BOB GELDOF HAS spoken about the impact that grief has had on his life, saying that it still “erupts” when he doesn’t expect it to. 

In a wide-ranging interview with RTÉ’s Brendan O’Connor, the Boomtown Rats singer spoke about his life, career and last year’s Presidential Election as he chose five songs that held a special meaning to him ahead of his 75th birthday later this year. 

He also opened up about the grief he has experienced, from losing his mother at a young age to the death of his ex-wife Paula Yates and later their daughter, Peaches Geldof. 

“It’s not defined by it,” he told O’Connor when asked how he has dealt with the “unimaginable grief” that he has experienced. 

Geldof’s mother died of a cerebral haemorrhage when he was eight years old. He said he doesn’t really remember her, but has “jigsaw moments” that he pieces together to form a sense of who she was.

“For me, my mum is lipstick on a China teacup, an arm with a glamorous evening gown black glove up past her elbows, me seeing legs pedaling on a Singer sewing machine.”

He said he has a clear memory of the night she died, and how, having gone to bed, his father broke the news to him the next morning. 

“My dad comes in, and he sat on the edge of the bed, and he said ‘Something terrible happened last night’,” he said.

“I didn’t say anything. And he said ‘Your mum died’, and then he started to cry. And I started to cry because my dad was crying. I’d never seen a man cry, and I’d certainly never seen my father cry, so I got afraid.”

He wasn’t taken to the wake, and on the day of her funeral, he was taken to see a film. “Children didn’t go to burials then, or at least I didn’t. I wasn’t brought,” he said.

‘It does erupt’

Geldof said this experience was helpful to him when his ex-wife Paula Yates died in 2000 at the age of 41. He described how it was their daughter Pixie’s 10th birthday that day when he got a phone call from Yates’ friend to tell him the news. 

“I remembered the directness of my father, and that’s precisely what a child needs. Tell me exactly. No obfuscations. When I had to tell my children that their mother died, it was terrible.”

He also reflected on how grief still affects him almost 12 years after the death of his daughter Peaches at the age of 25.

“It does erupt. I’ve been stopped at traffic lights, for example – this happened the other day – and suddenly, Peaches was there. She was with me, and I wept,” he said. “I wasn’t really aware I was weeping. I wasn’t sobbing, just tears that she was there.”

He described picturing his grief as “like a memory stick” that you can put in a computer.

“In that is all the memory, all the grief, all the pain, all the loss, all of that. And I stick that in an available compartment of my head, and 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 fucker, get back where you belong. That’s how I deal with it. It gets contained.”

Bob Geldof and his daughter Peaches in 2009. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Geldof said sometimes things like a song lyric will trigger a memory for him that brings the grief to the surface, comparing the feeling to something that “needs to be expunged”. 

He said many people listening to the programme will have gone through the same thing.

“All I know is that I hadn’t – sterile, old me – hadn’t quite understood how much I loved, how much I’d been loved. And as the poet [Philip] 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 it is the central, foundational, spinal thing of life, is love.

David Bowie

Geldof also reflected on moments in his career during the interview, such as hitchhiking to Brussels and blagging his way into David Bowie’s dressing room when he was doing the Thin White Duke tour in the 1970s and speaking to him about forming The Boomtown Rats. 

“I don’t know how, but I blag backstage. I know I did, because I’ve got photos,” he said.

He went on become friends with Bowie, who died in 2016, describing him as a “kind, thoughtful, caring man”. 

Bowie’s backing of me, from the very beginning of Band Aid right through to his death, was huge.

“It was David, people forget, who launched the original Band Aid video on the BBC. And he looked so cool. I had to say to him, ‘You look too cool, man.’” Geldof said Bowie agreed to put on his ‘Feed the World’ t-shirt, “but even then, he looked cool.” 

The Boomtown Rats will be performing in The Hub in Co Kilkenny next weekend. Asked about still performing, Geldof said he still loves to “leap about” on stage.

“I could chat to you now on the side to stage, they could say ‘Bob, you’re on’, and suddenly, literally, like that, I start going nuts, and I don’t stop until the show’s over,” he said. 

Presidential election was ‘flat’

Geldof was linked to a run at the Áras last year during the Presidential election, which was ultimately won by Catherine Connolly. Taoiseach Micheál Martin said he had spoken to the singer about running, but that the conversation was short because Jim Gavin had already been chosen as Fianna Fáil’s candidate for the race.  

Geldof later told The Journal: “I think I’d have walked the fucking thing.”

Asked yesterday if he thought he had dodged a bullet, he said: “Well, yes, without being rude, not because of the contestants or whatever they’re called. I thought it was a flat election.

“I simply couldn’t do it if I didn’t get the party nomination, I couldn’t do the 27 councils, and I don’t think they’d have nominated me.”

Geldof will turn 75 in October this year, something he described as “mad”.

“What am I doing being 74? I mean, literally, what’s going on? I don’t get it.”

When asked if he had planned his funeral, he said: “I’ve completely planned it. Give me a break. You’re talking to Bob Geldof here. I completely planned the show. The show is as written, and it’s to be a good time.”

O’Connor’s final question was whether Geldof would think he had lived a happy life when he is on his deathbed. 

“I don’t know about that. I think I’d think ‘That was mad. What was that?’”.