On the day that GQ meets up with Bob Geldof, the man looks as though he's just finished fighting off a gang of ineffectual stylists. The white suit is beyond crumpled, the hair appears to be heading in all directions at once and the voice sounds creaky, as if it has been haranguing everybody within earshot. Which of course it has. "F*** knows why GQ wants to give me this Outstanding Achievement award, the way I look most days. But I'm not proud. I'll take it."
Evidence of 53-year-old Geldof's recent splurge of missionary activity is in his hands. He arrives carrying a sheaf of proofs of his lavishly illustrated, soon-to-be-published book about Live 8.
This is quite a feat in itself. Geldof reckons his first call to Make Poverty History was less than eight weeks ago. Given that the concert only happened the weekend before last and was followed by the G8 Gleneagles summit (which he also attended), the book is a seven-day wonder. No wonder he was up until five o'clock this morning correcting the proofs.
Where does he get the energy? Geldof smiles wanly. His problem is what to do with the stuff. "I felt weird and dislocated after Gleneagles. My mate texted me while I was there: 'Be careful of the void.' I watched the choppers overhead going 'foo-foo-foo' as Putin took off and then I just walked away into a small copse and blubbed. Not sobs, just tears. Because it was over, finally."
This emotional episode in the woods rounded off a year that even by Geldof's standards has been exceptionally busy. "It doesn't seem like a year, it seems like a lifetime," he agrees. "The sum of what interests me has been present in what I've done. Which is, um, let's see... six Boomtown Rats albums re-mastered and re-packaged; two documentaries for Channel 4 on divorce and marriage; a six-part series for the BBC on Africa and the book to go with it; asked the PM to commission a report on Africa, which he did. Worked on that, then conducted seminars in each G8 city and six regions of Africa.
Did Live 8, and er... What else? Oh yes, Ten Alps [the TV production company he founded and in which he retains a ten per cent stake]. That's been doing great. Awash with cash, apparently."
It's no accident that he puts his own music at the top of this list. Geldof never misses an opportunity to remind people that he's a player first and a political activist second. He does this for a reason. "I know that nobody really thinks of me that way any more and they can f*** off, because everything I do spins off of music."Rocking Bob has been on a high ever since his last solo album, Sex, Age And Death, in 2001. Critics hailed it as his best effort for more than 20 years; more to the point, 200,000 people around the world went out and bought it. This led to last year's reissue of the Boomtown Rats catalogue which prompted the remastering of his three solo albums, Deep In The Heart Of Nowhere, The Vegetarians Of Love and The Happy Club. For all of October and November, Geldof will be playing some of these tunes live, touring with his band, as he has done every year for the past 30. "I really wanna gig this time to get the year out of my system," he says firmly.
In fact, he's already sung in public twice in 2005 - both times performing his biggest hit, "I Don't Like Mondays". In January he did it with a full orchestra after receiving the Brits' gold watch award for Outstanding Contribution. "Sadly, I was thrilled. Would it have happened without Live Aid? No. But it was for a life in music, which was fine by me. I get baubles handed to me at an unseemly rate and I like that." (His favourites, he reveals, are the Ivor Novellos he received in 1980, the year after the Boomtown Rats outsold every other rock and pop act in the UK.)
The second outing this year for Geldof's karaoke classic came in an unscheduled spot at Live 8. "Initially I wasn't going to play because that would have meant me taking somebody else's place, which would have been stupid. We'd already had to put the Kaiser Chiefs on in Philadelphia. But the night before, Richard Curtis was saying, 'You have to do it,' and of course I wanted to hear that.
So I said to Emma [Freud, Curtis' partner], 'Can I use your piano?' and we dashed around to her place and me and a couple of guys from the band went through it."
The only opposition to the plan came from Harvey Goldsmith, the event's promoter and timekeeper. "We were lurking by the side of the stage while Travis were on, 'cos I told them to leave their gear there so we could use it, and Harvey noticed us and got really f***ing mad. But I did love doing it. I would have felt awful if I'd been there and hadn't done what I do."
Geldof's surprise appearance contributed to the major drama of the day from the organisers' perspective - Live 8's two-and-a-half-hour overrun. After much haggling with various authorities, the event had been licensed to finish at 9.30pm sharp.
