songs, a reflection on the corrupt relationship between State, Church and business in his Irish homeland at the turn of the 1980s.

“And I wonder do you wonder, while you’re sleeping with your whore/Sharing beds with history is like a-licking running sores/Forty shades of green, yeah, sixty shades of red/Heroes going cheap these days, price a bullet in the head,” he says, reciting the opening verse of Banana Republic, the song he wrote in 1980 for the Boomtown Rats.

It caused a furore in the Republic and still reverberates today as the Rats, one of new wave’s most successful bands, reform for a UK tour.

“I’m a contrarian to a high degree,” he admits freely today. “I say things because I can.”

Although not a punk band, the Rats very much shared its attitude, and were prepared to be as outspoken as the Sex Pistols or The Clash. With Banana Republic, Geldof’s loathing of the Dublin establishment, and its ties with Republican paramilitaries in the North, “came to a head”.

“There was a terrible clandestine silence, it was a deeply brutalised society we grew up in,” he explains. “The elite – the Church, the State, business groups – were utterly corrupt.

“You had a prime minister who was selling off zoned land to developers and giving money to buy guns in the North. The Church shut up about it because they were sympathetic and they were abusing their parishioners. Businessmen were making all ends. We decided we would say something about it.”

Not everyone got the message, he remembers: “The Brits thought it was a nice pop song, grateful Germans thought it was about them.”

But in Ireland “they went ballistic”. “It got banned and there were speeches in parliament. The Bishop of Galway – the hypocrite who had a lovechild in New York – railed against it.”

Banana Republic features on a new greatest hits compilation which will accompany the Boomtown Rats’ first tour since 1986.

In the intervening years Geldof has been heavily involved in humanitarian work in Africa – which he began with fundraising via Band Aid and the massive Live Aid concert in 1985. He also set up the successful television production companies Planet 24 and Ten Alps.

Of the decision to regroup “for a brief period” he says: “I had finished a solo album last year and was in a musical lacuna. At the age I am you think ‘I’m curious about not only about the musical part but the emotional part. Do we still get along?’

“We got together. After some sheepish smiles at the ,beginning the band cranked up and I was taken aback by the power of them. I said I wouldn’t do it if it was just nostalgic but the noise was thrilling. When I opened my gob and started singing the songs again there was not a trace of nostalgia.”

Geldof dismisses the idea that the Boomtown Rats fragmented after Live Aid. “It was 10 years – we came to an end,” he says, pointing out that by that stage they’d outlasted virtually all of their contemporaries. “The Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, Richard Hell, the Pistols, The Clash, The Jam, The Stranglers, Elvis Costello, Ian Dury –these groups that set about writing songs with the intention to change pop music. How many lasted? Not many.”

By 1986, he had charitable commitments. “I was caught up in the African stuff; I’d promised people I would see it through to the end. I still do it today.”

For years Geldof didn’t make music. When the urge finally returned to write songs, following the tragic death of ex-wife Paula Yates, the material was very different. “What you are doing when you are a young man is creating your own universe you can be comfortable in,” he says. “That’s largely what you are singing about and doing. After 10 years that world is a bit redundant.

“As you get older you are living in that world, the need seems to be to write about the internal world, it becomes more interior, the conversation is more internal. The solo thing is much more about that.”

O2 Academy Leeds, October 31. 0844 477 2000 www.o2academyleeds.co.uk.

Riding the wave of punk to go their own way

When the Rats arrived in England from Dublin in 1976, punk was in its infancy and, says Geldof, they “felt part of it – our attitude was the same; our means of expressing it was different”. “If you imagine it like it’s a line – on one end is punk, at the other is new wave. There you had people using songwriting like Elvis Costello or Ian Dury, at the other end you had the nihilism of the Pistols or the political nihilism of The Clash. In the middle was The Stranglers, using more musical technique. The Rats were in the middle too. We’d use saxes and orchestras if that’s what the song required.”