Originally published in Swine MagazineWhen I see pictures on the news of tiny African babies with flies in their eyes and trails of snot hanging from their noses, with distended bellies which seem to have been directly transplanted from darts playing dwarves, and a look of painful resignation to the uncomfortable and pointless death from starvation which inevitably awaits them, I weep. I weep not just because of the overwhelming tragedy of a baby starving to death whilst I whine about McDonalds leaving the cheese off my burger (seriously though, plain cheeseburger still means I want cheese on it), but because I know that within seconds of this ghastly news being broadcast, an even more abhorrent sight will fill my screen. That of Bob Fucking Geldof.
Bob Fucking Geldof (his official full name, at least in my house) sees the plight of Africans as a giant Bat signal, searching the skies of London for any no-talent, long forgotten nonentity who will heed it’s glow. Except there’s no bat sign lighting up the dreary skies of Ladbroke Grove, just a huge pound sign. “Magazine deals!” it throbs. “TV Shows!” it intones. And who should come running but Bob Fucking Geldof, Africa’s last resort.
BFG’s biography is a slim volume to say the least. Or it would have been if every child in Africa went to bed on a full stomach. Having left the prestigious Blackrock College in Dublin in the mid seventies, he went to work for The Georgia Straight, a left wing free paper based in Vancouver. The firey rhetoric of this hippie pamphlet was the breeding ground of Bob’s fervour, and who better than the Canadians to rabble rouse and feed the flames of revolution. It was this Baptism of fire which gave BFG the temerity to pen one of his two hits, I Don’t Like Mondays, about mass murderer Brenda Ann Spencer. Her record of “killed two, injured nine” puts her just ahead of Beth Jordache in the female killer ratings. The single hit number one in 1979 and that should have been that. Four years of Bob Fucking Geldof was four years too many, but at least it was all over, he could go back to Vancouver and take part in a protest against cuts in arable farming subsidies, or whatever the fuck Canadians care about.
But no! Wait! What is that on the horizon? Yes, it’s a tumult of human suffering, and just like the motion picture of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, BFG’s involved again. After seeing the death and starvation which was destroying African lives, Bob thought it would be a spiffing idea to do a charity record to raise money for the poor mites. And it was a brilliant idea. But why did this tone deaf, gutter mouthed wannabe pikey have to get involved past the inception? Maybe because he felt that Trevor Horn didn’t have the necessary production experience to handle a single release? Trev may have produced Welcome To The Pleasuredome which had just sold over 4 million copies, but Bob had been working on Deep In The Heart Of Nowhere, which went on to sell, er, bugger all! No? Maybe then, Bob felt that the assembled rock stars did not have the media skills to front a campaign such as this. How could shrinking violets like Boy George and Marilyn have coped with the spotlight?
Okay, maybe it was that he felt the artists needed a helping hand, with their relative lack of savvy where the music industry was concerned. True, BFG was on the slippery slope to anonymity, but surely he had some sage advice to offer greenhorns like Paul McCartney, David Bowie, James Taylor and Sting. I mean what could they have known about releasing a record? No? Wait, I’ve cracked it. I know exactly what Bob had to offer the Band Aid single. Desperation.
The starving people in Africa were desperate, but even though they had gone without food for so long that their digestive systems were breaking down their internal organs for sustenance, even though they were literally being eaten alive from the inside out, none of them could match the compounded anguish of a man who would sooner punch his own mother in the face on national television than be anonymous. Pundits marveled at the way he ignored the promotional opportunities for his own album release, preferring instead to use his time in the dimming spotlight to underline the plight of tiny starving babies. Well, duh!
Given the choice between being well know for helping the helpless to eke out their pathetic lives, or for being totally and utterly ridiculed for subjecting the British public to one of the shittest albums ever to make someone chew his own ears off, he went for the kudos?! Well, fuck me backwards if he isn’t a modern day saint. The choice he made was one that anyone else in the entire fucking universe would have. Talk about right place at the right time, he clawed his way up from the pit of eternal musical hellfire to plaster his crater face all over the newspapers and to staple his wretched anatomy to the sidecar of fame. Right place? Yeah, after a good few months frenzied assault on the public psyche.
He traveled further to get the ‘right place’ than any other no mark. He made sure he flew out First Class to the US to appear on the recording of We Are The World. One of the hopeless organizers, currently residing in the Where Are They Now files was one ‘Michael Jackson’, how he managed to get it off the ground without Bob’s help I’ll never know. But still the Shining White Hope wasn’t satisfied. He disagreed with Margaret Thatcher! Can you imagine! It was so much of a national sport at the time that we considered it as a Commonwealth Games event, but good show Bob! You tarnished that halo of hers didn’t you?
Nearly a year ago Bob slipped to his lowest point yet. He hadn’t released an album since 2001, and despite over a million letters of thanks he hadn’t finished foisting his tramp-like visage on us just yet. People were beginning to forget about Bob Geldof, so out came the Band Aid 20 single, just in time to make some money, feed some Africans and put Sir Bob back on the agenda. Fair enough it was actually Midge Ure who had the idea of releasing the record again, obviously thinking that anything Bob could flog like a dead mare, he could flog better. That one backfired didn’t it Midge? He needed you to write the frigging thing in the first place, but try and grab some of that limelight for yourself and he’d chop your arm off. The record was horrible and populated by no-mark flashes in a shit stained pan. Turin Breaks and Danny Goffey? Wow! There truly are stars in my eyes! Maybe more money would have been raised by asking each of the desperate, wannabe saviours to pay fifty grand to appear on the record. That would have seen off Lemar for a start.
Then, just as we thought it was safe to enjoy life again, Live 8 was announced. Live 8 , the most pointless, ego massaging irrelevance since, well, Band Aid 20 was an insult to anyone who ever went without to send money abroad. “We don’t want your money, we want you” intoned the fetid pile of bone that is BFG (now Sir Bob Geldof. Obviously, even though it’s an honorary title, making ‘Sir’ Bob as clueless as ‘Professor’ Phil Redmond). And so a cavalcade of pop mediocrity and reanimated corpses (what, you didn’t seriously think Roger Waters was still alive did you?) were treated to the best publicity that African suffering could buy. On average, those who performed were treated to a 120% rise in album sales. 120%!!!!! And lucky us, even Sir Bob was on hand to perform I Don’t Like Mondays, even though any African artists were sent straight back to Matabeleland for even daring to suggest they should be involved. They weren’t commercially viable enough to take up space on the stage, whereas Bob and the Boomtown Rats are on every teenager’s wall. You can’t walk past a youth club in Britain without hearing 15 year olds discussing the relative merits of Mondo Bongo versus V Deep.
The general consensus on BFG is that wishy washy nonsense of “Whatever you think of the bloke, you have to admire what he’s done.” No, actually we don’t. We know all too well what’s going on in Africa. We knew it in 1984 because it was on the frigging nine o’clock news! We saw the exact same report as Geldof, but we weren’t arrogant enough to think that was our ticket to a lifetime of fame, a knighthood and a noble peace prize nomination. If every child went to bed in Africa having eaten three squares, Bob Geldof would end up in a pauper’s grave. If that isn’t an incentive to help Africa, I don’t know what is.
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