McCartney et al finally left the stage at midnight. "The health and safety people were going apoplectic. I was getting these texts saying, 'End this concert now!' Eventually I got handed a sealed envelope by three officers of the council. I was quite prepared to walk away but luckily Tessa Jowell [Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport] came down and sorted it."
Of course she did. Geldof enjoys the sort of matey relationship with the individuals who govern this country that the rest of us might with fellow drinkers in a pub. "They're not friends," he demurs, then immediately contradicts himself. "People think that Gordon Brown is quite aloof and it's true he doesn't do small talk, but he'll suddenly bark out something really funny." Geldof says he likes Blair "the way I would if he were a bloke in a band. I don't necessarily like the band, I like him."
The feeling is mutual. While Geldof was busy supporting Fathers 4 Justice - the pressure group agitating for the rights of divorced or separated fathers to see their children - he bumped into Blair at a function, the way you do if you're Bob. "He said to me, 'What are you up to now, are you behind this stuff on fathers' rights?' laughing, you know. And I said, 'Yes, that's the Geldof domestic agenda. Africa's the foreign policy.'"
He feels justifiably proud of his achievements on both fronts.
The campaign to change "a stupid and barbaric law which does untold damage to children" is going well. His own painful experience back in the Nineties as an estranged father of three - now four - daughters was handily timed, he thinks. "Sometimes I plug into the Zeitgeist because the Zeitgeist comes and bites me in the arse, basically."
As well as writing an essay for a Cambridge University research group, he has also personally addressed the Mothers' Union. "They're completely onside. So are most women." He thinks that pining fathers, like the guy who dressed up as Batman and suspended himself above Tower Bridge, are brilliant men. As long as they keep it funny and peaceful it's almost like Abbie Hoffman [leader of the anarchist activist group the Yippies] in the Sixties. How desperate does a man have to be that the only way he can signal to his kids, 'I'm still here and I love you!' is to dress himself up in a superhero outfit and climb up a crane?"
Live 8 was also similarly born out of a mounting sense of desperation. Having revisited Ethiopia - the destination for Live Aid's relief programmes - Geldof found the people still starving. "That really did my head in and it made me understand that we must deal with the structures of poverty and not just the symptoms, like AIDS, corruption and hunger." So he badgered Blair into producing a report, "The Commission For Africa", which the leaders of the world's richest nations all read, and then filed under "pending". "I'd spent a fing year persuading the PM to put his neck on the line and there's this report gathering dust! F off! That's why I did Live 8. It was time to bring on the boys and girls with guitars. It was a big ask, but geezers had to be told."
The rest is, of course, history. In one week in July, 1,000 artists in nine cities plus blanket coverage in the world's media equalled a cancelling of debts and doubling of aid to some of the poorest countries in Africa.
Geldof's most treasured memory came up in Edinburgh after he and Bono ("He feels like my little brother") hooked up with Richard Branson. Branson had just arrived at G8 with a planeload of American children seeking to remind their home-loving President that there really was a world beyond the White House lawn. It took Geldof back to the last time the three of them had been together, in a Dublin basement bar 30 years earlier. "There was me on stage with the Rats, Bono in the audience and Richard was there trying to sign us. And here we all were again. And I just thought, 'This is weird...'"
What really gets his goat, though, is the flak he took prior to Live 8 for not showcasing enough African artists. "Such a ludicrous Islington argument," is one of his milder comments during a 20-minute rant. His clinching point is the tiny numbers who tuned in or went online to watch the Johannesburg Live 8 concert, with its heavily indigenous line-up. "Young Africans want to see Eminem and 50 Cent. Not even having Mandela on stage there made a difference." So all those small-minded critics with their "personal little take on world music" can f*** right off.
Water off a duck's back to him. "I don't mind if people don't like me at all," he explains. "My dad said ages ago, 'What you must remember about Robert is that he truly doesn't care what you think about him.'"
Well, maybe. But Geldof is evidently a more complicated and sensitive character than the world - and his dad - would have us believe. He's back on the phone the next day, worrying that GQ might be planning to side with the doubting voices.
Dissing one of its Men Of The Year, in other words. Hmmm. Could it be, GQ humbly suggests, that Geldof might, for understandable reasons, be just a little bit overtired and in need of a good night's sleep? He turns this thought over in his large brain, then laughs amiably and rings off.
Originally published in the October 2005 issue of British GQ.
