Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Musician who fronted the Boomtown Rats and, inspired by the Ethiopian famine, organized Band Aid and the Live Aid concert.
On the island
Eight records
In the GardenFavourite
I don't know how he did it actually, because it's like um the equivalent of an impressionistic song. It starts off with this s simple music that's very beautiful, and he builds up this image in the words with this gruff voice.
Lounway Note always brings back to me the smell of dog piss and leaking gas. That was what um the squad in Tuffnell Park smelt of... and Loudon Wainwright... Kept me going and I thought if Mary Maguire and Big Frank Clark are out there, they have it worse.
I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now, is the great line from it. But I could pick really any Bob Dylan song, and it's a this was just the one that popped into my head
My world wouldn't have been possible without the Beatles. I seriously doubt if I'd have been... Abel... To conduct my life as I've conducted it without them.
it was this very raw, very intense music with this rhythm and it seemed to be talking about everything In the world, and I would sit there by myself listening to this guy, I had no idea who he was, somewhere in Chicago, howling.
These Boots Are Made for Walkin'
that beautiful um blonde girl who was on the beach in uh Barbados with me, was my um wife, uh, Paula. Um I still am mad for her... she made a record once with these friends of ours called Heaven Seventeen... It couldn't be anybody else, really. Here's my missus.
Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)
I picked this song, I mean it may be a bit corny picking this song, given it's me, but I just picked one at random, and mainly because I like the way that he uses sort of Jamaican English in this. It's fantastic.
I do like life very much, but at the moment when it ceases to be, I won't mind in the least, as I view myself here in my circumstances as being highly improbable.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:44Do you ever use the title [Sir Bob Geldof]?
I don't, but and the taxi driver on the way over was sir bobbing furiously.
Presenter asks
6:26Do you remember a distinct change in your life then [when your mother died]?
No, I don't. My father had come to me in the morning and... He said, I can't remember exactly, but in words the effect that your mum has gone to heaven He started crying and the fact that he was crying made me cry'cause I'd never seen him cry.
Presenter asks
9:26You got beaten a lot by the priests at school and by your father. What for?
Because I suppose I was a conoclastic. In school I wasn't doing at all well. They thought I was bright and as a result would try and beat me into doing well... my father would formalise beating me. If I got a six he'd beat me once. If I got a five I'd be beaten twice and so on.
Presenter asks
The keepsakes
The book
Samuel Pepys
Because they're big. I could read a day at a time and because I think he was fantastic.
The luxury
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
In the end, if it's not too grand, I'd bring the Metropolitan Museum of New York.
Does [your father] understand [that you wrote him a love letter in your autobiography]?
I think so. I think he's completely bemused... I do sort of understand him. I mean the American publisher said, Does your father understand that you've written him a three hundred and sixty five page love letter? you know. Uh, I wouldn't put it as strong as that, but he had a tough time and he's a stronger man than I.
Presenter asks
19:50Was fame any kind of liberation for you?
Oh, it was so fantastic. Between being on the dole, and eighteen months later to be on a beach in Barbados... I lay back on that beach and... thought about my life as being something so improbable. that it was laughable, but so enjoyable.
Presenter asks
28:23Did you ever give [entering politics] any serious consideration?
No, um No, not at all. I don't I didn't think it interested me and I don't think it does... Being one of, whatever, six hundred odd voices in Parliament subject to party whips would be like being in school again. And I know I couldn't subject myself to that.
“At the dawning of that particular day, it was at a specific moment during the day when I was on stage with my band, the Boontan Rats, and the emotive quality of the day, which I hadn't predicted at all nor planned for, struck me. And it was an electrifying moment to be aware that there was someone in Shanghai or Tierra del Fuego or wherever watching that specific moment.”
“I've I'm very afraid of boredom and so I stay frenetically busy, um to the point of irrit irritating myself to death and exhaustion.”
“It seems to me to be the purpose is to check out what all this stuff is, you know, this Bob Geldof stuff. To test it to its limits, which are less than some people and more than others, so long as. that at the moment when I finally Close my eyes. My last. Coherent thought was M that was interesting, then it will have been worth it and then blessed oblivion.”