“I think the rock and roll age has been and gone. Luckily for the Rats, we jumped in half-way through. I always thought it would be around forever and be a useful medium to talk about the condition of the self or the condition of the world. Or whatever. Certainly that’s what I took from it, growing up.”

With The Boomtown Rats back on the road, playing their first dates in 27 years, Bob Geldof is in the mood to reflect on the past, present and the future. And as ever, he is passionate, eloquent and challenging in what he has to say about it all.
“It’s the vehicle that has worked consistently for me,” he continues. “When I was 14 or 15, I sat alone with my records, playing them endlessly and thinking ‘nobody understands me’ – but Bob Dylan seemed to. You walked around with your albums under your arms. People would say ‘give us a loan of that’ and you’d say ‘no, fuck off’ (laughs).”
There is a feeling among musicians that rock ‘n’ roll – and indeed music in general – has lost that magical appeal. So was it that we got too much of a good thing?
“With the dawn of the web-age, music is so available, all the time, everywhere,” Bob reflects. “And so many people are making music. The diffusion of the media has meant the dilution of the message. And the message in rock ‘n’ roll of course is not the lyrical statement – it’s the actual noise itself. But even that has been adulterated. MP3 is fucking awful sound quality. Really grim. If that’s what you’ve grown up listening to, you’re possibly getting the same experience that you got listening to stuff on vinyl. I say ‘possibly’, because that’s how they get to know the bands that they like. And, of course, vinyl has far better fidelity – that’s not old men talking – that’s just the fucking truth.”

The times they have changed, apparently, And not for the better. But all is not lost. Bob Geldof insists that rock ‘n’ roll has not quite gasped its dying breath just yet.
“You hear, say, Nirvana for the first time, as I did passing a shop in London and I stopped to ask, ‘what’s that?’ You just knew that this noise was real and it was true. Will those kinds of things happen again? I’d like to think so but I’m not sure if it could have the impact that Elvis or Dylan or the Sex Pistols had or – if I’m not being too grand – the impact that the Rats had in Ireland.”
Ah, the Boomtown Rats! The band that exploded out of Dublin and Ireland in the summer of ’77, scandalising the nation and, along the way, scoring nine UK top 20 hits, including two number ones in ‘Rat Trap’ – the first ever UK No.1 by an Irish rock band, fact fiends – and ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’. All before finally bowing out at Self Aid in 1986. So how do the Rats fit into the picture in 2013 then?
“Well, it remains to be seen,” he says matter-of-factly. “The gigs have been fucking great. I did two things so I could get back into being Boomtown Bob. I got myself a snakeskin suit, made to measure, which was débuted at the Isle of Wight and I wrote four new songs – ‘Boomtown Rat’, ‘Back To Boomtown’, ‘Ratified’ and ‘Rat Life’.
“I’m not interested at all in nostalgia,” he adds, “and I wasn’t interested in re-creating the past or the old days or doing it for the glory of it. There was a curiousity. And when we started playing after all these years, the first thing that hit me was the power of that band, which I’d forgotten about. Then I thought about this random group of individuals who knew each other from around the same area and came together to make this noise that’s unique to them.”
It’s that old source of rock ‘n’ roll voodoo. Bodies together in a room. Someone strikes an E-chord. Now what? Everyone else piles in. The singer starts wailing. The noise could ony be made in that unique way by those bodies. It’s what defines a group. Add in a voice, a set of lyrics and...
“When I started singing the words of ‘Looking After Number One’, I was thinking, I could have written this yesterday,” Geldof says. “I don’t see what’s changed. It was the same with ‘Rat Trap’ – there was contemporaneousness to the words and the sound that seemed to me to be completely appropriate to the times that are in it. I genuinely mean that. There’s no particular incentive for us to do this again – obviously the money is good but that wouldn’t have been enough for me. I completely got into being in this band again within half-an-hour. I was enjoying myself and saying, ‘Will we do this one or that one – and we’d do it’. I thought, ‘Fuck me – that’s a blinder as well’. And not only that we were great but that I was fucking amazing!
He laughs. But you can tell also that he means it. And in many ways, that’s because he is amazing...

If you know Bob Geldof, you’ll already have worked out that age hasn’t mellowed him much. He remains as angry, bitter and disenchanted now as he was when he first wrote and played those songs. Spleen comes easily to him. It always did...
“I don’t understand why you wouldn’t be angry, embittered even, at what’s going on these days,” he offers. “All generations fail and this generation – my generation – has failed more spectacularly than others. Why wouldn’t I be bitter about that? People think I’m a contrarian – but I’m at my most comfortable when people are most disappointed in me.”
He recalls delivering the keynote speech at SXSW a few years ago.
“I was thinking, ‘What the fuck am I going to say?’ I mean, I’ve got stories like all those giants. But you’re not going to trump Quincy Jones, who did it the year before me. So what’ll I say to this group of assembled industry worthies? I was thinking, it’ll be something under the heading of ‘Rock ‘n’ roll and the End of Passion’. I got off the plane in Austin and you could barely move through arrivals because of the amount of roadies and flight-cases, and the rows and rows of articulated trucks outside.
“And when you drove into town every single available space, and I mean every space, was filled with music and road crews. So I went to sleep that night to the noise of bass drums and guitars and I thought, ‘How the fuck can I talk about the end of passion when there are people from all over the US and the world coming here just to play?’ So at about four in the morning I nailed what it was that was bothering me – and it was the end of relevance.”
Geldof was never a man to shirk from a big idea. Now he had something he could run with.
“What I meant was, that rock ‘n’ roll won the argument,” he embellishes, “but it was a pyrrhic victory because it failed to deliver in the end. The common culture now is pop music. X Factor in China is basically our pop music with a Chinese lyric and sentiment. African music is largely hip hop now and straight melodic pop. How did it get to that point?”
I leave a pause. Maybe he expects me to answer but I stay schtum...
“I don’t know,” he carries on, “but you need the same sensibility of a ’55, a ’76 or a ’64/’66 again. But it needs to be even more dramatic and more exotic and more of a shock. What I was saying is, ‘Wake up – this music can still be about stuff’.”
Welcome back The Boomtown Rats...

“Back in the Band Aid/Live Aid period I’d get a call a couple of times late at night along the lines of, ‘The Prime Minister would like to see you’. You don’t say ‘no’ of course, so I’d cycle into Downing Street and I’d go up and see Thatcher in the tiny little flat which is crap and being English of course they’d turn the heating off at 11pm, so it would be freezing.

“I guess Denis was in bed but she couldn’t sleep and she’d say, ‘Would you like a glass of whiskey, Mr Geldof?’ I’d say, ‘OK do you have some red’ – but she’d look at me with disgust. She just wanted to talk. She didn’t really know anything about Africa. She’d argue – she liked to engage in the intellectual argument, but she was useful to me at the time.
“There’s no question that she was probably the most radical politician of the post-war age, at a time when that was necessary. I remember the rubbish piled up everywhere and the unions controlling everything and swanning in and out of Downing Street. And then this guy Johnny Rotten comes along and screams, ‘There’s no future in England’s dreaming’ and ‘I am the Antichrist’ and all that stuff.
“What punk prefigured in a way, is what finally happened. But no-one expected it to come from the right. No-one expected it to come from a woman who lashed her handbag out at what everyone was raging about – the Monarchy, the unions, the old squirearchy etc. So in effect, Margaret Thatcher was Johnny Rotten in drag.
“She was necessary – but it was very painful, harrowing, destructive and sad, sad, sad beyond belief.”

The Boomtown Rats play Vicar St., Dublin (October 12 and 13) & Ulster Hall Belfast (October 18)