Bob Geldof reveals his brush with of suicide

His children gave him the will to live, the musician tells the BBC

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Musician and activist Bob Geldof said that his children was the only reason he didn't commit suicide after his wife's decline and death from drug abuse, in an interview to be aired by the BBC, according to the Guardian.

In the interview Geldoff reveals how he considered suicide after his marriage with television presenter and journalist Paula Yates collapsed in 1995.

"When she left me I was destroyed. I loved her very much. And I didn't understand why: never saw it coming. So I just floated; the pain was beyond immensity. The grief was universes of grief. My head was crowded with loss," the Dublin-born musician told BBC's JOhn Wilson, presenter of the Radio 4 program 'Meeting Myself Coming Back.'

Yates, who died 11 years ago from an accidental heroin overdose, had left Geldof, with whom she had three daughters, for singer Michael Hutchence, the frontman for the Australian band INXS. The couple had a daughter, but a year later, in 1997, Hutchence was found dead in a hotel room in Sydney and  was thought to have taken his own life. The grief caused Yates to go into a decline and succumb to addiction.
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"I was beyond despair: I didn't understand a single thing. It was so mad and ultimately epic in its tragedy; Shakespearean, I know that sounds grandiose but I don't think you can describe it any other way," Geldof said.

The former Boomtown Rats frontman, who is now best known as an international activist promoting aid for Africa, said his main concern had been to protect his children.

"I totally understood on an intellectual level that we were a media family and that I had been part of the national soap opera for some time," he tells Wilson, "but what was going on with the absolute decay and collapse [of Yates] was just awful and you could do nothing about it. It just all seemed to be going towards an inevitable end."

Geldof admitted that "the pain was so intense" that he considered ending his life. He began to compile a list of reasons to live and a list of reasons to die.

"There was only one item in the list for why I should continue: it just said, 'the children'."

Geldoff, who will be 60 later this year, ended the interview with the story of how he met his French girlfriend Jeanne Marine and how "gradually a soul gets stitched back together – in this case me."

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