Bob Geldof page 2

At this point, Bob prepared us for the “difficult” set of three songs from the new album. [“It's a wonderful album, Bob," someone shouted from the crowd, and he thanked them.] He said: “Any song I write is somewhat personal, somewhat autobiographical, because it comes from me. But after a time, you gain some objectivity from it. These new songs are difficult for me to perform, because they're still too close. They're still subjective, and probably always will be.

“Fortunately, over here, my family life hasn't been covered in the tabloids the same way as in the UK, where it's been a fucking soap opera. My personal life has been shit for that past five or six years. So, to do these songs, I'm going to disappear—I don't mean literally disappear in a fucking puff of smoke—I mean I'm going to go inside myself. I think that's why I wanted the seats; it gives me a bit of separation from you.

“So here we go. It's not exactly Top 40 material...”

Then he launched into “One for Me” (the opener of his album, and obviously about Paula; very powerful), “Mudslide” (possibly my favourite song on his amazing new album—great wordplay and just a gamut of emotions), and “My Birthday Suit” (a hearbreaker! The regret of things left unsaid. Beautiful).

The mood was broken with “I Don't Like Mondays,” which everyone joined in on, in what Bob termed a “fucking Tuesday-night karaoke. 'Thank God he finally played one we know!'” (joking tone; not angry tone).

He really is quite the raconteur, so I'm now going to go mad with the quoting from memory.

He talked about his childhood in Dunlaoghaire (“don't clap for it—it's a horrible place; we all wanted to escape it”), and played “Walking Back to Happiness.”

He also went over the process of making the Vegetarians of Love album. “The Boomtown Rats broke up in 1986—was it? Ah yes, right after Live Aid.” [Applause.] “Yes, thank you, but the problem was, after that, everyone wanted me to save the fucking universe. And I just wanted to write some tunes, you know.

“So I made an album called Deep in the Heart of Nowhere." [Applause.] “Yes, it had some nice tunes on it, but the problem was that the Boomtown Rats could have played about half of them. I needed to find a way to do my own thing.”

He said he'd heard about this approach of just putting musicians together and making music in the studio. “So I decided to try that. I told Columbia to get together some musicians I'd never worked with before, and give me two weeks in the studio. Two weeks. If it was shit, then it just be two weeks, it wouldn't be expensive. And it if worked, then I'd have an album in just two weeks.

“But it did work. I still think Vegetarians of Love is one of my favourite albums.”

He talked about how the Boomtown Rats would play just about anywhere—much like the current band —and how they ended up in Eastern Europe around the time of the fall of communism. In Russia, they got a tour in which they found out about “The Brain Room”.

In Room 19 were the brains of Russian geniuses (“all three of them”): Stalin, Lenin, etc., and scientists were charged with slicing up these brains and trying to figure out what made them geniuses. [A drunk Irishman in the crowd interrupted this tale to shout out the name of someone whom Bob explained to the confused Canadians was “an Irish footballer.” This became an anecdote later on the tour. But back to Russia…] “And I thought," Bob said, "what if I died while I was here? (Because I have thoughts like that.) And what if I accidentally ended up in Room 19? So you'd be stuck in this dialectic for eternity. It'd be like hell. So I wrote in the style of that particular hellish form of music, country western.”

Of course, then we heard a rousing version of “Room 19,” which I'd never liked so much as at that moment. It was followed up with “Inside Your Head,” an angry, intense song from Sex, Age, and Death (chorus: “What the fuck's going on inside your head?”).

Having been on the subject of Eastern Europe, Bob then talked about the siege in Russia, where Gorbachev was in prison and the military was trying to stage a counter-coup, and two or three students died under Russian tanks. Bob said these people were heroes to him; he didn't want them forgotten. Boris Yeltsin “fat. Old. Drunk. Red nose… Said something beautiful. And it was all the more beautiful coming from someone so unlikely. He said 'May the soil they rest in be soft'.”

And the band played “Soft Soil.”

