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Date Posted: 13:57:56 12/04/02 Wed
Author: Christine
Subject: Re: Bob Geldof live at the Rehearsal Hall
In reply to: Louise 's message, "Bob Geldof live at the Rehearsal Hall" on 06:42:51 11/25/02 Mon

>A reminder to all of you Canadian fans that Bob will
>be on Bravo! this coming Saturday (Nov 30th) at 8pm
>(Eastern Standard Time). Not to be missed!!

I also have a tape of the show and watched it when it aired. LOVED IT!! I agree with Lenair wholeheartedly in her review. If you need help getting a copy, don't hesitate to contact me. All the best!

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[> [> Bob Geldof in Calgary Herald re: Bravo -- Eric Alper, 10:24:42 12/05/02 Thu

http://www.canada.com/calgary/calgaryherald/story.asp?id={BDD20330-4836-4120-8523-2A40E8DF9143}

Geldof survives 'unsayable' pain

Nick Lewis
Calgary Herald


Saturday, November 30, 2002

CREDIT: Courtesy, Bravo!

Bob Geldof takes to the microphone in a TV special called Live at the Rehearsal Hall on Bravo! tonight.

ADVERTISEMENT


Live at the Rehearsal Hall: Bob Geldof, airs tonight on Bravo! (Ch. 36) at 6 p.m.

Bob Geldof is pacing his Battersea, London, apartment, where much of his latest record, Sex, Age & Death, was conceived.

"The whole record is loss, pain, grief, emptiness, aridity, despair, anger, bitterness . . . but not apathy," the 48-year-old growls into the phone. "Apathy is nowhere present."

This is Geldof's first record since 1993 and his most harrowing to date. It is also his first disc since his highly publicized divorce from broadcaster Paula Yates, her marriage to INXS singer Michael Hutchence and their tragic deaths. He is speaking to the press to promote a concert that airs tonight on Bravo!

He hasn't said much to the media in recent years about what he calls "the other thing," and has chosen 10 songs on this record to speak about "the unsayable" -- being left by Yates for Hutchence in 1995 after nine years of marriage, and the lovers' deaths. Hutchence committed suicide in 1997 and Yates died of a heroin overdose in 2000 after a failed copycat suicide in 1998. She left behind four children: three are Geldof's, one is Hutchence's.

The British tabloids at first treated Geldof as the injured party in the divorce. But Yates used the press to berate, accusing him of being the instigator of Hutchence's suicide by hanging.

Through all the controversy, Geldof -- knighted and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his famine relief work through Live Aid and Band Aid -- chose not to comment.

"I can't describe it," he says. "I couldn't describe the pitch of pain. It is unsayable."

The former leader of the Boomtown Rats says his former bandmates moved in briefly with him to help his depression during this tumultuous time, and they would sit around for hours in silence. He found their act of generosity bizarre but calming.

"For several years I was incapable of functioning in any sense," Geldof says. "I was inhabiting an emotionally minimal landscape and I was living, as a result of that, an almost animal existence. I was overwhelmed by the loss and the pain and so I needed to get out. . . . You either die or you find some mechanism. I'm lucky that for 27 years I've been writing songs, and so gradually, over time, your instincts return."

The two most interesting songs on Sex, Age & Death deal with Yates and Hutchence. The first track, One For Me, is directed at her vanity; another song, Inside Your Head, is more pointed. It contains the lines, "You got the palace/ You left me the shed/ You got a life/ You left me for dead/ So why put a noose around your neck / What the (expletive)'s going on inside your head?"

"As much as I find it difficult to talk about, the songs to me are utterly accurate," Geldof says. "Utterly accurate and true. And even though I didn't understand them when I did them, I understood them to be true. It's difficult to play them live because they are so true for me . . . when I do them I'm dragged back to the there and then."

Geldof's career is the stuff of fiction. He speaks of it as a soap opera, noting he fears the next chapter, which he feels he has no control over.

Geldof, who as an Irish national does not use the title Sir Bob, says he was a mouthy kid from Dublin who didn't find himself until he snuck into Canada in the early '70s, and was hired as the music editor at the Georgia Straight in Vancouver. When he was discovered by the immigration authorities and deported to Dublin months later, he had ambitions to start up a rock newspaper, make some money and emigrate back to Canada.

Fate intervened when his mates started a band called the Boomtown Rats and made him the lead singer.

"Girls wanted to shag me and I thought, this is a better job than journalism," he says.

Geldof and the Boomtown Rats went on to become a minor rock success. In 1985, he organized a collective of musicians, called Band Aid, to record the

charity single called Do They Know It's Christmas? for famine-struck Ethiopia.

Then came Live Aid, a set of two charity concerts in Philadelphia and London that raised $100 million US in famine relief.

He married Yates, a British TV personality, in Las Vegas in June 1986, shortly after he had been made a knight of the realm for his work on Live Aid. In 1995, Yates began a public affair with Hutchence, and Geldof was repeatedly blamed by the two for not awarding custody of his and Yates' children to Hutchence.

