Bob Geldof: Jack of all trades

By PAUL VALLELY

While the protests raged outside the G8 summit in Genoa, inside, quietly talking to world leaders, was the dishevelled figure of Bob Geldof, patiently pursuing his campaign to cancel the debt of poorer nations.

Geldof would have to be counted in the richer section of humanity, but it is a measure of his skilful husbandry of his own reputation that many people were surprised this month that the sometime rock star had struck a deal to list his media company on the London Stock Exchange. A reverse takeover arrangement will make his 10 Alps Broadcasting firm worth about £9 million ($31 million).

So successfully has he continued to nurture his "scruffy rebellious youth" image that it is easy to forget that Geldof is now a middle-aged businessman with greying temples and a daughter who is fast approaching the age he was when he formed the Boomtown Rats and set out on the road to stardom.

We tend to set in aspic images of people we meet only through a media lens distorted with the fog of celebrity. But Geldof can astutely manipulate that tendency to his own advantage.

Almost two decades ago I ghosted Geldof's autobiography, Is That It? Having kept in touch with him ever since, I have a singular inside track on the disparity between the private reality and the public image.

Bob has always been a bit of a hustler - right from his pre-punk days, when he bluffed his way into rock journalism in Canada, down to the succession of deals his various companies have done out of public sight in his post-pop years. We had met when I was Africa correspondent for the Times, covering the great famine. Geldof read my reports and his response to the African tragedy - organising Band Aid, a collective of top pop musicians who made a charity record that became the biggest-selling single of all time, and then Live Aid, a simultaneous concert in London and Philadelphia that created the largest television audience the world had ever seen - raised $US150 million.

Later, I travelled with him to decide how and where the money should be spent. And when, after two years of unpaid labour on behalf of the world's poor, he was flat broke we sat down together to write the book.

Whenever the media write about anything of which the reader happens to have direct experience, the shortcomings of journalism become all too evident. The public and private life of Geldof is a particularly dramatic example. He and his archly provocative then wife, the late Paula Yates, were tabloid fodder from the start, with lifestyles as extravagant as the names of their daughters: Fifi Trixibelle, Peaches and Pixie.

It was painful to see Geldof, in private, through the sad saga of Yates leaving him. He was wracked by the anguish of a divorce writ, woven through with fantastical, malicious allegations. He made Herculean efforts to accommodate increasingly erratic demands for access to the children, while insisting that they retain some semblance of a normal routine.

He was distressed that he had been the last person to whom Paula's lover Michael Hutchence spoke on the phone - in a row over access - before the singer was found dead in a hotel room in Sydney. He was devastated when Paula was last year found dead at her Notting Hill home, following an overdose.

The wild stories printed by the tabloids often bore no resemblance to the facts. But Geldof said almost nothing in public, and in private behaved as well as most of us could have hoped to.

It is not just his private life that has been subjected to wilful misrepresentation. Last year a Channel 4 documentary attacked Geldof for his Live Aid work, claiming his "well-intentioned" aid operations had inadvertently caused more suffering than they alleviated and that Geldof had been hoodwinked by Ethiopia's Marxist dictator. The fact that Geldof and his advisers knew and weighed many of these so-called "revelations" at the time was conveniently ignored.

His counter-blast on the programme spoke as eloquently in vindication of his humanitarian work as did his dignified silence about his private life. But the interface between his musical and business interests is a different matter.

Part of the problem is that pop music is an ephemeral world, and Bob has never come to terms with his own standing. In 1979 his single I Don't Like Mondays was No 1 in 32 countries. Bob would have liked to continue to reinvent himself in the pop world, but his subsequent pop projects have been far less successful. "I'm still quite big in Germany," he has told me forlornly.

The paradox for Geldof will probably always be that he has made the most money from the work he cares least about. But there is a bit of myth-making here. Geldof likes to say of his various ventures - be they pop music, television production, internet travel or his latest media and events company - that they arose only out of his anger at the inadequacy of what was available.

"I start things because what I see is crap and it makes me angry," he once said. "I started the Rats because all the records I heard were crap. I did Live Aid because what was happening was crap. I started Planet 24 (which produced Channel 4's money-spinning Big Breakfast tabloid television programme) because everything on TV was crap. And I'm starting the internet company because I am angry at all the crap on the net."

But he was also astute enough to realise that anger is never enough. Just as he wheeled in a ghost-writer to help with his autobiography, so he was shrewd enough, when he launched Planet 24 in 1992, to do so by merging his company, Planet Pictures, with 24 Hour productions, run by Charlie Parsons and Waheed Alli. They had the creative and business acumen to match Geldof's talent for spinning off ideas that he did not have the stamina to carry through.

Between them they turned Planet 24 into one of the hottest programming companies, and made Geldof a cool £5m when he eventually sold his stake in the company to Carlton.

Similarly, his internet travel company, Deckchair.com, may have been inspired by the problems he encountered when trying to use the internet to book a last-minute holiday. But he was canny enough to do it in conjunction with James Page, one of the founders of Eidos, the software company that created Lara Croft. "The first thing to say," said Geldof when interviewed for the first time by a financial journalist, "is that I'm a [deleted] useless businessman." And the multimillionaire then went on to talk about the detail of a reverse takeover and how he hadn't found it easy.

A useless businessman? Perhaps. But recently Prima Baby magazine asked its reader mums to vote for the best celebrity mum. The surprise winner was Bob Geldof, whom the readers dubbed an "honorary mum" in honour of his decision to adopt his ex-wife's orphaned daughter, Tiger Lily. Perhaps if Geldof continues on his present trajectory the business world may find it necessary to find a new tag to describe him, too.