Sir Bob Geldof has made a profoundly moving confession about one of the most harrowing moments of his life, revealing he is still haunted by how he told his young daughters that their mother, Paula Yates, had died. The 74-year-old Boomtown Rats frontman and Live Aid organiser opened up in an emotional interview on RTE Radio 1, detailing the tragic day in September 2000 when he learned his ex-wife had been found dead from a heroin overdose.
A Devastating Phone Call on a Birthday
The musician described receiving the fateful phone call from Paula Yates' best friend on what should have been a day of celebration: their daughter Pixie's 10th birthday. "When I had to tell my children that their mum had died it was terrible," Geldof recalled. He recounted the surreal scene of his daughters Fifi, then 17, Peaches, then 11, and Pixie, all dressed up and excited for the birthday festivities, with Pixie anticipating a lunch date with her mother.
Geldof admitted his initial reaction was one of stunned paralysis. "I put down the phone as if it was just a phone call and Fifi said, 'What? Don't tell me, mum something-something.' And I said, no, no. I said, go on, open your presents, stop messing around." He then turned to his partner, French actress Jeanne Marine, and whispered, "I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do."
Following His Father's Example
Drawing on the memory of his own father's directness when informing eight-year-old Bob of his mother Evelyn's death, Geldof decided to be brutally honest with his daughters. "I remembered the directness of my father, and that's precisely what a child needs - tell me exactly, no obfuscations," he explained. However, he believes he failed in the execution. "I just went up and I did what my father did. And they reacted differently. I think I failed, actually. I think I didn't do it right. That's bugged me subsequently."
In a decision he now considers psychologically sound, Geldof took the girls to see their mother's body. "I brought them to see her body, which is the thing you do now. And they saw it as an inert thing. Mum wasn't there. And it's like the wakes in Ireland, the person just simply has gone." This was particularly poignant for Geldof, who had been barred from his own mother's funeral as a child.
A Family Tragedy Repeated
The interview took an even more tragic turn as Geldof reflected on the cruel symmetry of fate. Paula Yates, the vibrant TV presenter known for The Tube and The Big Breakfast, died aged 41 from a heroin overdose. Fourteen years later, their daughter Peaches would meet the same tragic end at just 25 years old in 2014. The family's story is one of profound loss, beginning with Paula leaving Geldof for INXS frontman Michael Hutchence in 1995, their subsequent divorce in 1996, and Hutchence's suicide in a Sydney hotel room in November 1997.
Following Paula's suicide attempt in 1998, Geldof won full custody of their three daughters. After Paula's death, he also became legal guardian of her daughter with Hutchence, Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, formally adopting her in 2007. He expressed gratitude for taking Tiger Lily to see her mother's body, stating it helped her "understand the logic of life and death."
The Different Shades of Loss
In a startling admission, Geldof revealed that losing Paula to death was not as devastating as when she left him for another man. "It was not as bad - people are probably going to go nuts on me now and I hope, I wish they won't - it was not the feeling of loss. The grief, the agony, was not as bad as when Paula left me. That was worse," he confessed.
He described that earlier abandonment as requiring "something else in me and, honest to god, I just didn't want to wake up again. You deal with these chasms of grief, these universes of loss, these abysses of pain and not understanding anything." His salvation came from a decision to live for his children. "If you make the decision - I'm going to live because I have children and I'm going to make sure they're okay - the soul has no proposition except to bind itself together to somehow push itself back."
Finding Love and Light Again
After the split from Paula, Geldof entered a period of profound misogyny. "I didn't want to see another woman in my life. I hated every woman," he reflected. However, love found him unwillingly when he met Jeanne Marine at a Paris dinner party in 1996. "Whether I liked it or not, it took a while, but my soul demanded love," he said. "It came to me, and I was unwilling, and I resisted - never again, never again - because I will not survive again. I resisted, I resisted. But you have no choice."
He credits Jeanne, who spoke little English at the time, with his emotional recovery. "This gorgeous, wonderful woman that I bumped into, didn't know anything about me, who didn't speak English, perhaps that's what I wanted - complete silence while we began to understand each other." They married in France in April 2015, a year after Peaches' death, with Geldof explaining he proposed because the family needed "light in the fog" after the tragedy.
Living with Grief Decades Later
Now in his seventies, Geldof has developed a method for managing his enduring grief. He described how it can ambush him unexpectedly, like recently at a traffic light. "Suddenly Peaches was there. She was with me. And I wept." He visualises his grief as a memory stick containing "all the memory, all the grief, all the pain, all the loss."
"When it erupts as it does, unbeckoned, unbidden at a traffic light stop, I can see it, I can take it out, and I say, I know you, you little f***er. Get back where you belong. And that's how I deal with it. It gets contained." The humanitarian concluded with a hard-won wisdom: "I hadn't quite understood how much I loved, how much I'd been loved. As the poet Larkin says, all that remains of us, will be love. That's true, but it takes this 74-year-old geezer how long and what experience did I need to go through to understand that the central foundational spinal thing of life is love."
