Bob Geldof Faces The Music
by Joe Jackson of RAZOR Men's Lifestyle Magazine

Bob Geldof will never update his 1986 biography Is That It? He says he can't. Because there are too many people who could be hurt. Particularly in terms of the past five years. That said, Geldof also insists that his new album Sex, Age and Death - complete with 'snapshots' into his psyche and 'essences' from his life - tell the tale of that period more effectively than a book could. There's certainly no doubt that the stripped down, raw, emotional power of songs like One For Me, Scream In Vain and Inside Your Head mirror the terror and turmoil that followed the end of Bob Geldof's marriage to Paula Yates - and the suicide of her lover Michael Hutchence.

Songs like Pale White Girls and 10:15 mark Geldof's return on the path to love, a journey he is taking with Jeanne Marine. She is alternately described as a 'French film star' or as his 'live-in girlfriend,' but regardless of the term she is obviously a healing factor in Geldof's life. What's even more telling in terms of Geldof's life at the moment is that along with Jeanne they are both raising Fifi Trixibelle, Peaches Honeyblossom and Pixie, his daughters with Paula Yates. And don't forget to add Heavenly Hirrani TigerLily, the child Paula had with Michael Hutchence to the crowded home.

In a private residence in Soho, before the interview even starts, Geldof spends at least a half hour talking about the global ramifications of the terrorist attacks on New York, which happened earlier the same week. Like many a parent he's deeply concerned about the more specific effect the atrocities will have on children.

Geldof wonders aloud what words can be used to explain to kids such madness. Yet the deeper we travel into what he later jokingly refers to as a 'tennis match of a fucking interview' the more I realize Bob Geldof is actually using this at times, heated exchange to explain himself. To himself. Which also is the impetus behind what undoubtedly is his most powerful solo album yet: Sex, Age and Death.  

Most people probably start interviews with you by asking about Paula and your thoughts on her death, but first, tell me about 10:15 which is a very tender, explicit love song to Jeanne.

People aren't talking to me about Paula or Jeanne because I won't talk about specific individuals or specific circumstances. I won't get involved in the pornography of intrusion. But I don't mind talking about the emotional landscape of Sex, Age and Death. 10:15 is the last track on a record that deals largely with grief, loss, pain, disappointment, bitterness and anger. Then, at the end, you get this small redemptive note. It is a snapshot of a moment of kindness and tenderness in a hurricane of piteous cruelty.

Does Jeanne have any problem with the explicit nature of the lyrics?

No. She cried when she listened to it and read the lyrics. And she gave me a hug.

You present yourself as defenseless, even child-like in the song, with Jeanne, you say, saving your soul, soothing you, bathing you and holding you until you fall asleep. It's not exactly the Bob Geldof the world knows.

Female journalists have said that they were embarrassed because those lyrics were almost too much - unnecessarily raw and honest. But it's just a description of feeling, and I think I've always been fairly direct about anything that's happened to me. I'm unapologetic about who I am and what I am. Generally, I'm melancholic by disposition. I'm not Mr. Chuckles, though I seek that.

Lightness?

Exactly. Joy because I am joyless. Grace because I'm graceless. That was given to me for many years, then it was withdrawn. Joy and light and grace and beauty.

But did your whole emotional landscape really collapse inwards?

Utterly. I was wholly unable to function. As a person and, specifically, as a man. You'll note the album is littered with words like empty, arid, dry. And that aridity, those oceans of loneliness and deserts of grief are the areas you inhabit for a long, long time. 

Was that whole process initiated by Paula leaving? What triggered the descent?

When love was withdrawn.

Had it not been withdrawn before Paula left?

I don't want to go into the story of what happened. I can only say that's when it happened.

Yet the last time I talked to you, in '89, there was a rumor you were seeing someone else. Am I also wrong to suspect your life with Paula was beginning to fall apart even then?

Totally wrong.

Likewise the claim that you both had other lovers?

That's not true either. But I don't want to talk about that stuff.

Paula was quoted during the divorce proceedings as saying that you had at least six extramarital love affairs. I'm just trying to get a true sense of you and Paula, of a man and woman together; a true sense of the real emotional landscape behind your new album.

I won't talk about us as a man and woman together. You'll just have to accept that.

Tell me why, in the lyrics of, One For Me, you mock Paula? Even though you don't mention her by name.

