In April 2014, Sir Bob Geldof’s daughter Peaches was found dead at her home at the age of 25 after a heroin overdose – the same way her mother Paula Yates tragically died 14 years earlier.
Bob, 68, has opened up about his grief to our sister publication Woman, confessing it never goes away.
‘Time doesn’t heal, it accommodates,’ he recently said in an interview on Irish chat show The Tommy Tiernan Show. ‘It is boundless and it is bottomless, the grief, the abyss is infinite.’
The Boomtown Rats frontman described his daughter as ‘the wildest, funniest, cleverest, wittiest and the most bonkers of all of us,’ in his statement when Peaches died.
And, in an interview with Event magazine, Bob explains how he always allows himself to cry if he’s missing her – even if there are other people around.
‘I’ll be sitting there at the traffic lights and I’ll feel myself starting to weep and
I think “you’re weeping”, then I begin to really sob, racking sobs,’ he admits.
‘Then I look up to check nobody’s taking pictures. I just let it happen because there’s no use holding it in. Then I’m empty.’
Bob says that while he knew Peaches was taking drugs, he didn’t realise the extent of her struggles until she went to a rehab facility in Utah in 2013.
And while he says she was ‘initially doing well’ at the centre, she eventually walked away from her treatment, despite his attempts to stop her.
When she died the following year, Peaches left behind her husband, Thomas Cohen, and their two young sons, Astala, seven, and Phaedra, six.
Bob says he helps Thomas out (with childcare) when he can, describing the boys as ‘beyond stupidly cute’.
He also has two surviving daughters, Fifi, 36, and Pixie, 29, who he had with ex-wife Paula, as well as Tiger Lily, 23, who he raised and adopted following the deaths of both her mum and her dad, Michael Hutchence.
He’s previously explained how all three of them have been affected by Peaches’ death, confessing, ‘The impact when Peaches died was over- whelming. And if it has such an impact on individuals who don’t know you, imagine what the impact of these events is internally, in the family.’
But it’s his French actress wife, Jeanne Marine, who he married in 2015 after meeting in 1994, who he insists has kept him sane throughout dark times, explaining, ‘She loves me to bits, and me her, and that makes me so happy! In my private moments I actually just put my hands together and I thank God for Jeanne. I wake beside her and breathe her beauty in and the day is worth getting up for.’
While Bob’s own family life has been complicated enough, he was quick to wade in on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s move to Canada. As a friend of Prince Charles, he believes it was Charles who told his son and daughter-in-law,
‘It’s got to go this way,’ with regards to them dropping their royal titles completely, adding, ‘I think it’s quite right saying, “Well, you can’t have the money. You can’t be half in, half out. You can call yourself what you like, but if you’re going to pimp yourself out to companies, that’s just not going to work”.’
The singer also believes Meghan will get back into acting following their move to Canada and says Harry ‘is strong enough to try and forge a life’ on his own.
Watch this space!
