Irish singer and legendary “Live Aid” leader Bob Geldof showed that he’s lost none of his eloquence in paying tribute to Sinead O’Connor, who died Wednesday at the age of 56, during a concert at Ireland’s Cavan Festival on Saturday.
More than just pop-star acquaintances, Geldof said he was “very good friends” with both Sinead and her brother Joseph and “grew up with the O’Connors”: They lived just 75 yards apart, and shared the same bus stop going to school.
Geldof said the two had been speaking as recently as a couple of weeks ago, and although many headlines have seized on Geldof’s comment that her recent texts were filled with “desperation and despair, while some were ecstatically happy — she was like that,” they fail to note the many other touching things he said, as noted by the Irish Examiner and in a full video at the Daily Mail.
Most of all, his comments were full of love and remembrance for a near-lifelong friend. He recalled her coming to see his long-running band, the Boomtown Rats, “many, many times” as a teen. With a giant photo of O’Connor on the video screen behind him, he dedicated the two Boomtown Rats songs he and his band played next to her: the 1984 song “Dave,” about persevering in the face of tragedy, and the 1977 track “Mary of the Fourth Form,” which he said was O’Connor’s favorite song of theirs.
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Geldof said that O’Connor would bring the album that featured the song to school, which would “drive the nuns nuts,” and that she had pinned a photo of him on the school noticeboard.
“It was her favorite Rats song, and she loved this band,” he said. “She came to many, many, many, gigs as a girl.”
He also actually made a joke about her notorious 1992 “Saturday Night Live” appearance when she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II to protest abuse in the Catholic church. He laughed that she was inspired by the Rats tearing up a photo of John Travolta in an anti-disco protest on the British TV show “Top of the Pops.”
“It was a little more extreme than tearing up fucking disco,” he laughed. “Tearing up the Vatican is a whole other thing, but more correct actually, I should have done it.” However, he added, “She saw us on the [long-running Irish talk show ‘The Late Late Show’] kicking off about the Church and all that stuff, and she was thrilled by it. So, we love her very much.”
He also said several things that have become ubiquitous in the days since her death, but with heartfelt impact since he knew her so well. “She was relentless, she had a voice like none of us had ever heard, so pure,” and “She meant a lot to everybody, she meant a lot to us. Her voice represented her soul and spirit. And whenever we hear that, we will always be with a great woman… some of us watched her this afternoon on the web and we were just speechless on how beautiful, how brilliant she was.”
He also compared her to Maud Gonne, who will not be familiar to many people who are not students of Irish literature.
“I had to do a thing with The New York Times about her, two years ago, and I tried to tell them about Maud Gonne, [William Butler] Yeats’ great muse, love object, revolutionary woman — years ahead of her time — who told the truth, who was a great artist and who was a radical and an activist at the same time,” he said. “And it’s not a good comparison, but I said the sense I have is that Sinéad is the Maud Gonne of our time, and probably just as important in modern Ireland.”
According to a statement from her management, O’Connor nearly finished with a new album with collaborator David Holmes and planning dates for tour next year, and also considering “opportunities” around a film of her book.