That's a song of disappointment. You understand someone totally - more than any other person on the planet - and then events occur and suddenly you see this other person who is not at all the individual you were with for nineteen years. And you go 'what's that?' 'What about the grace and the joy and the light?' That's the atmosphere of this record. Music is a higher language because it can articulate feeling. It can articulate the unspeakable. Therefore you can, through songs - even pop songs - talk about things, like emotion. So when I say to you the record is about grief, loss, pain, disappointment, bewilderment, anger, that's what it is. One For Me - and I'm not being superficial or coy - is about fucking disappointment. You have to look at the songs in totality. In New Routine there's a line about a place 'past nowhere/ and the void between them.' That is the landscape I inhabited. But not you, with you being so fucking specific - which you are wrong to be.

Wrong to think it's about Paula?

In lots of ways, yes. I didn't sit down and write the song, saying 'that's one of the emotions I feel, do it.' I don't even know when I began this record. I know when it stopped, because we cut the record.

What about the facility for passion?

Passion or sex? Sex is a facility.

Both.

That wasn't there at all.

So you were incapacitated at a core level?

Utterly. That's correct.

You couldn't function sexually?

I couldn't feel my dick. Literally. And I would go through this physical checklist. There is that clich頯f a broken heart, but my ribs ached from the pain in my heart. I had to go to the doctor because I thought I was having heart attacks. I was losing incredible amounts of weight. I started freaking out. This feeling was located in the gut, which, again, is a metaphysical place, as opposed to your stomach. I would extract this ball from where the pain was, put it in my hands, look at it and say, 'this is who you are, I know you now.' But literally, below my legs didn't seem to be there. And that lasted a long time. 

How do you reconnect with your body after what seems to be a psychic rupture?

It's a gradual return of the facility. But female friends would come along and make me feel - since I'm not a good-looking person - desirable again. They absolutely understood that I felt love would never come to me again. That I felt ugly, undesirable, all those things.
They'd say 'you look a mess,' and choose clothes for me, they would tell me 'you're going out.' And we'd get a fancy car and I'd swan into some big party with a beautiful girl on each arm, knowing full well the paparazzi would be going fucking mad! So the man thing came back. There was a part of me that was quite proud that I had a beautiful woman on each arm. So I'd put on the show and it all came good in the end.

Meaning you began to function sexually again?

What happened was that some of these girls would start being tender with me, just touching me. The song Pale White Girls comes out of this whole experience. It was one of those moments of being patched back together. I was lying there, curtains blowing, a cold winter's night. I was with someone. I didn't know if I wanted to pursue this. But she did, because she was lonely. She was beautiful, and ludicrously ghost-like and pale in the moonlit night. So there was this scratching for love from both of us. Limbs reaching out, circling, and it got to be liquid in those moments. And she was liquid. There was a languid quality to the night. But I did think 'I don't want this.'

You say you see yourself as 'not good looking' but many did see you as a sex symbol. In your biography there is a pretty revealing line about how when you became a rock star 'the world - and it's legs - opened for me.' Why hadn't your self-image been strong as a result of all the other women?

I never had a strong self-image. Here was this beautiful girl I met before the Rats even made their first record and I was this lanky loudmouth, suddenly we went off on this wild ride together. So my entire good life had been shared with this beautiful girl.

Which might suggest your self-image was based on your position in the relationship with Paula and was something you only had to consider when her love was withdrawn?

Maybe you're right. These are difficult questions.

Was your self image, specifically sexually, effected by the fact that Paula left you for Michael Hutchence? She publicly described him as "the Taj Mahal of crotches." That must have humiliated you as a man.

I wasn't aware of that at the time because I didn't read any of that stuff. None of that impinged on me. But when I was made aware of it, I thought 'who are you? You're better than that! This is naff.' And that feeling, too, comes across in One For Me.

Do you think you were the ideal partner?

I thought we were great together.

It's said you thought her affair with Hutchence was just a "fling" and that she'd come back.

I can't go into specifics.

I read reams of press in preparation for this interview and in many of those articles Paula said you were violent, brooding, self-centered and stingy - so the reports claimed. All those allegations could make any fair-minded person think 'it's not just Paula's fault - or even Paula and Michael's fault - the Geldof marriage fell apart. Geldof has to shoulder some of the blame himself.'

The only thing I will say to all that is that I am not the least bit violent. I can't recall ever hitting a single individual, man or woman. And if there is anyone out there who can counter that claim I'd like to meet them.

You saw no flaws in yourself as Paula's husband?

I am totally flawed. Perennially flawed. I've said to you, I'm melancholic by disposition. I'm sure I'm very difficult to live with, specifically because of my make-up and personality.

