Sir Bob Geldof has revealed he regrets the way he broke the devastating news to his young daughters that their mother Paula Yates had died in a heartbreaking confession about learning to live with grief.
The Boomtown Rats frontman, 74, opened up about the harrowing moment in September 2000 when he learned his TV presenter ex-wife had been found dead from a heroin overdose on their daughter Pixie’s 10th birthday.
The Live Aid organiser confessed he is still haunted to this day about how he handled telling their daughters – Fifi, then 17, Peaches, then 11, and Pixie – about their mother, from whom he’d split six years earlier.
‘When I had to tell my children that their mum had died it was terrible,’ he said this week on RTE Radio 1. ‘I got a phone call and Paula’s best friend said she just found her.
‘It was Pixie’s 10th birthday that day. And the other two girls [Fifi and Peaches] were there and excited and Pixie was all dressed up. She was going over to have lunch with her mum.
‘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.’
Bob Geldof says he regrets the way he broke the news to his young daughters that their mother Paula Yates had died; Pictured with his daughters Fifi, Tiger Lily, Pixie and Peaches in 2005
Bob opened up about the moment in September 2000 when he learned his ex-wife had been found dead from a heroin overdose; Paula and Bob pictured in 1995 shortly before they split
The musician said he then turned to his partner, French actress Jeanne Marine, and admitted: ‘I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.’
Following the example of his own father, who had told him directly about his own mother Evelyn’s death when Bob was eight years old, he told them exactly what had happened.
‘I remembered the directness of my father, and that’s precisely what a child needs – tell me exactly, no obfuscations,’ he recalled.
‘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.’
He added: ‘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.’
Paula, who presented The Tube and The Big Breakfast, died aged 41 from a heroin overdose – the same fate that later claimed their daughter Peaches, who died tragically aged 25 in 2014.
Bob and Paula had married in Las Vegas in 1986 after a decade together, but separated in February 1995 when she left him for INXS frontman Michael Hutchence.
The couple divorced in 1996, and Paula gave birth to her daughter with Hutchence, Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, in July that year. When Michael died by suicide in a Sydney hotel room in November 1997, Paula was left devastated.
The Live Aid organiser confessed he is still haunted to this day about how he handled telling their daughters – Fifi, then 17, Peaches, then 11, and Pixie, then 10; Pictured earlier this month
In 1998, Bob won full custody of their three daughters after Paula attempted suicide. Following Paula’s subsequent death, Bob became legal guardian of Tiger Lily, later formally adopting her in 2007.
Bob added he is glad that he took their daughters, and Tiger Lily, to see Paula’s body when she died – especially as he was not allowed at his own mother’s funeral when he was a child.
‘I think that the psychiatrists or psychologists were right… it was the right thing to do,’ he said. ‘They got to understand, especially Tiger – she got to understand her mum had gone, and understood the logic of life and death.’
During his emotional interview, Bob said that losing Paula when she died 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 admitted.
Bob and Paula had married in Las Vegas in 1986 after a decade together, but separated in February 1995 when she left him for INXS frontman Michael Hutchence; Pictured in 1985
‘That required 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.’
The Irish singer explained how he forced himself to continue for his children’s sake: ‘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. This obliterated thing. And the only way to do that is somehow through love.’
After splitting from Paula, Bob found love again with Jeanne, 60, whom he had first met at a dinner party in Paris in 1996.
‘I didn’t want to see another woman in my life. I hated every woman’, he reflected on the difficult period following his split from Paula. ‘And whether I liked it or not, it took a while, but my soul demanded love.
‘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.
‘You allow it in, and once it weasels its way in, you begin to be less hateful as a person. You begin to bind again, and you become human again.’
Paula died aged 41 from a heroin overdose – the same fate that later claimed their daughter Peaches, who died tragically aged 25 in 2014; Peaches is pictured in 2013
He continued: ‘I was so lucky. 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.
‘All of that factored into it. I just got lucky. And that was it. And you grab hold of that or at least some part of you grabs hold of it.’
He and Jeanne married in France in April 2015 – a year after Bob’s daughter Peaches died aged 25 from a heroin overdose, the same fate that claimed her mother.
The Live Aid legend said he proposed to Marine because the family needed ‘light in the fog’ after Peaches’s death.
Discussing how he manages his grief today, Bob admitted that he occasionally sees Peaches and is overwhelmed by loss.
‘It [grief] does erupt. I’ve been stopped at traffic lights, for example,’ he said. ‘This happened the other day – suddenly Peaches was there. She was with me. And I wept.
‘And being me, you’re a bit afraid that the guy in the next car doesn’t see you and take a picture of you and all that stuff. So you have to be careful. But I wasn’t really aware I was weeping. I wasn’t sobbing – just tears as she was there.
After splitting from Paula, Bob found love again with French actress Jeanne Marine, 60, whom he had first met at a dinner party in Paris in 1996; Pictured in 2024
‘All of these things, I picture it like a memory stick for your laptop. And in that is all the memory, all the grief, all the pain, all the loss, all of that. I stick that in an available propartment 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 f***er. Get back where you belong. And that’s how I deal with it. It gets contained.’
The humanitarian added: ‘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.’
