bobgeldof—savedbylove

SECTION 3
FASHION
Milan and
the pleasure
principle
Constance Harris
Pages 16 & 17
March 3 2013
Sunday Independent
INTERVIEW
Wahlberg
makes his
Mark
Julia Molony
Page 20
REVIEW
THE EDGE All the top gossip 2
DEAR MARY Addressing my
girlfriend’s abortion 10
TRAVEL Liadan Hynes finds
honeymoon heaven in Crete 28
TV Declan Lynch on the box 40
LIVING
+ TV,
MUSIC,
THEATRE,
CINEMA &
ARTS
BOB GELDOF — SAVED BY LOVE
◆ THE BIG STORY, PAGE 8 ◆
8
LIVI NG
SUNDAY INDEPENDENT
March 3 2013
THE BIG STORY
THE SAVING OF
GELDOF’S SOUL
Bob Geldof talks to
Barry Egan about
the mother he
can’t remember,
the agony of losing
wife Paula Yates to
Michael Hutchence,
finding happiness
with French
actress Jeanne
Marine, the joy of
having his children
enjoy his music and
the relevance of
the Boomtown
Rats’ music today,
as the band
prepares to reform
for a major gig
‘A
MOTHER’S happiness is
like
a
beacon,”
Balzac
wrote,
“lighting
up
the
future.”
Bob Geldof never
had that light. The shadows gathered
in his world from an early age and
remain to this day. Evelyn, just 41,
died of a brain haemorrhage when
Bob was six.
I ask him can he remember her.
He shakes his head — a head full of
unkempt, salt-and-pepper hair. A
few moments later, the 61-year-old
says he can recall “Proustian things,”
what he terms “hints of a life”: a
velvet glove on her right hand —
“up below the elbow, a velvet, long
evening glove” and lipstick on a
china tea cup, crushed-out cigarettes
with traces of lipstick on them.
“This is what I used to do,” Bob
says putting his finger through his
hair, indicating that it was as a young
child he'd put his little finger through
his mother’s hair. “And put my thumb
in my mouth and turn her hair like
this while sitting on her knee.”
From that, he says, you piece
together an emotional sense — “not
a visual image” — of a mother.
They’re triggers to what you felt, he
adds, “but it isn’t a sense of loss.
That’s rooted down deep and that’s
where the discontent comes from.
There’s always a sort of feeling of
emptiness. I go like that” — he touches his lower stomach — “because it
seems to be rooted here. ‘It’s a Godshaped hole, Bob,’” he says in a codChristian caricature of a hectoring
Irish voice, “if you just accept it’.”
“Others say: ‘Poor Bob, you’re
missing your mother.’ I’m not,” he
says firmly. “I’m not missing God, I’m
not missing my mother. It is just a
sense of it, which probably stems
from my mother’s death, but it doesn’t impede. But the psychological
thing must be some sort of animus. Must be. Not that it bothers
me, that sense of easy desolation
that overwhelms me…”
Bob describes his panic stages
from the ages of 11 to 15, where he
would come home to an empty
house in Dun Laoghaire. His
father, a travelling salesman, was
away all week. Bob had two older
sisters; one was married, the
other was at university.
“I had that sense of ‘I need
someone to hold on to me here’.
That was the loss,” Bob explains.
“Adding to a bizarre fear of coming
home and it is always November —
in my head, my youth is always
November — and the house is dark,
I walk up the steps and I’d go in and
I’d keep my head down. And if I
don’t keep my head down at the top
of the stairs, there would be a woman
looking at me.”
His mother?
“I’d imagine it was my mum,” he
says, “but I don’t know. And then,
because I didn’t want to light the fire,
I’d turn on the gas oven and put my
feet in the oven and tilt back in the
kitchen chair and just read a book.
But I daren’t look at the window on
to the yard, because there would be
a face looking in the window like
that. I remember that face. I’d say:
‘Stop it, now’.”
This story has echoes of something Geldof told me in an interview in 2002 in London: in 1995,
when his wife Paula Yates publicly
left him for INXS pop star Michael
Hutchence, leaving him a broken
man bordering on madness.