You refer to Hutchence hanging himself in Inside Your Head with lyrics like 'so why put a noose around your neck/What the fuck is going on/Inside your head?' Was Inside Your Head fuelled by the kind of anger you once told me has fired your psyche nearly all your life?

Even if anger didn't fire my psyche, don't you think anger would be present in the circumstances I'm talking about?

Definitely, especially at what seems to have been the needless loss of life.

That more than anything else. And so Inside Your Head is a song of bewilderment. There is no anger directed at any of the characters or individuals involved in our story. Inside Your Head is absolute bewilderment at the piteous cruelty and tragedy that befell us all. It's 'what the fuck is going on?' Or, as I say at another point in the song, 'someone out there is taking the piss.' In other words, this can't be happening. Especially the way it ended.

But whom are you addressing the song to? The ghost of Paula, the ghost of Hutchence?

No, not the ghost of Paula. Paula wasn't dead when any of these songs were written and that's important to remember.

Either way, in terms of the sense of rage felt, the song does remind me of say, Lennon's How Do You Sleep? from Imagine.

But that was directed at Paul McCartney. This isn't directed at anyone specifically. In fact, the lines could pertain to me in the song. And often do.

You didn't put a noose around your neck, Bob.

No, that does pertain to... but it's the 'why!'

Paula reportedly said 'you may as well have strangled him yourself.' The coroner apparently stated that Hutchence's death was at least aggravated by having argued with you.

Stop. Stop. I've just done the Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, Marie Claire, The Big Issues and, just before you arrived, The Irish Times. And you're the only one who's coming back at me with guff from other newspapers and what they speculate. I'm fucking telling you what I felt.

I also interviewed Paula, wrote the Hot Press obituary for the woman and researched her death for that, so I must reject you saying what I'm quoting is 'guff from other newspapers.'

But I bet you your research was 99% shit. It's not your fault, as a journalist, but the sources you were depending upon.

But surely it's legitimate to ask if you felt guilty about Paula's death, or Hutchence's death?

No, it's not. Because that is, as I say, the pornography of intrusion.

But you have addressed these issues in songs.

But I'm addressing myself in these songs. This record is for me. And what you think about it, I don't mind. The record doesn't demand that you go into that world. I don't imagine why you would bother to do that. But if you do, don't you understand the difference between art and something you seek always to reduce to the empirical? The two are inextricably divided.

Obviously. But you have said that from the beginning of your career with the Rats, many of your songs were like diary entries. So this album will also be read as another musical chapter of autobiography. Maybe even the next installment of Is That It?

And people would be right to read it that way. The title Sex, Age and Death is shorthand for experience. This could only have been written in the last five years. I wish it wasn't. I wish I'd have been able to write another record. In other words, I wish that this experience never happened, but it did.

The truth is that all you can write about is what you experience. It helps, of course, to see Picasso's A Woman Weeping and know it's Dora Maat; to know what happened between them. Then the painting becomes personal - and, please, I am not equating myself with the genius of Picasso - but, other than that, it is a profound piece of art. You stare at it and you have an absolutely intuitive understanding of what it means. 

Hopefully, too, someone in Germany, who has no knowledge of "Tabloid Bob" will pick this album up and what they'll get, hopefully, is a sense of it's universality.

Even so, if a deeper knowledge of Picasso and Dora Maat - or Lennon and his mother, in terms of his primal album or Dylan and Sarah, in relation to Blood On The Tracks - can make a work more resonant you must understand where I'm coming from, trying to get a true psychological setting for the songs on your new album?

But every single context you have given me has been utterly wrong. I understand that's not your fault because you've read what you believe to be papers of record. But what record? I said nothing. And there was an obvious reason - and agenda - when other people said things.

The psychological setting for these songs is what happened to me in the last five years. In my head. Or the feelings.

You say all these songs were written before Paula died, have you written about her death? Will you?

I respect your right to ask these questions but they are wildly inappropriate. But, no.

But, surely you accept that the thousands of people who read Is That It? - and were impressed by its honesty - would like to read a similar tome about the past five years in your life? Maybe even more so than the ten 'snapshots' on this album?

This is a higher form of talking about all that. I, absolutely, think that listening to this album you would get a far better understanding, intuitively, about what the story is. Because this, as I say, is the story of feeling.

Whereas you, as I told you earlier, are an empiricist. You read things, believe them, then cobble together what you think is a total understanding of the story. That doesn't make it true.

