Bob Geldof: Maximum Bob

He's been called everything from a saint to a cuckold. He made his name with The Boomtown Rats; then came Band Aid, and then The Big Breakfast, with a tumultuous marriage to Paula Yates along the way. Now all Bob Geldof wants to do is get back to music, but his other lives have a habit of crowding in...

Bob Geldof. And all the things people think of him as. Saint Bob. Sir Bob. Unbathed Bob. Smelly Bob. Hangdog Bob. Businessman Bob. Drop-the-debt Bob. Cuckolded Bob. Control-freak Bob. Belligerent Bob. Noble Bob. Bob the Builder (OK, I'm stretching it a bit here but, who knows, he might have constructed the odd Ikea bookcase in his time). Heart-broken Bob. Paula 'n' Bob. Paula 'n' Michael and not Bob. Bereaved Bob. Dogmatic Bob. Band Aid Bob. Dad Bob. Mum Bob (not so stretched, as a women's magazine did once vote him an "honorary mum"). TV mogul Bob. Give-us-ya-fucking-money Bob. Dogmatic Bob. No-euro Bob... enough, enough!

OK, agreed, time to stop Bob-ing. But the point I'm trying to make here, I guess, is that most people think of him as almost every kind of Bob apart from the Bob he'd most like to be thought of, which is probably Musician Bob. Yes, of course, he used to be Boomtown Bob, but that was a long time ago and somehow doesn't really count any more. One summer in the sun and all that. I hope this doesn't sound mean because, while that summer was a sensational one – "Rat Trap", "I Don't Like Mondays" – I do believe there is so much else to truly admire about Bob, so much else to talk about. "What will you want to talk about?" his people ask me before I meet him. Well, there is so much, I start to say. "The music? Bob's only interested in talking about the music he does now." Oh, bliss.

We meet at the Oxford Playhouse on the day he is due to start the second leg of his current tour. It's mid-afternoon, and chilly, as I wait in the theatre's rather underheated café, surrounded by little old ladies for whom this is obviously a favourite nice-cuppa stop. It's not exactly Wembley. Bob's agent is here. I think Bob's agent used to be Lonnie Donegan's agent because, as various of Bob's band members arrive (of a certain age, shall we say, with quite a lot of Regatta fleece action going on) they say things like: "Sorry about Lonnie." The agent, it turns out, is very sorry about Lonnie indeed. "He went mid-tour. Ouch!" Bob's manager is here. An Irishman, with a crucifix in one ear. The manager says Bob is doing a local telly interview in a room upstairs at the moment, but I'll be on afterwards, before the next one. And how long will I get? "Six minutes," he says. Six minutes? "Eight, if you keep him talking," he adds. Oh, bliss. Oh, double bliss. Life's a bitch and then it has puppies and all that.

Eventually I am called up, by which time I've been sitting for a while and discover that one of my legs has gone soundly to sleep. (Damn. It'll be awake all night now.) I sort of drag it behind me into the room, where it immediately collides with a cup of coffee someone has left on the floor, and coffee goes everywhere. Truly, you've never seen such a rapidly expanding brown stain. "Oops," I say, wildly embarrassed. "Doesn't matter," says Bob, in a kindly way, from under a Donny Osmond-style cap.

Actually Bob, now 48, doesn't look like an Unbathed, Smelly Bob at all today. He is Snazzy Bob, in his checked trousers, black corduroy jacket, suede shoes and the cap, which, alas, partly obscures that beautiful bony, nosy, pouchy face of his. He is wonderfullyjolie laide, in a Mick Jagger kind of way. "It's only a municipal carpet," he adds. I explain about my dead leg. I add that my hands are part-frozen, too, and I'll have to warm them up before I'll be able to hold a pen. He says: "God, you are a fucking moaner. Do you live with someone?"

"Yes," I say.

He looks at me, from under the cap, in a most disbelieving way.

"Are you trying to say, 'Not for much longer'?" I ask.

