Bob Geldof on the Boomtown Rats: 'If I was writing those songs today, I wouldn't change a word'

Hello Robert Frederick Zenon Geldof, KBE and Nobel peace prize nominee! How come you are touring with the Boomtown Rats for the first time since 1986?
Initially there was an offer to play the main stage at the Isle of Wight. Garry [Roberts, guitar] called me up with a certain trepidation, but it appealed to my vanity. Isle of Wight, main stage, hello, you know. I'd been to the 1970 festival and slept in a hut made of branches. It was like Butlins with rock'n'roll, but I loved it and saw Leonard Cohen and Hendrix and the Who so to go back felt nice. Also, enough time had passed for me to be curious. Were the Rats any good or was I deluding myself? And some of the guys needed to pay mortgages, so if I can help out, cool.

Has it been fun reconnecting with your young, punk-era self?
More than I could have possibly imagined. It turned out that the Rats were a very powerful band, which you don't know at the time because there's no time for reflection. I obviously thought: "I'm going to look a right cunt, aren't I? Jumping around like I was 23." So I went to Brick Lane and got them to make me this fuck-off snakeskin suit and Boomtown Bob re-emerged, fully formed: this loudmouth twat with hair.

The Rats had nine consecutive top 15 singles in the late 70s and early 80s. Are those songs still relevant?
When I started singing those songs again I honestly thought if I was writing them today, I wouldn't change a word. In 1975, I was a kid who couldn't get work through the failure of the economy, just like today. I wrote Lookin' After No. 1 in the dole office on a shop receipt. I wrote Someone's Looking At You in 1980, but when we rehearsed it again the Guardian front page was Obama spying on the American people. I Don't Like Mondays (1) – the first week into rehearsals some fucking clown killed his parents and his mates and another guy shot up a naval facility in Florida. This shit has actually got worse.

Do people tell you that your songs touched them?
I met this journalist [Sushi Das] who's written a book called Deranged Marriage, about growing up as the kid of Indian immigrants in London. Her mother was always trying to get her to pray to Hindu gods. One day her father went in the girl's bedroom and sprayed on her headboard was "Geldof is God." He went ballistic! Luckily he didn't open the wardrobe and see the poster smeared in lipstick. But she listened to Lookin' After No. 1 and heard "I don't wanna be like you. I wanna be like me." I'm thrilled about that.

What drew you to music?
My mum died when I was seven, but I was 11 when I started to understand the lack in my life. I was biologically confused with puberty and my father was away Monday to Friday selling towels and there was no money and I suddenly started thinking: "Fuck this." Suddenly Radio Luxembourg brought me this thin gold thread of alternative possibility. Dylan, Lennon, Jagger and Townshend sounded like I felt. At 16 I got to play harmonica with John Lee Hooker in a pub in Dublin, drunk. He's going: "Get off! Get off!" But that was it for me.

Didn't you became a music journalist before you were a rock star?
I left school with nothing and worked with the homeless and stayed with hookers who'd get beaten up by their pimps in front of me. I ended up in London on the street, which was like a Steinbeck novel, but I panicked that I was going to end up like that. I drove heavy machinery for fantastic money and eventually ended up in Vancouver illegally on the way to dig gold in the Arctic Circle. I lied to an underground paper (2) that I was a journalist. I interviewed a 16-year-old Bryan Adams, so I was responsible for that. I hung out with Lou Reed and mad cunts. Eventually the Mounties chucked me out, but by then I was so sick of the current music that I couldn't do the job. I reviewed a Stylistics album and just wrote: "This is shit." Then I went back to Ireland and some guys in the pub talked about forming a band and that was the Rats.

When you tore up a picture of John Travolta on Top of the Pops at the height of Grease mania in 1978, did it feel like the storming of the Bastille?
It did because it took so long to happen. Punk was a London clique. You didn't get punks in Derbyshire. We did our first gigs in schools with the Ramones and Talking Heads. You'd see kids in Showaddywaddy T-shirts and fucking loon pants and mullets, staring. Soon afterwards, we were being killed by the cultural Taliban of the time for having hit singles. I'd written Rat Trap when I was stuck working in an abattoir. John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John were No 1, 2 and 3 in the charts (3). Over four weeks, Rat Trap sold 690,000 records to get to No 1. Nowadays it's maybe 20,000. John Travolta had great pop songs, but that stuff had to be put aside and replaced with adult themes. It was fantastic.

