Peaches’ boys will be better off growing up outside the Geldof family, says Sir Bob
BOB GELDOF was repeatedly overcome with grief yesterday as he spoke movingly about the death of his daughter Peaches.
In his first TV interview since losing his daughter in April, the Boomtown Rats singer revealed he wanted Peaches’ two young sons to escape being ‘wrapped up in the Geldof life’, which he likened to a ‘national soap opera’.
Instead, he praised their rock singer father, Thomas Cohen, 24, and Cohen’s own parents for their devotion to raising the two boys.
Geldof, who has an honorary knighthood, said he believed Astala, two, and Phaedra, one, would have no ‘craving to remember their mum’ in much the same way that he did not have memories of his own mother, Evelyn, who died from a brain haemorrhage when he was young.
The 62-year- old singer told Lorraine Kelly on ITV: ‘[Astala and Phaedra] are so small... I’m not sure that they’ll have this craving to remember their Mum, and I think that is healthy.
‘They are young enough to be able to build emotional relationships away from
‘Their dad and his parents are amazing’
the primary relationship with the mother. I know that sounds very cold and empirical but obviously I have had to think about the rest of the family and Tom, their dad, and Keith and Sue, their grandparents, who are amazing people and doing fantastically with the guys.
‘I don’t want them becoming wrapped up in the Geldof life – it’s great in some respects, it’s appalling in other times.
‘My Mum died when I was six or seven, I have no memory of her. I am shown photos. I have no interest in that, much, because I have no memory of her.’
Miss Geldof died in April at her home in Wrotham, Kent, after taking heroin. She had been in sole charge of Phaedra and was discovered by her husband, who had been looking after Astala.
The Geldof family has been plagued by drama. Peaches’ mother Paula Yates left Geldof in 1995 after an affair with the Australian singer Michael Hutchence.
Hutchence died in a hotel room in Sydney and his death was later ruled to be suicide.
Miss Yates died of a heroin overdose in 2000. Those closest to Peaches claim she never recovered f rom l osing her mother when she was only 11.
On the day, she and her elder sister Fifi Trixibelle, who was 17, were celebrating their younger sister Pixie’s tenth birthday. Following her mother’s death, Peaches began drinking alcohol and experimenting with drugs.
In her last interview before she died, she appeared to predict she would die in a way that mirrored her mother’s demise. She told Spectator Life magazine: ‘It’s like I’m someone in a book. Your life, they keep telling you, is preordained, “I’m going to die like my mother ... she’s going to end up like her mother”.’
Commenting on the ups and downs of his family life being played out in a very public arena, Geldof said yesterday: ‘The problem is that for 40 years the family has been sort of part of the national soap opera. I never expected that.
‘People kind of think they know us, and to some extent they do know part of it, and I wish it were otherwise.
‘My life seems to be incredibly episodic, like a soap opera, and I’m never aware I’m in the next scene until something happens and I’m already in the middle of it and there’s no getting out of it.’
He described the pain of losing Peaches as intolerable and
‘It’s intolerable, it’s very hard’
said he often finds himself sobbing in the street when he is overwhelmed by emotion.
‘I’d imagine that will be there for a long time,’ he said. ‘It’s intolerable, it’s very hard, as everybody must realise. What else do you do, you get on with it.’
Salvation comes through performing, he said. ‘Being on stage is entirely cathartic, it just clears your head. I just get on a stage and go mad.’
He also finds solace in how warmly his daughter is remembered and how the younger generation no longer know him as a star in his own right but as Miss Geldof’s father.
‘I liked it,’ he said. ‘I liked being Peaches Geldof’s Dad.’
He recently became engaged to his girlfriend of 18 years, Jeanne Marine, 49.
‘I love her to bits, she’s amazing and I certainly would not have got through the last 20 years without her,’ he said.