“I was actually mad,” he recalled
of that time of being temporarily
parted from his children, Fifi [born
March 31, 1983], Peaches [March 13,
1989] and Pixie [September 17, 1990].
Bob added by way of explaining his
madness that he could hear their
footfall on the stairs. And he would
shout out to them in the morning —
“7.30am? What are you doing up,
love?”
The sad fact was Bob was utterly
alone in the house. “I would suddenly twig that I was talking to those
ghosts,” he told me in 2002, “and I
would smell them going up to bed.
I would go in to tuck them up and I
would be actually at the bed, and the
bed was flat and I would just collapse.”
Freud believed that traumatic
experiences that a child cannot
process, because they occurred too
early in life, persist in the mind as
existential anxieties. Geldof ’s preexisting and unresolved abandonment fears because of his mother’s
‘I hated women.
Hated them. All of
them. And my female
friends I was viewing
with deep suspicion.
I didn’t want female
company. I didn’t
want their succour,
their support’
death were magnified into something awful for the 48-year-old Bob
when Yates in effect abandoned him
for Hutchence.
I ask him if that fear of being
abandoned ever goes away. When
Jeanne Marine — his partner of 16
years — goes away for a weekend,
does he fear at a subconscious level
she is never coming back?
“No,” he says. “That isn’t there.”
Did he ever ask his father to help
him get past all this psychological
torment Bob carried because of his
mother?
“He couldn’t. He was a man of his
time,” he says of Robert, who died on
August 26, 2010 at the age of 96.
“You met my dad. He was a very
broad-minded, intellectual man. His
grasp of things and his perspective
of them was solid. You could have a
proper argument with him. But what
he wasn’t capable of dealing with —
nor was I — was: ‘Dad, I think all this
stuff is because I miss my mother…’
What he would accept is that he
went off the rails because of it. No
question about that. All of us were
deeply affected by it, as are my lot by
what happened to their mum,” he
says, referring to Yates, who died of
a drug overdose at her home in London in September, 2000.
“And you deal with the fallout of
that all the time. Unfortunately for
my lot, they get beaten up for what
happened in their life.”
There were other subconscious
factors at work, too. Bob told me in
an interview last summer that Paula’s
family was “uber-weird.” (It was only
in 1997, the year she died, that Paula
discovered that her biological father
was TV host Hughie Green, rather
than the man she thought was her
dad, Jess Yates, himself a TV star
who had been plagued by controversy) “She was an only child. She was
parked into boarding school at a
young age, then taken from Wales
where they lived ... and moved
around the place.” As a result, she,
Bob remembered, “was completely
obsessive about family in an Enid
Blyton way. So, without realising it,
the family was so important to us
because neither of us had it.”
I wonder if Jeanne was aware of
the underlying emotional minefield
she was walking across when she
started going out with Bob in 1996.
“The thing is,” he begins, “I never
thought it would happen to me.
Never. But when you do fall in love
and you love your wife and the family that you both needed but didn’t
know and the intensity of that —
while the outside world could say
what it wanted about you — you had
this personal thing.
“This own world, which every
family has, where whole histories
go undetected. We had that and it
was really good and then it was…
“…and then it was Shakespearean,” he says, referring to the breakup of his marriage to Yates and the
tragic deaths that followed. “But
beyond the Shakespearean tragedy,
I inherited this bleak, cold world
that has no comfort to offer and is
pointless.” There is a pause.
“Then suddenly, against every
desire or instinct and great fear that
you will ever, ever, ever, ever, ever,
ever so expose yourself so nakedly –
which you didn’t even know you
were doing. Your innards were
f**king stretched out on a railway
line. You didn’t know that. And the
f**king locomotive comes and cuts
them apart. You didn’t know that’s
what you were doing. And suddenly along comes this other thing which
belies that. I resisted it. I was not
ever, ever…I was just going to...”
He sang that he “hated each and
every woman” on Dazzled on the
How To Compose Popular Songs That
Will Sell LP last year.
“There was no question of it. I
hated them. Hated them. All of them.
And my female friends I was viewing
with deep suspicion. I didn’t want
female company. I didn’t want their
succour, their support.”
