The Parkinson show Interview ITV1 - Saturday 12th February 2005

On this week's show, Michael kicks off the series with two big hitters. Bob Geldof discusses his recent work in Africa, the sudden loss of his mother during his childhood and his early rock and roll years.

Michael: On the show tonight the Hollywood superstar and action hero who makes a habit of saving the world, he is Bruce Willis. But first, since doing this job I've met many extraordinary people but none more exceptional and singular than my next guest. He's the punk-rocker who has talked to popes and presidents, prime ministers and plutocrats. This week he has won an award at the Brits for his outstanding contribution to music. Please welcome, Bob Geldof.

Michael: That was a lightning fast walk-on! You've got the Olympic record for that, about three seconds flat! We've got all the music for you so you can walk down and milked it, bowed and...

Bob: (To the band) Thank you very much! What do you do at the time? You always feel a complete doofus standing there! (Laughter)

Michael: Now what about this award eh, outstanding contribution to music? Given the list of awards you've got already, where does this rank?

Bob: Very high, pathetically.

Michael: Why pathetically?

Bob: Because for me the only thing that I can do that I like doing, that I think I do fairly well is music. The rest is stuff I can do so I do it, so getting this one, you can really wrap up all the other bits of metal and paper, don't throw them out, put them in a drawer, but I'll keep this one.

Michael: I suppose it's a timely reminder, this is what you must be thinking, that to some people you are a musician. That's what you are.

Bob: Well I think I am. I don't think they're very interested in that, which I also think is fair enough.

Michael: Why do you think they're not interested in that?

Michael: But I suppose also too in your case, I mean, whatever you have achieved in music has been spectacularly overwhelmed by what you have achieved in other areas.

Bob: In the social arena yeah. I mean there's no comparison with me and the Beatles but that's what happened to them in that their music at the beginning was absolutely superb but what made them extremely famous was their accents and their haircuts and their suits. They went outside the narrow confines of the day. And when I was in The Rats I was on your show and stuff and then the Band Aid and Live Aid stuff happened and then the entire country joined in with that. And then you become known for that and as I say it's fair enough.

Michael: Is that you got known as Saint Bob, is that a burden to you, Saint Bob?

Bob: It got bad when it first started because I didn't know what to do with it at all. I'd always been called several things Michael, you know? (Laughter) Generally this thing would happen, you'd be walking along a street and older ladies would come along touch the hem of my garment (touches Michael's sleeve) and they'd start crying (gestures for them to go away) (laughter) And that was very disconcerting and they'd put upon you things that you didn't really represent or things that you couldn't possibly live up to and that's, you know confining and a bit scary. And I wrote a book and that did well and I hoped to deflate the whole cult of personality that had built up but it really didn't. But over the years they've got used to me.

Michael: Let's go back to those formative years then. It seems to me that reading about you that your childhood was defined by the sudden death of your mother when you were seven. It seems to me that it was a crucial point in your life that changed you.

Bob: I think that it would be in anyone's life. I mean, my Mum woke up one night and my Dad who's called Bob as well and she said, 'Bob I've got a headache' and dead. And my dad was forty one, she was forty, he was destroyed. And that for my two sisters and for my dad who was ninety in November was I suppose for any family the moment. And there is a perpetual sense of, loss isn't the word and emptiness isn't the word but there's a void somewhere and I assume that it must be at that point that it happened. And it's not filled with God, it's not a God-shaped hole or a Mum-shaped hole, it's not. Love puts it at ease and I'm sort of melancholic and gloomy by disposition anyway, fairly famously, so that's where you root it.

Michael: And how did it manifest itself when you were a child? Did it make you an awkward child?

Bob: I was OK in school up until about the age of ten and then for some reason I just opted out and I also developed asthma at about eleven. And I think it possibly, apparently classically, you know Dorothy Parker wrote interestingly about this, when you actually need someone around like your Mum and Dad and they're not there you develop this sense of breathlessness and that was the asthma which I grew out of at the age of about nineteen or twenty.

