I Don't Like Mondays

Last night I met Sir Bob Geldof. It was such a surreal and special moment for me, and I still can’t believe it happened. I was scrolling through Instagram or Facebook one day when I saw “A Night with Bob Geldof” advertised. It said it was a talk about his life with a few songs thrown in. The instant I saw it, I bought two tickets — one for me and one for Mum. There was an option for a meet and greet, so without hesitation I upgraded the tickets.

We actually got front-row seats, and each ticket including the meet and greet was $300. I think that is a very reasonable price, especially for someone like Bob. Initially, the show was scheduled for the Adelaide Entertainment Centre, but closer to the date I got an email saying it had been changed to the Norwood Town Hall, which must have been because of lack of ticket sales. I thought that was a massive jump. They didn’t even try to fill the Festival Theatre. I also thought it would have been a bit of a blow for Bob personally, but Mum and I were really looking forward to the show.

The meet and greet was at 5:30pm so Mum and I went to my hairdresser at 4:00pm. One of the owners of the salon said that her niece was going to see Bob and she had meet and greet tickets too. My hairdresser is on the Parade so it wasn't a long walk to the Town Hall where we lined up out the front with all the other meet and greeters. You can see us in the line below.

Once we got inside the Town Hall, we waited around in the foyer for a bit. There was an Italian-looking woman standing nearby with her friend. She looked around fifty, and I have no idea why, but I suddenly knew she had to be the niece of the owner of my hairdresser. So I just walked up to her and asked — and she was!! She was absolutely shocked. She asked how I knew, and I just said it was a guess. I was a little surprised myself. It must have been because she looked Italian, and the owner of my hairdresser is Italian too.

Mum and I chatted with her and her friend for a while, and then we were asked to head upstairs. My mum has very real mobility issues, so we took the lift. As we stepped out, we saw the female toilets right in front of us. I took a photo of the sign on the door.

I took the photo because of the braille. I absolutely love braille. In the past, I even tried to learn it — I had a blind teacher and went to his house a few times, and he lent me a braille machine. But then I hit a few bumps in life and couldn’t keep going.

I still think braille is an incredibly powerful form of communication, and in the future I’m going to look into buying a braille machine so I can start using it in my artwork.

There was a largish group of people waiting out the front of the concert hall. There was a room off to the side where I assumed the meet and greet would be held. You can see the small crowd below.

We could hear Bob singing in the hall, and someone said he was doing a soundcheck. We’d been standing for quite some time and Mum started to struggle. There was a really lovely older couple standing near us, and the man asked Mum if she’d like some help sitting down on the stairs. She said yes, and he gently helped her over, while his partner sat with Mum and he stayed standing, talking to me. They looked cool — probably in their sixties, but the kind of people you could imagine being genuine Boomtown Rats fans.

I have to admit, I was really nervous about meeting Bob. He’s a rockstar, and I assumed he would be used to beautiful women and glamorous people. I am really fat, and I would be standing in front of him as someone who doesn’t fit society’s narrowest standards of beauty. I even told Mum I didn’t want to meet him.

We were sitting on the stairs when the door behind us suddenly opened — and it was Bob. I looked up and gave him a big smile, and he looked straight at me and gave me a warm, genuine smile back. In that moment, I felt completely at ease.

I had expected him to look away in repulsion, but then I remembered he’s a girl dad. He has four daughters, including Tiger Lily, the daughter of Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates whom he adopted. His daughter Peaches tragically died of an accidental heroin overdose in 2014.

And remembering that Bob is a father to daughters changed everything for me. Because even though I don’t look like the kinds of women he has been photographed with, I realised he understands women — all kinds of women. He’s been married twice, lived a big life, loved deeply, lost deeply, and he knows humanity in all its shapes and stories.

So instead of feeling nervous, I suddenly felt calm. Safe, even. Because Bob Geldof isn’t the kind of man who judges women by their bodies — he’s the kind of man who has seen life from every angle and knows how to be kind.

