Bob Geldof considered suicide after the death of his daughter Peaches.
The 64-year-old singer was left devastated following the untimely passing of the TV presenter – who died from a drugs overdose in 2014 aged 25 – and while in mourning he started to make lists of the "upsides" and "downsides" of being alive, but a phone conversation with a pal ultimately saved him.
He said: "I’d make lists and keep working at the writing of those lists until the upside overwhelmed the downside. In my case I wrote down, ‘What’s the upside of being alive?’ and ‘What’s the downside of it?’ Was it ever really serious? Overall, no. In that moment, though, perhaps it was.
"I had the sanity, luckily, to phone a friend and tell him, ‘Look I think I’m just starting to get rationally irrational.’ He almost slapped my face (with his tone) and said, ‘Don’t do anything f***ing stupid, stay exactly where you are’ and came around very quickly. People talk you through these things."
Bob also admitted proposing to and eventually marrying his long-term lover Jeanne Marine helped him through his grief after losing Peaches.
He said: "Peaches had just died and I decided that John Lennon, in all his glorious naivety, was right; love is all you need.
"There’s one of my own songs that goes, ‘To live and love is all there is, life without love is meaningless.’
"[Marriage] didn’t make us love each other any more but I asked her in front of all our friends and family. And I married her on her 50th birthday, so what an amazing f***ing present that was."
Following the death of Peaches – who left behind sons Astala, three, and two-year-old Phaedra, who she had with husband Thomas Cohen – Bob admits he "dreads" what could be "coming next".
Speaking to Irish newspaper Sunday Independent, the Boomtown Rats frontman – whose ex-wife Paula Yates, Peaches mother, also died of a drugs overdose, in 2000 aged 41 – added: "It’s not as if there isn’t anything coming, and you sort of dread what is coming next. I don’t know what it could be.
"It seems to me to be a bizarrely episodic life. The trick, for me, is to remain incessantly busy."
Bob Geldof considered suicide
