Songs in the key of death

Friday September 28, 2001
The Guardian 

For eight years Bob Geldof kept silent about Paula Yates, Michael Hutchence and their affair's bleak aftermath. Now he has written an album about them. He talks to Caroline Sullivan. (Bobgeldof.info would like to thank the Guardian unlimited for the use of this article.)

Bob Geldof is reputed to make women forget themselves. His glamorous consorts - first Paula Yates and, for the past few years, the French actress Jeanne Marine - attest to his unlikely pulling power, and even some journalists apparently gibber like teenagers when they meet him. During a brief stint as a DJ at the London rock station Xfm - one of the many things he's turned his hand to since Live Aid made him a household name in 1985 - one interviewer was so floored that she wrote: "He's very, very sexy . . . he was looking at me and sending shivers down my spine."

One can only assume that her encounter hadn't kicked off with a chat about the state of his prostate. Geldof will turn 50 on October 5, and in response to a query about the physical effects of middle age, he tells a graphic tale of paying a visit to the doctor the other week. Squeamish readers, skip the next paragraph.

"I keep reading in women's magazines about getting your prostate checked when you're 50, so I had it done," he says, barely pausing to chew the strands of spinach salad he's absently shovelling into his mouth. "I hated it. Gentle as my GP is, a chubby finger up the arse isn't fun, despite lashings of KY jelly on the rubber glove."

Nice. "It's weird that I'm 50. You look like shit at 50. Though with me, that's been a lifelong given." It's impossible to believe Geldof is about to enter his sixth decade. Although his life, personal and professional, has taken improbably dramatic turns since Live Aid, physically he barely seems to have changed since that day. His oft-stated aversion to bathing may have had a preservative effect, but it's more likely that he has just been lucky with his Irish-Belgian (the latter on his father's side) genes. The uncombed mop is flecked with grey and the bags under his eyes are a trifle baggier, but otherwise there's little difference between Geldof 2001 and the 1980s firebrand.

Nor have his mannerisms changed: the gesticulating to make his point, the way words tumble out, seemingly unedited, in an accent that's overwhelmingly Dublin even after 25 years in London. Geldof is still passionate, still driven by whatever forces led him to launch what was then the world's biggest charity appeal single-handed. He approaches each new project with equal intensity, whether it's getting his broadcasting company Ten Alps listed on the London Stock Exchange (he owns 12% of the £9m firm, which he set up after selling his interest in the TV production company Planet 24 to Carlton for £5m); petitioning world leaders with Bono on behalf of the Drop the Debt campaign; or promoting his new album, Sex, Age & Death.

The record is his first in eight years, and it marks the first time he has spoken, through 10 new songs, about what he calls "the unsayable": being left by Yates for Michael Hutchence and their subsequent deaths. Predictably, it's arousing more tabloid interest than previous solo efforts such as The Vegetarians of Love. Many people have forgotten he's a musician rather than a full-time businessman and knight.

Geldof accepts this. "I know this will attract much more attention than usual, but what else could I have written about in the past six years? When Paula left me, I couldn't get up, couldn't sleep - the total emptiness of everything was overwhelm ing. I was so struck by the fact that your heart does break. The ache was so painful that I got beta blockers from the doctor, but I was trembling so I stopped them after a week. I just stayed in the house because there were millions of press outside and I looked like shit, though I've made a career of that."

Geldof was the last person to speak to Hutchence before the INXS singer hanged himself in 1997. Yates held him partly responsible but he has behaved with dignity, refusing to talk publicly until now about the divorce or its bleak aftermath. He still refuses to discuss his children - the three daughters he had with Yates, and Tiger Lily, her child with Hutchence. (Last December the courts dismissed a challenge from Hutchence's family and appointed Geldof Tiger Lily's legal guardian.)

"It drives girls mad that boys don't talk about things, but in my case I actually couldn't," he says, pushing his salad aside and lighting an incongruous cigar. "I'm someone who's quite verbal, but some things are literally unsayable and remain so. Why music becomes important is that you can articulate the unsayable through a heightened language."

