My culture picks: Bob Geldof

22 February 2018

Musician and activist Bob Geldof is also the writer of A Fanatic Heart, a documentary exploring the life of Nobel Prize-winning poet WB Yeats. With the documentary now out on DVD, Geldof talks to Front Row about what's capturing his cultural imagination.

The Speckled People is Hugo Hamilton's memoir about growing up in 1950s Dublin with a German mother and an Irish nationalist father.

Geldof says: "I’ve just finished a book by a man called Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People. And it is exactly what reading is meant to be. It is unputdownable simply because of its language.

"The old guitar player in the Boomtown Rats just sent it to me. Then I read the reviews and they were like, ridiculous. And then I started reading it and it’s so brilliant! I mean you literally just want to stop and reread a sentence. It is just weighted so perfectly.

"He’s my age and I wondered why I didn’t know this guy, because obviously he lived near me and stuff. I rang Gerry [Cott], the ex-Rats guitar player and said, 'Did you know this guy?' and he said, 'Yeah', that he bumped into him twice. He was sort of an odd cove, but you don’t get that from the book.

"Anyway, I don’t think many people know it and I can’t recommend something more thoroughly for anyone just for the beauty of the language. It's an odd little book but it's got great truth."

Photo: Irish writer Hugo Hamilton | Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

Directed by Martin McDonagh, the film charts a mother’s struggle for justice in a small town in Midwest America. Three Billboards picked up five Baftas, including Best Film, Best Screenplay and Best Actress in a Leading Role.

"I loved it!", says Geldof, "Obviously Frances McDormand should win the Oscar for it. It all centres around her and her performance. It is thin gruel if you were to tell people the basic plot, but it’s not about that. It is about other stuff."

And the very individual, esoteric things that McDonagh does? "This is the only reason left to go to the cinema, when you've got characters explored over weeks and weeks, like in Breaking Bad or Mad Men or something like that on Netflix. What is cinema for? It can do, as Spielberg discovered, the huge, big, extraordinary explosion."

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was released in the UK on 12 January 2018.

British painter Rose Wylie creates energetic large-scale paintings on canvas. Quack Quack was her first institutional solo exhibition in London.

Geldof says: "I saw Rose Wylie’s show at the Serpentine. I encountered her about 25 years ago because she lives near me in Kent but I had gone to see her husband’s stuff. And she very diffidently came and said, ‘Actually I paint as well, Bob’. And I said, ‘OK, great, show me’ and I enthused more about her stuff. To which her husband, now dead, was a little angry about.

"I'm glad to see that she is in the Serpentine. Well worth visiting. It looks effortless. It looks almost childish. She’s been doing this for a long time but there is something going on again and I’d love to put my finger on it but I can’t."

Running for seven seasons, Mad Men is an award-winning drama series set in the world of advertising in 1960's New York.

Geldof says: "The missus is bingeing but I’m going through it slowly. It took me a while, I thought every episode was the same. I’ve been told that they’ve got it all right. Everyone’s smoking: what do they do to the actors? I mean, what do they sign up to? ‘Look, it’ll be eight years if this works by the way, do you smoke? No, you've got to smoke’. And what do they do, sign off health insurance on it? But aside from that, now I’m in it I think it’s relatively fascinating. I do look forward to it but I couldn’t do a Breaking Bad on it."

"I like box sets, I don’t want to stream. I like to keep excellence on my shelf because when I look at it I’ve got a library, you know, and I sit in the library, not reading, just excited by all those things in front of me that I’ve read. I can’t remember but I remember that book with that thing excited me and thrilled me but I don’t know what it is, so I’m surrounded by the potential of excitement."

Mad Men is available to watch on Netflix, or to purchase as a box set for your library.