Robert Frederick Zenon “Bob” Geldof, KBE (born 5 October 1951) is an Irish singer-songwriter, author, occasional actor and political activist. He rose to prominence as the lead singer of the Irish rock band the Boomtown Rats in the late 1970s and early 1980s alongside the punk rock movement. The band had hits with his compositions “Rat Trap” and “I Don’t Like Mondays”. He co-wrote “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, one of the best-selling singles of all time, and starred in Pink Floyd’s 1982 film Pink Floyd – The Wall as “Pink”.
BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS
Full Name: Robert Frederick Zenon Geldof
Description: Vocalist, Humanitarian, UK
Known For: Lead singer of “BOOMTOWN RATS”
Music Styles: Rock
Location: Dublin, United Kingdom
Date Born: 5th October 1954
Location Born: Dún Laoghaire,, Ireland
CONTACT DETAILS
Web Site: http://www.bobgeldof.info/
YOUTUBE VIDEO
BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILE
Bob Geldof KBE
An Irish singer, songwriter, author, and political activist.
Geldof is widely recognised for his activism, especially anti-poverty efforts concerning Africa. In 1984 he and Midge Ure founded the charity supergroup Band Aid to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. They went on to organise the charity super-concert Live Aid the following year and the Live 8 concerts in 2005. Geldof currently serves as an adviser to the ONE Campaign, founded by fellow Irishman Bono. A single father, Geldof has also been outspoken for the fathers’ rights movement.
Geldof was granted an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II, and is a recipient of the Man of Peace title which recognises individuals who have made “an outstanding contribution to international social justice and peace”, among numerous other awards and nominations.
Geldof was born and brought up in Dún Laoghaire, Ireland, a son of Robert and Evelyn Geldof. His paternal grandfather, Zenon Geldof, was a Belgian immigrant and a hotel chef. His paternal grandmother, Amelia Falk, was an English Jew from London.When Geldof was six or seven, his mother, Evelyn, 41, died of a cerebral haemorrhage.
Bob Geldof attended Blackrock College, where he was bullied for being a poor rugby player and for his middle name, Zenon.[16] After work as a slaughterman, a road navvy and pea canner in Wisbech, he was hired as a music journalist in Vancouver, British Columbia for Georgia Straight.
Musical career
The Boomtown Rats
Returning to Ireland in 1975, he became lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, a rock group closely linked with the punk movement.
In 1978, the Boomtown Rats had their first No. 1 single in the UK with “Rat Trap”, the first new wave chart-topper in Britain. In 1979, they gained international attention with their second UK No. 1, “I Don’t Like Mondays”. This was both successful and controversial. Geldof had written it in the aftermath of Brenda Ann Spencer’s attempted massacre at an elementary school in San Diego, California in 1979.
In 1980, the Boomtown Rats released the album Mondo Bongo. Its single “Up All Night” was a hit in the U.S. and its video was played frequently on MTV.
Geldof became known as a colourful interview subject. The Boomtown Rats’ first appearance on Ireland’s The Late Late Show saw Geldof as deliberately brusque to host Gay Byrne and during his interview he attacked Irish politicians and the Catholic Church, which he blamed for many of the country’s problems. He responded to nuns in the audience who tried to shout him down by saying they had “an easy life with no material worries in return for which they gave themselves body and soul to the church”. He also criticised Blackrock College. The interview caused uproar, making it impossible for the Boomtown Rats to play in Ireland again.
Geldof left the Boomtown Rats in 1986, to launch a solo career and publish his autobiography, Is That It?, which was a UK best-seller.
His first solo records sold reasonably well and spawned the hit singles “This Is The World Calling” (co-written with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics) and “The Great Song of Indifference”. He also occasionally performed with other artists, such as David Gilmour of Pink Floyd and Thin Lizzy. A performance of “Comfortably Numb” with David Gilmour is documented in the 2002 DVD David Gilmour in Concert. In 1992, he performed at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert with the surviving members of Queen at the old Wembley Stadium, singing a song he had co-written with Mercury, called “Too Late God”.
Geldof has also worked as a DJ for XFM radio. In 1998, he erroneously announced Ian Dury’s death from cancer, possibly due to hoax information from a listener who was disgruntled at the station’s change of ownership. The event caused music paper NME (who had been involved in a running feud with Geldof since his Boomtown Rats days—primarily due to his disparagement of The Clash) to call Geldof “the world’s worst DJ”.
