How to Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell

Bob Geldof has always said that from being a child in the 60's he has had two interests - music and politics - and this from a time "when the two were inseparable." As a result he says he "understands and articulates the world through the rhetoric of rock 'n' roll." It seems to help him "frame his experiences and helps to make them understandable." Geldof is fifty-eight and a half years old. Typically blunt, that (58 1/2) is what he calls his latest outing (though its published title is How to Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell, a title borrowed from an old music manual Geldof found in a second hand book shop). How to Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell/58 1/2 may not seem like a continuation of the bleaker winter of 2001's Sex, Age and Death. Its vitality and pervasive optimism would suggest not. But whereas on his last album Geldof mourned the grief and loss and rage that is the end of love, in this he celebrates its re-birth. He seems entirely bemused by this miracle of renewal. This is the man, after all, who thirty-five years ago wrote "Looking After No.1"! The fifty-eight (and a half) year old realizes that that just isn't enough. This is great stuff. True stuff. No preening or posturing. Honest, funny, tender essentially human stuff. Very Geldof.