You could take every tabloid paper and write a biography of me and I would probably be interested in it but I will not recognize 78% of the events in that book. Or the motivations. Or quotes. I wouldn't recognize it as being any part of my life. Because it would be utterly false.

'Tabloid Bob' is a character who lives out there. And because he is a separate character to me, anything can be attributed to him.

Would you say the same is true of, say, a 'Hot Press Bob' in terms of even the Geldof I interviewed before? Or the person I perceive from knowing every album you made?

I do think you have what is, fundamentally, a wrong understanding of me, and of Paula, somewhat. But you do know me enough to know I will try, honestly, to answer your questions. But what do you mean by a question like 'will you write a song about Paula's death?' I might. Yet how do I know or not? I might write a song about the feeling of her death but you mightn't even recognize it as being about that.

As for writing another biography, I couldn't. Because there are too many people who are still alive and might be hurt by it. And there are some things I can't talk about because of various contracts and deals that I've done.

So I couldn't be as honest as I was in the first book. And with regards to the events of the last five years I just wouldn't be. Out of a sense of honor.

All you need to know - (laughs) this sounds like Keats, Truth is Beauty! All you need to know is that a boy and a girl were together for nineteen years and in that alone there are volumes.

There was a time - you mentioned Keats there - that he and poets like Yeats were the only ones who could help you articulate the unsayable. Even to yourself.

Yes. And Philip Larkin, for that bleak emptiness. As for Yeats, obviously the last section of the lyrics of 10:15 have echoes of Yeats poem with the line 'when I am old and by my fireside' I say, 'when I am old and tired and gray.' So those poems did help. Even the ones we all had to learn by heart back in school. 'I shall arise and go now.' Just that idea of 'take me out there.' Essentially, I wanted to disappear to the furthest corner of the gray world, but you can't. Especially when you have children.

How do you function as a father when you are so annihilated by loss, so low?

You keep things together, but even that is more of a strain. Totally. You put on a public face - or try to - and get ahead with what you have to do.

Surely trying to help your daughters deal with their mother's death is even more difficult when you are bereft inside?

It is. And 'bereft' is the word I've been missing.

You can have it, to compensate for all the grief I've been giving you today.

(Laughs) Thank you.

Now that your own album is finished, do you listen to it at all?

No. I can't. I put it on once and couldn't get through the ten tracks. Yet I did hear myself explained, and I needed that. I needed to put a shape to the experience, to the last six years.

I had been rambling around inside myself, not knowing what to say. So when I hear it playing my psyche says 'that's right.' It's like sending a postcard back to yourself.

But I'm fed up with my life being extreme. I await the next episode, with trepidation. I will step into the next scene, which seems to be written by other people, yet I'm fucking fearful now. And tired.

Bob, you're coming up to fifty, isn't it about time you started taking control of your own life and writing your own 'scenes?'

Maybe. But no one can be that in control of life.

Maybe the truth is that you never really lost control of your life until Paula left. Then you knuckled under the double pain of her loss and, finally, the loss of your mother.

You're possibly right. And, as I say, I imagine the depths of grief were so intense that was what was happening. But when I lost control, at the start, I didn't think that. Such thoughts only come a little later down the line when you stand back from all this. But when I did realize that was a possibility, I did talk about all that with my immediate family.

Why didn't you deal with the death of your mother at the age of seven?

You can't really understand things at that age. Kids have extremely strong survival mechanisms but you don't deal with a death, or a loss, at that level. You must get on with life, so you blanket as much as possible.

Dorothy Parker has written very well about this. Then, at an age when you become cognizant of things - eleven seems to be the key age - things kick in. She developed asthma at eleven. I did as well. But you grow out of that when you become a man and are able to deal with things.

Losing a parent too young also can leave someone feeling extreme anger. You did once tell me rage was a motivating factor in your life.

Maybe that's it. What I do perfectly understand is that if my Mom hadn't died I'd probably be happy living in Dublin and being, actually, maybe a journalist. I probably would have done well at school as opposed to getting nothing. I would have been happy going down that route in life.

Did your mother's death act as the single most powerful propellant factor in Bob Geldof's life?

That is it. As in, the conditions that immediately followed. Like my Dad having to be away because he was a traveler, my sister going her own way and me, essentially, growing up on my own. Organizing my own life from a very early age. With no one there to make you do your homework, you read. Then listen to pop music, then politics. All those threads of life that bound together later were put in place because of my Mom dying. The logical conclusion is that I was fired up because of her death, though I didn't understand what the dynamic was. And I probably still don't, fully.

What's your emotional state now?