Along with U2’s Bono, he has devoted much time since 2000 to campaigning for debt relief for developing countries. His commitments in this field, including the organisation of the Live 8 concerts, kept Geldof from producing any more musical output since 2001’s Sex, Age & Death album.
In 2002, he was listed as one of the 100 Greatest Britons in a poll conducted among the general public, despite the fact that he is Irish.
After Live 8, Geldof returned to his career as a musician by releasing a box set containing all of his solo albums entitled Great Songs of Indifference – The Anthology 1986–2001 in late 2005. Following that release, Geldof toured, albeit with mixed success.
In July 2006, Geldof arrived at Milan’s Arena Civica, a venue capable of holding 12,000 people, to play a scheduled concert to find that the organisers had not put the tickets on general sale and that only 45 people had shown up. Geldof refused to go on stage once he found out how small the attendance was. To offer some compensation for fans, Geldof stopped to sign autographs to those who had shown up. He then played a well-attended free “Storytellers” concert for MTV Italy in Naples in October 2006.
Die Toten Hosen & Bob Geldof performing at the “Deine Stimme Gegen Armut” (Your Voice Against Poverty) concert in Rostock, Germany on June 7th, 2007.
Band Aid
Main article: Band Aid (band)
In 1984, Geldof responded to a BBC news report from Michael Buerk about the famine in Ethiopia by mobilising the pop world to do something about the images he had seen. With Midge Ure of Ultravox he wrote “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” in order to raise funds. The song was recorded by various artists under the name of Band Aid.
In its first week of release the single became the UK’s fastest seller of all time, entering the chart at number one and going on to sell over three million copies, making it the biggest-selling single in UK history up to that point, a title it held for almost 13 years. The single was also a major US hit, peaking at No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100. “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” returned to the UK chart a year later, reaching number three, and eventually it raised over £8 million.
Following this massive success preparations were started for the biggest rock concerts the world had ever seen, the following summer.
Live Aid
Main article: Live Aid
As Geldof began to learn more about the situation, he discovered that one of the main reasons why African nations were in such dire peril was because of repayments on loans that their countries had taken from Western banks. For every pound donated in aid, ten times as much would have to leave the country in loan repayments. It became obvious that one song was not enough.
On 13 July 1985, Geldof and Ure organised Live Aid, a huge event staged simultaneously at the Wembley Stadium in London and John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia. Thanks to an unprecedented decision by the BBC to clear its schedules for 16 hours of rock music, the event was also broadcast live in the UK on television and radio.
It was one of the most monumental stage shows in history, with Phil Collins flying on Concorde so that he could play at both Wembley and Philadelphia on the same day.
During the broadcast of Live Aid, Geldof shocked viewers into giving cash by not only twice mouthing profanities but also by slamming his fist on the table and ordering them not to go out to the pub but to stay in and watch the show.
Nearly seven hours into the concert in London, Geldof gave an infamous interview in which he used the word fuck. The BBC presenter David Hepworth, conducting the interview, had attempted to provide a list of addresses to which potential donations should be sent; Geldof interrupted him in mid-flow and shouted: “Fuck the address, let’s get the phone numbers!” It has passed into folklore that he yelled at the audience, “Give us your fucking money!” although Geldof has stated that this phrase was never uttered. Due to his Irish accent, the profanity was stated to be misheard as “fock” and “focking” respectively. After the outburst, giving increased to £300 per second.
The harrowing video of dying, skeletal children that had been made by photo-journalists setting their films to the tune of “Drive” by the Cars, contributed to the concert’s success.
In total, Live Aid raised over £150 million for famine relief. Geldof was subsequently knighted, at age 34, for his efforts. His autobiography, written soon after with Paul Vallely, was entitled Is That It?. This book achieved further fame for being featured on the General Certificate of Secondary Education examination syllabus in a following year.
Much of the money raised by Live Aid went to NGOs in Ethiopia, some of which were under the influence or control of the Derg military junta. Some journalists have suggested that the Derg was able to use Live Aid and Oxfam money to fund its enforced resettlement and “villagification” programmes, under which at least 3 million people are said to have been displaced and between 50,000 and 100,000 killed. However in November 2010 the BBC formally apologised to Geldof for misleading implications in its stories on the subject of Band Aid, saying it had ‘no evidence’ that Band Aid money specifically went to buy weapons.