At the dinner at which he met
French actress Jeanne in Paris in
1996, Bob remembers himself as “not
convivial”. They had met briefly in
1990 when Bob was recording The
Vegetarians Of Love LP.
“She was going out with an actor.
I thought she was a staggering beauty, Brigitte Bardot. So when she was
at that dinner, it was bizarre. She had
come because Katarina and Telse
Boorman were my mates. They gave
me the dinner to help me out and
invited Jeanne. ‘He’s on his own;
you’re single.’ That was the sort of
match-making thing, I guess.
“She’s a knock-out,” he adds. “Her
physical beauty is overwhelming for
me still. Besides that, she is a really
lovely person. She enabled me to
take care of my children. She enabled
me to reconstruct myself as a human.
What’s there not to love?” he asks
rhetorically.
What is she getting out of all this?
“She gets me!”
I try again. I say that here is a
woman who did everything for him
— saved him from himself, helped
him bring up the kids by another
woman. Bob is, by his own admission, not exactly Mr Chuckles.
So, is he massively witty and
funny at home with her by way of
compensation?
SUNDAY INDEPENDENT
March 3 2013
LIVI NG
9
WHAT I DID: ‘The legacy in Ireland of the Rats is that it articulated this generation’s time. The record companies were on red alert to look at Ireland as a source of potential.’ Photo: Gerry Mooney
Mr Chuckles bursts out laughing. arate thing.”
ask these questions because it makes mum. My adenoidal voice is from
“The rush of energy and arrange“I’m crap. But you know, we watch
On his song 10:15 from his 2002 me seem like a complete f**king my sinuses. So that’s physical. ments and melody — you realise
telly and cuddle up and she insists album Sex Age & Death, he sang: nutcase.”
Apparently, she used to like banging very little would have stopped those
on watching her crap French news ‘Jeanne saved my soul again last
This domestic intrigue is played the piano and singing songs. The kids from breaking through at that
at 7.30pm. At 8pm I go on to the night’.
out between two homes in England: Geldofs never did that. So that show- point in time,” he says of the Rats.
Channel 4 news. She’ll go and make
“That’s about the balm of some- Bob has a home in Kent and another offness is maybe her.”
“We had it.”
something to eat for us.
one loving you when you couldn’t in Battersea in south London.
That show-offness can be witJoseph O'Connor wrote in
“It’s a man and a wife and their possibly love yourself, never mind
As a consequence of his genteel nessed up close during the sum- Banana Republic: Reflections On A
family. She can’t cook. She’ll make the person who you loved exces- poverty growing up in Dun mer in Cork, when Bob reforms his Suburban Irish Childhood from his
something. That’s not to say that it sively telling the world how much Laoghaire, he is ‘tight’ with his own band the Boomtown Rats for a long- book, The Irish Male at Home and
is excellent. It’s like any man and they hated you,” he says, meaning kids. “They leave the lights on and awaited concert.
Abroad: “In November 1978, the
woman who love each other: rows Paula Yates, “and how that love was I turn them off,” he says. “I object
It is not overstating it to say that Boomtown Rats became the first
like anything else. I love being with a chimera and how it never existed when they spend needlessly.”
many of the Rats’ more incendiary Irish group of the era to get to the
her.”
— that it was all shite. And so in the
Bob’s father was a master chef as songs ring as true today as when he top of the British charts. On Top of
In terms of bringing up the chil- self-loathing that occurs to everyone well as a master salesman. He did- wrote them in the mid 1970s and the Pops that week, as he jabbered
dren, Bob adds, “it may also have — I am not unique — you are sud- n’t exactly pass on the gourmet early 1980s: “Banana Republic could the brilliant lyric of Rat Trap into his
made it more different as well — not denly rerouted and told [by Jeanne skills to his only son. “Can I cook? be as valid now,” he says referring to mike, Geldof ripped up a poster of
being their mum. And you know, Marine]: ‘No, no, You are capable of I’m all right,” Bob shrugs.
ferocious lyrics like ‘Septic Isle Olivia Newton John and John Trayou have all that dynamic and pol- being loved and I am doing it’.”
