Live Aid mastermind Bob Geldof once told his fellow Irishman and journalist Joe Jackson he would never update his 1986 autobiography 'Is That It'. Joe Jackson now suggests that "in ways the two interviews, each roughly 10,000 words long, and two thirds of which has never been previously published, from 1989 and 2001, that make up my book about Bob are, in ways an update of his autobiography. Certainly in the sense that they are psycho-sexual studies."
Not that Geldof would necessarily agree. Although he might. He told Joe Jackson towards the end of the second interview - which he described as "a tennis match of a f*****g interview!" -"You, Joe, would recognise, having interviewed me over more than a decade, that there are consistencies in my nature. You also identified that hollow space."
What is that hollow space? All is revealed in Bob Geldof: The Joe Jackson Interviews Plus. The book also contains a profile Joe Jackson wrote of Geldof in 2001 and, for the first time ever, the back story of the history shared by Jackson and Geldof who are roughly the same age, grew up in the same area of Dublin - "be he came from the right side of the tracks and I came from the wrong side!" says Jackson - and lived near each other for twenty years. Jackson also photographed Bob Gedof professionally back in 1977 and it is his own portrait of Bob which adorns the cover.