Sir Bob's end-of-year tour has coincided neatly with a new Best of the Boomtown Rats compilation, which he was characteristically forthright about plugging. Tracks for the album were chosen by polling the fans for their choices, which is how oddball selections like When the Night Comes gained an unexpected return trip to the spotlight.

But despite the band's successes in the late 1970s, the Rats' music probably wouldn't make it to many people's desert island. Quite what made the exhaustingly histrionic I Don't Like Mondays such a big hit is difficult to work out in retrospect, while the likes of Joey's on the Street Again now sound like laboured impersonations of early Bruce Springsteen. But as Geldof himself has commented, most people come to his shows to see Bob Geldof, international personality, rather than out of any profound attachment to the back catalogue. And since the evening is structured as a series of autobiographical reminiscences with music in between, most probably go home feeling they've had their money's worth.

It's Geldof's inability to stop that has endeared him to, or forced himself upon, large swathes of the world's population. Whether he's battling famine in Africa or telling an anecdote onstage, Geldof keeps charging ahead long past the point where anybody else would have stopped. It's the secret of his success, and burdened him with expectations that he could "save the entire fucking universe", but it can also make him a bully and a bore.

At the Union, most of his yarns were worth hearing, like how I Don't Like Mondays (about a Columbine-style school massacre) was banned in America, then suddenly popped up in an episode of The West Wing, sung by Tori Amos. He included songs from the agonisingly personal Sex Age and Death album, but kept talking about how "miserable" they made him. Well stop singing them then. Or would that be too easy?

· At Liverpool Academy tonight. Box office: 0151-256 5555.