Bob Geldof yelled at fans for wearing Primark because he wants to talk up the working classes but never walk among them

Lefty, boho windbags like him will spend an entire lifetime exalting the glorious, faultless working classes – in song, in prose, in mid-interview rhetoric. This continues until the very second they’re actually faced with them

Bob Geldof (AFP/Getty)

As a journeyman observer of Bob Geldof’s antics over the past 30 or more years, I enjoyed his Brentwood Festival outburst about his Primark-clad audience. Geldof is never boring. Never apologises. Never resigns, albeit temporarily, from public life in a fit of contrite pique. We should treasure that as Britain’s old anarchic guard dwindle. And last Sunday was gold standard Geldof. “You are wearing wall to wall fucking Primark!” he ranted at Essex families who’d pitched up in the heatwave to watch the funky overbite-inducing line-up including Tony Hadley and Level 42.

“This is a rock and roll festival!” Geldof berated the host of loyal fans. “When you come to a rock and roll festival, you dress for a rock and roll festival!” Geldof – a man who’s been perpetually “dressed for rock and roll” since 1975 – was wearing a silver snakeskin suit. In his vintage years, Geldof has adopted the guise of a steam-punk circus master. Or, more accurately, Beetlejuice tarted up for a magistrates court appearance. This is not a look easily cobbled together from high street stores on a £20 budget, but then I’ll guess Geldof hasn’t shopped off-the-peg since the hit single I Don’t Like Mondays began his financial assent to Sunday Times Rich List fodder.

Geldof has, I presume, never known the exquisite joy of carting home a big, heavy Primark brown paper bag, the handles cutting into your hands, suffering from the early sparks of buyer’s remorse because you only popped in for a pair of trainer socks. Now you’re carrying an enormous haul of cut-price mass-produced deck shoes, leggings, clutch purses, snoods, costume jewellery, plus nine scented lint rolls that sort of fell into your pull-along cart in the queue. Maybe Geldof should go to Primark; it might cheer him up. If he’s free next Monday, perhaps myself and some readers can take him. We can go for a Bubbletea afterwards, then on to Mexican night at ‘Spoons.

Sensing the crowd’s chagrin over his Primark remarks, Geldof continued the charm offensive: “What are you booing for? We're in fucking Brexit-land here, guys. Yeah, we're Irish, we're still in Europe.” It may be obtuse of me to point out that Geldof on the Thames with a boat full of lounge-suited media twonks did almost more to swing ‘Average Joe’ Britain towards voting Brexit than Eddie Izzard’s Question Time ‘cerise beret and statement lip’ combo.

Geldof was doubtlessly rattled by the Brentwood audience in their cheap crop-tops and ill-fitting shorts made in shiny fabrics and shipped from Bangladesh. But then lefty, boho windbags like him will spend an entire lifetime exalting the glorious, faultless working classes – in song, in prose, in mid-interview rhetoric. This continues until the very second they’re actually faced with them, en masse, in their Primark togs, in ASDA at Christmas, or in the Luton Airport Easyjet queue, or at a football match. At this point they find the man in the street ghastly, unimaginative, politically incorrect, a bit racist and just simply not as nice to be around as the small circle of nodding-dog jobbing session singers, sculptresses and hot stone healers they know in North or West London.

Geldof also, I feel, pines for the festivals of yesteryear that all older farts chunter about. He possibly longs for those non-commercial ventures, “strictly for the heads”, where the crowds were avid music-lovers who’d bought their clothes by sending postal order to PO Box numbers in the back of the NME. Perhaps, like me, Geldof glorifies an era before the magazine ‘Get Your Festival Fashion Look’ features filled with daisy-chain head dresses; a time where festival coverage wasn’t Millie Mackintosh in a nine-page shoot from the VIP lounge sitting astride a hay bale. And to all this a quiet voice in my head says, 'Things have moved on, Grandma, leave it.’

When Geldof says crowds should “dress for rock and roll” he possibly means “dress to lose a shoe in the mosh pit, get into a knife fight with a Hells Angel, and stay awake for three days solid, before falling asleep in a latrine which is merely a plank over a pit”. But Brentwood Festival isn’t like that. It’s a very safe, average British festival in 2016, filled with everyday Primark-clad, Brexit-voting people. If he felt like that last Sunday, please, God, let someone book him a last-minute slot at V Festival in Chelmsford.