Geldof Shows New Life in New York
On September 21st, Bob Geldof played one of this year’s greatest
concerts to a theater full of empty seats. The former singer in the
Boomtown Rats and knighted architect of Live Aid was back in New
York for the first time in more than a decade. New York, sadly, was
elsewhere. Only 350 people showed up at Town Hall, not even a
quarter of capacity.
But the turnout — and loud affection of those who came —
brought out the fighting soul in Geldof. One of the brassiest
frontmen of the New Wave era, he powered his way through two hours
of top song, straight talk and sharp laughs like a man who knew his
true worth. “My personal life has been shite for the last six
years,” Geldof confessed early in the night, a restrained reference
to the black circus of his late-Nineties divorces from pop-TV
hostess Paula Yates, the child-custody war that followed and the
tragic suicides of Yates’ boyfriend, Michael Hutchence of INXS, and
then Yates herself. Yet the Geldof on stage at Town Hall was more
like the one I first saw with the Rats at the Apollo theater in
Glasgow, Scotland, in December, 1978: a dancing mantis with a voice
full of Irish spit and Jagger vinegar, fronting his five-man band
(including fellow ex-Rat, bassist Pete Briquette) with such brio
and exuberant strum that he broke half a dozen guitar strings
during the night. With Bob Loveday’s violin and Alan Dunn’s
accordion putting the jig’n’reel in Geldof’s punk-enriched pop, the
effect was a hard-driving Pogues — except the singer wasn’t
drunk.
It was a shock to hear how much quality writing Geldof has done
since the end of the Rats, under the long shadows of Live Aid and
tabloid hell. “Room 19 (Sha La La Lee),” from his 1992 solo album,
The Happy Club, was a bolt of Cajun-mod cheer — “I’m a
Believer” via the Small Faces and squeezebox. “Soft Soil,” also
from that album, was a piercing ballad about common people making
uncommon sacrifices. Geldof also put bright living skin on the
skeletons rattling around in his dark new album, Sex Age and
Death (Koch): cranking up the acidic kissoffs in “One for Me”
with a free man’s glee; turning the harsh accusations in “Inside
Your Head” into a thumping composite of the Rolling Stones’ “Let It
Bleed” and John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band.
Even in the Rats’ golden age, Geldof, as a songwriter, was
written off as more mouth than metaphor. But his heated reading of
the 1979 teenage-sniper story “I Don’t Like Mondays” — just voice
and keyboards — was a stunning reminder of Geldof’s original gifts
for detailed storytelling, magnetic melody and the acute
self-examination that was often mistaken, even by his champions, as
high-brow nihilism. And when Geldof threw himself into the
full-band blasts of “Rat Trap,” “Mary of the 4th Form” and “Diamond
Smiles,” you could hear again why the Rats were, in their
half-decade, Ireland’s E Street Stones — and why Geldof should
play those songs more often.
It may happen. Backstage, after the show, I watched Chrissie
Hynde of the Pretenders rave to Geldof about the show and give him
the full-court press, encouraging him to take his act across
America on a double bill with her band. We should be so lucky.