Geldof says he considered suicide when he lost Yates to Hutchence. He made a list of reasons for and against staying alive, calling them "why you should stay around" and "why bother staying around." The latter was a page long. The other list had only two words -- "the children."

"I describe my life as extremely episodic, and it is a soap opera life," Geldof says.

"Plenty of people lose their wives, but it doesn't result in the utter madness that surrounded us and in the high tragedy in the way it happened. That doesn't happen. Nor does it happen that one day in Ireland you start a band and the next day you've got mega hits and mega concerts. Nor does it happen that one day you decide to do a little record for famine relief, and it becomes this massive phenomenon. None of that is predictable.

"It's very tiring."


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[> [> [> Bob Geldof in Edmonton Sun and Jam Canoe -- Eric Alper, 10:26:39 12/05/02 Thu

http://www.canoe.ca/JamMusic/nov30_bob-sun.html

Still at war with the world
Bob Geldof's newest songs have that familiar angry edge
By FISH GRIWKOWSKY -- Edmonton Sun
The apocalypse Bob Geldof's been broiled in, you'd expect he'd taste a little bitter, be a bit sour. He's not. It's much worse than that.

Geldof is at war with the world. Known at the starting gates for his snappy, dead-on songs for the Boomtown Rats, the 48-year-old is now as famous for his Shakespeare-level real-life tragedy.

His TV-star wife's final departure to INXS singer Michael Hutchence is his burden as much as igniting Live Aid in 1984 is his legacy, earning him a knighthood. (Never mind his playing Pink in The Wall.)

The love triangle was as doomed as they get - both Hutchence and Paula Yates are dead. The Australian singer was found hanging in his hotel room, and Yates left us forever with a heroin OD in late 2000. Ugly business.

But Sir Bob, dazed, crawled back, found his haggard muse and crafted new music. Live at Rehearsal Hall: Bob Geldof on Bravo tonight at 6 just might be proof he's recovered some.

Even if you talk to him.

FISH: Where are you right now?

BOB: I'm on tour in the U.K. right now. Tonight I do a George Harrison thing with Tom Petty and Ravi Shankar and Ringo (Starr) and Paul (McCartney), so I'm excited about that. Plus the usual music and touring and politics and business that keeps going on forever. I'm tired and overworked, so you're not going to get a very happy interview, I'm afraid.

FISH: That's OK, it's not a very happy world. One of your angry new songs, Mudslide, blew me away. Is it any consolation that out of all the mayhem you went through, something beautiful came?

BOB: It doesn't help, is the truth. There was no intention to make an album, no, no, no. If you're asking would I go through anything like that to make some art, I wouldn't survive it again. I couldn't do it again. I do understand that millions of men have their wives leave them and millions of men lose love. But I've learned that a life without love is absolutely meaningless. You move past the moment eventually, but it took years for me. The situation was absolutely mad in the extreme and ended in high tragedy. When hubris enters, can nemesis be far behind? Of course not. The last thing I was thinking about was music. But gradually the urge came to me, like vomit in the gorge, and I began writing songs again. The end result put a shape to an otherwise shapeless horror, I couldn't find the edges of this thing, and I finally externalized it in a way.

FISH: Well, your return is hopeful. It's good to see you live. Taped, that is.

BOB: The Bravo thing? I've never seen it. I don't know if the idea of the band came across properly or not. I never look at anything taped or written about me or I just get mortified and humiliated. But one of the nice things about making music for the past 27 years is an awful lot of songs get embedded in the culture. I was waiting to get on stage in Boston and The West Wing was on and there was a school massacre and someone said, 'Tell me why I don't like Mondays.' Then they segued into the song. Of course, it was by f---ing Tori Amos, which I suppose I get paid for.

FISH: The Georgia Strait (in Vancouver, B.C.) where you once worked is now big and glossy and full of ads. Does success always have to result in stagnation, or at least the rumour of it?

BOB: I'm not familiar with the Strait now. I'm aware that Dan (McLeod, the founder) made some money. What he set out to do was brave. He produced a generation of people in Vancouver that embraced an absolutely unlikely ethic. If it's become dull and boring, it's par for the course.

Rolling Stone is completely hopeless. If it hasn't got a pair of (breasts) on the cover it won't sell, it seems. I told (senior editor) David Fricke to abandon it all and go back to the writing. Even if we loved the Rolling Stones, we were well prepared to hear Lester Bangs dissing them because the writing was so incredibly well-crafted and phenomenal. That's gone now.

FISH: Have you ever become too bitter to continue activism, or does that fuel it?

BOB: Oh, I get right f---ed off. That's my constant stance. The point is I can't be gainsaid, because after 18 years I know what I'm bloody talking about. Bono and I are the Statler and Waldorf of pop-star activism. He's sort of enamoured of the world and wants to give it a great big hug, whereas I want to punch its lights out and kick it in the nuts.

FISH: Do you like Garfield? You guys have that "not liking Mondays" connection.

BOB: What?

FISH: Never mind.


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