BOB Geldof has revealed he’s haunted by the memory of telling his children their mother had died of a fatal overdose.
The Boomtown Rats frontman, 74, married girlfriend Paula Yates in Las Vegas after a decade of romance together.
Paula is famously credited with being the secret force behind 1985’s Live Aid, the global fundraiser organised by Bob.
The humanitarian tapped into his glamorous partner’s music-industry contacts and revealed it was really Paula who brought together the likes of Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet to boost the appeal, which ended up raising about £150million for the starving in Ethiopia.
She had access to big-name celebs through Channel 4’s Eighties music show, The Tube, which she hosted with Jools Holland.
And fundraising to help victims was actually an idea dreamt up by Paula — who was just 25 — in the family home she shared with Bob, then 33, and their two-year-old daughter Fifi.
The idea came after they watched the evening news and witnessed Michael Buerk’s now-famous 1984 news report on the humanitarian crisis.
Away from the limelight, the couple went on to have two more children — Peaches in 1989 and Pixie in 1990.
But in 1995, Paula interviewed Michael Hutchence on Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast and started a wild, drug-fuelled affair with the INXS frontman.
Her marriage to Bob was severed and she went on to welcome a daughter, Tiger Lily, with Michael in 1996.
Tragically, in 1997, the singer took his own life in a Sydney hotel room aged 37.
The following year, Bob won full custody of his three daughters after Paula attempted suicide.
But three years later, Paula died aged 41 of a heroin overdose at her home in Notting Hill, London, on Pixie’s 10th birthday.
Tragically Peaches, her daughter with Sir Bob, died the same way, aged 25, in 2014.
Following Paula’s death, Bob also became legal guardian of Tiger Lily, later formally adopting her in 2007.
HARROWING PHONE CALL
The political activist has now opened up about the heartbreaking moment he was told the mother of his children had died.
He then had to find a way to tell his daughters, who were then aged 17, 11, and 10.
The Irish singer-songwriter told 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 confided in his partner Jeanne Marine for help, but decided to tell his children straight what had happened.
He recalled his own father telling him at the age of eight-years-old how his mother had passed away.
“I remembered the directness of my father, and that’s precisely what a child needs – tell me exactly, no obfuscations,” he said.
Bob said they all “reacted differently” but he believes he “failed” and “didn’t do it right” which has “bugged [me] subsequently”.
The Live Aid organiser allowed the three girls to see Paula in her coffin, which he did think “was the right thing to do” after consulting psychologists.
‘I JUST DIDN’T WANT TO WAKE UP AGAIN’
Touching on his own experience with grief after Paula’s death, Bob admitted it was “not the feeling of loss” and “agony” caused when she left him for Michael Hutchence.
“That required something else in me and, honest to god, I just didn’t want to wake up again,” he confessed.
“You deal with these chasms of grief, these universes of loss, these abysses of pain and not understanding anything.”
Sir Bob told how he pushed through for his children and eventually fell in love with French actress Jeanne.
“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 said.
The couple tied the knot in 2015, a year after daughter Peaches’ death, because the family were seeking some “light in the fog”.
Bob spoke candidly about the pain of losing his daughter and said he’s still overcome with grief.
The central foundational spinal thing of life is love
Bob Geldof
“It 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…
“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 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 f***er.
“Get back where you belong. And that’s how I deal with it. It gets contained.”
He 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.”
