Why Bob's back

The Geldofs are off on a family outing. Bob is sitting calmly at the wheel while the kids are riotously competing for control of the car stereo. Fifi, 19, is into Ryan Adams and Counting Crows. Peaches, 13, is the teenage rebel fixated on The Who. Pixie, 12, is addicted to the song Leader of the Pack, which she plays every day before school, doing dance routines with her sisters, while six-year-old Tiger Lily wants nothing but Britney.

It is Bob's paternal task to produce harmony from this chaos. "If I want unanimity in the car, I stick on Nirvana's Nevermind or a bit of Bob Marley," he says. "They are the only ones where I know everyone will shut up."

Bob Geldof has never had much trouble getting people to shut up and listen. Those of us who watched Live Aid in 1985 might not remember his musical performance in much detail, but the indelible image of the day remains Geldof in the studio impatiently demanding that we give him our f***ing money.

There are, by his own admission, many different Bobs. "You get Boomtown Bob, you get your Big Breakfast Bob, your Band Aid Bob, Book Bob, The Wall Bob - that's a big one, people underrate that one - and you get your Bob and Paula," he says.

People are always giving him cheery greetings in the street, shaking him by the hand and slapping him on the back, and by now he can pretty much predict which Bob they expect to meet. Usually, it's that same impatient, expletive-strewn Bob. "A lot of them get disappointed when I don't say, 'Oh f*** off !'" he laughs. "If I'm irritable and they ask for an autograph and I do say 'F*** off !', they whisper excitedly to their friends, 'He said it, he told me to f*** off !'"

Today's Bob, sitting in a record company office in Wandsworth, wearing a black corduroy suit, black dress shirt open at the collar to reveal a large, bejewelled gold crucifix, and black loafers with no socks, is the one we first met back in the days of punk rock and might have forgotten about: Pop Star Bob.

Yes, in addition to raising money for charity, campaigning against Third World debt and for the rights of divorced fathers to get custody of their children, and running a broadcasting-company, Geldof is still a musician. It is, he says, his defining activity. Next month, he will be back on stage in London for the first time in a decade, singing songs from his last solo album, the grimly self explanatory Sex, Age and Death.

Making the record, he insists, was not a catharsis. Going back onstage to sing the songs, however, finally brought a degree of closure to the period of unbearable tragedy that began when his wife, Paula Yates, left him for the singer Michael Hutchence in 1995, after 19 years together.

The details are well documented. Hutchence and Paula had a daughter, Tiger Lily, in 1996. Hutchence died in 1997, Paula died in 2000, both deaths, it seems, self-inflicted.

Tiger Lily now lives with her three half-sisters, Geldof, and his partner of seven years, 36-year-old French actress Jeanne Marine, who found fame in Braveheart. At first, " overwhelmed by pain", Geldof had no wish to listen to music at all, let alone to make it again. "I had no desire to hear," he says. "I was incapable of hearing, literally mute with terror." But, eventually, he realised it was through music that he could express what words could not do.

"Artistically, it would have been disastrous not to have dealt with this whole chronic experience of five, six, seven years - desperate beyond measure, extreme beyond what you can imagine," he says. "And that isn't being grandiose. Two of the three people died. That is tragedy in excelsis. It's not a pleasant experience doing the songs live and I can't listen to the record, but for me it is wholly accurate. The there and then becomes the here and now. And I've no wish to be in the there and then again."

Yet he has an inexplicable compulsion to revisit that time and place. "I don't understand why that should be so but I do understand that gigs always have been for me a catharsis. Emotionally, it's a purge. Psychologically, it's levelling. Physically, it's exhausting. Financially, it's rewarding. So in every sense you are depleted but complete.'

His life may be on an even keel now, but Geldof seems driven by the desire to make it better. Like any parent, he's concerned about how his children will grow up under his influence. He distils his view of parenthood as follows: "You do as good as you can do, knowing, indeed hoping, that your children will react against you. That's absolutely what I hope."

And what will they be reacting against? What kind of father is Bob Geldof? He pauses to consider the question before answering with disarming honesty: "I'm fairly strict - they would probably say very! Sometimes I shout too much, but I do that to everyone and I really wish I didn't. There are a lot of moral strictures because I kind of believe in that stuff."

