Bob Geldof interview
Geldof survives 'unsayable' pain
Calgary Herald
Saturday, November 30, 2002
Page: B9
Section: Arts & Style
Byline: Nick Lewis
Bob Geldof is pacing his Battersea, London, apartment,
where much of his latest record, Sex, Age & Death,
was conceived.
"The whole record is loss, pain, grief, emptiness,
aridity, despair, anger, bitterness . . . but not apathy," the
48-year-old growls into the phone. "Apathy is nowhere
present."
This is Geldof's first record since 1993 and his most
harrowing to date. It is also his first disc since his highly
publicized divorce from broadcaster Paula Yates, her
marriage to INXS singer Michael Hutchence and their
tragic deaths. He is speaking to the press to promote
a concert that airs tonight on Bravo!
He hasn't said much to the media in recent years about
what he calls "the other thing," and has chosen 10
songs on this record to speak about "the unsayable" --
being left by Yates for Hutchence in 1995 after nine
years of marriage, and the lovers' deaths. Hutchence
committed suicide in 1997 and Yates died of a heroin
overdose in 2000 after a failed copycat suicide in
1998. She left behind four children: three are Geldof's, one is
Hutchence's.
The British tabloids at first treated Geldof as the
injured party in the divorce. But Yates used the press to
berate, accusing him of being the instigator of
Hutchence's suicide by hanging.
Through all the controversy, Geldof -- knighted and
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his famine relief
work through Live Aid and Band Aid -- chose not to
comment.
"I can't describe it," he says. "I couldn't describe
the pitch of pain. It is unsayable."
The former leader of the Boomtown Rats says his former
bandmates moved in briefly with him to help his
depression during this tumultuous time, and they would
sit around for hours in silence. He found their act of
generosity bizarre but calming.
"For several years I was incapable of functioning in
any sense," Geldof says. "I was inhabiting an emotionally
minimal landscape and I was living, as a result of
that, an almost animal existence. I was overwhelmed by the
loss and the pain and so I needed to get out. . . .
You either die or you find some mechanism. I'm lucky that for
27 years I've been writing songs, and so gradually,
over time, your instincts return."
The two most interesting songs on Sex, Age & Death
deal with Yates and Hutchence. The first track, One For
Me, is directed at her vanity; another song, Inside
Your Head, is more pointed. It contains the lines, "You got
the palace/ You left me the shed/ You got a life/ You
left me for dead/ So why put a noose around your neck /
What the (expletive)'s going on inside your head?"
"As much as I find it difficult to talk about, the
songs to me are utterly accurate," Geldof says. "Utterly accurate
and true. And even though I didn't understand them
when I did them, I understood them to be true. It's difficult
to play them live because they are so true for me . .
. when I do them I'm dragged back to the there and then."
Geldof's career is the stuff of fiction. He speaks of
it as a soap opera, noting he fears the next chapter, which
he feels he has no control over.
Geldof, who as an Irish national does not use the
title Sir Bob, says he was a mouthy kid from Dublin who
didn't find himself until he snuck into Canada in the
early '70s, and was hired as the music editor at the
Georgia Straight in Vancouver. When he was discovered
by the immigration authorities and deported to Dublin
months later, he had ambitions to start up a rock
newspaper, make some money and emigrate back to
Canada.
Fate intervened when his mates started a band called
the Boomtown Rats and made him the lead singer.
"Girls wanted to shag me and I thought, this is a
better job than journalism," he says.
Geldof and the Boomtown Rats went on to become a minor
rock success. In 1985, he organized a collective of
musicians, called Band Aid, to record the charity
single called Do They Know It's Christmas? for famine-struck
Ethiopia.
Then came Live Aid, a set of two charity concerts in
Philadelphia and London that raised $100 million US in
famine relief.
He married Yates, a British TV personality, in Las
Vegas in June 1986, shortly after he had been made a
knight of the realm for his work on Live Aid. In 1995,
Yates began a public affair with Hutchence, and Geldof
was repeatedly blamed by the two for not awarding
custody of his and Yates' children to Hutchence.
Geldof says he considered suicide when he lost Yates
to Hutchence. He made a list of reasons for and
against staying alive, calling them "why you should
stay around" and "why bother staying around." The latter
was a page long. The other list had only two words --
"the children."
"I describe my life as extremely episodic, and it is a
soap opera life," Geldof says.
"Plenty of people lose their wives, but it doesn't
result in the utter madness that surrounded us and in the high
tragedy in the way it happened. That doesn't happen.
Nor does it happen that one day in Ireland you start a
band and the next day you've got mega hits and mega
concerts. Nor does it happen that one day you decide to
do a little record for famine relief, and it becomes
this massive phenomenon. None of that is predictable.
"It's very tiring."
