Bob Geldof. Photo: Supplied
Bob Geldof, the rock legend behind Band Aid and Live Aid, is looking forward to heading to our shores early next year for shows celebrating his life and continues to bat off accusations of 'white saviour complex'.
Live Aid, one of the largest satellite link-ups and television broadcasts of all time, reached an estimated audience of nearly 2 billion people in 1985 in 150 nations.
It was the biggest aid programme ever mounted, raising millions of dollars in aid and saving a claimed 2 million lives in Africa in the mid-1980s, after an Ethiopian famine, the worst of the 20th century, in the middle of the longest running war of the 20th century.
The movement snowballed from the release of charity single 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' by Band Aid, a project initiated by Geldof, who was already well-known as the lead singer and composer for Irish rock band The Boomtown Rats. It ultimately inspired 'We Are The World', written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie.
Geldof says it was in response his feelings of "disgust, rage, anger, shame and horror" to a BBC report on the famine.
"It just went crazy around the world. The Americans called me up and said will I come over and do one with them?
Bob Geldof: Songs and Stories from an Extraordinary Life
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"Then it struck me as being quite obvious that you need to take these two brother records, which were now the biggest selling records around the world, join them together and do a concert using the common language of world, which at that point had become pop music, and talk about something that would, if it had continued, would've been a mortal blow to the human corpus.
"We came in the punk period of rock'n'roll so our songs were about things, whether it was us or the Pistols or The Clash or whatever, and so I was always political … the Rats, our hits are always about something, they're not 'yummy, yummy, yummy', you know, so I responded to something that I would normally respond to."
However, some critics have argued recently that these projects - as well as their retellings like the Just For One Day musical based on Live Aid - showcase 'white saviour complex'. Geldof has hit back, saying that's woke "nonsense".
Bob Geldof organised the historic Live Aid concert in 1985. Photo: Supplied
'I've never done a one-man show'
Now, the 73-year-old will revisit never seen footage and untold stories from across his nearly 50-year musical career in his show, which he says he has renamed to "Life WTF?"
"It starts in a couple of weeks with the anniversary of the Band Aid record and then next year, 40th anniversary of Live Aid, the 50th anniversary of the [Boomtown] Rats, the BBC are doing three one-hours rescreening of the concert, CNN America are doing four 45-minutes rescreening the concert, and the Rats are [doing] a big tour, big festivals in Europe in the summer.
"It's very different, the other stuff I can do second nature, but I've never done a one-man show, I've never stood on a stage by myself.
"I'm looking forward to it but at the moment, I'm really intellectually entertained by noodling in my head, what is this thing, how do I wrestle it to the ground so when pitch up in New Zealand it's fully coherent.
"That'll be a break for me in the middle of next year, it won't be a chore, it'll be something fun that I want to do."
Prior to his global fame from Live Aid and while touring with The Boomtown Rats in New Zealand, a young journalist came to his Dunedin hotel room to interview him, but his tape recorder failed him. The singer sat down on the floor and helped him to get it to work.
That journalist is now Sunday Morning host Jim Mora.
"I'm surprised that it worked because I'm a complete technophobe," Geldof says.
"I tell you why probably I was sympathetic to you. People forget, well they don't know, I used to do your job. I had been the music editor of an underground paper in Vancouver, Canada, called The Georgia Straight … so I knew very well the panic that happens.
"I used to pretend that things were going great, knowing full well I was losing an interview with George Harrison of the Beatles, literally, you know, so I just invented the interview anyway."
Tickets are now available for 'An Evening with Bob Geldof' on 28 March at Auckland's Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre and on 29 March at Wellington's Michael Fowler Centre.
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