Everyone who was upstairs was then ushered into a side room, and we all lined up to meet Bob. While we were in the queue, I met another really big woman — probably about the same size and around the same age as me. She showed me a tattoo on her shoulder that said “Bob Geldof.” I asked her if she was going to show him, and she told me she had met him when she was younger and had shown him back then. Apparently, he freaked out and kept saying how she was the same age as his daughter, and she said he practically ran away from her. So she wasn’t going to remind him tonight.

While we were talking, she asked me if Mum was my mother or my grandmother. I said she was my mother, and she was shocked. Then she asked me how old I was, and I said 43. She absolutely couldn’t believe it. She told me she thought I was in my twenties, and then she smiled and said it meant we both experienced Bob in the same way.

I was getting butterflies watching all the people in front of me meet Bob. Below you can see two sneaky photos I took of what it was like waiting in line.

The lady in the photo below completely lost it. She was so overwhelmed she started crying. Bob was so kind to her and really comforted her.

As Mum and I edged closer to Bob Geldof, I remembered exactly why I loved him so much in the first place. I loved his work with Live Aid. Live Aid represents everything I think the world should be about — unity, humanity, and people coming together for a common cause. There has never been another event like it, and I doubt there ever will be. And Bob orchestrated that. He did that.

I love Live Aid, I love Bob Geldof, and I love the Red Cross — and there I was, just about to meet my hero.

When I was next in line, I suddenly decided I didn’t want any photos of myself with him. That’s because I hate photos of myself while I’m so fat. But even though I didn’t want a photo, I did want to give him a big hug.

When my turn came, the woman coordinating everything took my phone — I handed it to her without even thinking — and then I walked straight over to Bob and asked him if I could give him a hug. He gave me a huge smile and said, “Of course.”

Below is the photo the coordinator took of me giving Bob a massive, big bear hug.

I didn’t mind her taking that photo, but I didn’t want anything that could identify me. So while I stood there telling him my name and asking a few basic questions, the coordinator asked me to stand next to him so she could take a photo. I said, “Oh no thanks, I don’t want any photos.”

Bob looked at me and asked why I didn’t want any photos — even though he would have known exactly why. I told him I hate having my photo taken, and he said, “I fucking hate having my photo taken too.” I thought that was sweet, because it felt like his way of putting me at ease.

I said goodbye and walked off, and then it was Mum’s turn to meet Bob. She told him that I was her daughter. Do you know what he said? He said, “You must be so proud of her. She is gorgeous and very nice.”

It was so sweet — exactly the kind of thing a girl-dad rockstar would say about a fat fan who is not particularly visually pleasing. But the truth is, I don’t know what I was thinking when I assumed he would judge me. All the work he did with Live Aid alone shows he’s a fundamentally good person somewhere along the line.

After we’d both met Bob, we made our way to the concert hall. We had front-row seats, and below you can see the view from the front.

Below you can see the image that was on the screen while we waited for the show to start.

Bob came out and the crowd went wild. It was such a warm, energetic atmosphere, and I’m actually glad they moved the event to Norwood Town Hall. It felt full and intimate, rather than half-empty like it might have been at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre.

Bob was incredibly open, and in so many ways he allowed himself to be vulnerable in front of the audience. A few things really stood out to me. He talked about growing up in poor Dublin, Ireland. His father beat him — and his father would cry while he did it. He has two sisters, and he went to boarding school, where he was also beaten.

He described himself as a rebel at school. At one point he ordered fifty little red Mao books, which were delivered to the school and got him into a lot of trouble. You can see a copy of the book below.

He moved to London after school and became involved with the Simon Community, a long-running homelessness charity in Ireland and the UK. He worked in a meat-processing factory for a while, and somewhere along the line he started his band, the Boomtown Rats. He talked openly about how he used to sleep with a lot of groupies, and one night he slept with Paula Yates. The next day she turned up at his house with all her belongings and simply moved in. They fell in love, got married, and had three daughters together. He spoke passionately about Paula and their early love story.

