Aging & Wisdom Quote by Bob Geldof

There is a sly revisionism at work here: not the dishonest kind, but the kind that comes with age, distance, and finally giving yourself credit. Geldof frames The Boomtown Rats as "good fun" first, a deliberately modest phrase that reads like a defense mechanism. Fun is what you call something you loved when you’re wary of sounding sentimental or self-mythologizing. Then he drops the real payload: "I can actually look back and think... I was in a great band". The word "actually" matters. It signals that pride is not his default setting; it has to be earned, negotiated, permitted by time.

"Saga age" is a particularly Geldof-ian move: half-joke, half-shield. It nods to prog-rock cliché and old-guy status while refusing the tragic-rocker narrative. He’s not lamenting decline; he’s claiming a new authority over his own past. That shift is the context: decades of being known as more than a frontman - the Live Aid figure, the public scold, the philanthropist-celebrity hybrid. When your cultural identity becomes bigger than your discography, nostalgia can feel like an indulgence. Here, he allows it, but only in a way that keeps him honest.

"It was always a collective thing" is both tribute and self-edit. It pushes back against the hero-frontman template and, quietly, against the idea that the band existed merely as the prelude to "Bob Geldof: Important Person". The subtext is accountability: if it was collective, then the glory is shared, and so is the story.