“I do the full-on Christmas thing,” screaming in the suffering sea. It volta, whose twee single Summer
itics in the house as every f**king
On How I Roll from How to Com- he says, “which is mega, because a sounds like crying'.
Nights the Rats had just ousted
parent in a separate relationship…” pose Popular Songs That Will Sell, couple of the kids went through
“Looking After Number 1 could from the number one slot. In school,
Did they ever think of having a Bob sings about being woken up at vegetarianism. I used to slip them be right now,” he continues. “Rat my friends and I were speechless
child together? “I couldn’t do that. 4am in a bad dream about the devil gravy and pretend it was the other Trap is all about here. That is the with pride.”
I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it any under the floor boards. “I’ve always stuff. And now they are outraged. I thing the Brits never got when we
“The legacy in Ireland of the
more. And then when Tiger came to been like that,” he laughs. He reads was giving them a bit of protein!” he were being compared to The Clash. Rats,” King Rat Bob Geldof says
us, you know…” He is referring, of in bed to the point of exhaustion to laughs. Asked what he inherited We’re Irish! She’s So Modern about now, “is that it certainly articulated
course, to Michael Hutchence and get him self to sleep.
from his mother, Bob pauses: “It is a Paddy showing up in London and this generation’s time. That possibly
Yates’s child Heavenly Hiraani Tiger
I say it sounds like a sitcom: poor not possible for me to know, but seeing Paula and Magenta Devine altered the cultural landscape to
Lily Hutchence, known as ‘Tiger', Jeanne in the bed beside this rest- what friends say is my look is hers. and Julie Burchill. That’s what it is allow other bands to emerge out of
who was born on July 22, 1996.
less insomniac. He corrects me: The others look like Geldofs, but I about. Those precise girls before Ireland. The record companies were
Just over a year later, on Novem- “She is much worse than me. She look like the Knotts, who came from they made it big.”
on red alert to look at Ireland as a
ber 22, 1997, her rock star father was has got totally broken sleep pat- Cork. My mum won a beauty contest
And there was, of course, also the source of potential.”
found dead from suffocation caused terns. I sleep through that. She is in Cork. My sinuses are from my odd girl back in Dublin — referHe put on one of the Rats' album
by hanging under the influence of always searching for a way to sleep
enced on Mary of the Fourth Form. in the car recently with Tiger and
drugs in a hotel room in Sydney; right through the night. It disturbs
“That was Bertie’s PA — Mary her pals in the back.
Yates died of a drug overdose at her me. She will get up and make some
Preece,” he recalls of the woman
Tiger: “What’s this, dad?”
home in London in September 2000. hot milk or something or watch a bit
who would subsequently go on to
Bob: “Me.”
Bob and Jeanne subsequently raised of French telly and go back to bed.
work for the Taoiseach. “She was
Tiger: “What!”
Tiger as their own.
But she has to sleep with her iPad
beautiful and I could never have
“She liked it,” Bob says proudly
“So here was a little sprog. So on.”
her. I wanted her so very much and now. “And Peaches commented on
there was no energy to have anothSo he and Jeanne have officially
I would never have her. Legs forev- Rat Trap last year. She texted me:
er one. I wouldn’t want one.”
the most restless bedroom in Enger and totally self-possessed in her ‘Top track!’.”
Asked how Jeanne feels about land.
beauty and her youth and I was
Top band, Mr Geldof. Your mothbeing referred to by him in the
“Probably, yes!” he roars with
dumb-stuck.”
er would be proud.
media and in his lyrics as his saviour laughter. “It sounds f **king horIn terms of his kids’ reactions to
who dazzled him with love, he rendous! I am aware when I talk to
him onstage, Bob says Tiger came The Boomtown Rats play Live at
shrugs: “She doesn’t mind. I love her. you how odd we seem,” he laughs
with her mates to a show at Isling- the Marquee, Cork on July 5.
The love isn’t predicated on the again. “But it is not very different to DIFFERENT LOVES: Geldof with Paula ton Town Hall and “were all into it”, Tickets, €35, €45, on sale now.
gratitude I feel to her. That’s a sep- other people. I wish you wouldn’t Yates and with Jeanne Marine (left)
he beams.
www.ticketmaster.ie