Bob Geldof went from being a rock star to being the initiator of the greatest charity concerts of all time. The musician will be 70 years old on October 5th.
He doesn’t exactly look like a shining hero in shimmering armor, more like a poor old knight. Like someone who’s been bad for the years. A tangled, gray mane falls into a furrowed, usually rather sullen face. Somebody like Bob Geldof could well have played a shady character role in “Game of Thrones”. He turns 70 on October 5th.
Prince William: “You are a rotten man”
When he was invited to Buckingham Palace in the 1980s and was talking to the heir to the throne Prince Charles (72), his first wife Princess Diana (1961-1997) came by with her two sons. The eldest of them, Prince William (39), was four or five years old at the time. He marched straight to Bob Geldof and said, according to the book author Sally Bedell Smith (73): “You are a rotten man.” His parents were horrified, Diana forbade William to shut up.
Bob Geldof looked a lot better then, but also pretty wild. Just like a rocker who is on the road as a knight of the British Empire. With the guitar instead of the sword. The British Queen Elizabeth II (95) raised him to the nobility in 1986 and knighted him: Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire – that is his title.
“Saint Bob”
“Sir” Robert Frederick Zenon, his first name, was not allowed and is not allowed to call himself, because that is only allowed to the ennobled citizens of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Geldof, however, is Irish, born in Dún Laoghaire, a small port town in the south of Dublin. His friends call him “Sir Bob” or “Saint Bob” anyway, because this knight is also considered a saint.
That has nothing to do with his musical calling, but with his destiny as a benefactor. Bob Geldof went down in rock history primarily as the initiator of “Live Aid”, which raised well over 100 million dollars against hunger in Africa. That, in turn, would not have been possible without rock music, but one after the other.
It is a film-ready life, with many more or less dramatic climaxes that can drain the substance. It all started with building roads in Dublin. Bob Geldof drove heavy trucks, and his company sent him to Canada, where he was supposed to be doing gold research near the Arctic Circle, as he was revealed in an interview with “Spiegel”. “In Vancouver, however, I dropped out and tried to get a residence permit. I lied to the authorities cheekily that I was a journalist.”
So he became a music journalist and interviewed stars like Lou Reed (1942-2013), George Harrison (1943-2001), Elton John (74) and Eric Clapton (76). Nevertheless, he did not get his residence permit. The authorities sent him back to Dublin, where he wrote for the magazines “Melody Maker” and “New Musical Express”. But because he always saw himself as a musician, he also founded the band Nightlife Thugs, for which he sang and wrote lyrics.
Cult status with the Boomtown Rats
Then he moved to London to get a record deal. The punk wave was in full swing there. Geldof called his band Boomtown Rats, as one calls the workers in American oil fields. He got to know the other stars of the scene, made friends with Sting (70), among others, was active with Eric Clapton and Phil Collins (70) for Amnesty International – and had great success with his music. The Boomtown Rats became a cult band.
In 1979 he landed a world hit with “I Don’t Like Mondays”. The song tells a true horror story: Bob Geldof was on a promotional tour through the USA, he was giving interviews on radio stations when the news came that a girl (16) had robbed a school on a Monday in San Diego and killed her with a gun the father had given for Christmas, shot the headmaster and the caretaker. When asked about the motif, the girl replied: “I can’t stand Mondays.”
Another true horror story animated Geldof to the greatest project of his life. In 1984 he saw horrific images on television of the effects of a famine in Ethiopia. From then on he was only concerned with one question: How can I help? He wrote the hit “Do They Know It’s Christmas” with Midge Ure (67) from the band Ultravox.
Then he had the idea of producing a benefit single with other stars with the song. The proceeds should go to hunger relief. Sting, Phil Collins, Bono (61), Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and many others immediately accepted. It became a # 1 hit.
He made history with “Live Aid”
His masterpiece followed a year later. He founded the “Band Aid Trust” and mobilized all the big stars for his charity project. The two simultaneous “Live Aid” concerts in London and Philadelphia became the greatest music spectacle of all time. Almost two billion people saw the live broadcast on television. The equivalent of around 88 million euros in proceeds for Africa.
He repeated such mega performances in 1989 and 2004. And in 2005 Bob Geldof organized the global “Live 8” concert in London’s Hyde Park and simultaneously in Johannesburg, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Philadelphia, Tokyo, Moscow and Barrie (Canada). His humanitarian commitment introduced him to politicians and statesmen, the Queen ennobled him, he was considered a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, for which Norwegian MP Jan Simonsen (1953-2019) proposed him in 2006.
Geldof also got to know the downside of his popularity. In an interview with the Associated Press he said, “I wasn’t allowed to go back to my job. I’m a pop singer. This is how I make my money. Nobody was interested. Saint Bob was not allowed to do it anymore because it’s so petty and meaningless. I was lost.”
The tragic downside of success
Bob Geldof also complained that Live Aid “totally affected my personal life”: “It probably cost me my marriage.” From 1978 to 1996 he was in a relationship with the TV presenter Paula Yates (1959-2000). Then his wife left him because she found her new love in the Australian rock singer Michael Hutchence (1960-1997). The INXS front man was found hanged in a hotel room in Sydney in 1997.
This suicide apparently triggered an avalanche: Paula Yates became depressed and died in 2000 of a heroin overdose. Her (and Bob Geldof’s) daughter Peaches (1989-2014) probably never got through the death of her mother – she was eleven at the time. In 2014, Peaches Geldof, 25 and a mother of two, was found dead in her apartment. Next to the corpse sat the then one-year-old son Phaedra. The autopsy revealed a heroin overdose.
“That she will be 25 forever, that’s almost unbearable in my head. Because the cliché is true: Nobody should see their children die,” said Bob Geldof in an interview with Irish broadcaster RTE Radio 1. “Peaches is on every second Day with me. ” He felt “partly responsible” for her early death, because he had known about her drug addiction for years.
Meanwhile, Bob Geldof has found some peace. He has been married to the French actress Jeanne Marine (55) for the second time since 2915.