For two years after Yates left in 1995, during which she vilified him and he lost custody of their daughters (sparking yet another public crusade, for better access for estranged fathers), Geldof didn't listen to music. "When love is taken from you, you can't function. I didn't do anything. I didn't even want to go out with girls because I didn't have a dick. I was incapable. I was emasculated, eviscerated. The song $6,000,000 Loser was about getting my dick back."

He certainly seems to have done that, if the song is any indication. In it, Geldof wheezes over minimal, electronic backing: "Hey, baby, are you up for pumping/ Let's go bumping/ Are you up for humping?" The rest of Sex, Age & Death, however, is relentlessly sad: full of yearning for the 18-year relationship he shared with Yates, grief at what he calls the "Shakespearean tragedy" of her death, and "bewilderment" at Hutchence's suicide.

The ragged blues number Inside Your Head - key line: "Why put a noose around your neck?" - relates to Hutchence. "That song is completely straightforward. I'm utterly bewildered by the piteous tragedy and unnecessariness of it, and angry it happened at all," he says, still unreconciled four years later.

Some of the anger is reserved for his ex-wife, who made him the country's most famous cuckold when she began her affair with Hutchence on live television. She interviewed celebrities from a bed on The Big Breakfast, the show produced by Planet 24, and the Australian singer was a guest. Within months of their on-air flirtation, Yates left Geldof, who takes belated revenge on One for Me. "You don't even need to get your clothes off any more/ You're a bit too old for that stuff now, anyway" are just some of its spiteful observations.

"I have no memory at all of when I began the album or when coherent phrases began to come back to me or when I began to want to listen to music again. When I started writing again [all the songs were written before Yates died last September], my friend Pete Briquette from the Boomtown Rats began following me around with musical equipment. I'd hit a bass note occasionally, then beaty bits would eventually follow, and then as I became more enthused by music I took a job at Xfm. I was getting hugely enthusiastic by then, and in between DJing I'd go in and do a few bits in the recording studio."

In this disjointed way, he finally completed Sex, Age & Death. Its hollow, weary core and minimal arrangements won't put it on Radio 1's A-list, but the album proves he's still a musical contender. That's important to Geldof. He is better known these days as an entrepreneur, campaigner and "honorary mum" (as voted by readers of Prima magazine), but in his own mind, he is a musician before anything else. As he sees it, it's only his "wildly episodic life" that has stopped him consolidating the success that began in 1977 with the Boomtown Rats, who had two number one singles (Rat Trap and I Don't Like Mondays).

Exhaling a cloud of cigar smoke, he says, "I haven't had choices. Post-Live Aid was a nightmare. I became ubiquitous, and that's been a death blow to my musical ambitions."

Where does he keep the medal he received from the Queen when he became an honorary knight? He beams for the first time. "My medals! I love wearing them to Elton John's annual bash because mine are nicer than his. I'm a Chevalier, a knight, a sheikh and a Prince Tuareg in Western Sudan. I look like Idi Amin when I've got them all on." He admits he has won so many awards, as well as a Nobel peace prize nomination for Live Aid, that he's forgotten some of them; he keeps them in a cupboard, filed away alongside the World's Best Dad mugs his kids give him for Father's Day.

This seems appropriate: his family is his backbone. He says life would be pointless without his daughters and Jeanne, whom he namechecks on the closing song, 10:15. Whatever peace he may have attained from making the album - and he didn't find it to be the catharsis he expected - it would mean nothing without them.

"They keep me going when things go wrong, and with my life, I have empirical evidence that things do go wrong," he says. As it happens, he's in the midst of a new, slightly smaller crisis involving his girlfriend. "The minute she turned 36, she started talking about having a baby, and I just don't know if I can go through that again."

But wouldn't he enjoy the patter of little feet around his south London mansion block? "God, you're joking," he groans. "I can't stand the idea of nappies again, and the crying. I'm exhausted."