franna wrote:

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FT Jules?  I'm impressed.  I thought I was the only one nerdy enough 'round these parts to read that one, and I certainly don't read it regularly. That aside, while Attitude Chicken is nowhere near my favorite track on HC, I love the story about its title.  I can absolutely imagine that happening, and I admire the person who said it.  Normally, I refer to such items as yuppie food (generally), or in this case (specifically), "chicken with blah blah blah sauce."  I guess I'm just a hometown girl.

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FT - I read that too, but I'll admit that I only touched the FT because I got sent the link trhough my Google alert...

Liked the article though. Do I understand correctly that AC is Bob's favourite track from that album? Hard to believe! He never used to play it live (does so now, though).

"blah blah sauce" - lol Franna!

Brief overview? No. But I'll copy and paste the article for you!

copyright: Financial Times, November 1, 2005

Songwriting, sainthood and masterly swearing
By Peter Aspden
Published: November 1 2005 02:00 | Last updated: November 1 2005 02:00

There are some clichés about Bob Geldof that simply aren't true: on an unseasonally warm day in Soho, he is dressed smartly, in a crisp, light suit; his hair is well cut; his face, far from crumpled, is relaxed and alert. And then there are those preconceptions that are amply fulfilled: he cannot be bothered to hide his distaste for press interviews; he loves the sound of his own voice; he cannot stop swearing. Geldof's fluent monologues are rich with expletives, which serve not only to emphasise his points but also to give a kind of swelling momentum to his expansive tracts. He is here to talk about a new four-CD anthology of his solo work, spanning the 15 years that followed Live Aid. This interview, as they say before The Sopranos, features bad language from the beginning.

The start of Geldof's solo career was in effect the summer of 1985. But if he emerged from Live Aid feeling euphoric over his new-found role as an ambassador for Africa, it was not reflected in his feelings about his music. "I had no idea where I was in my life. Everyone wanted me to carry on being Saint Bob and give up this silly music lark. The band [Boomtown Rats] I had played with all my life had gone. I didn't have confidence in myself, as a player or as a writer. What did people want from me? That I'd go on ****ing saving the entire ****ing universe."

Enveloped in what he now calls a post-Live Aid tristesse, it took his friend, the former Eurythmics guitarist Dave Stewart, to restore his confidence. "He picked up a guitar and started playing my own songs to me. He'd learnt my songs. I thought: 'That's weird.' He told me they were great songs, and I should get back to work."

The result was an album, Deep in the Heart of Nowhere, whose opening song and first single bore the grandiloquent title "This Is The World Calling". Was it not a portentous move, considering the momentous event that had preceded it? "It wasn't me. It was [assumes cheesy American record company executive voice] 'I tell you it's a ****ing smash. This is the biggest record you'll ever have.' And it was. In Denmark." Nordic enthusiasm aside, the record bombed.

He was given warning of his demise. "I realised I was doomed when I heard: 'DONG! This is the television news. DONG! Gorbachev has launched perestroika. DONG! Bob Geldof has released a new solo album.' It was on the Six O'Clock News! How ridiculous was that? I knew the game was up."

It was the first sign of a parting of the ways between Geldof the philanthropist and Geldof the rock star who wasn't cutting it any more. The public loved one, and remained profoundly unmoved by the other. Geldof's bitterness was portrayed in a song on his second album, Vegetarians of Love, called "The Great Song of Indifference", which also happens to be, in plural form, the subtitle of the anthology.

A jaunty cod-Irish number ("a piss-take of the whole Paddy thing"), it features the line "I don't care if the Third World fries, it's hotter there, I'm not surprised, I can watch all nations die, honey I don't care at all." The irony may be clumsy, but it came from a deep-rooted irritation. "It was my sub-conscious throwing all kinds of drivel at me. [The titling of the anthology] is ironic, yeah. I do think that all my songs are suffused with a passion. They are anything but indifferent."

