This guy was too busy “saving the world” — in reality, providing musicians with a chance to preen and fight, and making the lives of millions of Africans worse –– to manage his own family. The mother of his numerous children off’d herself.
Now we’re supposed to listen to him again?
Good rule of thumb:
Everything Bob Geldolf says is wrong.
Proceed accordingly.
There is not the smallest suggestion that Geldof ever fell out of love with his teenage Maoism. Not once in Is That It? does Geldof feel obliged to utter the faintest reproof of Communism as a system, let alone as the system which exterminated several hundred thousand Ethiopians with the same callous deliberation that Stalin showed in the Holodomor.
Geldof does, at one point, allow himself in his recollections a brief and hostile reference to “Stalinist” elements in Britain’s pop music magazines, these elements consisting, it would seem, of those who shared his former schoolteachers’ reluctance to take him at his own exalted valuation. Other than that, his ignorance of modern history is as breathtaking as his arrogance about it. The combination, however lucrative for Geldof’s ego, turned out to be literally lethal for those whom he purported to help.
***
If Joe Strummer makes Ray Charles look like Tim Tebow, then Bob Geldolf makes Joe Strummer look like Jonas Salk.
