Rat still Live and kicking
BACK in 1989, Fianna Fáil councillors decided to block an award of the Freedom of the City of Dublin to Bob Geldof, on the grounds that the inspiration behind the hugely successful Band Aid single and Live Aid concerts for Africa was "still young and volatile."
The lead singer of the Boomtown Rats is no longer young, but there are plenty of rattled people in high places who would be happy to describe him as "volatile."
Among these are the organisers of the latest G8 summit at Gleneagles, where world leaders escape their electorates to enjoy a banquet or two, photo-calls and some wind-baggery, alongside one of the finest golf courses on the planet.
Those leaders, too, will have groaned at the news that the pop star is summoning a million people to the Edinburgh area for a march to pressure the Big Eight leadership to sign up to a long-awaited debt relief and aid package for Africa.
Geldof is not, however, summoning people to the barricades. His heroes are the velvet revolutionaries, men like Nelson Mandela.
Four years ago, he used these words to condemn the violence at the Genoa G8 Summit: "Though it is OK to bang your fist on the table, it is not OK to put your fist in the face of your opponent."
He prefers to focus on Africa, the continent he has got to know since he was first jolted into action by Michael Buerk's BBC reports from Ethiopia back in 1984.
For some years now, he has worked alongside Bono to promote the 'Drop the Debt' campaign, while arguing that the continent needs a lowering of trade barriers as much as a big increase in aid transfers.
He has proposed a Marshall Plan for Africa designed to jump-start a continent that has witnessed a 25% drop in per capita GNP over the past 20 years.
Geldof has followed Bono in attempting a touch of flattery. He has praised both Blair and Bush for their efforts to assist the continent. He may have gagged, but he knows better than most that these are two leaders now on the political home straight, looking to their historical legacy and not to the next poll.
The "Drop the Debt" campaign has been criticised on the basis that debt cancellation will benefit corrupt local elites who will divert the funds thus released into further military adventures and personal wealth-creation projects.
Geldof's response is that without serious wealth transfers, civil society will not develop and corruption will remain embedded. Much surely will depend on how that transfer occurs, however.
Around the time of the first Live Aid concerts in 1985, The Boomtown Rats were labelled a band in decline and Geldof a man in search of a new mission.
The Rats finally ran out of sewer room in 1986, but they had made their mark as the first "new wave" band. Their lead singer summed them up as follows: "I know that the Boomtown Rats were of minor importance, but we were the first to post these Lutheran ideas on the church door...we spoke out against that de Valera cosy consensus of Church and State."
Geldof is hardly more lavish in his compliments about the Ireland of 2005.
He makes no secret about his preference for life in London over its "parochial" counterpart across the Irish Sea and has hit out at "all that dreadful nonsense about the Celtic Tiger."
"I'll tell you who the real ' tigers' were...It's the men and women who came to Britain in the 1950s and are forgotten about" words which have some resonance in a week of shaming disclosures about this generation's treatment of our elderly.
But if the singer-campaigner can be contemptuous about our pretensions to affluence, he has the well-developed antennae and energy of the successful entrepreneur.
The Geldofs are a well-travelled crew. Three of Bob's grandparents came from overseas. His grandfather moved from Belgium to set up a restaurant.
Bob's father, Bob senior, travelled the Irish countryside, selling towels.
His youngest child learned early on to be self-sufficient but at a cost.
Following the early death of his mother, Evelyn, when Bob was seven, he developed asthma but he also believes that the experience taught him to be "independent and organisational."
An academic flop as a schoolboy, he soon found his feet, working as a builder and later as a music journalist in London and Vancouver. Ejected from Canada as an illegal, he returned to Dublin and tried to persuade a bank manager to lend him money to set up Buy and Sell. The manager told him to "come back when you are 40." The return trip never happened.
By his mid-thirties, Bob was a celebrity a skint celebrity.
He may have helped raised more than $100 million for Live Aid, but soon after, he experienced Armageddon with the failure of a concert tour.
In 1988, he was earning £80,000 from a series of milk ads, but by then, the foundations of an altogether more significant commercial career had been laid with the establishment of Planet Pictures in 1986.
A few years later, following a merger with Twenty Four Hour Productions, Planet Productions was born. In 1992, Planet launched "The Big Breakfast", an innovative Channel 4 TV breakfast show hosted by Chris Evans.
The Big Breakfast is viewed as one of the most innovative TV programmes of the 1990s, an outrageous irreverent departure from the comfy sofa and woolly jumper breakfast programme norm.
It was on this show that Bob's late wife Paula famously encountered the INXS singer Michael Hutchence, a dalliance which precipitated the end of their marriage and eventually led to Paula's early death.
In 1999, the owners sold Planet to Carlton Communications. Bob netted £5m in the process.
Geldof also made a killing from a dotcom venture, the online travel company deckchair.com, in 2001. He is currently involved in a large media and event company, Ten Alps, which listed on the London Stock Exchange in July 2001 following the reverse takeover of Osprey Communications Plc.
Ten Alps runs a global events business. It makes documentaries through the highly regarded 'Brooke Lapping' production team. Clients include Microsoft, EMI and the BBC and number around 60 in total.
Revenues in the six months to October 31 last amounted to just under £12m, with pre-tax profit of £72,000.
Geldof's involvement in WAP mobile phones disappointed, but he scored an early big hit in the emerging reality TV market through his co-ownership of Castaway Productions, which developed the series "Survivor" a huge hit in America.
But now he is back doing what he does best shaking things up, jarring consciences, rattling those tins and forcing statesman to start delivering on all the fine words.
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