NEW YORK, NEW YORK - DECEMBER 09: Bob Geldof performs onstage during The Rainforest Fund 30th ... [+] Anniversary Benefit Concert Presents 'We'll Be Together Again' at Beacon Theatre on December 09, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Rainforest Fund) Getty Images for The Rainforest Fund

This past weekend, the music community came together for the online and television virtual event One World: Together at Home in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Spearheaded by Lady Gaga and Global Citizen, the event—which featured a who's who in music including Gaga, Taylor Swift, Lizzo, Beyonce, Elton John, Billie Eilish, Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones—generated $127 million for COVID-19 relief and response. Going into the broadcast, One World drew the natural comparisons in the media to Live Aid, which was mounted on July 13, 1985 (dubbed ‘the day the music changed the world’) to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. Performed in London and Philadelphia with a dream bill of music superstars, Live Aid has since set the gold standard when it comes to the marriage of music and humanitarianism.

Undoubtedly the most recognizable face of Live Aid is Bob Geldof, who helped start it all 35 years ago first with the Band Aid charity single “Do they Know It's Christmas?” But before becoming an activist, Geldof was best known as the singer for the successful Irish post-punk band the Boomtown Rats, who scored a string of hits in Ireland and the U.K. from the late ‘70s to mid '80s—including the classic “I Don't Like Mondays,” which was a minor hit in the U.S. Following Live Aid, the Rats broke up in 1986 and Geldof went on to a career as a solo artist.

Following their reunion in 2013, the Rats—Geldof, guitarist Garry Roberts, bassist Pete Briquette and drummer Simon Crowe—released Citizens of Boomtown last month, their first new studio album in nearly four decades. It was accompanied by a film documentary about the band's 40-year history and Tales of Boomtown Glory, a book of Geldof's collected lyrics. Like many other musical acts, the Boomtown Rats had tour dates lined up for this year that were eventually postponed due to the pandemic, which also impacted the momentum following Citizens of Boomtown's release. Geldof acknowledges that the inconvenience is nothing compared to what other people are dealing with during the current crisis.

“What am I regretful about, from my point of view, is that I like this album,” Geldof says in a recent phone interview conducted shortly after Britain and Ireland went into lockdown. “We were working up to the release date. That all works when you have the kit and caboodle working: you got the album, you got the tour, you got the film, you're doing the promo. That's all gone. You're not going to really be able revitalize it when things kick back into normal.”

At the time, the reunion of the Boomtown Rats seemed quite unlikely as Geldof was long settled into his solo career. He says: “Subsequently I realized that the guy who jumped around in front of the Boomtown Rats as this sort of character called 'Bobby Boomtown,' which was a part of me and seems to want to come out...in times of confusion and chaos.

“The first time we cranked up again, my one caveat was, ‘If it felt nostalgic, I was out. I was gone. I have no interest in that.’ Nostalgia is a lie anyway. The minute this group of individuals, including myself, began playing properly, it was a shock to me. It was a thrilling shock.”

Citizens of Boomtown marks a fine return to rock and roll form, almost as if decades had not passed since the group's last album but still sounding contemporary. Geldof says that the songs off the album—from the very '70s rock-sounding “Trash Glam Baby” and the bluesy “She Said No,” to the reflective and lovely “Here's a Postcard” and the electronic influenced “Get a Grip”— didn't necessarily share a particular thematic thread. Says Geldof: “There are just shades of being alive today without making the pointed reference...and the fun of being in this really cool band again. It's not like a Bob Geldof record—this is a Bobby Boomtown record. And you can hear that in the last track, “The Boomtown Rats,” because to get to the guy who writes the Boomtown Rats songs, I had to write myself back to him: “Do you wanna come to Boomtown?/I'll meet you 'round the back/Between the dirty alley/And those Boomtown Flats/They're dedicated to St. Boomtown/He's the patron saint of crap.”

The Boomtown Rats: (l-r) Simon Crowe, Pete Briquette, Garry Roberts, Bob Geldof. credit: Hamish Macdonald

Coinciding with the record release is the documentary also titled Citizens of Boomtown and directed by Billy McGrath, which features interviews with members of the band as well as Bono, Sinead O'Connor and others. The film begins with a depiction of 1970s Ireland where the band was formed—a time of civil unrest, economic depression and punk rock. Among the takeaways from the film for Geldof was that it put a frame of reference on the things he and the band experienced on their rise to fame and success on the charts. “What we had in common was this great rage against the country that we've grown up in and which has failed us in our generation terrifically and we all needed to get out. Once we got rid of that stranglehold of the church, then Ireland joined the 21st century. I'm really proud of that. But the bad thing was the sense of betrayal and anger that resulted.”

