Bob Geldof: The Man Who Wouldn’t Take No For An Answer
Bob Geldof looks like hell. The bottom half of his long, rubbery face is practically black with five o’clock shadow. His greasy brown hair is shoved up in an unruly arc. He wears a rumpled denim jacket and floppy lime-green sneakers without any laces. And his fly is down. It’s hard to tell whether Geldof has just rolled out of bed or hasn’t slept in a week, but smart money would probably he on the latter.
Geldof is the last to arrive at the CBS Records office in London’s Soho Square for tonight’s Band Aid Trust meeting. He’s come straight from a grueling afternoon rehearsal with his band, the Boomtown Rats. Before that, he was frantically working the phones over at Phonogram, haranguing musicians, television producers and stuffy government officials about various details of the imminent Live Aid concerts. Earlier in the week, he defied jet lag with a whirlwind two-day trip to Philadelphia to oversee progress of the U.S. half of the show.
Now Geldof calls the Band Aid meeting to order. “There are problems,” he growls as he launches into a vivid, hour-long account of his powwow in Philadelphia with American promoter Bill Graham and his Live Aid staff. The budget for the show at John F. Kennedy Stadium is six times that of the London production at Wembley Stadium. Organization is slow. One prominent British band complained to Geldof that no one in Philadelphia was returning its calls regarding stage requirements. Describing the technicians and businessmen he met in Philadelphia, Geldof spares no praise for those people working eagerly to make his impossible dream–a global rock concert and telethon to aid starving Africans–come true. Anyone who gets in his way is “a fucking wanker.”
Eventually, Mick Worwood, a Band Aid volunteer in charge of corporate sponsorship for the concert, gets a word in edgewise. He says an executive at a major tobacco company is hesitant about placing an ad in the Live Aid concert program, claiming Geldof once told the press that “advertising cigarettes is like advertising death.” Geldof, who doesn’t smoke, looks unrepentant. “Sounds like me,” he says with a shrug.
The meeting continues for another two hours, dominated by Geldof. He rails against the trucking companies in Port Sudan that are holding up distribution of Band Aid foodstuffs. He curses out British ticket agencies scalping Live Aid tickets at nearly double the price. He says he wants to initiate legal action against companies holding money made from the sale of Band Aid merchandise. It’s apparent from this meeting that a good idea about getting a few pop-star friends together to cut a record to help the battle against starvation in Africa has, for Bob Geldof, turned into a long-drawn-out siege. While his own band struggles for survival, Geldof is committing all his energy to outwitting and outmaneuvering the middlemen and corporate robots clogging up the Band Aid pipeline that eventually ends with the hungry skeletons in Ethiopian refugee camps.
Finally, Geldof loses his temper completely. The last straw is a shortsighted Yank who was needlessly complicating preparations for the prime-time ABC-TV broadcast of Live Aid in the States. “Think of it!” he shrieks. “A family in deepest Siberia will be watching the same show as a family in Boise, Idaho, experiencing the same emotions, giving to the same cause.” He runs a hand through that greasy hair. “Can’t these people see the romance in this?”