davidclensy.com

Interviewing Bob Geldof is a rare honour, but a famous challenge for any journalist. There are support websites set up by battle-weary hacks to offer guidance on the art of surviving a conversation with the Irish rock star-cum-charity icon.

There are probably underground therapy groups to aid recovery for those who have been through the process.

His astonishing articulation, combined with the shortest fuse in the history of human temperament and the focus of an atomic grasshopper brain, make a lethal combination, able to set interviewers sweating profusely and taking up smoking.

It’s a combination that not only made him a suitably arrogant icon for the post-punk years, but also made him a formidable political lobbyist – able to bend the ear of the world’s stoniest leaders.

The 1985 Live Aid concert, which he almost single-handedly instigated and organised, raised more than $245m for famine relief. And this year’s Live8 concerts forced the hand of G8 leaders to pledge an increase in aid to Africa of $25bn by the year 2010.

But in the wake of the biggest concerts the world has ever seen, Bob is looking forward to getting back to a more normal rock star existence. He has just released Great Songs of Indifference, an anthology of his solo albums, and his current tour will bring him to Hull City Hall on December 1.

So what can fans look forward to once they’ve bought their city hall tickets?

“They can expect to see a lanky paddy whining on about his life,” Bob says, before finding a momentary calm to explain: “I’ll be doing a lot of the solo stuff, but I’ll also be going back and doing a lot of the Boomtown Rats stuff too. And I will be storytelling in between songs, because that’s the only way I can sing the songs. I can’t just suddenly switch on an emotion I was feeling 20 or 30 years ago. I have to talk about how the song came about to get into the mood to sing the song. I talk myself into it each time.”

Bob’s calm breaks as quickly as it arrives.

“I won’t do pantomime,” he suddenly roars down the phone. “I won’t do feckin’ pantomime.”

Time to change the subject I sense. This anthology-style box set sounds exciting …

“Yeah, we put the anthology together, and I’m really pleased with it,” he says. “But the Sex, Age And Death album is brilliant,” he adds. “If I had to keep just one it would be that. That said, I don’t like listening to it, because it was a sad time for me and it makes me sad. I don’t like singing those songs live for the same reason.”

It’s not surprising – the 2001 album marked the end of a tragic run of years in which Bob’s private life had been raked through the press following his divorce after Paula Yates left him for INXS frontman Michael Hutchence. In 1997, Hutchence had been found hanged in a Sydney hotel room, possibly as the result of a solitary sexual game, the same night he’d had a row on the phone with Geldof about access to the children. Paula Yates had died of a heroin overdose a year later. But the cathartic energy of the Sex Age And Death recording sessions remains.

“We had so many great songs,” he says. “But I don’t like albums of more than a dozen or so tracks. So there were lots of great tracks that weren’t used. I’ve been putting them together recently, to release them now as a whole other album, which we’re calling SAD Too – get it? SAD – standing for sex, age and death.

“With all the other Live Aid stuff I do, people do tend to forget I’m a songwriter,” he adds sullenly. “After Sex Age And Death people said, Christ I’d forgotten what a great songwriter Geldof is. And that critical reappraisal gave me a lot of confidence again about my writing. Bands like the Strokes and the White Stripes started saying how much they loved my music. That was good.”

Listening through the anthology, melancholy seems a distinctive theme for much of Geldof’s writing.

“There is melancholy running through my songs, but that’s just me,” he says. “I’ve never been Captain Chuckles. People have always known me as broody. After Live Aid a lot of people wanted me to stay forever Saint Bob. But I was just glad to get back to the music – to doing what I love doing, and not spending day and night on the edge all the time worrying about Live Aid.”

Halloween this year marked the 30th anniversary of Bob’s first experience of playing rock music live. Pointing this out to him seems to lighten his mood. The Boomtown Rats’ first gig was in a classroom in an Irish secondary school.

“I can remember it vividly,” he says. “It was the day when this rock ‘n’ roll life just switched on for me.“I was terrified, and was hiding behind a coat, scarf and a cap, as well as standing with my back to the audience.

“But after about three songs I began to hear the sound of applause, and I was gobsmacked. Nobody had ever applauded me for anything in my life, and I knew straightaway I liked it.”

This was rock ‘n’ roll, and it felt good for the young Bob. And according to Bob, it felt even better moments later when a girl from the audience walked up to him and said she wanted to sleep with him.

“I’d heard about that kind of thing happening in England,” he adds. “But I didn’t think it really happened. This was Catholic Ireland – and I was there with my girlfriend. But it all felt good. And yes, I did shag the girl that night.”

Beforehand Bob had only ever read or written about this kind of lifestyle.

“I’d worked as everything by that point from a slaughterman to a navvy, laying the road on the M23,” he says. “But I’d also spent time in Canada writing for a music magazine, until I was thrown out of the country as an illegal. So I’d gone back to Ireland to set up my own music magazine, Hot Press.

“I told a journalist at the time that I planned to change the country with it. I set up an advert-based mag called Buy And Sell to cover the cost of Hot Press, and they were both a big success. They’re still going today.

“If my mates hadn’t turned round and said let’s start a band, that’s what I’d still be doing,” Bob admits, before suddenly snapping, “That’s it, we’re done. Bye.”

And, like a thousand journalists before me, I was left listening to the cleared tone of the line. But that’s rock ‘n’ roll for you.