Commission for Africa
In January 2004, on a visit to friends in Africa, Geldof came to believe that more people were at risk of starvation there than had died in the famine of 1984/85 which had prompted Live Aid. He rang the British Prime Minister Tony Blair from Addis Ababa. According to the Live 8 programme notes by Geldof’s biographer and friend, Paul Vallely, the Prime Minister responded: “Calm down Bob. … And come and see me as soon as you get back. ”
The result was the Commission for Africa. Blair invited Geldof and 16 other Commissioners, the majority from Africa and many of them politicians in power, to undertake a year-long study of Africa’s problems. They came up with two conclusions: that Africa needed to change, to improve its governance and combat corruption, and that the rich world needed to support that change in new ways. That meant doubling aid, delivering debt cancellation, and reforming trade rules. The Commission drew up a detailed plan of how that could be done. It reported in March 2005. To force the issue Geldof decided to create a new international lobby for Africa with eight simultaneous concerts around the world to put pressure on the G8. He called it Live 8. The Commission’s recommendations later became the blueprint for the G8 Gleneagles African debt and aid package.
Africa Progress Panel
Geldof is a member of the Africa Progress Panel (APP), a group of ten distinguished individuals who advocate at the highest levels for equitable and sustainable development in Africa. Every year, the Panel releases a report, the Africa Progress Report, that outlines an issue of immediate importance to the continent and suggests a set of associated policies. In 2012, the Africa Progress Report highlighted issues of Jobs, Justice and Equity. The 2013 report will outline issues relating to oil, gas and mining in Africa.
Bob Geldof worked closely with DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa), an organisation founded by U2’s Bono in 2002 to promote debt-relief, third world trade and AIDS relief in Africa. It merged with the ONE Campaign in 2008, where Geldof also is very active. In June 2009, on behalf of the ONE Campaign, he co-edited a special edition of the Italian newspaper La Stampa with a view on 35th G8 summit.
Personal life
Geldof’s longtime girlfriend and eventual wife was Paula Yates. Yates was a rock journalist, and later presenter of the music show The Tube which ran from 1982 to 1987. She is known for her in-bed interviews on the show The Big Breakfast, from 1992. Geldof met Yates when she became an obsessed fan of the Boomtown Rats during the band’s early days. They got together as a couple in 1976 when Yates flew to Paris to surprise him when the band was playing there.
Before they married, the couple had a daughter, Fifi Trixibelle Geldof, born 31 March 1983 (and while Geldof was still conducting an affair with the young Claire King). She was named Fifi after Bob’s aunt Fifi, and Trixibelle because Yates wanted a belle in the family. After 10 years together, Geldof and Yates married in June 1986 in Las Vegas, with Simon Le Bon (of Duran Duran) acting as Geldof’s best man. The couple later had two more daughters, Peaches Honeyblossom Geldof (known as Peaches Geldof) on 13 March 1989, and Little Pixie Geldof (known as Pixie Geldof) on 17 September 1990. Pixie is said to be named after a celebrity daughter character from the cartoon Celeb in the satirical magazine Private Eye, itself a lampoon of the names the Geldofs gave to their other children. Geldof has stated that his children find his music ‘crap’ and him an ’embarrassment’.
In February 1995, Yates left Geldof for Michael Hutchence, the lead singer of INXS, whom she had first met back in 1985 when she interviewed him on The Tube. Geldof and Yates divorced in May 1996, and Yates moved in with Hutchence. Hutchence was found hanged in a hotel room on 22 November 1997. Geldof soon after went to court and obtained full custody of his own three daughters and has since become an outspoken advocate of fathers’ rights. After Paula Yates’s death from a drug and alcohol overdose in 2000, Geldof became the legal guardian of Tiger Lily Hutchence, believing it best that she be raised with her three half-sisters. In 2007, Geldof formally adopted her.
Regarding his Jewish ancestry, in an interview with the Manchester Jewish Telegraph, Geldof said “I was a quarter Catholic, a quarter Protestant, a quarter Jewish and a quarter nothing – the nothing won.”
Geldof currently resides in Battersea, south London with his partner, French actress Jeanne Marine, and Tiger.
In 2014, Geldof hopes to become the first Irish person in space as he is set to be one of the first ever astronauts on the Space XC commercial service, a $100,000 per person flight.
On 7 April 2014, his daughter Peaches died at the age of 25. Geldof stated the family was “beyond pain” after he confirmed the news of her death. Geldof announced his engagement to Jeanne Marine, his partner of 18 years, on 1 May 2014.
Wealth
According to The Sunday Times Rich List, Geldof was worth £32 million in 2012.
The Financial Times said in September 2012 that Geldof could face a large tax bill, after HM Revenue and Customs closed an investigation into investment vehicles used by wealthy individuals.