Bob Geldof was recently told that some music fans today don’t even know who he is. It was, he says, “the best news I’d heard in a long time.”
What it means is that those fans may regard Bob Geldof as a musician, rather than The Guy Who Did Live Aid, the 1985 African relief concert he bemusedly refers to as “The Thing.”
“A lot of people can’t be objective about me as a musician since then,” he says. “They assume my music must be some sort of dabbling. I’ll bring a new album to a station, and they’ll go, `Oh yeah, hey Bob,’ and not even listen to the music.”
His last two records-the 1990 “Vegetarians of Love” and the new “The Happy Club”-are his best work since his early days with the Boomtown Rats, the Irish band with which he started around 1976. “Happy Club,” recorded in 10 days, offers a fine mix of Bob Dylan, traditional Irish music, Van Morrison-esque choruses, nice melodies and plain rock ‘n’ roll, all capped by a powerful anti-fascist growl called “Roads of Germany.”
“I don’t like to write polemics,” Geldof says. “The only other one I can think of was `Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ With this one, I had been traveling through Germany, Bavaria, the Black Forest, incredibly beautiful country, and it all just closed in on me-how Hitler didn’t build this scenic road for people to get to work. He built it to invade Poland.”
When it’s suggested that being well known, but not being a Michael Jackson-level star, has put him in a position where he can record what he wants, he laughs.
“That’s the optimistic interpretation,” he says. “Actually, I do what I want because I don’t sell enough . . . If I were Phil Collins, they’d care.
“Besides, as a rock star I’m useless. I just don’t look good in a limo.”