This whole thing does seem to be a feature among performers, artists, and painters - a parent dying young. It's like all you're ever saying is 'love me, love me' and the more people say 'I love you' the better you feel. It's a standard, boring, commonplace thing. And pathetic. But you don't reconcile yourself to that, because it is irreconcilable. You can do the psychology thing and the counseling things - which I don't, because I don't want to - and they will say 'if you just acknowledge so-and-so.' Well, I did acknowledge it a long time ago, but it's still here. You tell yourself it happened a fucking hundred years ago but deep inside you're still feeling that loss. Yet you're not consciously trying to fill it. It's just a fact of life.

But is having children a form of consolation? You have said your kids are of central importance to you.

I don't think they are there to fill the hole. But yes, they are of absolute importance to me because I love them so much. I assumed, prior to the experience, that I would be the most unlikely father. When Paula rang me and I was in New York she was blabbing, saying 'oh, I'm pregnant' and I went 'oh fuck!' but I didn't actually say that. I said 'that's fantastic!' She was thinking that I was going to go mad, and she was worried for herself because it happened out of the blue. I just stared at myself in the mirror and kept saying, 'what the fuck now? You're going to be a father.' But then I wondered would I do all right? I knew it was the long haul, and I thought 'why not?' And what better babe to do it with? It's going to be a hoot!'

Even so, looking back, do you now see that being a Daddy to Fifi, Pixie, Peaches and TigerLily turned out to be far more than you ever thought it would be?

Yeah. But, once I made my mind up at the start, I was always full on for being a father.

Despite the fragmentation of your first family?

That makes you even more full on.

And then your second family fragmented...

Yes. And the physical absence of the children at times was totally overwhelming. That's why I can't understand the laws of these islands which almost insist that, qualitatively and quantitatively, a woman is better capable to raise children because that isn't so.

Empirically, what all reports will say is that, in terms of nurturing, a man is as capable as a woman is. And I don't understand why children are taken from men when the marriage ends. Don't give me nonsense about 'access.' What kind of word is that? As feminists discovered in the 70s, even the language is predicated against them. The same is true in terms of men now.

'Mothering' implies femininity, but men mother as well. And 'father' as well. So to reduce men to wage slaves isn't right. I've spoken to the minister in this country about being involved in the embryonic white paper on this subject because it is something that bothers me. Deeply.

You and Paula agreed on shared custody of your three daughters after the marriage broke up.

We did. But I can't talk about that, for obvious reasons.

Having exorcised some of your demons from the past five years - or longer - you must be relatively content right now.

Sex Age and Death is not an exorcism. It is, as I say, putting a shape to a hitherto inchoate set of experiences. But it doesn't even begin to deal with all that's happened.

So it would be wrong - and unfair to Jeanne - for me to end this interview by suggesting you are going to go home tonight, to her and the children, and withdraw into a Geldof shell?

I'm not. No. And, as I say, the album does end with a song of redemption.

But the redemption is only fleeting, only a moment of grace.

That's exactly what it is. That's why I end the song saying that at some point in the future 'I will think of this day smiling.' I was never sure it would continue. It was like a - I don't want to say 'healing' because that's too much of an Americanism - but definitely so much tenderness and kindness after so much darkness. Out of all that you resurrect a version of yourself that is as valid and complete a version as it was before. But it's not the same version. You, Joe, would recognize, having interviewed me over more than a decade, that there are consistencies in my nature. You already identified that hollow space. But inside me there also are so many things that have changed.

So the light and joy are back in your life? And we're not falsely assuming that all the light and joy and grace went out of your life when Paula died?

I wouldn't want to give that impression either. But that hole we talked about earlier is compounded by loss. Yet it would be too neat an ending to ask am I happy?

Because if you'd asked me this at any point in my life I would have reacted like, you know, a rabbit-in-the-headlights! But in as much as happiness is a fleeting emotion I will say that I have loads of happy moments these days. I go home and see the little sprig coming in the door in her uniform and I'm mad for it. Then Pixie comes in and says something funny and it's great. Then in comes this beautiful girl, Jeanne, and she wants to be with me. How can you not be happy?

Even so, according to 10:15 Jeanne gave you a good bath Bob so all that stuff should finally be cleansed from your soul.

She did. (laughs) I don't even remember getting the bath. It's that fucking thing. Like, you're out on the lawn and you're with the woman you love. You've got money in the bank and the bills are paid, yet there's this little worm wriggling inside you and you go 'but....'

But, Is That It?

Exactly! I'm still saying Is That It !