Sir Bob Geldof

Sir Bob will be headlining the Rock and Rebuild concert at Star City on May 1st, where 100% of income from ticket sales will be donated to help support communities affected by disasters in Australia, New Zealand and Japan. BBM was the only magazine to speak to Sir Bob when BEN HARLUM chatted to him from Italy.

When did you first realise you could help charities and fundraising efforts with your music?
Really from the get go, don’t forget that we came out of the punk scene where the idea was to change everything, that was one thing we all shared. We started in the summer of 1975 when, really, rock and roll was over. It didn’t reflect people’s lives or what we were going through, which was dire economic crisis with the three-day week in England and stuff like that. There was no future for any kids and what you were getting on television was John Travolta, Olivia Newton John and the Bay City Rollers; forget it!

We started playing music that was fast and aggressive, with the clear intent to use music to talk about actual stuff that was happening in the word. The first words you heard from me on our first radio single was that “the world owes me a living,” while from the Sex Pistols it was “I am the antichrist,” so it was clear. I don’t think music does change things, but it suggests things are possible and demands the desirability and the inevitability of change. That’s what I’ve always understood music to be ever since I heard Townsend, Jagger, Dylan, Lennon…

Surely committing to fundraising gigs is a lot of pressure on your shoulders…
It’s not. It’s satisfying for everybody there to know that every penny spent from the gig will go to help somebody or something, and there’s a sense of satisfaction from their point of view. From the performer’s point of view it’s their job to put on the absolute best show they could, because if they go in with an indifferent attitude it’s going to be a disaster.

Live Aid, for example, worked because it had to be the best show anybody had ever seen. It had to deliver value for money, not just ‘lets get together to stop this thing happening in Africa’ because that wasn’t good enough. Band Aid’s record had to be the best, a really good record. They couldn’t just be sappy, they had to be a really good sappy. I don’t feel pressure on me, and I don’t want the impression to be that I put this gig together because I didn’t. I was asked by a friend whether I would come down for it, and of course I would. Australia has always been welcoming to me, and all of us around the world watched what was happening in Australia, New Zealand and Japan with absolute dismay. The heavy impulse in you as a human being is to say to somebody who has had their house washed away that some expression of sympathy and do something.

Is it difficult to put together a set list with so many solo albums as well as all your work with the Rats?
The fact I have a new album out is great because when I played before Christmas in Sydney, the new album was written but not out. So, quite frankly I hadn’t learned all the new songs. In the set we have some new tracks but still have a lot of the old favourites from back in the beginning. It’s a lot of albums, a lot of tunes, a lot of hits so we’ll play a lot of them. They’re all my songs anyway, so the ones I wrote as a kid still work with the ones I wrote as an old man.

You told the Guardian that it’s hard to get the UK public to accept that you do in fact play music, why is that?
I’ve been around so long that my face is part of the national soap opera, a minor face but a face nonetheless, so they associate me with Live Aid or my family, who are now unfortunately part of the national narrative. When they think of you, they think of those things and it’s hard for them to focus on the music when all that other stuff has happened. It’s hard for them to understand that the other stuff has happened because of music, which is difficult because I view myself as a musician only. I articulate what I think about the world, through music. It bothers me when people overlook the music for the other stuff, but it’s understandable that they do. I think it’s mainly in the UK and maybe America where people have that view of me that’s so very hard to shift.

Music is clearly your passion, but why would you put a new album on the backburner for ten years?
It’s not necessarily that I put it on the backburner; it’s just that there are times to make music and there are times not to make music. You can only make music when the impulse occurs. You and I could sit down when I come to Sydney and write a song in thirty minutes, but it’d be shit. You referred to why people don’t focus on the music, and it’s because I talk all of the time. The reality is, the stuff that’s important to you are stored in the back of your head and sometimes they need to be pushed forward and be acknowledged.

It sounds wanky, but it’s true, that you need to put a frame of references on your experiences to put it in perspective. Nine years ago… my wife left me and I was destroyed by it, I didn’t understand it because the pain and loss was so overwhelming. So your subconscious forces itself forward and that resulted in the record, Sex Age and Death. Now I’ve externalised the pain, I can understand it all and move beyond it, which took me eight years before I started to write the new album. It’s only when I talk to guys like you that I understand why I was in that mood at the time and what the lyrics were about.

John Lennon, in all his faux-naivety, was right because love is all you need.

You seem to have a love / hate relationship with the media, which I find ironic because you started as a music journalist…
I don’t think it’s a love / hate thing, I just accept it for what it is. I don’t know about Australia but in the UK this new album has generally had great reviews, which you don’t expect when you go into the studio. My impression was that they really beat up the Rats but I recently went
back to look at things they said about the band and the reviews for the band were more positive than negative. I suppose you’re so sensitive to it as a kid that the bad ones really, really hurt you, and you lose your self-confidence. I’ve seen it in reverse, people who have been praised to death but it hasn’t done them any good… and I won’t tell you who.

I’ve also seen absolutely destroyed by blanket negative reviews, they just stop them dead. My way of dealing with it was that I’d go on the attack because back in those days, reviews meant more than they did now, especially in places such as NME. So I’d organise fifteen interviews for one bad review, to squash the effect of that review. It wasn’t conscious but now I realise that’s what I was doing. These days? I couldn’t really be arsed. I’m not interested in the charts, which is just as well because I’d be in trouble if I did. I’m not interested in that idea at all, because the charts are meaningless when you see the album by Cake reach number one in America with 44,000 sales only.

Finally, how do you compose popular music that will sell?
By going through eight years of absolute shit and coming out the other end. [laughs]

Rock and Rebuild Concert Sunday, May 1st
Lyric Theatre, Star City

Tickets available from Ticketmaster online and by calling 136 100.

Click here for your chance to win tickets to the event.