Bob Geldof: I still sob over Peaches’ death while stuck at traffic lights
IT’S almost six years since his daughter Peaches died of a heroin overdose at the age of 25.
But Sir Bob Geldof has revealed he still has ‘unbearable’ moments of grief.
The musician, 68, said he can find himself crying to the ‘maximum’ at traffic lights in his car after becoming overwhelmed.
In an interview at the weekend, he said: ‘Last week I went to the funeral of a mate’s son and he didn’t want me to come for fear that I had to relive it, but I had to be there for him because it is unbearable. Time doesn’t heal – time accommodates and it’s ever present.
‘You’re driving along and you’re at the traffic lights and for no reason whatsoever the person in question inhabits you and I cry and then I look around to make sure the people next door don’t see me or are taking a picture and posting it.
‘But that happens to everyone and you say, “I’m going to cry now” and you do it to the maximum because there is no use holding it in.’ Speaking on The Tommy Tiernan Show on Ireland’s RTE One on Saturday, The Boomtown Rats frontman described his grief as ‘boundless’ and ‘bottomless’ and said it is a matter of learning how to ‘accommodate that’.
‘It’s shimmering away all the time but you can’t live like that,’ he said. ‘I just get tired of the soap opera nature, it’s so extreme the things that happen I think “stop, stop”.’
Sir Bob’s first wife, Paula Yates, also died of a heroin overdose in 2000. As well as Peaches, the TV presenter, who was 41, had daughters Fifi, 36, and Pixie, 29, with the musician. She also had daughter Heavenly Hiraani, also known as Tiger, 23, with Michael Hutchence who took his own life, aged 37, in 1997 when Tiger was 16 months old.
Sir Bob said his wife Jeanne Marine gives him ‘boundless joy’ and being on stage is his ‘catharsis’, leaving him feeling ‘alive’. The pair have been together since 1996 and tied the knot in 2015.
It’s not the first time he has opened up about the death of Peaches at her home in Kent in April 2014. He previously said he had ‘half expected it’.
Speaking to Miriam O’Callaghan on RTE Radio 1 in 2015 he said his daughter was ‘with him every second of the day’.
‘This thing of being forever 25, in my head, that’s unbearable, simply because of that cliche – you’re not supposed to see your children die,’ he said. ‘But she is the one who is with me every second of the day and she is the one who bangs into my consciousness at any moment, especially in any down moment…where I’m not doing something.’
Peaches was married to musician Thomas Cohen with whom she had two sons, Astala and Phaedra. They were three and two years old respectively when she died.