Sir Bob Geldof: ‘I’m f***ing sick of anniversaries!’
From his work with The Boomtown Rats to bringing us Band Aid with its enduring legacy, and the unforgettable Live Aid gigs, the outspoken music-maker has made an outstanding contribution to UK pop culture.
By Nick Reilly
Ask Sir Bob Geldof any question on any given day, and you’ll likely get an answer which boomerangs to one corner of his life where there’s a cracking story at hand, before it whizzes backs to the original point. In this instance, Rolling Stone UK has just asked the venerable rock legend and revered humanitarian how he feels about accepting The Lifetime Achievement Award, supported by Defender, at the ZYN Rolling Stone UK Awards 2025.
The typically Geldof answer which emerges sees him immediately regale us with stories of his days spent as an illegal immigrant in 1970s Canada, where he dug for gold in the Yukon. While there, he spent time in Vancouver after telling local paper The Georgia Straight a little white lie that he was a visiting journalist, allowing him to blag a role as the paper’s music editor. It was the work of our big American sister which informed his work.
“Rolling Stone was looking at everything, politics included, through the lens of rock ’n’ roll, and found people like Hunter Thompson were rock ’n’ roll people, and there was a fizziness to the writing,” he recalls of the paper. “I ended up getting 50 per cent of the paper and we used pretty good writers, but then I got popped out of the country because the Mounties found out I was there illegally. So, yeah, getting this award really wraps together a lot of things that have happened in my life. So, I’m thrilled.”
Although, with a note of caution, he adds: “The problem is with this is that these are the rock ’n’ roll equivalent of gold watches. It’s like to say, ‘There you go, mate. Now will you please fuck off?” For the record, Bob, we’d tell you to do no such thing.
But the fact remains, however, that the man from Dún Laoghaire has lived a life so wide-ranging and eclectic that anything less than answers like these simply wouldn’t suffice. Or, as he puts it himself: “If someone’s trying to put a nice little fucking ribbon around my life, I just don’t go like that.”
Instead, he’s the man who truly harnessed music’s ability for global change with both Band Aid and Live Aid (more on that later), but he’s also the man who led one of Ireland’s most revered rock bands in The Boomtown Rats. That very band just marked their 50th anniversary this year by heading out on an almighty celebration tour.
“The tour has been massive, but then the success of [the Live Aid musical] Just For One Day has truly taken me by surprise,” he explains of a memorable year.
“And then there was the Live Aid documentary on the BBC, which was the most watched documentary of the year, which took me by surprise again.”
Between all this and promo duties for two new releases from the Rats, it meant he was clamouring to get back to his original rock ’n’ roll day job. “There’s the artwork for the albums, the fucking constant interviews for all of this stuff, you know, which drives me fucking mad, and it just seems you’ve just spent a lifetime doing that really more than anything else. When we finally got to the gigs, it was a relief, because that’s so natural to me,” he says.
“And then on a personal level it’s been great too. I’m 10 years married, the missus is 60 and we’ve been together for 30 years. But fucking hell, man, I’m fucking sick of anniversaries!”
It’s an understandable apathy given the sheer busyness of the man, but at the same time a reflection of his rather significant contribution to pop culture. Throughout it all, he says, rock ’n’ roll has been his “guiding principle” ever since he was growing up in 1950s/60s Dublin and found himself on his own for large portions of the time. His mother died when he was just six, while his father – a travelling salesman – was away during the week.
“I’d be home from school and there was no one there, so I’d get the coal in the basement, make a fire, light the fire and make my own dinner,” he recalls. “Obviously, there was no one there to make me do my homework, so I just listened to rock ’n’ roll on the radio and that’s when it became the guiding principle. You could hear these young boys and girls, not that much older than I was, singing about whole other universes and possibilities. Here was the noise of change and this thing itself was the rhetoric of change.”
The unique set-up also meant that Geldof shared a unique kinship with the Rats, who had experienced similar times of isolation.
“Pete [Briquette, bassist] was sent to a boarding school in Dublin because he was from the countryside of Ireland and only one boy in his class could read and his parents were freaking out. And it was only in The Boomtown Rats documentary a few years ago I learnt that Gerry [Cott, guitarist] was from a highly abusive family and two of his brothers committed suicide,” says Geldof.
“It was only at that time I realised that none of us had ever had, in effect, a family. So, there is that corny thing of our band being a gang. It wasn’t a family, but it was this place where we found a satisfactory living arrangement. All of us understood that music was our get-out-of-jail-free card. I could write the tunes, but the noise the band made was the rocket fuel. It was the propellant, and we all wanted out.”
Of the first Rats gig, he recalls: “I was going nuts even on that first gig. I don’t want to get overdramatic, but it just felt deeply comfortable. Not like coming home, but just, ‘This is it. This is maybe what it’s meant to be.’” Being me, I would push that as far as it could possibly go, not expecting to push it 50 years plus two days, or indeed to be able to carve a life out of such thin gruel, but there you go.”
And then, of course, there’s the small matter of the most successful charity single and indeed fundraising gig ever. It was Michael Buerk’s famous report on what he described as the “biblical famine” in Ethiopia that sparked the start of Geldof’s most enduring legacy in the form of Band Aid and latterly Live Aid – believed by many to be one of the greatest gigs of all time.
It marked Geldof out as not only a rock star, but a philanthropist who wasn’t afraid to butt heads with heads of state – as seen when he successfully challenged Margaret Thatcher over the government’s refusal to waive VAT on Band Aid sales.
But now, some 40 years after Live Aid, Geldof’s time with the charity could be up. An email from Geldof to the Live Aid trustees reported in new book Live Aid: The Definitive 40-Year Story, says: “Band Aid’s time has been and, if not gone, could go relatively quietly and easily… I personally would like to bow out. I feel I’m done.”
In a life tempered with tragedy – first the death of his former wife Paula Yates and then his daughter Peaches by a heroin overdose in 2014 – his work with Band Aid has remained a constant driving force. So, is he really done?
“With the structure of it, there’s no need for me to continue being the chair. I promised that every single penny would go to someone who required it, and for 40 years I’ve held to that promise and put in place the structure that allowed for that exactly to happen.”
“So what’s the need for me to do that?” he continues. “And the other thing that came from being chair of Band Aid was that you can generate the political activity that comes on the back of it with the financial firepower we had.
“We took that to the absolute top of the political and economic structures of the world, and we altered those structures, and I don’t know what else you can do. We took a little Christmas song and harnessed the political and economic structures of the world. The boys and girls with guitars and pianos did that.”
He adds: “For 40 years we’ve been doing that sort of stuff, and yesterday we were making sure that Band Aid will be there to help if women who have been subjected to mass gang rapes in front of their husbands in Sudan can actually escape from that and gain the semblance of a future life.”
Geldof continues: “People don’t have to understand the workings of it, but when they say Band Aid or Live Aid, they think a concert or a record, fair enough, but they don’t do every single day waking up to the latest horrors. I’m not gonna stop waking up to that and I’m not gonna stop trying to ameliorate that. It’s just that there’s no need for me to be the chair of Band Aid.”
So, all considered, and quite thankfully, he’s not going gently into that good night just yet. For a life well lived and one that continues to be, Bob Geldof is our incredibly worthy winner of The Lifetime Achievement Award.