Today, Bob Geldof is grinning his way through a day of media – or, in his words, “promo bollocks” – from a Melbourne hotel room. He mock-grumbles he’s already exhausted by it. But he’s talking up a storm from the moment his face, framed by a wild thatch of white hair and beard, and a definite look of mischief in his eyes, appears on Zoom. He’s soon delivering sweary anecdotes, well, for Africa.
It’s all in aid of a one-man Australian and New Zealand tour in March and April, one in which he’ll tell stories, sing a few songs and take questions from the audience. Today’s interview conveyor belt is good practice for deciding what goes in the show, he says, one he’s titled Life WTF? and one he’s happy to admit he hasn’t quite figured out yet.
“I’m looking forward to being by myself on a stage. That’s the weird thing. It’s challenging, because I don’t know what it is, but I know there’s a show there. I can feel that. I’ll spend the next two months working on finding out what that is, and what’s actually interesting. I think it’ll be good. I just don’t think it’ll be a celeb showing up and doing rip-roaring tales. I’m not sure what the fuck it’s going to be, but it’s going to be mega.”
He says seeing the solo storytelling shows in recent years by Bruce Springsteen and U2′s Bono – the respective foghorns on We Are the World and Do They Know It’s Christmas? – gave him some ideas.
It’s not that Geldof hasn’t been on stage lately. He has been back fronting his reunited original band, The Boomtown Rats, for the past decade, playing half a dozen or so gigs a year and recording 2020′s Citizens of Boomtown, the group’s first album since 1984.
The Dublin-born band celebrate a 50th birthday next year with the inevitable raft of reissues. Originally, the band reunion came about because two members “weren’t doing great in life” – founding guitarist Garry Roberts died in 2022. Geldof felt an obligation of friendship. Nostalgia-allergic as he was, he found some old Rats songs made new sense. And not just the biggest hit, I Don’t Like Mondays, which was inspired by a 1979 American school shooting.
“Suddenly, things like Someone’s Looking at You had a different relevance. Suddenly, we were in a different world of you being the product and CCTV and Google and Zuckerberg sucking up your digital exhaust and your personal data and looking at you all the time … the words really didn’t need alteration at all. Rat Trap seemed as relevant to me now as ever. Especially just straight after the 2008 crash where we’re still reverberating from Trump being an avatar of that as well.”
But Geldof’s solo turn here may reflect his wider entertainment appeal in 2025: that many would rather hear him talk in that insistent, fullstop-free, Irish way of his than sing.
After all, he is the guy who did Live Aid. The 1985 event and the charity singles that preceded it were defining moments of the 1980s and in pop music. Its 40th anniversary approaches.
Before Live Aid, Geldof was the Jagger-esque frontman of one of the uncoolest, most critically unloved bands of the New Wave era, which, by 1984, had passed their best-before date.
But after Live Aid, Geldof was a generational hero, a saint, and a “sir”. He was also a band-free singer-songwriter whose 1986 autobiography Is That It? became a bestseller, while his subsequent folky solo records haven’t much.
Yes, he remembers his first time in New Zealand as a solo act, when he was booked to play the failed 1988 Neon Picnic rock festival. He was the only international artist who actually got on the plane and turned up. He ended up helping organise a make-good concert with then-mayor of Waitematā City Tim Shadbolt, who he remembers as “a sort of nutter” and “a lovely guy”.
Since those days, the Geldof cult of personality has endured. Sadly, there have been tragedies and tabloid attention to give it a boost along the way. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there were the deaths of his former wife Paula Yates and the man she’d left him for, Michael Hutchence. Geldof and Yates’s second daughter, Peaches, like her mother, died of a heroin overdose in 2014.
You may wonder how any of that might go into a show called Life WTF? But the moment to raise that never arrives in our allocated time, and interviewers have been told to refrain from asking “anything too personal on his family past”.
Live Aid and its grander if less iconic 2005 20th-anniversary sequel, Live 8, have, in a way, carried on doing what they were designed to do. The concerts still generate royalties, as do seasonal revivals of Do They Know It’s Christmas? “Extraordinarily, we still make money because more people have seen the concerts on YouTube than ever saw them in the first place.”
The money goes to the Band Aid Charitable Trust, of which Geldof is a trustee, and it continues to distribute more than £2 million a year to aid projects in Africa. These days, his involvement amounts to a dozen emails a day, he says. “I’m in daily contact with loads of people on the ground. On one hand, it’s extremely boring to do. It’s like admin, but if a request comes in and it’s anecdotal, you realise the horror you’re actually dealing with. Being able to ameliorate the effects of that horror, there is a satisfaction.”
