I had expected him to be a tricky customer but he far
exceeded my expectations. His harshest critics, and I am not among them, would find it difficult to claim that Geldof has not been genuinely big-hearted and an effective catalyst in pushing governments in the wealthiest countries to tackle the economic plight of Africa. But even beyond his political and charitable galvanising, I had developed something of a soft spot for him over the decades.
For a man who can be almost comically disarrayed and foul-mouthed, to the extent that his anger sometimes appears out of control, Geldof was a model of dignified restraint when his late wife, Paula Yates, left him for Michael Hutchence. While she was most outspoken about how unhappy her ex-husband had made her, I was unable to find a single criticism of Yates by Geldof, and to this day, as I witnessed, he talks about her only with love and respect and regret. I was also struck by the grace and the immediacy with which he embraced the orphaned Tiger Lily, the daughter of Yates and Hutchence, into his own family.
I approved of his un-rock’n’roll parental firmness; there is an instance of this in his riveting book on Africa, published to coincide with the television series, when he is in the back of a truck in the dark, in a state of bowel-loosening terror, and one of his daughters phones on the mobile to seek permission for a sleepover. All thoughts of an imminent ambush by gun-wielding rebels on some hell-hole of a road are eclipsed by Geldof’s concern that homework has been completed and that said daughter is back home by 11 in the morning, even if it is the weekend.
His appearance has changed dramatically over the years and, again, I rather applaud his lack of vanity. He was a strikingly good-looking youth, as chief Boomtown Rat, in that sexily dishevelled Jagger-Stoppard mould. With Paula, who loved her frocks and once incurred her husband’s wrath for making a public appearance in something too revealing while he was out of the country, Geldof could be seen in three-piece tweeds sporting a strange surrealist-beatnik beard.
But, increasingly, with his drib-drab locks and hanging clothes, his pale glistening face contorted in a rictus of existential pain, he brings to mind a tramp from a Dennis Potter drama; a preacher from an early John Huston film, wide-eyed in the wilderness. He seems a man driven by his destiny, the huge mantle of Africa weighing down his bony shoulders. He talks – and how he can talk – with a lyrical, almost biblical, intensity and he has given himself the power because of the unassailable rightness of his cause to castigate, chide and cast into the darkness, anyone who stands in his way. So pity the poor wretch of an interviewer who has been dispatched to be more than a mere recorder to tape his sermonising zeal.
Why, with this well of good feeling that I had towards him, did I expect Geldof to be tricky? Partly because it has become an ingrained, and rather dominant, strand of his persona that he is grumpy. But also because the sensible-sounding book publicist had warned me, “You know, Bob is a very strong personality.”
There had been niggling criticisms of him in the press but, mostly, from the usual suspects. It became clear during our encounter that it was the disappointment felt by the more unusual suspects – about the lack of specifically African but more generally black faces in his concert line-up in London – that really bothered him. Although he affected not to know – most disingenuously – that it was the lack of blackness per se that disturbed people. These
voices clamoured even louder after our interview and, at the time of writing, have clearly forced Geldof to rethink his position.
Something else hovered, a ghost of a thought, in the back of my mind. A young, twentysomething colleague – clear-headed, super-bright and unencumbered by Seventies feminist ideology – felt that there was a strong whiff of misogyny around Geldof. She said this en passant and I didn’t have time to quiz her about it. I was probably a bit uneasy about his campaigning alongside Fathers 4 Justice for aggrieved dads but also felt some sympathy for his view after rereading the articles about his painful custody battles with Yates.
Reviewing his life in the hundreds of cuttings, in the days before we met, I found myself warming to Geldof even more. He seemed gratifyingly co-operative and quite forthcoming about the likely effect on his developing personality, as a small boy left to his own devices after his mother had died and with a travelling salesman father who was often absent for long stretches of time. But as I read on, knowing the dreadful inevitability of what was to come – the utterly senseless, sad deaths of Hutchence and Yates – the research began to feel almost oppressive.
It was not as though I had felt any particular kinship with Paula Yates while she was alive. Although she was peppy and minxy, quick-witted and funny, she was also an absolute pain in her finger-wagging at working mothers mode. (And what were her In Bed with Paula interviews for her husband’s successful TV company if not work?) But even that phase, when she wore her aprons and crinolines and baked apple pies, seemed odd and slightly desperate in hindsight. After the split, she wrote her autobiography in which she described how confined she had begun to feel in her marriage: “Bob is the most controlling person in the world, which he freely and rather proudly admits. He used to tell me, ‘If I can’t exactly control the environment I’m in, I feel like I’m going mad.’” And towards the end, “I felt that I couldn’t do anything in case Bob was cross with me. I was always quite scared of him and hated him to be angry with me.”
What I found really upsetting was a piece for The Sunday Times Magazine’s Life in the Day slot which appeared after her death. Reading it was like being ambushed by her torment and distress, and all the more poignant for her occasional rallying attempts to regain her perky tilt on life.
She talks about her agoraphobia and depression, in between the jokes, and the horror she faces at three in the morning when she lies awake: “thinking ghastly thoughts about death, the transience of beauty and the squandering of talent”. And, so bleak this: “There’s a horrible dark place inside me now where nothing much matters any more.”