"Fucking right," he says,

I think this is the less kindly Bob, although he does have a point. Six minutes in our house, and we've had sex (twice) with time left to wallpaper the living-room and put the cat out. Six minutes is acres of time down our way. I may be the most leavable person I know.

So, to the music, I guess, before I am booted out from the word go. His current album, Sex Age & Death, is his first for 10 years, and while I'm not wholly convinced about it musically – Bob's voice, never especially lovely, has not got lovelier over the years – its lyrics have attracted a huge amount of attention. Bob's never talked about the Paula/Michael thing. Bob won't talk about the Paula/Michael thing, and why should he, simply to satisfy our curiosity?

But it's in the lyrics in "One for Me", which is obviously about Paula's slide into booze and drugs oblivion ("Somebody saw you at the party/ You did the one where you are falling flat on your face/ Apparently you fall with such good grace...") and "Inside Your Head", which I assume is about Michael: "You got a life, left me for dead/ What the fuck's going on inside your head?/ So why put a noose around your neck...".

I ask him if he was, at any point, reluctant to release them, knowing they would be leapt upon in the way they were. He says: "It's the musical equivalent of the Zen conundrum. If a tree falls in the wood and no one hears it, has it fallen? What is the point of writing songs that no one hears? A song only becomes complete, and breathes and lives as something significant to you, when it is articulated and performed. Why that is, I don't know. But I would argue that Dora Marr or Weeping Woman... whatever the name of that painting is... if Picasso had painted it and then had painted it out the next day, it would have been a significant loss. It's a great painting of pain and a fractured individual. If someone listens to one of my songs, and paints their own picture, that's somehow got meaning unlike anything – anything – else I do." The other thing to admire about Bob is his fantastic, head-spinning articulacy. He is never Inconsequential, Small-talk Bob.

I ask him: if someone hadn't heard Sex Age & Death, and he could play them one song, which one would it be? He thinks, then says it would probably be "Mudslide", a song which, to me, seems less a song, more a primal scream. What's it about, Bob? "It's full of images of emptiness and aridity – well, the whole album is – and it's packed with that, and the void I appear to inhabit. It's the nothingness of that."

Void? Nothingness? But Bob, your life appears so extremely jam-packed. You are a very Busy Bob. The campaigning. The businesses. The children. The music. (Phew, got that in). He says he only does so much because of the void. "A lot of the frantic quality of life is trying to stuff up that hole." Where does the hole come from? Your mother's sudden death when you were six? Or is that too much of a cliché? "It is a cliché, but death of a parent in childhood is very common among writers and performers. There is a song I did on the last record, called 'Everybody Has a Hole to Fill'. I get a lot of letters from people who say it's a God-shaped hole, but of course it is not. The upside is that you know what the hole is; unlike other people, you spend your time almost perpetually discontented, but at least you know the source of that." Can the void ever be filled? "It doesn't exist literally, so it's not fillable." Doesn't that make everything futile? "I take a different view. You have got a short amount of time to do as many things as seem plausible to you, so it is not futile."

I ask if a parent-hole can ever be filled by substitutes? He says: "Are we getting to something pertinent to my current family life here?" I say yes, we are. (After the deaths of Michael and then Paula, Bob took in their daughter, Tiger Lily, who is now being brought up with her half-sisters, Fifi Trixibelle, Peaches and Pixie but, alas, no Sindywindylambchopfoufou, as they missed a trick there). "I think there can be viable substitutes. What a parent requires is abundant and endless love and concomitant patience and that's it. Raising children, frankly, is a piece of piss. Everyone who goes on about it – please, do me a favour. It may be tiresome and if you have to earn money and bring up children etc etc, then it is difficult, but actually raising children, provided there is that infinity of love, in whatever circumstances... frankly, what do you do? You change nappies, you get food, you do the bath, you put them to bed, you play with them, you cuddle them. It's not the greatest skill on the planet. It might be the most important but it's not the greatest."

I put it to him that this frantic restlessness has never seemed to affect his personal relationships. After all, Paula left him after 19 years of marriage, not the other way round. He's never bounced about having umpteen children with umpteen women. "Good point. I'll have to think about that." He thinks about that.

