#bob-geldof

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Bob Geldof Calls U.S. Return With Boomtown Rats 'Cathartic'

Bob Geldof doesn’t like Mondays. At least he doesn’t like this particular Monday, when this journalist is asking him about Band Aid, the supergroup of British pop stars he convened 30 years ago this November to record “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” the charity single that helped to feed Africans starving in the wake of a devastating famine in Ethiopia.

"Sixty-thousand documentaries — you can look at them. You don’t need me talking about it!" Geldof says testily, when asked for his proudest accomplishments on behalf of the still-active Band Aid Trust.

To be fair, Geldof has been asked about this countless times before. Made an honorary knight by Queen Elizabeth II for his African activism, humanitarianism and philanthropy are still a part of his everyday life. Just last week, Geldof gave the annual Green Lecture at Westminster College in Missouri; previous speakers include presidents Harry S. Truman, Gerald Ford, and George H. W. Bush.

On top of that, he is a grieving father. Geldof lost his 25-year-old daughter, Peaches, this past spring to a heroin overdose, the same circumstances under which her mother, Paula Yates — Geldof’s former wife — died in 2000.

Now, it seems, Geldof is seeking some relief in the form of rock ‘n’ roll. This week he returns to the U.S. for a pair of shows as the singer of the Boomtown Rats, the feisty pop-punk band that he helped to form as a youth growing up in Dublin. It’ll be the band’s first Stateside gigs here in nearly three decades, following a summer reunion tour in the U.K.

"To go back to New York and Boston and to forget all that other stuff is amazingly cathartic — I mean, really cathartic,” says Geldof. “I’m so refreshed, even though I’m exhausted, after a gig. My mind is clear, my body’s loose. I sleep the sleep of the just, which is unusual.

"And it’s not just a blessed relief,” he continues. “I don’t have to think when I do music. It’s instinctive and intuitive. It’s so exhilarating to be on a stage.”

The Boomtown Rats were the first U.K. punk group to score a No. 1 single on the British charts. After 1978’s “Rat Trap” knocked “Summer Nights” out of the top spot, Geldof and the gang celebrated by ripping up photos of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John on the U.K. countdown show Top of the Pops.

In the U.S., the Rats are best known for the somber single “I Don’t Like Mondays.” Released in 1979, it references that year’s Cleveland Elementary School shooting in which then-16-year-old Brenda Spencer wanted to “shoot the whole day down” — and did. The school’s principal and a custodian were killed, and eight children and a police officer were injured.

The Rats broke up in 1986, shortly after Geldof found international fame, not as a rock star, but as the organizer of Band Aid and Live Aid, the 1985 mega-concert/telethon starring practically every major music act and staged simultaneously in stadiums in London and Philadelphia. (The Rats played the U.K. show, at Wembley Stadium.)

Read on, as Geldof discusses why he decided to “re-Rat,” beginning with a triumphant comeback performance at last year’s Isle of Wight festival; how he feels about singing songs he wrote almost 40 years ago; and the reason he thinks “social media killed rock ‘n’ roll”:

YAHOO! MUSIC: Why did it take some 27 years for the Rats to reform? Were there previous opportunities to and you just weren’t ready?

BOB GELDOF: I don’t know if there was opportunities before. It had never come up, and I wouldn’t have wanted to. I made it clear I wasn’t interested in nostalgia in any way. So if it sounded dated, old-hat, or like we were living old times for the guys' sake, I wasn’t going to do it.

You know, I made six solo records, which have done as well as the Rats did — which is not boasting, it’s just they have. I’ve got that band as well, so I was more interested in what I was doing in a contemporary sense, musically. If it hadn’t been the Isle of Wight, [reuniting with the Boomtown Rats] probably wouldn’t have entered my head, and the other guys probably wouldn’t have even bothered asking. But in my personal mythology, the Isle of Wight [Festival] looms large. I was there when Hendrix and the Doors and the Who and Leonard Cohen played. To play on that stage, the vanity of that is probably the great spur. And the cash deal was also good. And then I was just thinking about it, and I was curious as to whether the band had been as good as I always said it was. So curiosity, vanity, and cash: They’re the three reasons I agreed to regroup.

But it wasn’t a one-time thing. How did you go from that to a full-fledged tour?

The Isle of Wight, we nailed it. It was triumphant. I really hadn’t understood the power of this random group of kids who lived near each other and started playing out of the shed in the back garden, then you’re making records and it all kicks off — you never have the distance to understand. You have no perspective. And, suddenly, at the Isle of Wight, you’re in front of tens of thousands of people, and you haven’t heard that music live [in] nearly three decades, and it takes you by surprise. I mean, you’re almost a member of the audience at that point. And the racket that you make together, it is powerful, it is different, and it’s really exciting. So I got excited again.

Why are you only doing two shows in the U.S.?

Because I don’t think anybody’s interested in us in America. And I think that was ever the case. I don’t say that out of self-pity; it's just realistic. I wish that they’d got me and my generation. But you must remember, it was before MTV. So the Pistols, the Clash, and Elvis [Costello], Ian Dury, the Jam, and the rest of us, we never got away in America. People know us, but there was no way to show America this different look, this different attitude, this different way of doing things. People think the Clash were a huge band in America; truth is, they weren’t.

You wrote a lot of the Rats lyrics when you were a young man. You’re weeks away from your 63rd birthday. What is it like to sing them today?

The Boomtown Rats — this was music with clear intent to change. I wrote some of [the songs] when I was working in an abattoir, and I wrote some of them when I was on a dole queue. So, here we were [at the Isle of Wight Festival], singing those songs… and I couldn’t see any difference between now and then.

When I sang those words, I’d say animus was present in me, and the words rang true. And I could sing them with the exact same conviction two weeks before some other clown in America killed people in another school, and so I could sing “I Don’t Like Mondays” with utter conviction.

 We’d just read about the NSA spying on, never mind Americans, but Europeans, logging all their emails and their phone calls, and I wrote a song called “Someone’s Looking at You" in 1980, which is sort of [1984-esque government] paranoia. All of them seemed to have a total, contemporary relevance.

Those songs were hits on the pop charts. Looking at the current crop of musicians, they aren’t writing about social ills and school shootings, which are tragically far more frequent occurrences today than when you wrote “I Don’t Like Mondays.”

I would argue hip-hop in the early days was precisely the same — N.W.A. and Public Enemy. But your point is well taken. In fact, that’s what I was speaking of in Missouri. The subject was “You Say You Want a Revolution: Art and Social Change,” from the Beatles song. I think people are writing songs about it, but it doesn’t matter because rock ‘n’ roll has lost its relevance. Rock ‘n’ roll from my generation and several before it and a few afterwards was the social media of the time. Now it’s been replaced by other stuff, not the least being social media, which killed rock ‘n’ roll. The ubiquity of social media meant that even major bands had to give away their albums free, because they’re not gonna sell any. Nobody actually believes in buying music — that’s because the dissemination of the medium has meant the dilution of the message. The medium literally is the message. It doesn’t matter about the human genius contained in the machine; it’s the human ingenuity of the machine that people are bothered about. So they flash their iPhone 6, 7 ,8, 9,10’s, but what’s inside it is free, and not really worth spending much attention to.

Lori Majewski is the co-author of Mad World: An Oral History of the New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s.

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Translate Request has too much data Parameter name: request Translate Request has too much data Parameter name: request It’s been a while since I have tried to rhyme in my title… and I’m still pretty bad at it, but no matter, it may not rhyme but it ain’t no lie.