His third album, 1992'sThe Happy Club, like the first two, went largely unlauded.Like all his work, Geldof saysit is witness to its own time;that time happened to be thecollapse of the Soviet empire. "The [Boomtown] Rats had played in eastern Europe, and now we were literally touring through the change. We played in the parliament building of Warsaw one week after Poland became free. I was givenBrezhnev's dressing room. There was a red phone with no dials on it, I picked it up, and a voice from the Kremlin answered."

When listening to Geldof's rapid-fire reminiscing, you don't get the time to wonder why Brezhnev should have a dressing room in the Polish parliament, nor how Geldof would recognise the Kremlin's switchboard greeting. He has swiftly moved to his favourite song from the album, "Attitude Chicken", and another anecdote. "I was in New York and this guy in the booth behind me was looking at the menu, and it was all [pretentious voice] 'Unpoulet nestling on a bed of whatever' and he called over the waiter, whose name was René of course, and he said: 'Have you got anything apart from this attitude chicken?'"

Geldof's antennae and sense of the absurd made for shrewd observational ditties. This was hardly music to change the world; its only crime was that it came from a man who had been promising to do just that. But tragically it was his own world that fell apart. In what he now calls a "well-documented freefall" of his life - the very public failure of his marriage and the subsequent deaths of Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates - he at first suffered a creative block, before making his fourth and best solo album, 2001's bleak Sex, Age and Death. Or SAD.

"Suddenly, there were critical hosannas, awards, people saying: 'We'd forgotten he could write songs.' You can take all the other work away, but I'll stand by SAD. I think it's a great ****ing album. But I don't listen to it because it makes me so sad, and I don't like playing it for the same reason. It is too raw."

The album features none-too-disguised attacks on Yates (written before she died) and Hutchence, but ends with the tenderest of love songs to his current girlfriend, Jeanne Marine. "I needed that, something to mitigate what had gone before."

I ask how it made him feel, as an artist, that his best work had been prompted by such suffering. "I know it makes good copy, but I think that's bollocks. That you have to be tortured to do it. Sting, who is 30 years my friend, says he puts three weeks to one side and makes a ****ing record. How does he do it? HOW? It's not as if they're ****e songs. That pisses me off."

Looking back at his work, I say, it remains the case that he has never really melded the two parts of his persona, saint and songwriter, together. Did he not watch Martin Scorsese's documentary on Bob Dylan, and envy that fusion of song and zeitgeist?

"Truly not. Those things had never been said before, and it was a time of seismic social change. You could argue "Do They Know It's Christmas" did its job, though it was nothing, nothing, like even the lowliest of Dylan's songs."

He was heavily criticised in the wake of Live 8 for naivety, I say. "By the same five people." Did it not bother him? "I couldn't give a ****. It's arrogant bollocks, as your own paper has pointed out several times." He runs through the familiar arguments, patient and always impassioned. "Live 8 was a monumental political success," he concludes. "I leave it to you to decide whether it was a cultural success."

Geldof has also been a highly successful businessman, through the setting up and timely sale of ventures such as Deckchair, an internet travel agency, and the television company Planet 24, although he is still in media production through his company Ten Alps. Compared to trying to rid the world of poverty and write great songs, how easy was making money?

"It's like writing the songs - you live in your moment. And if you are in the moment, you are by definition tuned into the zeitgeist." Geldof sold Deckchair just before the dotcom collapse. "I knew it wasn't sustainable so I got out. Maybe I understand hype from being in the music business. There's no 'He's a brilliant businessman'. It is about understanding the moment. What does this mean? Let's move."

They are, he says, the same skills as he applies to his work for Africa. Pushing for change is a matter of marketing. "And that's what we do, myself and Richard Curtis and others. We market ideas through selling records and TV shows. We know how to do that." He says Live 8 was all about bringing emotions and expertise together, and taking the result into the negotiating chamber. "And meanwhile lobby like ****, daily, daily, daily. It's not the work of ****ing ages, but it's exhausting and it's non-stop."

'Bob Geldof - Great Songs of In-difference: The Anthology' is released by Universal Music on November 14