In an interview with the UK‘s ITV last night, Boomtown Rats singer Sir Bob Geldof left a sobering message with viewers when he told in an interview that he blames himself for the unexpected death of his daughter Peaches Geldof this recent April.
Told Geldof who admitted he knew of his daughter’s unrelenting heroin addiction which would ultimately claim her life:
‘You blame yourself. You’re the father who is responsible and clearly failed.’
‘For anybody watching, who has a dead kid and you’re a parent. You go back, you go back, you go back, you go back, you go back, you go over, you go over. What could you have done? You do as much as you can.’
Asked if he knew about Peaches’ drug addiction, he said: ‘Yes, of course I knew about it and we did more than talk about it, yeah. But I don’t want to go into that too much.
‘She was an adult. When they are 18 they are off and running. But you advise, you are there – the usual dad stuff. When they mess up you try to clean up the mess. You admonish. I’m certainly not benign about the whole thing’.
‘I was never afraid to cry so I did. It is a ten minute thing and then on you go.’
Sir Bob would also tell that newspaper attacks on his daughters following their mother Paula Yates’s death from a drug overdose in 2000 had also ‘damaged’ them.
‘She was super bright. Too bright’, he said.
‘She could never be still so you look for something that sedates you I suppose.
‘A very errant mind that could focus intensely on a book which she would consume and just absorb it.
‘But the rest was a franticness. She knew what life was supposed to be and God bless her she tried very hard to get there. And she didn’t make it.’
Geldof said performing with the Boomtown Rats helps him to escape the grief of losing his daughter.
‘I put on my snakeskin suit and I can be this other thing,’ he said. ‘It is utterly cathartic. Those two hours and I am drained. In every sense it empties, it drains my mind. On stage I’m lost in this thing and it’s a very brief respite.’
The despondent father would finally add the following: ‘My life turned out to be extremely episodic.
‘I certainly do not want the two little chaps caught up in our story and I supposed because of Paula, because of the girls, because of me, we have been in the British people’s face for 40 years, much to their irritation, I think a lot of the time, but I have to say they have been very kind.’
Ultimately one can’t help but wonder to what degree Sir Bob knew of his daughter’s drug use and how far he went to stem her use, yet then again how much say does anybody have, parent or not over another adult’s decisions in life?
And then there was this comment on the web that caught my attention:
You cannot always save the people you love, they have to want to save themselves and it is a fight they must wage alone. All you can do is love that person and Bob, you did that and Peaches knew you loved her.
You cannot always save the people you love, they have to want to save themselves and it is a fight they must wage alone. All you can do is love that person and Bob, you did that and Peaches knew you loved her.