“None of us had a family,” Geldof further added about the band’s origins. “We had no money, there was no television, no telephone. There was no distraction really. So I was obliged to read and listen to the one rock and roll station, No school master, no authority, no priest can tell us to shut up anymore. Now we got the language that I learned when I was 10 from Mick [Jagger] and Keith [Richards], Bob [Dylan], John [Lennon] and Paul [McCartney]. They told me there were other possibilities, that there were other universes, change was necessary, change was inevitable, change was desirable—and the language of change could be rock and roll itself.”

Between 1977 and 1985, the Boomtown Rats were a steady presence on both the U.K. and Irish singles charts. Decades later, the topics discussed in their politically- and socially-charged songs still remain timely and relevant, such as “I Don't Like Mondays,” written about a real-life deadly school shooting in California. “If I sing [“Mondays”] now, I don't sing about a school shooting in 1979,” says Geldof. “I'm singing about last week's massacre. Or when I sing “Rat Trap,” I still sing about the hopeless and the lost. If I sing “Banana Republic,” it's not about the utterly corrosive and corrupt state of the banana republic that Ireland was when I wrote it—now I'm singing about the political infantilism of the American republic. If I'm singing “Someone’s Looking at You,” it's not about the conditions of the world in 1979—it's about your smart [devices] and Alexa, always tracking. When I'm singing, there's this ferocious motor behind me...that absolute anger that propels it out.”

Quite fittingly, the new Rats album and film arrived as Live Aid will mark its 35th anniversary this July. The story behind that event has since become legend: in 1984, Geldof one night when he saw a BBC News broadcast of the famine in Ethiopia. That led him and Ultravox singer Midge Ure to start the all-star Band Aid group to record the song “Do They Know It's Christmas?” It later spawned into the televised mega-event Live Aid that overall raised $127 million for famine relief. Twenty years after Live Aid, Geldof and Ure mounted Live 8, a series of concerts intended to press the G8 countries to provide more aid and impose debt relief for poorer nations.

Of Live Aid's legacy today, Geldof, who was knighted in 1986, says: “I've said in the past that rock and roll was an articulate form of inarticulateness. Rock and roll divorced from its political and economic moment doesn't make no sense. That's why the guys showed up [at Live Aid] on that day, to fulfill that promise of what had been laid down in 1956 [when rock and roll exploded]. It was always used for revolutionary change. At that point, rock and roll was also directly involved with the technological culture; Elvis and Little Richard came about because of the diffusion of television, a brand new medium in the United States. By 1985, we had satellite and cable [and] pop music was the lingua franca of the planet. You can talk to humans everywhere now through this new medium of satellite and cable.”

What also struck a nerve to Geldof was that Europe was paying taxes to grow surplus food and then paying more taxes to burn that surplus—while just seven nautical miles away, millions of Africans were starving. “Once I made that trip to Africa between Band Aid and USA for Africa [the American supergroup that recorded the single “We Are the World,” which Geldof also participated in]. I immediately understood that famine is the child of poverty. You don't die of hunger in the United States. You die of hunger because you're poor. The problem is economic. To change that, you must change the economy. To change the economy, you must engage with the agents of change, which are politicians. The only thing politicians understand are the numbers. So let's get the numbers, let's get 1.2 billion people to watch this f***ing concert. And then with that in our back pocket, we can go to Thatcher, Reagan, all those guys—and I did.”

Much has changed since the Rats’ first go-round, Live Aid and Live 8, with Geldof citing the 2008 recession, the plight of immigrants in Europe, the erection of borders, and the current crop of world leaders who make cooperation in politics seem unlikely. “We elect fools to mediate this chaos,” he says. “And then the child of this planetary swirl of capital and ideas that people call globalization results in Brexit in this part of the world. And then we have the global pandemic. So of course you need the Boomtown Rats to make a f***ing noise again. That's why it makes sense.”

Source: Forbes.com

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