Bob Geldof - The Years Of The Rat
In the first part of a major interview conducted at last year’s Music Show in the RDS, BOB GELDOF talks candidly about life as an illegal immigrant in Canada, how the Boomtown Rats took on official Ireland and then went on to duke it out with the Pistols and The Clash, and what triggered his involvement in Live Aid. Plus, a look back at Bob and the Rats on the cover of Hot Press.
Niall Stokes, 09 Feb 2011
OK Bob, we’re not gonna pick right through your childhood here you’ll be glad to know – but after you left school you went to Canada and based yourself in Vancouver for a time. Why’d you do that?
Bob Geldof: I’d been working on the M23 in England driving heavy equipment, specifically a big green thing with an engine front and back and a scoop in the middle, that was my speciality and, it was great money and you could listen to music as you went along, I had this big, sort-of tape recorder that I used to listen to music with. I’d heard about jobs in the Arctic Circle, driving these things, digging gold, but they just had men up there and men just drank and fought so the requirement was you had to have a girl with you, and I’d just been dumped (laughs), and she went back to Dublin and so I came back and I got a job down in Ballsbridge in the abbatoir, and while I was there I tried to woo my errant lover with… offal. And you know, the kidneys, the livers, but I think it was the sausages that turned her. And she decided to come back to my loving arms, and we set off for Canada.
Were you writing songs at that stage?
While I’d been in the meat factory I’d written ‘Rat Trap’, about a couple of guys that worked there and a guy called Paul. Anyway, we set off for Canada, went across on the Greyhound, the usual, and I got to Vancouver and I was an illegal immigrant, so while I was getting my illegal papers together, which is quite easy, I mean, I’m sure everyone’s done it, you just send a self-addressed envelope to yourself and you go to the National Insurance and say ‘Look this is where I’m living’ and they give you a National Insurance Card, it takes about a month – and so that was my route up to, and beyond Whitehorse, up in the Yukon, and I was going up there. This was 1973, ‘74. And the deal was they paid you a lot of money, about the equivalent of three grand a week now, or four grand a week. They trained the girls to drive the same stuff on half pay and then after six months they were on full-pay. And you’d work three weeks and they gave you a ten-day break in Florida and flew you back, so… excellent… I was quite happy to be there for the rest of my life with the mosquitos.
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