Hia, I'm from the West Midlands in England, quite near to London.

No-one I know from school even knows about Bob Geldof or The Rats, or anyone else from around that time for that matter. I think it's a real shame that more people our age don't recognise what a great person Bob Geldof is. I also like David Bowie and Duran Duran; much better than nowadays music I think!

haha..yeah, how young is young? :) well..speaking for myself I´m turning 18 this spring, guess that´s pretty young..;)

oh yes..thank heaven for reissues..what would we do without them...young and old fans, that is!

well...my first favorite band were the pink floyd, then I saw the Wall and sort of got hooked on Bob, so when I saw sex, age & death in a store a month later...well, the rest is history :)

so, may I ask...did you go to gigs and stuff...back then? ;)

Well I have know for quite a while about the Liveaid/Bandaid stuff, and have known for ages that he sings, maybe it's me i'm just odd, but I proberbly picked it up from my sister, she likes all the 70's/80's stuff!

so there you go, thats how! lol

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Originally posted by: Hayley
"Same here really, no one really seems to take any notice when you talk about the Rats or Bob, I mean they're just like yeah ok, I like him but no one else seems to! WHY? Half the people at my school haven't even heard of him !!! Hayley x  "

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Ah, that old chestnut. The reasons are numerous.

1. Band Aid/Live Aid/The Big Breakfast : Tough as it is for all of us to swallow, for Geldof the greatest success has been (no pun intended!) as a political campaigner & media mogul. This has pushed his earlier ten year career with the Boomtown Rats into the shade, despite them being the second biggest selling band of the Punk & New Wave era (the biggest incidentally were the Stranglers - & they're still going, surprisingly!) in the UK and having one of the biggest selling songs worldwide of all time with "I Don't Like Mondays".

2. Journalists : Geldof fell out with most of the music press because he got into a long protracted feud with The Clash, in particular Joe Strummer - whom was a nice enough bloke but had a nasty habit of putting down bands he saw as "competition". Not that he was alone - Dave Vanian of The Damned did the same - but a lot of music journalists (especially Tony Parsons & Julie Burchill, BOTH of whom were believed to have a crush on Joe ) treated every word Joe said as sacred. Bob - never one to miss a battle of words - was always better at the cutting put down than most, and he tore The Clash to pieces in the mainstream press (ie. they were a punk "boy band" who thought themselves the new Stones), something none of his other victims dared to. Geldof was never forgiven for it, particularly by "trendy-lefties" (ie. those saying left-wing view to look "cool", not out of conviction) who idolised The Clash as a sort of thinking man's street gang, whilst sneering at fans of, say, Abba, without appreciating the irony - at least the Abba fans were into them for the music...

3. Geldof's tendancy to slag off his own music (mainly to placate certain media organisations in order that they will give him good coverage for whatever charitible cause he's doing this week). Anyone that slags off their own work should not be too surprised if no one then buys it. In particularly, he slags off his singing...er, Bob, can't you remember what the others sounded like back in the late 70s/early 80s? Don't even mention today, when you've audio mixing devices to smooth the worst vocals in the world!)

4. Virtual Unavailability of Back Catalogue Until 2005 : 'Nuff said. In that time, vinyl was all but replaced by CDs the decade before. The Virgin & HMV stores in Glasgow still find themselves running out of copies of "The Fine Art Of Surfacing". Most of those ordering their stock will have been unaware that this album got a gold disc in its times & saw three Top 10 singles, & so understocked.

5. The slowing down & then stopping of recording/touring activities from 1992 until 2001. In that time, Britain had two changes of Prime Minister, Scotland & Wales their own Parliaments, & Heart of Midlothian even won the Scottish Cup. We're talking some serious history going on in the years in-between! Where was Bob? Mostly doing his media mogul stuff inbetween "personal problems" (if you saw "Saint or Singer", you'll know what I mean).

Things might be starting to change now. I got the shock of my life at the Carling Academy gig last year when I found myself having to fight off a hoarde of teenyboppers trying to shove their way to the front. "Sex & Age & Death" has definitely resurrected him as a musician not just out of the dead, but out of the "old loyal fanbase" stage. We're living in interesting times!

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Originally posted by: ArrGee
" The Stranglers were the biggest selling band?  Was that during the era or since?  I always thought Blondie outsold the lot of them, and that at the end of 1979, The Boomtown Rats were only outsold by Blondie & The Police.  Also since that age, The Clash have been repackaged and re-sold so much that I'd expect they would now have sold more than anyone (despite doing bugger all prior to 1990 in terms of sales). Geldof's putting down of his own music is weird.  He used to tell people the Rats were the greatest band you'lll ever hear back in the late seventies, but came over unduly modest since Band Aid/Live Aid.  His singing has character like say Lennon, Jagger, Davies, Bowie, Rotten, Gallagher etc., none of whom are what you would call great technical singers, but make a great sound.  This happens with everyone I like though, Jarvis Cocker is the latest to go on about his reedy vocals."

