Guest
Geldof was born Robert Frederick Zenon Geldof in Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin, in the Republic of Ireland, to parents of Catholic extraction. He attended Blackrock College, near Dublin, a school whose staunch Catholic nationalist ethos he disliked. After work as a slaughterman, road navvy and pea canner, he started as a music journalist in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, for the weekly publication Georgia Straight. Upon returning to Ireland in 1975, he became the lead singer of the band The Boomtown Rats, a rock group closely linked with the punk 1978, The Boomtown Rats had their first No. 1 single in the UK with “Rat Trap“, which was the first New Wave chart-topper in that country. In 1979, the group shot to international fame with their second UK No. 1, “I Don’t Like Mondays“.[2] This was equally successful, as well as controversial; Geldof wrote it in the aftermath of Brenda Ann Spencer’s attempted massacre at an elementary school across the street from her
