Bob Geldof: Q&A
Bob Geldof hadn’t planned on disrupting his personal and professional life when he began to organize a benefit record in the fall of 1984. His group, the Boomtown Rats, had released its sixth album, In the Long Grass, with little success. Despondent about the group’s future, he happened to see a television documentary about the famine that was ravaging Ethiopia. “I felt disgusted, enraged and outraged, but more than all those, I felt deep shame,” he later wrote. “What could I do?”
He thought it would take only a few weeks to enlist England’s biggest pop stars and record a single, Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” Nearly everyone he contacted —– including Bono, Phil Collins, Sting and George Michael — –was willing to participate, and the record spurred a number of similar projects, including USA for Africa’s We Are the World. “Maybe things had been shabby and cynical and selfish for too long,” Geldof wrote in his autobiography, Is That It? “Maybe people in bands wanted to do something, become more involved and active again.” After he visited Africa and realized that the money raised by these records “was nowhere near enough,” he grew increasingly obsessed. With little expertise but limitless determination, he organized Live Aid. “I thought we’d get $10 million,” he says. The final tally was more than $120 million in cash and an equal amount in goods and services.
After Geldof was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and knighted by the British government, he gladly returned to pop music. These days, Geldof seems ambivalent about Live Aid, not only because it changed his life in ways that make him uneasy but also because it changed the relationship between pop music and politics in ways he views as unproductive. His mind works fast, almost as fast as his mouth. Proud one minute, self-deprecating the next, Geldof views Live Aid with a series of contradictory emotions, as only a skeptical optimist could.
If, in the course of a day, you see Live Aid mentioned in a magazine, is there one particular memory that comes immediately to mind?
If I read it in a magazine, I just skip by. But for the specific event, the main memory I have is walking onto the stage at Live Aid with the Rats, and the noise of the crowd. The noise was just huge, huge like nothing I’ve ever heard. It put me in context. Before that, I’d just been working, making sure it was happening. Until then, the emotional content of the day had escaped me completely.
And secondly, I remember the point in “I Don’t Like Mondays” where I stopped the song. That moment was singular, in that my life —– which had seemed this random series of events, which didn’t make any sense to me at all, and where I just tired of internal arguments with myself – all of it absolutely made sense at that moment. For ten seconds I felt calm. That was a very luxurious moment. It lasted, as I said, seconds, and it went.
Why would you skip over the article?
Live Aid is all things to all people. The Tories could use it as “a shining example of individual action and individual responsibility.” The Communists would say, “It’s the proletarian rage against the excesses of the First World.” The acme of my media career was getting the cover of the [conservative] Spectator magazine and the cover of Marxism Today on the same week. And both thought Live Aid was a good thing. So when you read a paper, it depends on what the guy wants to make of it. Who the fuck cares? It worked.
To some extent, was Live Aid one person’s attempt to be able to feel good about himself?
No, it wasn’t. If you look at the Rats’ songs, Live Aid is not out of context. The concert was music made manifest through organization, which was possible for me to do given that I had organized my own life, from the age of seven. As for feeling good about myself, I didn’t. Why would I?
Because you helped save lives.
I may have been instrumental in doing it, but I did not do it. [Pauses] It was just too huge. It was so constant that any time I sat down and reflected, I was afraid. I was afraid that I couldn’t do it. I would meet kings and presidents and prime ministers and have to not make a fool of myself. It’s frightening going on the floor of the United Nations. You’d go on and rely on your native wit and your sense of outrage and anger to carry you through. There was never a time I thought, “Aren’t you doing a great thing.” I’m glad I did it, but this American thing of “Feel good about yourself,” it’s not possible in my case. When Townshend, McCartney and Bowie raised me on their shoulders at the end of Live Aid, I remember vividly being overcome by embarrassment.
What’s the situation in Africa now?
In most of the countries, grim. It’s a mess. It isn’t any better. There are people alive who wouldn’t have been, but we didn’t set out to end world hunger. We couldn’t. We called it “Band Aid.” You don’t put a band-aid on a gaping wound. It still, of course, continues.
Do people say, “Bob, there are still hungry people in Africa. You should do another concert”?
Sure. But it wouldn’t work. It would get some money, but the net effect would be less. It’s the law of diminishing returns.
You were accused of using ‘moral blackmail’ to get people to play Live Aid.
I could give a fuck if they did Live Aid or not. It was a pragmatic thing; if they were out, I had to get somebody else. I didn’t lie or blackmail very much. I had to announce the gig —– it was six weeks before the show, and I had to fucking do it. I realized that talking on the phone to musicians was one thing, but unless it was in the papers, they weren’t going to commit. If you look at the original list that was announced, and at who actually appeared, you’ll see what was going on. Bryan Ferry rang me up and said, “Listen, I haven’t agreed to this.” And I said, “Well, it’s cool, Bryan, if you want to pull out, that’s fine. I just have to go out and announce it.” [Laughs] Of course, really, he couldn’t.
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