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Blondie did good business in most (but not all) of the English speaking nations, not so well elsewhere. Once Tony Visconti got his hands on them & tried to make them "all things to everyone" (a disco band on minute, a new-wave band the next, club cabaret in-between), they were in trouble in the areas they had not already broken though c/o "Parallel Lines", and hoping that Debbie Harry's looks would carry the day were hoping a lot in an era when attitudes were hardening in a lot of quarters towards "pretty boy/girl Pop". Their fate was spectacularly similar to the Rats - a minor hit with "Island Of Lost Souls" the warning, the stiffing of "The Hunter" single and album the fall from grace - & as per usual with Chrysalis Records, the second that happened they dumped them - see also Leo Sayer!), & up until the contrived "Maria"/"No Exit" comeback, you couldn't get most of their back catalogue for trying. I always thought it was ironic that Geldof's surmise on the reasons for the Rat's fall far better applied to Blondie, & they had the music press on their side right until their fall too!

The Police? Well, they always considered themselves to be a White Reggae band & nothing to do with Punk or New Wave (though I think like Ian Dury & The Blockheads & XTC they found themselves subverted by the mood of the times).  They didn't really hit paydirt until "Don't Stand So Close To Me", when Sting decided to trade on his appeal to the ladies out of a fear their appeal was already waning (they even did panto in Japan to try & break the market there! No, I never knew they had panto either!!!).

The Clash's sales? Well, put it this way, after all the claims about "turning down a million quid to reform...", it turned out they were about to after all for considerably less, until Joe Strummer's sudden death put paid to that - and the lack of the atypical "in sympathy" back-catalogue sales boost one sees on such occasions showed they were very much a spent force. With no Parsons & Burchill et al to overegg their reputation cake, they were certain to fade. Decades after the event, the newer generations get the latest "greatest hits" package, wonder what all the fuss was about (& probably laugh themselves silly over "The English Civil War"), mutter "Come back The Levellers, all is forgiven!", and put back on their Marilyn Mansun discs...

The Stranglers definitely outsold the lot of them easily at that time - four big selling albums between 1977-1979 alone, doing very good business in Europe, South America & the Far East. No one can touch them on that. A lot of that was down to the silly amounts of money they flung into their fan club - the Stranglers Information Service. Credit where it's due, Jet Black knew exactly what he was doing - he created the sort of fan service that produced a fiercy loyal following that inspired fans to "convert" others & lessen the chances of them dropping out...the sort that U2, REM were to copy years later.

But if we are talking about the biggest selling band during that period of time, well, that was easily Abba - even allowing for the USA wondering what all the fuss was about.

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Originally posted by: Jules
"I just wondered how you all came across Bob? Most teenagers I know don't know much about him, or at least that he sings! "

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I'm 14, I'll be 15 on June 18th 2005.

I was probably quite late jumping on the geldof wagon, about two years ago or more one of my friends went to see Bob playing in Kings Lynn in Norfolk, England. He was really pumped about it and being honest I had no idea who the **** he kept going on about.

I did a bit of research and eventually discovered "I Don't Like Mondays", it was probably about last semptember when I started doing "trade" in Geography, this moved on to talking about Poverty and LEDCs. My geography teacher, being a huge Bob Geldof fan tried to work in Band Aid and Live Aid as much as he could. After a while I ended up buying the best of the Boomtown Rats and the Live Aid DVD and a few months later here I am...

I'm 15 1/2 in Hawaii. I've been trying to get more people to know and understand Bob and what he's done, and is doing to help the world. It has only slightly worked with my more liberal-minded friends. But I'm trying to do what I can without crossing the boundaries in place. You see, I am a minority at my school. There are a lot of local Hawaiians, and the white kids seem to be at a disadvantage. There's also only so much you can do when you're in a military family, at a school funded by the military, with a complete council of only military personnel and youth to help organize events and lay down rules.

So while I have all of these restrictions, and school is out, I've been spreading the news of Live 8 and the past of Band Aid and Live Aid through my own personal websites, as well as coordinating efforts with http://www.if-only.org. What's happening in the world and the lack of reachable information on it is quite disturbing most times. The other day, a friend of mine told me, "If you did not have that website, I wouldn't knwo anything that's happening in our world." I almost feel a sense of obligation to let others know what's happening, as well as give them the resources to do something about it. It's the latter which makes for harder work.

I do my best to stay up to date with national and world-wide news. I've given up on local news. It's only about tragic death, murder/rape, fires, shark attacks, local food, and corporate scandels. It would be out of place for me to even try to correct these things. Hawaii is one of the most liberal states in the US, but we have a Republican governor. Again, I have given up hope for Hawaii. And it seems redundant to skip this and move onto the world, but a peaceful community for the Earth is more important than partisan politics in the Aiea district.

welcome mrsrat well..it's seems you've got a very good taste in music I'm a big floyd fan too...

Our first granchild lucy is only 18 months old and i put the cds on when she,s  is in our car  she shakes her head claps her hands ten years of this and she should be hooked!!