Bob Geldof: Boomtown's tycoon

It is a measure of one particular aspect of Bob Geldof's skilful husbandry of his own reputation that many people were surprised by the news this week that the sometime rock star had struck a deal to get his media company listed on the London Stock Exchange. A reverse takeover arrangement will make his 10 Alps Broadcasting firm worth about £9m.

So successfully has he continued to nurture his "scruffy rebellious youth" image that it is all too easy to forget the truth that Geldof is now a middle-aged businessman with the grey showing at his temples and a daughter who is fast approaching the age he was when he formed the Boomtown Rats and set out on the road to pop stardom.

In part, of course, this says as much about us as it does about Geldof. When it comes to those people whose acquaintance we make only through a media lens distorted with the fog of celebrity we tend to set those images in aspic. But it is also a tribute to Bob Geldof's astute ability to manipulate that tendency to his own advantage.

I have to declare an interest in recording this insight. Almost two decades ago I ghosted Bob Geldof's autobiography, Is That It? Having kept in touch with him ever since, I have a singular inside track on the disparity between the private reality and the public image. Some of this speaks of insignificant minutiae; I seem to recall that in those days he and I were around the same age but I notice from the press cuttings that I appear to have got older faster than Bob has.

But some of it goes to more fundamental traits, for Bob has always been a bit of a hustler – right from his pre-punk days when he bluffed his way into rock journalism in Canada down to the succession of deals his various companies have done out of public sight in his post-pop years. I have to admit here that when we wrote the book together in the aftermath of Live Aid, he beat me down to half of the royalty percentage I had asked for, though since the cheques continue to trickle in (largely from libraries now, which photocopy extracts in industrial quantities for schools) I am not complaining.

We had met when I was Africa correspondent for The Times, covering the great famine which stalked right across sub-Sahelian Africa from Ethiopia to Mali. Geldof had read my reports from there. His response to the African tragedy – organising Band Aid, a collective of top pop musicians to make a charity record which became the biggest-selling single of all time, and then Live Aid, a simultaneous concert in London and Philadelphia, which created the largest television audience the world had ever seen – raised $150m (£106m) for the starving people of Africa. In its time, it became as significant a moment in the collective memory as Woodstock had been for the previous generation.

Subsequently, I travelled across the continent with him to decide how and where the money should be spent. And when, after two years of unpaid labour on behalf of the world's poor, he got a letter from his bank manager to say he was flat broke we sat down together to write the book.

It is a sad fact that whenever the media write about anything of which the reader happens to have direct experience the shortcomings of modern journalism become all too painfully evident. The public and private life of Geldof is a particularly dramatic example of that. He and his archly provocative then wife, the late Paula Yates, were tabloid fodder from the start, with lifestyles as extravagant as the names of their daughters Fifi Trixibelle, Peaches, and Pixie – names which Paula capped with her fourth child, after she left Geldof for INXS frontman Michael Hutchence, whose child she named Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily.

It was painful to see Geldof, in private, through the sad saga that followed. He was wracked by the anguish of a divorce writ, woven through with fantastical, malicious allegations. He made Herculean efforts to accommodate Paula's increasingly erratic demands for access to the children while insisting that they retain some semblance of a normal school routine.

He was distressed by the fact that he had been the last person to whom Hutchence spoke on the phone – in a row over access – before the singer was found dead in a hotel room in Sydney, naked, with a ligature around his neck, in an act of either auto-erotic asphyxiation or of despairing suicide. He was devastated when Paula was last year found dead at her Notting Hill home, following an overdose of drink and drugs, on the day of the birthday of one of their daughters. Through all this the wild stories, allegations and attacks printed by the tabloids often bore no resemblance to the actual facts. But despite this Geldof said almost nothing in public, and in private behaved as well as most of us could have hoped to in such a messy situation.

But it is not just his private life which has been subjected to wilful misrepresentation. Last year, band-wagonning on the fashion for revisionist history, a Channel 4 documentary attacked Geldof for his Live Aid work, claiming his "well-intentioned" aid operations had inadvertently caused more suffering than they alleviated. Geldof had been hoodwinked by Ethiopia's Marxist dictator, claimed a prime-time two-part series called The Hunger Business which alleged that much of the aid was diverted from its rightful destination.