Michael: But you were a lonely child weren't you? You must have been because your Dad was away a lot of the time on the road selling stuff.

Bob: Dad sold towels and things like that so he'd go away on Monday and come back Friday. And my sisters were older and my elder sister got very ill and she was given six months or something to live and so my father was really going mad and we really had no money. It was hard for him, he's a great man and anyway that was resolved in a bizarre manner and my middle sister was the school swot so she stayed in to study and so largely, yeah, you bring yourself up. So the upside is you learn to be organised, you need to organise your life. And you learn to be independent but it's not independent, you become very dogmatic more than independent. There was no one there to temper my opinion to say, no you're wrong.

Michael: Yeah, I was going to wonder where that came from that awkward streak, that cussedness.

Bob: That would be the Irish probably! (Laughter)

Michael: It's not just the Irish, it's more than that. Irish is gift of the gab but this is something more you're got. What I like about you is that you're fearless and that you have an opinion and you're not frightened to put it forward, politically correct or not. And that's a great gift in my view, I mean not many of us are that brave and I just wondered where that came from?

Bob: Well it could be that but I'm not brave. I mean I'm often afraid when I go into these big meetings, that I'll make a big fool of myself. And often I do and I go away and I think (tuts) but somebody says something that is wrong or you can't agree with then you must say it and from that point you get discussion and things can be worked out. And it was ever thus, I mean I wasn't particularly interested in sports but I always liked politics and music and I hit the right year when I was eleven in 1963 or 4.

Bob: Because music came to the fore in the British Isles, it became the main cultural arbiter. And it was to do with politics largely.

Michael: Did you ever in that period of school and after the loss of your Mum, I also read something extraordinary somewhere that after the loss of your Mum you actually used to walk round on your hands and knees.

Bob: I forgot about that, my sister reminded me.

Michael: What was that about?

Bob: For some reason I took to walking around like this. ('Walks' with hands on floor behind him). (Laughter)

Michael: You went everywhere like that?

Bob: Yeah, I'd get on a bus and go upstairs like it. (Laughter) And after a while, my father used to just put up with it. We'd be walking along the street and I'd be walking along like that. (Laughter) I mean he is an extraordinary man. And that went on for about a year. But I did forget about that until my sister reminded me. But I don't know why, and I don't know why I did it. Yes of course now I know. Anything to get attention of course.

Michael: That was is was it?

Bob: I suppose so, why else would you possibly do it? (Laughter) Unless you want to come back as a crab in a later life. (Laughter)

Michael: We'll talk in just a moment. Back soon for more of a chat and a song from Bob Geldof. (Commercial Break)

Michael: Welcome back. Bob, I've known you for a while now and I think it's fair to say, you're not a slave to fashion are you? (Laughter)

Bob: I brought three suits here with me this evening and a few shirts.

Michael: You do look smart.

Bob: The thing is I do like clothes but I look crap. (Laughter) And when we were talking earlier about when you're bringing yourself up. I think this is it, all theory but, when you're a little boy and you're going off to school by yourself and doing your breakfast and all that, really you just put on the first clothes to hand and if there's no one there to iron your shirt, aged nine you're just not going to do it, you're not going to iron your shirt. But you don't really pay attention to it and you just grow up without that sense for it. And I'm not saying that's an excuse for it now and I've got a huge floppy face and it's all baggy. (Ahh from audience). No but that's it, imagine if I stood beside Mr Dapper here.

Michael: Mr Dapper! Cheeky sod. (Laughter) Did you have any sense in those days though of what you wanted to be? You said that you wanted to be famous, that you wanted to be known. I mean that's a perfectly normal thing.

Bob: No, I didn't say that then. When the Rats started in one of the first interviews they said, 'what do you want to get out of this?' And I said ' I want to get famous, get rich and get laid.' Which was not what you're supposed to say in the middle of that punk kind of thing that was going on but I said it to annoy people.

Michael: What about the first gigs? What do you remember about the first gigs you did?

