Bob Geldof – the opinion-wielding Irishman who was destined for greatness – turns 70 with an undiminished lust for life

Everyone knows about Band Aid and Live Aid – they’re the reasons why he’s long been officially known in his adopted home of Britain as Sir Bob Geldof – but high-profile campaigning is just one of several strands to the man. There’s the entrepreneur, the media mogul, the TV presenter, the WB Yeats scholar, the acclaimed memoirist, the artfully dishevelled bloke with the most abrasive motormouth in the business.

He has always had opinions, usually polarising ones at that, and he’s never been afraid to share them. Geldof was an angry young man – and he had every right to be: the Ireland of the 1970s was a bleak place for any artistic kid who wanted their homeland to be a bit more tolerant and enlightened.

He poured all that fury and frustration out in song. Banana Republic held a mirror up to the “septic isle” of the time, a place dominated by “the black and blue uniforms, police and priests”. Rat Trap documented an Ireland where any kid with a brain and a bit of ambition got the hell out. It would sit defiantly at the top of the UK charts for two weeks in 1978.

Today, homegrown musicians like Kojaque shine a light at a very different Ireland, but a place that can still feel like an enemy to young people. But there’s nobody grabbing the headlines and the attention like the twenty-something Geldof did all those years ago.

Geldof says he was born with an inquiring mind, one whose curiosity was insatiable. Perhaps, inevitably, he was drawn to journalism in his pre-fame days, and to Canada, which must have felt like a different world.

But that need to express himself, irrespective of the cost, drove him to mega-fame and one that he embraced with vigour.

The Boomtown Rats were far more than a frontman with a set of lungs and long list of opinions. The band was a rattle-bag of significant musical talent, but they would have got nowhere without Geldof. After all, several more naturally gifted Irish groups failed to get out of the starting blocks.

Geldof has always been larger than life. It wasn’t a case of if the band would make it, it was when. His propensity for hard work and for networking were just two of the factors why, by the end of the ‘70s, the Rats were inescapable.

Despite Russell Brand’s uncharitable assessment which, in fairness, was motivated by Geldof calling him a “c***” at an awards show, the music has been of critical importance to the man.

Early last year, just as the pandemic was taking hold, the Boomtown Rats released their first album in 36 years. It may not have matched the highs of their heyday, but it offered a reminder of how rock is a central component of Geldof’s lifeblood.

I interviewed him during promotional rounds in Dublin. A gregarious presence, he was looking forward to taking the album, Citizens of Boomtown, on the road. But Covid would soon intervene.

“I don't know what the young me would have thought of this 68-year-old guy jumping around the stage,” he told me, “but I just love how freeing it is – you give it everything and at the end of the gig you’re spent emotionally and physically. And that’s just the best feeling.”

I have interviewed Geldof a number of times and his charisma is hard to underestimate. Unlike many of his peers, he seems to enjoy the business of media engagements and you get the sense that he is never happy to just go through the motions.

“I was always interested in activism,” he told me. “Back in school, it was for the Simon Community. Live Aid was a step up from that.”

Live Aid made quite an impact that summer of 1985 and there’s been nothing like it since. Some years ago, when I interviewed Midge Ure, Geldof’s popstar friend and co-organiser of the massive money-raising event, he mentioned that he was still in awe of Geldof’s limitless vision. “He had the balls to do it, others just dream about it.”

While Geldof has had a remarkable career, and enjoys the trappings of fame and success, few would want to step in his shoes. He has been beset by awful personal tragedy on two occasions.

First, in 2000, his former wife, Paula Yates – the mother of three of his children – died of a heroin overdose, five years after she had left him for INXS frontman Michael Hutchence. As the Australian rocker had, himself, died in 1997, leaving their daughter Tiger Lily orphaned, Geldof stepped in and adopted her.

Then, in 2014, his second eldest daughter, Peaches, died aged 25. She had become famous in her own right — very much a chip off the old block. And as with her mother, a drug overdose was to blame.

The grief, Geldof says, is “bottomless”. He has come to understand that time does not so much heal as accommodate.

And the grief has not come to define him. Despite his trademark grumpiness, Geldof has a lust for life that’s rare. He always seems to be thinking about the next thing.

He mused to this newspaper about how he doesn’t appear to be as well liked in his homeland as Bono is. It’s a comment that will have raised eyebrows. While he has a special ability to get under our collective skins, he’s one of our own too – and most of us are proud of him. Tonight’s birthday tribute on The Late Late Show will only have been begrudged by the odd malcontent.

It’s likely there’s plenty of life in the old Rat yet, not least when Geldof and his old band step on stage at the London Palladium in a fortnight’s time. Now who’s laughing, Russell Brand?