What I found interesting was how Bob said Paula had been watching the news one night and saw the devastating reports about the famine in Ethiopia. It really upset her, and that was the moment Bob said he knew he had to do something. So I genuinely believe Band Aid and Live Aid were both born out of Bob’s response to something that deeply moved the woman he loved. In a way, it was all for love.

In 1984, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure brought together a supergroup called Band Aid. It was made up of some of the world’s biggest musicians — Bono, George Michael, Sting, Boy George, and many more. Together, they recorded the charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” with all proceeds going directly to famine relief in Ethiopia.

Below you can see Bob singing Do They Know It's Christmas?

I think Band Aid was such an incredibly good thing, but as I was sitting there listening to Bob sing “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” I couldn’t help thinking about how patronising the song itself is. Its lyrics frame Africa through a Western lens, implying that an entire continent is defined by famine and hardship, while overlooking the rich diversity of cultures, religions, and traditions across it.

The line “Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?” is especially offensive — it assumes that celebrating Christmas is universal, when in reality many of the countries affected by the famine were not Christian-majority nations to begin with. It also suggests that African people are somehow unaware of Christmas, when that simply isn’t true at all. I know it was well-intentioned, but I do wonder whether they would get away with something like that now.

Bob talked about how, in 1985, he organised Live Aid — two simultaneous concerts in London and Philadelphia that were broadcast to nearly two billion people around the world. It became one of the most significant humanitarian events in history, uniting artists, governments, and everyday people in a single global effort to raise funds and awareness for the Ethiopian famine.

Below are two photos Bob shared with us. The first is of a starving child affected by the famine, and the second is a follow-up photo of the same girl as a grown woman who was able to build a life for herself because of the funds raised through Live Aid.

The Boomtown Rats had one really famous song called I Don’t Like Mondays. It’s a song I know well — not really because of my interest in Bob, but because it’s often played on the radio, at the pub, and even in clubs when I was younger. Bob told us the story of how he started writing it on a plane, and then he sang it.

When he stood up and performed it at the Norwood Town Hall last night, it felt like such an intimate moment. This is a song he has sung hundreds, if not thousands, of times before. He wrote it; it must live in his bloodstream by now. And yet, there I was, experiencing him sharing it with all of us in that small hall.

It was a special moment — one that sends shivers down my spine even thinking about it now. It was iconic. Below you can see Bob as he sung I Don't Like Mondays. 

Bob didn’t say a word about Michael Hutchence or his daughters, but he did talk about separating from Paula and the intense heartbreak he went through. He spoke about her death, and about eventually finding love again. He has been with his new partner for 30 years now, and they’ve been married for 10. He’s still heavily involved in work for Africa.

As I listened to Bob talk about everything he’s experienced in his life, I felt so ridiculous for ever having been nervous about meeting him — or for imagining, even for a second, that he might call me fat or make some comment about how I look. He has lived such a vast, unique human life.

It’s kind of funny that this scruffy, foul-mouthed rockstar is a knight, but he absolutely deserved it.

Bob finished the show by playing the spoons, and then he was joined by a few musicians for an incredible Irish folk song that had everyone up out of their seats. You can see below.

I feel good about seeing and meeting Bob last night. It was a perfect night, and I’m so glad I got to share it with Mum. But there is something that has put a bit of a dampener on it for me. Bob has faced criticism for accepting substantial speaking fees related to his anti-poverty work. For example, one corporate event in Melbourne reportedly paid him around A$100,000, plus business-class flights and luxury accommodation, to speak about Third World poverty. While the fee didn’t come from charitable funds, many people felt the contrast between his high remuneration and the subject of his talk was uncomfortable.

I don’t really understand how he could accept that much money to speak about Third World poverty — in some ways, it’s unfathomable to me. Thinking about it now, I’m not sure how it sits with me or whether it changes how I see him. I’m glad he didn’t call me fat; he seems like a genuinely nice man. But I can't help but feeling he might be a hypocrite.