Bob: I remember them perfectly, we did Halloween night in the classroom in 1975. And I remember in one of your first interviews you said, 'how would you describe your voice?' And I said, bloody awful and that's what I thought really. I'd never heard myself and we were making a racket, a good racket and Gerry the guitar player came and said we'd got a gig and I really was frightened because I just thought it was a bit of fun. And I said, how much? And he said thirty quid. And I said, you've got to be kidding, sixty at least. And so he came back the next day and said, OK then do it so I was done for. And we pitched up and we didn't know how long to play for so we'd got three hours worth of stuff. And we'd thought of this name, the Nightlife Thugs because I thought you needed a name that suggested something before you've even heard the band. But I'd been reading Woody Guthrie's book Bound for Glory and I'd come upon a bit when he was eight and he was in a gang called the Boomtown Rats and so I started with my hat and scarf and coat on. And we started with a disaster because our guitarist forgot the opening riff. So we were just staring there. So I turned my back on the audience and gradually the sound of clapping filtered through the racket and so I turned around. And the coat, hat and scarf came off and we took a break after an hour and fifteen minutes and I'd read about this stuff happening in England in a magazine called Forum that Alistair Campbell was editor of. And this girl walked up to me, there was thirty people in the classroom and said, 'I'd like to shag you'. (Laughter) So this was the career for me, clapping and shagging! (Laughter) And so I went to the blackboard and wrote Boomtown Rats on the board. And the second gig there was a hundred and twenty people in the pub in P******* in the Dublin mountains.

Michael: And more girls?

Bob: Well that's the thing, they were going completely berserk. We were playing on the floor and they were looking at us differently. And I looked round at my friends and they look different. It was like I was watching them on television. I was singing and looking around and no one in the audience was seeing Geldof, because no one ever called me Bob or Robert, I was always Geldof. I wasn't that, I was something else. And I looked up to get a pint and the barman was dancing up and down the bar and I just thought, I'm never going to be anything else.

Michael: Did you take the lady up on her offer?

Bob: Erm, yes. (Laughter)

Michael: And?

Bob: Well I was so freaked out. I mean, it was alright, I didn't blow it completely. (Laughter) But you know, this was Catholic Ireland 1975 and it was so great because you know you think you have to be a gentleman and say, 'shall I see you tomorrow' and she said 'no'. So it was your first rock and roll shag and she just wanted to do it and I just wanted to do it and no more need be said which was great at the time. (Laughter)

Michael: Is there a pecking order? I mean I assume you get the first choice and then?

Bob: Absolutely!(Laughter) And then the lead guitarist. But then you know if there's a points competition going on the singer always gets handicapped. So I was always pulled back.

Michael: Did you dream of coming to London? Did you dream of escaping from Ireland?

Bob: Yeah, London was the centre of the universe don't forget in the mid 60s. It really was, anything that was happening was here. And I felt I wanted to be there more than anywhere else and that turned out to be true and when I finally pitched up here a felt.

Michael: This sense that you had from the beginning though, politics and music. I mean, music in the strict sense has not changed anything has it? It changes the way people feel, the way people move but it doesn't change much politically. But what you've done, you proved that you can use your fame and celebrity to bring together a change that did change things. And that was Live Aid.

Bob: Well Live Aid did that but I don't agree with you, I think that music does change things.

Michael: You think so, you think a song changes a politicians mind?

Bob: Yeah I do?

Michael: What examples would you give me?

Bob: A couple of Bob Dylan songs. I think that music articulates a change that's happening in society before a society knows it's happening within them. So when you have the Beatles for example.

Michael: But that reinforcement more isn't it?

Bob: It is but without being tossy about it, you know, what an artist does, and I'm excluding myself from this but they tap into that which is happening anyway and articulates it back to society and if that becomes a hit it becomes a very powerful political tool because a million people perhaps are buying that one song and that can be used. And so when people are marching in the streets and singing Blowing in the Wind or the Times are a Changing or something like that.