Bob Geldof Is Back Under Original Guise: Musician

NEW YORK —  Bob Geldof, musician, is back.

Not St. Bob, the humanitarian of British tabloid headlines. Not Sir Bob, knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1986, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize that same year. Not author Bob, who’s already written a best-selling autobiography, “Is That It?” And not businessman Bob, who oversaw millions and millions of dollars in contributions for the starving Third World.

Geldof remains chairman of the board of trustees of Band Aid, although he says the organization will cease to exist fairly soon. But his main focus these days is “The Vegetarians of Love,” his critically acclaimed second solo album.

This is no Boomtown Rats rock ‘n’ roll extravaganza; Geldof has instead assembled a mostly acoustic band featuring accordion, violins, flute, tin whistle, mandolin and ukulele.

“For me, I suppose, it’s simply a reaction to stuff I hear on the radio which I don’t like--basically, house music and New Kids on the Block or Kylie Minogue,” Geldof said in a recent interview.

For the new album, Geldof enlisted an old friend--ex-Rats bassist Pete Briquette--and four traditional musicians he had never met. They recorded 28 songs in five days; any song that didn’t click after three takes was thrown out. Geldof improvised many of the lyrics on the spot.

The spontaneity shows. On “A Gospel Song,” Geldof tells the band “middle eight coming up” during an instrumental break. Geldof asks at the start of another cut, “Are we rolling?” And at the end of “The Great Song of Indifference,” the entire band is heard laughing loudly.

“Indifference” is already a Top 40 hit in Britain. “The last thing everybody expected was this Irish pub song. And it became a big dance hit, you know? Thirteenth-Century dance music,” said Geldof, laughing.

After almost a decade as front man for the New Wave-era Boomtown Rats, Geldof became a household name in 1984 by organizing the cream of British musicians to record “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” to raise money for African famine victims.

That was followed by USA for Africa’s “We Are the World” and the internationally televised Live Aid benefit. For two years, Geldof met with heads of state and political power brokers; the scruffy Irishman was photographed with everyone from Nobelist Mother Teresa to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Geldof looks back on those days with pride tempered by the realization that there was only so much that could be done.

“I mean, I never said we were going to stop world poverty or world hunger. I said it was a Band-Aid. ‘You don’t put a Band-Aid on a gaping wound,’ if I remember, was the quote at the time,” Geldof said.

“That wasn’t the function, to stop world hunger. It was to raise the issue to the top of the political agenda, and we did that.”