The fact that many of its so-called "revelations" were factors which were known and weighed at the time by Geldof and his advisers was conveniently ignored by the programme-makers. Those of their interviewees (such as myself) who pointed this out were dropped from the film in favour of a battery of politicians, aid workers and others who lined up to attack Geldof as the dupe of a repressive regime.

Not that Geldof needs me to defend him. His counter-blast on the programme spoke as eloquently in vindication of his humanitarian work as did his dignified silence in the case of his private life. But the interface between his musical and business interests is a different matter.

Part of the problem is that pop music is an ephemeral world. It is of its essence that bands and singers come and go like flowers in a summer meadow.

Bob has never come to terms with his own standing in this matter. His talent, and good fortune, entitled him to his moment in the summer sun. In 1979 his single "I Don't Like Mondays" was No 1 in 32 countries. Bob would have liked to continue to reinvent himself in the pop world, as did great figures like David Bowie or Madonna, or to achieve iconic musical status like Paul McCartney and Pete Townshend, the pair of pop giants who bore him shoulder-high across the stage at the end of Live Aid. But his subsequent pop projects have been far less successful.

"I'm still quite big in Germany," he has told me forlornly on several occasions. His new album, expected in the autumn, is entitled, with grim irony, Sex, Age and Death. "My kids' generation only know I'm famous because they saw me in the Spice Girls' film," he has said.

The paradox for Geldof will probably always be that he has made the most money from the work he cares least about. But there is a bit of myth-making here. Geldof likes to say of his various ventures – be they pop music, television production, internet travel or his latest media and events company – that they arose only out of his anger at the inadequacy of what was on offer to him as a consumer. "I start things because what I see is crap and it makes me angry," he once said, with his usual memorable turn of phrase. "I started the Rats because all the records I heard were crap. I did Live Aid because what was happening was crap. I started Planet 24 (which produced Channel 4's money-spinning Big Breakfast tabloid television programme) because everything on TV was crap. And I'm starting the internet company because I am angry at all the crap on the Net."

But if he was angry then he was also astute enough to realise that anger is never enough. Just as he wheeled in a ghost-writer to help with his autobiography so he was shrewd enough, when he launched Planet 24 in 1992, to do so by merging his company, Planet Pictures, with 24 Hour productions, run by Charlie Parsons and Waheed Alli. They had the creative and business acumen to match Geldof's talent for spinning off ideas that he did not have the stamina to carry through. Between them they turned Planet 24 into one of the hottest programming companies, and made Geldof a cool £5m when he eventually sold his stake in the company to Carlton.

Similarly, his internet travel company, Deckchair.com, may have been inspired by the problems he encountered when trying to use the internet to book a last-minute holiday in Florida last winter for his children and his French girlfriend, the actress Jeanne Marine. But he was canny enough to do it in conjunction with James Page, one of the founders of Eidos, the software company that created Lara Croft. And, again, when he set up Ten Alps Broadcasting – the firm which is to back itself into the publicly quoted marketing and communications business Osprey Communications, and finally get Geldof listed on the stock market – he did so in partnership with radio producer Alex Connock.

"The first thing to say," said Geldof when interviewed for the first time by a financial journalist for the City pages, "is that I'm a fucking useless businessman". And the multimillionaire then went on to talk about the detail of the reverse takeover and how he hadn't found it easy.

"Frankly, I'm chronically impatient – once you get the institutions and the City, and visit the company and talk to their management, it does go on.

There are a lot of people involved. People who do public company deals say this is easy, but it is new for me," added Geldof, who will become a non-executive director of the firm and will own about 12 per cent of the shares. "We do TV, radio and events production. By adding advertising and sponsorship revenues, it allows us to own that content which, in the world of new media is the name of the game."

A useless businessman? Perhaps. But recently Prima Baby magazine asked its readers to vote for the best celebrity mum in a poll of mothers. The actress Kate Winslett, who not long ago called her baby her "most successful production", landed 43 per cent of the votes. But the surprise write-in choice of the voters was Bob Geldof, whom the readers dubbed an "honorary mum". They gave him 4 per cent of the vote in honour of his decision to adopt his ex-wife's orphaned daughter, Tiger Lily. Perhaps if Geldof continues on his current business trajectory the City one day may find it necessary to find a new tag to describe him too.