His fellow unpaid trustees include Christmas co-writer and producer Midge Ure, Live Aid promoter Harvey Goldsmith, former head of the BBC Lord Michael Grade, and prominent British music lawyer John Kennedy, whose new autobiography is entitled Just for One Hour, the name inspired by Geldof insisting that that’s all the time some pro bono legal advice would take in the early days.
But the Band Aid/Live Aid nostalgia-fest has already started ahead of its ruby jubilee. There’s a jukebox musical Just for One Day, which opened in London’s West End at the start of this year and is being franchised around the world. The show has an actor playing Geldof and a chorus line belting out a playlist of songs from the 1985 concerts in Wembley and Philadelphia, including David Bowie’s Heroes, which gives the production its title. British reviews have been mixed, some seeing it as a further polishing of “Saint” Bob’s halo. The man himself likes it very much.
“It’s really great. It’s nothing to do with us. We get 10%, so it’s in our interest to make it work. But I’ve never, ever been to a show where at half time the audience gives a standing ovation. I took Pete Townshend one night and [Queen drummer] Roger Taylor another, and they were fucking blown away by it.”
There’s also been the 2024 Netflix documentary The Greatest Night in Pop, about the all-star recording of We Are the World, the American response to Christmas, which features Geldof as a wide-eyed visitor to the early 1985 overnight Los Angeles recording session helmed by producer Quincy Jones, who died earlier this month.
“He just couldn’t bear to hang around with Trump again,” quips Geldof about Jones’s death. “As we all know, he was absolutely a copper-bottomed, gold-plated musical genius, and to have been a friend of his is mad. I’d get a call, and it would be Q, and I’m thrilled by that. Someone of his kindness and generosity and huge, capacious intelligence. The reason that worked is because Quincy banged his conductor’s baton and said, ‘You are coming here,’ and there’s not a musician in the world who says no.”
Geldof hasn’t seen the documentary, as he doesn’t like watching anything he’s in. He figures in its funniest moment. When Stevie Wonder wants to add to the Lionel Richie-Michael Jackson-penned song a section in Swahili, he starts working up his own vocal arrangement of way-oh way-oh gibberish while others humour his efforts to stamp his mark on the track.
“I just thought, ‘It’s three in the morning, this is not going to get done.’ I’d had enough. So I just said, ‘Stevie, they don’t speak Swahili in Ethiopia.”
The rest of the night, Geldof says he spent awestruck by the ensemble, which included Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Smokey Robinson, Tina Turner, Paul Simon, Willie Nelson, Harry Belafonte and more – “the greatest collection of our culture ever assembled”. He took snaps on his Instamatic and gathered autographs on the song’s music charts. He started with Springsteen.
“‘I want your autograph.’ He said, ‘Seriously?’ I said, ‘Yes. Seriously, shut up.’ So, he signed it. Then I went over to Paul Simon. He signed it. I looked behind me and Springsteen is following, going around getting everyone’s autograph. Everyone turned out to be a fan. The only one I don’t remember going around was Bob Dylan. But he didn’t really understand what he was doing there.”
Geldof may not like watching himself on television but he’s made a fair bit of it. During the 1990s, he turned his back on music and got himself a day job as a television tycoon with his own UK production company, Planet 24. Before it was sold in 1999 for £15 million, it made mainly light entertainment and magazine shows such as The Word and The Big Breakfast, which featured Yates.
“It turned out that I could do the business thing. It’s not difficult if you’re in rock’n’roll and pop. You just totally understand radio and television, or whatever medium comes along, really.”
Not part of the sale was a new production company for the Survivor format, which Geldof and producing partner Charlie Parsons initially pitched to the BBC. It was first made for Swedish television in 1997 as Expedition Robinson, before the US version launched in 2000, leading to more than 50 international iterations, all paying licence fees to its originators.
“You fall into these things, and they balloon out into all sorts of areas. Inventing the fucking show Survivor was a very big balloon. Thank you very much.”
No, he’s never watched any of it, and he sold his interest in the franchise in 2017. He’s not doing the solo tour because he needs the money.
“You have to keep constantly engaged, right? Find things that engage you, and this one-man thing, that engages me.”
Plus, recent events, he thinks, make remembering his 1985 project a little more worthwhile.
“All the stuff around the Live Aid anniversary has a certain poignancy now that Trump and that foulness has been elected. It stands as a rebuke to that idea of the world, which I like very much. It has a different and fresher relevance. It’s not simply just a remembrance. It’s an advertisement for the possibility.”
Bob Geldof, Kiri Te Kawana Theatre, Aotea Centre, Auckland, March 28; Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, March 29.