He is working to have the custody law - currently seen to favour mothers - changed to give fathers a better deal. "I think the law is a sort of legal pooper-scooper: it runs around behind society trying to put parameters around the morality that society finds comfortable for itself. So society will always run ahead of the law.

"The net result is that you've got blatant discrimination and open injustice. Things like that exercise me. When I confront them I get annoyed. My thing is, 'let's go and change this.'

"I am very direct and not in any way enamoured of authority or stuff like that." Ever the self-analyst, he gives a dry laugh. "It's kind of childish at this stage of my dotage."

That passionate attitude is, perhaps, the legacy of punk: that era in the late Seventies when pop groups believed they were making great political statements. Not Geldof, who had already set up one of Ireland's first anti-apartheid groups when he formed the Boomtown Rats in 1975. "Punk was this proto-Thatcherite outburst. The times were definitely going to produce radical politics and they did. Similarly, I think Live Aid in the mid-Eighties flew in the face of that orthodoxy of the individual, the 'greed is good' - the Reaganomics - none of which I object to, particularly. Be a yuppie, get your wedge, but the concomitant right to have and hold your money comes with obligations."

He says he takes no particular personal pride in Live Aid, which he launched with Midge Ure and which most people would regard as one of the defining events in the history of the past 25 years.

He had not expecteded an entire generation to become radicalised by a pop spectacular that reached every corner of the globe and raised - and still raises - more than £100 million for famine relief in Ethiopia, a crisis currently recurring.

"We created a generation who believed it was possible to shift the agenda, that the individual was not powerless, that you were not helpless in the face of monstrous human events, that you could take a situation that was nowhere - nowhere! - on the international agenda and shift it right to the top," says Geldof.

"I hadn't really thought about that but the moment it was over I understood that the great power was the political lobby it created. It allowed me to tool around the world, double the amount of money for a start, but certainly start talking about the political agenda. So since then you've had quite literally the global political agenda being nothing but what Live Aid talked about.

"Maybe it just articulated the moment, but certainly, whether it's Genoa, Bonn, Monterey, Kyoto or Johannesburg, that's the agenda talked about at that moment - the disparity between poor and rich.

"There was a tangible connect which I hadn't predicted and couldn't have foreseen, so I can't take any pride in that. But I do think the agenda shifted, and now we have a generation of Live Aid babies in power: Blair was one year in Parliament then, Clinton watched it all day, Bush saw a couple of hours.

"These people were of a generation who were aware of this thing and now they are in power, so you can push the agenda along. You're talking to people who utterly understand the emotional connect with this event and what it was talking about, and have taken it on board as policy."

It must be hard enough bringing up four children, running a TV production company and performing 150 gigs so far this year without all the globetrotting trips to popes and presidents, but Geldof feels compelled to keep it up. "I didn't ask for the f***ing thing," he says. "It just turned out to be a big deal. And so that becomes the gig. And it would be wholly irresponsible to say that's enough."

As African politics return to our front pages with Zimbabwe in turmoil and the fresh famine in Ethiopia - the very same crisis that he brought to our attention - Geldof remains critical of the response. "The African leaders have been really disappointing, frankly, as have the Europeans," he says. "I feel the same anger and dismay and I don't know when that stops. I'd love it to stop."

He says he has no remaining ambitions because he never had any: "Never had that coherent idea that I wanted to be this or do that." His life, he often says, has become a soap opera. "Things happen to me in extremes. They don't happen in moderation. And I get tired of that. And I don't necessarily understand it." He wishes that people would see him first and foremost as a musician, but understands that his other activities make a greater impact. "Once you go into another area, your fame, your notoriety, becomes exponential. So that's what happens with me."

Last year, Geldof celebrated his 50th birthday with a big party, proud to reach the landmark. "I never thought I'd get there, never thought I'd get there with a bit of money, never thought I'd get there still being able to do the thing which I absolutely love, which is central to me, and that's the music. And I thought, 'f***ing hell, you've survived.'"

A sadness passes across his face. "Just about."

Bob Geldof is at the Bloomsbury Theatre on 5 December, 020 7388 8822.