A Conversation with Bob Geldof – HuffPost 9.19.14

BG: We grouped up about a year ago actually for the Isle Of Wight festival which, along with Glastonbury, are the two big festivals here. It was weird, though. Like everybody I said, “I’ll never do that.” The solo thing I’ve got going was doing great, I brought out a record called How To Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell or something and it did very well. It got awards and all that stuff and I was touring that. Then two of the Rats came and said, “Look, would you think about doing this?” and I said, “Look, we’ve talked about this before.” If the past is another country it’s not one that I wish to visit. I lost my passport a long time ago. You can’t revisit old glories; they turn out to be not so glorious really, revisited. But they said, “Look, we’ve got this offer for the Isle of Wight.” The Isle Of Wight isn’t where I popped my rock ‘n’ roll cherry, but I saw Hendrix and The Doors and The Who and Leonard Cohen and all of these amazing people in 1969-70 with hundreds of thousands of others. Suddenly, my vanity was piqued. Playing on that legendary stage–I wasn’t going to do that a solo thing. I think the regrouping came about because of vanity, curiosity and cash. The vanity with the Isle of Wight, the curiosity was, “Were we any good? Was that all bulls**t? Was that me shooting off as usual?” And the cash was always handy. I said if it felt like pantomime, if it felt like nostalgia, I wouldn’t do it, and they said, “Okay, well let’s give it a try.”