IN 1985 Garrick Roberts had a worldwide audience of millions headlining at Live Aid with his band the Boomtown Rats. Next month he'll be a hit with a handful of hopefuls from Herefordshire looking to start their own business - just like he did when fame became a flip-side.

Garrick had "10 years of a great time" at the top as a guitarist with the Rats, one of Britain's biggest bands in the late 1970's-early 1980s and fronted by Bob Geldof.

"I got to drive up Sunset Boulevard with my elbow out the window," says Garrick of the maverick years which brought the Rats a string of hits including the punky Rat Trap and the iconic I Don't Like Mondays.

But Garrick is also the kind of guy who will have an elbow out the window on the short ride from his Bromyard home to the Bank House Hotel, Bransford, on October 3 when Hereford and Worcester Business Start-Up hosts a Directions day, aimed at getting fledgling firms up and running.

There, he's starring in a show-and-tell session about what it takes to be your own boss - and get to like Mondays.

Business Start-Up put Garrick back on the road again - but fine-tuning boiler systems not guitars.

Though a dab hand with a flue-gas analyser, the old rocker can still grind out a mean (hot) air guitar on the torque wrench, the same spirit that saw him start the Rats with friend and fellow teen party crasher John Johnnie Fingers' Moylett in the early 1970s. Growing up with them in Dun Laoghaire, near Dublin, was a young - and The Rats took rock n' roll around the world.

It was a wild time and what kept Garrick grounded was the memory of playing to "two maids and a tea trolley" in a hotel lounge on an early tour. So he wasn't going to be fazed by the world watching Live Aid.

"We did our bit, it went all right. I saw the rest of it through Elton John's binoculars," he says.

For the full story, see this week's Hereford Times.

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