"The classic idea of the family seems to be very important for me. Again, we go back to obvious reasons why. My greatest fears are loneliness and poverty. The former is taken care of by the notion of home, and poverty is something that has to avoided at all costs because I never want to go back to that condition for myself or my children. That sort of core stability seems to me to be paramount. But, you know, if I couldn't go away and do concerts, then it would be horrendous. I don't know what I'd do. I'm restless at home, pacing and things like that. I'm a nightmare to live with." (He lives, now, with his girlfriend, the French actress Jeanne Marine.)

Are you ever content? "No. But I don't think that's extraordinary. It's part of the human condition. The people who are cited as being content – yogis, monks – are utterly psychotic. To cloister yourself behind walls... that's mad, and would presuppose massive discontent of the spirit." Bob's favourite poet, by the way, is Keats and his favourite Keats poem is "Ode on Melancholy". Make of that what you will.

So, he's driven by a fear of loneliness and poverty, which can only mean what? A fear of ever having to revisit his childhood? He remembers the day of his mother's death (from a sudden stroke, in the middle of the night) with absolute clarity. "She was sitting in the bay window of our house in the evening. She had a friend round and gave me a cuddle, on her knee, before I went to bed. I can't remember what day it was. Maybe it was a weekend because my dad (a commercial traveller) was home.

"My older sister had her friend Olivia round for the night and they were going to have a midnight feast and promised to wake me so I could join in. I woke in the middle of the night and I heard them making a noise and I said: 'Why didn't you wake me?' They said they were laughing too much whereas, in fact, they were crying.

"I went back to sleep and woke in the morning and I heard adults downstairs. Then my dad came up and sat on the end of my bed, and he was sobbing. It was the first time I'd seen my father cry and I was really frightened by that, and he said mum died last night and I cried because he was crying and it seemed to be the expected response, but the enormity didn't register, really. I was packed off across the road to play with a neighbour and then I stayed with friends, the Nevilles, who took me to see a comedy with Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin and all those people in it.

"I didn't see my mum again. I didn't go to the funeral or anything because it didn't happen in those days." Photographs? Did you have photographs? "First, there weren't many photographs around back then. Second, I was shagging a girlfriend on the floor one night and she had a cigarette and we set the place on fire and a lot of things were destroyed."

Did you ever rail against your mother's death? "If I was in deep trouble at school, I would rail against her and say: 'Where are you?' but it was only very occasionally." I suggest that, maybe, his sense of injustice is also related to his mother's death. How unfair, to lose your mum in the middle of the night! He thinks this is true, but adds that he wouldn't be him unless his mother had died. His father was mostly away. He brought himself up, living on tinned spaghetti and going about in dirty clothes with dirty hair. "I was scruffy by default because the last thing an eight-year-old is going to do is iron his clothes." He can trace most of his traits back to this period. "My sense of organisation, independence, stubbornness, that dogmatism which comes from not having anyone to temper your opinion... they are my determining characteristics. Unfortunately."

Alas, the next TV crew are now setting up. I think I get more than my six minutes but still feel I haven't started getting to the Bob-ness of Bob. I ask him quickly which Bob he thinks he is to most people. "You know," he says, "if you see a poster saying 'Tonight, Bob Geldof', I think most people would go: 'Doing what?' The soap opera has lasted 27 years, so all the plot lines come into play. Is it Band Aid Bob? Is it Boomtown Bob? Is it Paula Bob or Big Breakfast Bob? I don't know which one flies into their head."

Which one would you want to fly into their heads? "I don't what anything. I don't have any interest in that whatsoever. But what impacts on me is their confusion. They see that poster and think 'fucking weird' and pass on. The key issue is the musician. It's not that I insist on that. It's just that if you want to know what I think I do, and the only thing that has meaning to me, it is that." The music, I guess, comes as close to void-less content as he's ever going to get. "Bye-bye dead leg," he says dryly as I go. The bloody thing was up all night, as predicted.