Q&A; WITH BOB GELDOF : Thin Line Between Pop and Politics

It’s been eight years since Bob Geldof created the defining events in ‘80s pop music: the Band Aid record and the Live Aid concerts, which raised more than $140 million for African famine relief and renewed pop’s ‘60s spirit of social activism.

That involvement has obscured the fact that the Dublin-born Geldof is essentially a singer and songwriter. And although he’s not very career-conscious, he does grow weary when the attention centers on philanthropy rather than music. “I’m trying to plug a (expletive) record here,” he said impatiently during a recent phone interview from New York, after too many questions about Live Aid.

His career in England and Europe is respectable, but his music hasn’t made a mark in the United States. Geldof’s third solo album, the just-released “The Happy Club,” is a loose, spontaneous affair that’s equal parts Van Morrison, Dylan and Cajun music, and he plays the Roxy tonight as part of his first U.S. tour in more than a decade.

Geldof, 40, is also a partner in a successful television production company, and a high-profile presence in London, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Question: With all your interests--the charity work, your production company, etc.--how much attention do you give to music?

Answer: Well, 98% of the year is given to music, and 2% would be to anything else, when I’m bored. I need to be stimulated by other things constantly, but let me put it in perspective. If I did everything else and wasn’t allowed to do music, I would go mad. But if I do nothing but music, it still isn’t enough to occupy my mind 100%. . . .

There’s a million things I think about. I woke up last night at 3 and I was lying awake and I invented this new type of toothbrush. I’ve got this, here it is, this piece of card and I’ve done all these drawings all over the card. It would be nice if I woke up and suddenly there was a hit song in my head.

Q: How are you approaching this U.S. tour?

A: With some trepidation. I mean, who’s gonna . . . come and see me? . . . I haven’t played here for God knows how long--12 years maybe. It’s not that I’m not confident about my abilities, but I’m not confident about whether anyone’s gonna be there to see my abilities, or whether they give a . . . .

Q: What kind of spirit were you after in the new album?

A: On my last record, “The Vegetarians of Love,” what I was trying to get at was a new musical language. Being Irish, that Irish thing is quite native to me, and the rock thing was intuitive. And Dylan had got me into Woody Guthrie, and the Stones had got me into Muddy Waters and all that bit when I was a kid, and I had a lot of Cajun records. I thought if I could get a fraction of that spontaneity and wit and spirit and passion and relevance, then I’d be OK.

With this one I wanted to make it a little more garagey-sounding. I’m interested in making a record, literally a record of six people sitting around in a semicircle playing this stuff. That’s why I leave in some of the comments and the laughs and the asides and the mistakes, because it is just that bit more natural, it’s what it was like there.

Q: Did the Live Aid undertaking severely distract you from music?

A: It totally stopped it, because for three years I couldn’t do anything. Most people think it was a record and a concert. Well, in fact most of it was the organizational work in London, the banking systems around the world, the organizational effort in Africa, the shipping fleet, the trucking fleet, all those things. You can’t afford to take your eye off the ball.

Q: What was it in your background that equipped you to do what you did?

A: The two things that have interested me from the age of 11 is politics and pop. . . . I was just using that which came naturally to me. I was a songwriter so I wrote a song (Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” co-written with Midge Ure). My medium was music and television, so that’s what I used, and got friends to play on the stage at the end.

But the other stuff, the organizational stuff, was also second nature to me, because from the age of 7 I’d brought myself up, ‘cause my mother was dead and my father was away (at work as a traveling salesman). So I organized my life from the age of 7. You had to get enough food in for the week, you had to cook it yourself, I had to have enough coal in for the fire. But that was OK, because you learn to think for yourself quickly and organize things.

Q: You say your interests were pop and politics. What do you think of the argument that pop singers should stick to singing and stay out of politics?

A: They’re my interests, and I think one way or the other pop and politics are the same. . . . It’s not coincidental that Bob Dylan articulated his moment in a very political sense. The Beatles were political. The Rolling Stones were clearly political. Every time you see a Vietnam movie, the backing track is always the Doors and Jimi Hendrix. The two are inextricably bound, so to divorce the two is stupid.

That’s a different thing from saying that pop stars should stick to music. Yes, I agree in general they should. There’s nothing worse than someone well-known pontificating platitudes. . . . It irritates the (expletive) out of me.

Q: Do you think there’s more social awareness and activism in pop music since Live Aid?

A: I think it was always there. We might be more aware of it now. I think the idea of the big concert has become devalued currency, and I think now that they’ve become a bit of a cliche with overuse, you only get the rock audience looking at it, and even then a small portion of the rock audience, because how many times can you see the same people doing it?

And I also think it’s not enough simply to do it. You must posit a pragmatic end, and you must then go and achieve that end as opposed to just having a (expletive) concert because you want to draw attention to something.

There’s got to be a mechanism for creating the political lobby for change and then actually pragmatically setting about making that change occur. Because if you don’t succeed in that, the audience becomes increasingly cynical. I mean, the idea is that the individual is not powerless.

I don’t want to talk about it much more. It . . . was a long time ago and it doesn’t interest me that much talkin’ about it.

Q: Just one more thing. Are there issues now that engage your passions the way that situation did? Is there anything that would make you do something like Live Aid again?

A: Yes, there’s millions of issues that engage me. But I would need to feel a visceral response that made me believe that I could effect a change in those issues. It would have to be something that you could actually do pragmatically to alter things, and that occasion occurs very rarely. . . . But if I was assaulted one night on television by something that I found repulsive and shameful, and I felt that something was possible, yes, I possibly would.

But then I’ve got to measure that against the fact that most people would say, “Oh for (expletive) sake, it’s Geldof again, would he shut up?” It would be that much more difficult.