Sir Bob Geldof has dismissed suggestions that he has a ‘white saviour complex’ because of his charity work.
The 73-year-old musician was the driving force behind both the Live Aid single Do They Know It’s Christmas? and the Band Aid charity concert which raised awareness of famine in Ethiopia during the 1980s.
After raising millions of pounds for important causes over his life, he has scoffed at those who are disparaging of his efforts.
In a new interview with the i Paper, Sir Bob said of the ‘white saviour’ term: ‘That doesn’t exist. That’s just a word, a theory like Original Sin.’
U2 rocker Bono – who worked closely with Geldof in raising money for Africa – confessed in his 2022 memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story that he considered some of Band Aid’s work to be tone deaf.
But the Boomtown Rats frontman has dismissed ‘woke’ criticism of his charity work.
Quizzed on Bono’s comments, he said: ‘Well yeah, he probably believes it. But there isn’t such a thing. I’m not interested in political correctness, this certain woke stuff.
‘It’ll pass and you’ll still have hungry people. I’m only interested in stopping human beings dying of starvation. I’m not interested in boosting someone’s idea of their parents’ country.’
Sir Bob’s ongoing work with the Band Aid Charitable Trust has raised almost £150 million, while Live Aid raised a remarkable $125m (£92.7m) for famine relief, but he accepts that it has come at a personal cost, ‘definitely’ contributing to the end of his marriage to the late TV presenter Paula Yates.
She left him for INXS frontman Michael Hutchence in 1995 before passing away from a heroin overdose in 2000 at the age of 41.
He also acknowledged the toll his fundraising took on the Boomtown Rats, who initially broke up in 1986 before reforming in 2013. They are now celebrating their 50th anniversary with a tour.
His headline-grabbing charity campaigns always overshadowed the band’s musical output, which included hits I Don’t Like Mondays and Rat Trap.
‘The consequences were: you always worried that you were letting people down, that you were failing. I didn’t doubt I had the ability to do these things. It sounds glib, but it’s easier than getting people to hear your music. It’s just there’s never an end,’ he added.
This is not the first time Sir Bob has spoken about the criticism he’s received for his approach to charity work.
The Irish star faced backlash last year when the new Band Aid 40 remix was released after Ed Sheeran released a statement saying his ‘understanding of the narrative’ had changed since 2014 when he appeared on a version of the song.
But after fiercely defending Band Aid, Sir Bob claimed that he was actually ‘energised’ by the controversy.
‘The debate rages around it. That’s fantastic, because then you can access the politics with the culture debate as sensitivities and sensibilities and opinions change and just absorb it all,’ he told Billboard at the time.
The chart-topper also admitted to the i Paper that there have been times when he has considered what things would have been like if he hadn’t become an activist, but insisted he was ‘glad about everything that’s happened’.
‘But would you have chosen a different life if you had been given the option? If I’d been told 40 years later, “You’re going to wake up to eight, 10, 12 emails of horror every morning?” Yeah,’ he revealed.
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