Behind Geldof the humanitarian lies a man who still lives to make music

For someone whose music career has taken a back seat, in many people’s minds at least, Sir Bob Geldof has been a busy man. “I’m doing gigs all the time,” he says, in that instantly recognisable Irish drawl.

“I’ve been to Norway and I was in Sweden with [Bob] Dylan the other week and I was in Australia recently. I play all the time, but this will be the first time I’ve played in the UK for ages because nobody’s interested,” he says, with a knowing mixture of self-deprecation and exasperation.

Does this irritate him I venture, half expecting my question to be met with a volley of invective? “Yes, it’s annoying,” he says calmly. “I would like to get on a bus to do a gig and be able to go home afterwards rather than having to fly off to South America or somewhere.”

It’s been a bone of contention for him that for all his global fame his music has largely slipped off people’s radar, at least in Britain. Ask the average person in the street if they’ve heard of Bob Geldof and they’ll say yes. Ask them to name some of his songs and, apart from a couple of Boomtown Rats hits and a certain Christmas charity record, you’ll probably be greeted with a look akin to a dog that’s just been shown a card trick.

Nevertheless, Geldof’s new album How to Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell has been well received by both fans and critics. “The album has done well, much to my surprise,” he says.

It’s his first since Sex, Age & Death a decade ago, and is his fifth album as a solo artist, featuring 14 new compositions that he recorded with his band both at his home and in various friends’ studios.

After 35 years in the business he still enjoys writing songs, if not the record-making process. “I can’t stand being in the studio, it bores me to death. You must be disciplined and I don’t find it a pleasant process. I don’t have the patience because I’m a pop star and Irish.”

But playing live is a completely different kettle of fish. “From the very first second you walk on stage it’s a unique experience. The most satisfying thing is that you’re up there with this great band because live music has something that is missing from the recorded version. When you’re on stage it just happens, it’s just there and then and you get a heightened reading of a song.”

This enthusiasm hasn’t dimmed and next month he starts a UK tour that includes a concert at Bradford’s St George’s Hall in November, where he will play a mixture of new songs and old hits from his days in The Boomtown Rats.

These days, Geldof the musician is less well known than Geldof the humanitarian and activist – the man who galvanised a group of rock and pop stars to create Live Aid, which has now become part of 20th century folklore. But while he might not eventually be remembered for his music, it was music that enabled him to make a difference.

His earliest musical memories are as clear as crystal. “I remember hearing Elvis singing Don’t Be Cruel on the radio in a drawing room in Cork. I was five years old and it electrified me,” he says. “For my first holy communion I got a pink guitar, like a ukelele, with four plastic strings and later I remember my sisters taking me to see The Beatles, Dylan and the Stones all in the same year, 1964.”

Growing up in Ireland during the 60s, he found himself increasingly politicised. “Music and politics were always what it was about for me, I wasn’t interested in sport. I came of age when music and politics were essentially the same thing.” His discovery of blues music was followed by anti-apartheid campaigning. He then worked as an illegal immigrant on an underground newspaper in Canada before, as he puts it, “the mounties got their man”.

He was sent back to Ireland and was “bored stupid” knocking around in Dublin, when he inadvertently found himself embarking on a career that would shape his life. “I went to a pub with two friends. I didn’t like pubs – they drove me nuts – but they said they were starting a band, so I said I would be the manager.”

A year later in 1976, the band – The Boomtown Rats, with Geldof now singing – became part of the punk scene that hit an unsuspecting world. The band’s first English gig was in a pub in Clitheroe, Lancashire, playing to a dozen people. “We came back three months later and played to 180 and of those who had seen us originally, three had started bands.”

This DIY approach, he says, was the power of the punk movement. “Children left school and were told to go and do their shift but the economy was running into a brick wall and you had Johnny Rotten saying ‘I am the anti-Christ’. It was a massive critical moment, retrospectively, although you don’t realise when you’re living through it.”

The aims of punk’s acolytes were twofold. “The first job was to get rid of John Travolta and the Bay City Rollers and the second was to change the identity of rock and roll back to what it was in the beginning,” he says.

“We were true to what we set out to be, making music that reverted to some kind of truth.”

By the mid-80s the hits were drying up and punk’s dynamism had been gazumped by the kind of pop music it had sought to demolish. But then he saw Michael Buerk’s report on the devastating Ethiopian famine in 1984. It led to the charity song Do They Know It’s Christmas? and then Live Aid the following year, and he’s been a vociferous anti-poverty campaigner ever since, returning to Ethiopia in 2004 with Unicef to revive media interest in the troubled country.

As well as raising £150m over the past 25 years, Live Aid has become synonymous with Geldof, earning him an honorary knighthood. So how does he reflect on the impact it’s had on him? “It’s just part of my life, although it’s far bigger than I ever imagined, and at least 40 per cent of my time now is spent working on Africa. Live Aid was 25 years ago, it’s not unimportant and it might seem a slight to say but what is really important to me, in a musical context, is what I’m doing now and playing in Bradford,” he says.

“I’m not in the least bit interested in myself. I don’t bear self-analysis.” He would much rather talk about his song-writing which, he feels, has been a constant anchor throughout his life.

But trying to get people to listen to your music when a whole generation has grown up seeing you, not as a musician, but as a political figure meeting the world’s leaders in a bid to make poverty history, can be difficult. His writings have ended up on English literature exams and his utterances can be found in school text books. His musings have even, on occasion, been mistaken for biblical quotes.

“You know the words in John Lennon’s song Julia – ‘when I cannot sing my heart, I can only speak my mind?’ I have the opposite problem. I have endless ways to speak my mind, but those ways are useless for singing your heart. The former I can do, the latter I must.”

But even though, at 58, he still gets frustrated at the world and is still trying to help feed it, he says his 50s have been his “happiest” decade. “I never imagined that could be the case, but it’s true. The emotional wars subside. The battle for ideas has been won or lost. The children have grown. Your peers are in positions of authority, so access and action become easier.

“You’re just about young enough to be still interested in the new and not quite old enough to not care. There’s a last chance to invent or contribute. There’s no need for nostalgia because the present is too interesting, but old age always hovers close on the almost near. But that’s sort of interesting too – in a confrontational sort of way.”

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Bob Geldof plays St George’s Hall, Bradford, on November 17. For ticket information call the box office on 01274 432000.