Time to kick it up again. Bob commented that it was “difficult to play songs from 1976, 77. Because I remember that guy who wrote those songs, but fuck it. I'm 50 years old.

“But I was at radio station, and they asked me to play this song, and I said, 'I don't remember the chords.' Then John here starts playing the chords. So the DJ says, 'You do remember the chords!' And I said, 'Well, I don't remember the words.' So he goes to get them off the fucking Internet!

“Anyway, but then Jamie starts playing them in a Johnny Lee Hooker style, and I thought, yeah, I could get into that.

“So this song... When I went to school in Ireland, boys went to one school with the priests, girls to another with the nuns. So you had no chance of getting fucked. Ever. [Audience response.] Well yeah, except by the priests! But that never worked out. Those guys had no commitment.”

Then he talked about meeting girls outside of school, waiting while they spent an incredibly long time in the washrooms. But when one girl in particular—Mary—would emerge, he could tell right away, because her legs were so long, you'd see them far in advance of any other part of her.

“After a couple of years, Mary finally figured out that I was into her. Probably from all the drooling. So she asked me to a dance. I had her repeat it louder so my mates could hear.

“So we're at this dance, and I'm giving it everything I've got. But as you can see from here on stage, I'm not fucking brilliant this. She's looking at me like, what the fuck. So nothing is happening. And finally I'm reduced to begging and pleading: 'I'll just put it in a little. You won't even notice.' Yet somehow knowing this is totally the wrong approach.

“Finally, she takes 50 pence out of her pocket and puts it on the table. Which is so… You know, I'm not going to have sex with you, but here's 50p. (Which I did take, of course).

“I saw Mary at a gig recently, and she's still a babe. She's the assistance to Irish Prime Minister, which explains how things are going for him.”

And of course, they then played a rousing “Mary of the Fourth Form.”

Request time followed at this point. First up was, that “raga” tune, “House on Fire.” This is a wonderful song from a rather obscure Boomtown Rats album, V Deep. But it's just great live, even though Bob had to hum the words in a few spots, and the band just slowly got the groove of it. (Bob commented that it wasn't bad, considering they had never played it before!)

He was then asked for “$6,000,000 Loser,” from Sex, Age, and Death, and said that they didn't have the equipment (probably a voice box?) needed for it. But he did play the basic song, at one point substituting the lyric as “take my heart and fuck with it.” [I have to say I've never typed “fuck” so often in my life as in this report…]

Then we got “Beat of the Night,” from Deep in the Heart of Nowhere, which is so rhythmic it also sounded just great, despite some humming and fillers. That nearly made up for their not playing “Rain” (or “Dave” as it's called in Europe), despite Jean's yelling it out on my behalf.

And then, “Rat Trap.” At this point more and more of the crowd started to mass in front of the stage, dancing. I was itching to join in. “Go,” Jean said. “I'll go outside.” So I did, and he did. [And we both got a show. I saw Bob up really close. Jean saw two people having sex outside.]

Bob and band said good-bye at this point, but we did manage to lure them out for another two-song set. It started with the elegiac “Pale White Girls,” one of the more “positive” songs from Sex, Age, and Death. Next was one I didn't know, called “Hole to Fill.”

Of course, that wasn't enough, and we got the band to return again with a reprise of “The Great Song of Indifference,” which was such a hoot with everyone dancing in front of the stage! We were doing our very best Irish jig impression as the band played the song became faster and faster... (And I have to say, again, that the crowd was so great—tall guys making sure I could see around them, everyone politely avoiding pushing or bumping into one another...)

Of course, we had to get them out again, and were treated to “Diamond Smiles” (which, it now strikes me, almost has a Paula resonance, doesn't it?). But despite sincere efforts to get a fourth encore, the show was done at this point. 2.5 hours. Three encores.

Everyone was right. He was amazing. This was, without a doubt, one of the best live shows I've ever seen. So if the Geldof fan in your life tries to drag you to a show? Just go…

See also: A much shorter version of this concert review at Bob Geldof's official Web site.

Me and Bob - page 2