'At 53, I now realise I was in a great band': Bob Geldof talks to MW about his time in The Boomtown Rats, his daughters' musical tastes and his forthcoming Brits recognition for his outstanding contribution to music.(Tribute)

Did re-mastering The Rats' back catalogue teach you anything new about the band?

"At the age of 53, I now realise that I was in a great band. Seriously, I think the Rats were an amazing band, musically. I'm really astounded by the songs' complexity and the ability of these guys to play. I mean, the guys in the Rats played their fuckin' arses off. [A big part of] it was boredom. Once you've done I Don't Like Mondays, it's like, 'Oh, that's what a hit is, is it? OK, I can write fuckin' piano tunes 'til they're coming out my hole.' But The Rats didn't like anything that sounded like what we'd done before. I played the original version of Do They Know It's Christmas? to the Rats and they didn't really like it on the basis that we'd done something like it before."

Which Rats album has aged the best?

"Obviously I love the first one, because when I listen to that I just think, 'There is nothing gonna stop these guys--nothing.' V Deep is the one that I really love. I just think, 'Here's a band who know that the public won't accept them as The Boomtown Rats anymore: When I heard the song He Watches It All, I thought, 'That's fuckin' cool.' And Never In A Million Years is that scream of 'fuck you'. It marks its moment very well."

The Boomtown Rats were never accepted as part of the punk London orthodoxy.

"We didn't know what the word punk was when we started doing stuff in Dublin. They were just utterly confused that when we showed up in the storm of punk in 1976--which was a wholly London phenomenon, there were no punks from Derbyshire or Cornwall that I remember--they couldn't get with our programme at all. We'd do slow songs like I Can Make It If You Can and if we didn't actually have sax, we'd do sax riffs and organs. If you look at the first photographs, we look Feelgoods-ish, the pub rock thing. I heard Dr Feelgood and Marley one afternoon--this would've been the tail end of the summer of 1975--and it fuckin' blew my head away. Marley's great cathedral of music with his rhetoric of revolution in this patois, I thought it was extraordinary and beautiful, and then the Feelgoods were recording on four-tracks and saying you can be a mega rock star in your pub. So gradually our hair got shorter just to distinguish ourselves. And when Pete [Briquette] started suggesting we write our own songs, the first thing I wrote was Do The Rat as a joke, this hideous pun, because the music press at the time was still full of crap puns and I was still a stringer for the NME. And punters started doing this ridiculous dance and we'd give out pounds of fresh liver as a prize:'

When did it all start to go wrong?