You've been touring Ireland again. Weren't you banned from playing there?
That was because of Banana Republic, which was No 3 in the UK and just huge in Ireland. If you grew up there, there was a claustrophobia of silence. The Haughey government was morally bankrupt and corrupt. There was a civil war, which people call the Troubles – it's not a "trouble" when 3,200 people are murdered. The church were often supporting one side of the killers while they were abusing the children of their parishioners. It was a brutalised society and I'd had enough of it! [laughs]. One night, Pete [Briquette, bass] was off his face and came up with this great bass riff. I started writing about government whores and "this septic isle". The Brits thought it was a cute pop song but suddenly every gig of ours in Ireland was stopped by an injunction. In the end we set up a gig at a private estate with no insurance and RTE Radio announced it one minute after midnight, when the courts closed, so they couldn't stop us. I expected 300 people. There were 30,000.

Are you still as angry about things as you were back then?
It's right to be angry. What's dismaying about this latest catastrophic fuck-up called austerity is that it's a technical term, but for tens of millions austerity is a reality, where people have no future whatsoever. It happened through international gangsterism, where people fix the bank lending rate and commit fraud and nothing happens to them. Put these fuckers in jail!

It's 28 years since you were moved by images of starving Ethiopians into doing Live Aid (4). Is it true that when you phoned Tony Blair in 2004 to tell him people were still starving he said: "Calm down, Bob …"?

[Laughing] Yes it is. But why be calm about that? Why not be vociferous and make the point that "Look, you're prime minister. You have an amazing opportunity to change things." Whatever people think of Blair, he was a game changer in Africa and he stopped the killing in Belfast, which I never thought would happen in my lifetime. I have a signed copy of the peace agreement on my wall. Things have got better in Africa. Nonetheless, there are still vast numbers of hungry people. The next thing is climate change, which will hit vulnerable areas first.

Could you do a new Live Aid, to wake people up?
Live Aid was using the top technology of the time. Now I have access to politics and humanitarian groups. But great pop songs are great pop songs. Those times will come around again.

Do you listen to current music?
I've got four kids, 30 to 17 (5). One is a superb songwriter, fantastic voice. We know where that comes from [laughs]. But they play things on Spotify and I ask: "What's that?" The new Arctic Monkeys album is a proper album. I'm dismayed that These New Puritans' Fields of Reeds isn't on the Mercury list, because it's like a mind bath.

You're 61 and going grey (dis)gracefully. What's been the happiest time of your life?
I don't really do happy, do I?

OK, unhappiest?
When Paula (6) left me … Obviously. I sorta collapsed … but I'm happier now than I ever was before and that's because of the woman I've been with for a long time. When we met, it was the perfect relationship. She couldn't speak a word of English and I still can't speak French.

How on earth did you bond?
[Laughs] Shagging, basically!

Why are you going to be the first Irishman in space(7)?
Why not? They offered it to me for free and I want to see the Earth in all its febrile beauty. It's extraordinary that you can do that in my lifetime. I remember my dad standing with me on the porch in the 1950s with the radio turned up very loud, listening for Sputnik going "beep beep" and glimpsing it in the clouds. Next year I will be that shining ball. If something goes wrong, fuck it, bang! What else is there to do? I suppose I could write a song called Space Rat.

Boomtown Rats are on tour until 10 November and play London Roundhouse on 26 October: boomtownrats.co.uk. The Classic Album Selection – Six Albums '77 to '84 box set and Ratlife digital EP are out now on UMC/Mercury

Footnotes

(1) The Rats' 1979 Number 1 was inspired by Brenda Ann Spencer, who shot two adults dead and injured eight children in an school playground, later offering the explanation, "I don't like Mondays."

(2) Georgia Straight, which can still be found at www.straight.com

(3) You're The One That I Want, from the Grease film soundtrack, topped the chart for nine weeks in the summer of 1978.

(4) The 1985 internationally broadcast dual London/Philadelphia concert, set up by Geldof and Midge Ure, which raised millions for Ethiopian famine relief

(5) Fifi Trixibelle, Peaches Honeyblossom and Little Pixie Geldof and Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily Hutchence Geldof.

(6) Geldof's wife, the TV presenter who left him for INXS singer Michael Hutchence (who fathered Tiger Lily) in 1995. Yates died of a heroin overdose in 2000.

(7) The Irishman will become one of 100 "founder astronauts" on one of Netherland's-based Space Expedition Corporation's flights in 2014