Posted by Harley on December 28, 2001 at 01:06:50:
In Reply to: Re: Bob Geldof posted by Jan on December 27, 2001 at 02:36:58:
I think he is an 8. The contrast between Feed the World and his rumoured capacity to have worked very hard to f@#$ over Michael Hutchence and totally control media angles on the Paula/Michael/Bob love triangle strike me as being particularly 8ish ( a demonstration of the healthy and unhealthy sides)
: When we think of his volunteer-work towards third world countries the Self Sacrificial Style is a possibility too. Somehow the way his face looks reminds me of Self Sacrificial persons I know too.
: more on Bob (case text citation):
: case text citation:
: Sir Bob Geldof is nervous about this interview. I know because he told me so, calling me the day after our encounter to clarify comments he had made. “I can usually articulate things but I feel fumbling and crap. I’m actually quite embarrassed,” he admitted. “It’s making me very uncomfortable.”
: This is a side of Geldof the public doesn’t see much. His image is of almost belligerent self-assurance, this latter-day saint with a ready smile and a dirty mouth. Over the erratic and often unlikely course of his 25-year career, we have seen him throwing shapes on Top of the Pops with the Boomtown Rats, swearing at television cameras in righteous anger at man’s inhumanity to man, and being knighted by the Queen.
: But whatever unlikely situation he has found himself in, Geldof seems to carry himself with a kind of fearless conviction, as if he really doesn’t care what others think of him. Ask him, for example, if he is ever fazed by encounters with world leaders and he’ll say, “No. It’s a pain. The Irish understand that authority has to be tolerated and not necessarily respected. I tend to go in a bit grumpy.”
: But our interview, it would appear, is quite another matter. “I am very nervous,” he confesses, with an uncharacteristic hesitancy. “There’s things I’m saying that I really don’t want to say. I don’t want to talk about individuals, necessarily. Awful things were going on and, of course, the press attention compounds it; everyone has an opinion, but I haven’t talked about any of this. Conditions and circumstances were so awful that, unusually for me, I could not find words to express the chasms of grief, and oceans of loss, and universes of loneliness that were occurring. It was just literally unsayable.”
: I am sure you know what Geldof is trying not to talk about. Over the course of the past six years, his many remarkable achievements as a musician, businessman, charity organiser and political lobbyist have been all but overshadowed by the dramatic events of his personal life, ‘the soap opera’ as he refers to it.
: In 1995, after a relationship of 19 years, Geldof’s wife, Paula Yates, left him for INXS singer Michael Hutchence (who, in turn, left his girlfriend, supermodel Helena Christensen). An acrimonious divorce ensued, with a custody battle over their three daughters, Fifi Trixibelle, now 18, Peaches, 12, and Pixie, 10, eventually being settled in Geldof’s favour.
: In 1996 Yates gave birth to Hutchence’s daughter, Tiger Lily, but just over a year later Hutchence was found hanged by his belt in a Sydney hotel room, naked, with his toenails painted red. Geldof had been involved in an angry telephone exchange with him earlier the same night. By then Yates, who had rarely touched alcohol during her years with Geldof, had already begun her remorseless slide into drug and booze-soaked oblivion. She was found dead in her bed of a heroin overdose in September 2000. In a final twist almost too melodramatic for fiction, Geldof was awarded custody of Tiger Lily. Now four years old, she is being raised with her half-sisters by Geldof and his French actress girlfriend, Jeanne Marine.
: “The whole thing is beyond fiction,” admits Geldof, striving to be careful about what he says. “At a certain point the story was so overwhelming; aside from being a personal tragedy it was taking on Shakespearean qualities. There was your rock star, in the classic leathers and limousines sense, your media babe, your supermodel and your living saint. Now, as a dramatis personae what better could be delivered to the papers? I really understood that. But it would take more than the tabloids to write that story – it’s so complex, the personalities within.”
: Return to music
: Geldof has tried to make sense of it in his own fashion, by returning to his first love, the thing he did before he became famous; indeed, the very thing that made him famous. Music. He has recorded a new album, his first in eight years, entitled Sex, Age and Death (to be released by Eagle Records this month).
: “I’m well aware of the implications of the title,” he comments, cautiously. Yet the album contains songs of such emotional transparency that it makes something of a mockery of his public circumspection. Sex, Age and Death is a quite intensely personal, searingly confessional document of a man in a state of crisis and abandonment. “How can it be anything other?” Geldof demands, his voice rising in sudden agitation. “This is all I can do! I don’t have any other songs!” The album does not make for easy listening – and not just because Geldof’s voice, never one of the loveliest things in popular music, has not improved with age. Musically, it spans an eclectic variety of styles that don’t always sit comfortably together. But lyrically it has a nakedness that almost takes the breath away. “What it comes down to is that though I can articulate things in conversation, where I express things best, I think, is in songs,” he says. “The sequence of words and the sounds they make register within and it helps you begin to make sense of yourself. When I listen to the songs, though everyone else may detest them, I kind of go, ‘that’s right’. So no apologies for any of it.”
: Despite such bravado, it becomes apparent during a subsequent phone call that he is concerned about the possible misinterpretation of one song in particular, the opening track, One For Me. With its rolling rhythm, snappy verses and singalong chorus, it is the closest the album comes to a pop song, albeit one that leaves a distinctly sour taste in the mouth. “You’re a lot of laughs, ain’t you babe, you cracked me up, I laughed so much I nearly died,” Geldof snarls, before launching into a quite merciless character demolition of someone few listeners will have trouble identifying. There are references to ‘teenage clothes in see-through sizes’ (which he compares to ‘mutton dressed up on a Sunday plate’), public drunkenness (‘apparently you fall with such good grace’) and photo shoots for celebrity magazines such as OK!, to which he adds the coda, ‘You don’t even need to get your clothes off any more/ You’re a bit too old for that stuff now anyway.’ The chorus, which has the nyah-nyah quality of a playground chant, declares, ‘Ooh, ooh, you should have known better.’ It sounds as if Geldof is having a last, vindictive laugh, a notion he vehemently rejects. “None of the songs were written after Paula died,” he stresses.
: Indeed, when he talks about his ex-wife, the deep affection he holds for her is readily apparent. “Paula had such spirit and style. Whole generations of girls took their cue from this great girl. She could do the most ridiculous and outrageous things and carry it off brilliantly with such aplomb and grace. She made me hoot. To watch very closely this other person emerge who’d lost possibly a sense of balance, and a sense of self... you know, it’s not my place to be disappointed but it was just, what the f- is going on now? I sing, ‘You should have known better’ because... she should have! It’s not that I’m laughing, it’s ‘you’re a lot of laughs’, the show was going on out there and ‘ha ha ha, very funny’, you know? ‘I nearly died.’ In my mind, I did. I couldn’t watch anything, couldn’t read anything, but I heard about it enough. This thing was spiralling down into degradation. You know, ‘Somebody saw you at the party/You did the one where you were falling flat on your face.’ It’s only true. It’s only true.”