Sinead O’Connor left texts laden with despair: Bob Geldof

Bob Geldof praises Sinead O’Connor’s courage but tells crowd in Ireland she sent him texts full of ‘desperation and sorrow’ throughout their long friendshisp.

Sinead O'Connor performs on stage at Melkweg, Amsterdam. Picture: Paul Bergen/Redferns.

Sinead O’Connor sent Bob Geldof text messages “laden with desperation, despair and sorrow” weeks before her death, the singer told a festival crowd.

Geldof, lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, dedicated the band’s performance at Cavan Calling in Ireland to O’Connor, who died at her home in south London last week at the age of 56. A cause has not yet been given but police have said they are not treating the death as suspicious.

Geldof, 71, said he grew up with her family and lived “down the road” from her. He told the crowd: “Many, many times Sinead was full of a terrible loneliness and a terrible despair. She was a very good friend of mine. We are talking right up to a couple of weeks ago. Some of the texts were laden with desperation and despair and sorrow and some were ecstatically happy. She was like that.”

He praised O’Connor’s outspokenness and bravery, singling out the moment when she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live in 1992 in protest of child sexual abuse within the Catholic church. Geldof said: “She tore up the picture of the Pope because she saw me tearing up a picture of John Travolta on Top of the Pops. It was a little more extreme than tearing up f***ing disco – tearing up the Vatican is a whole other thing.”

Sir Bob Geldof has been a lifelong friend of Sinead O’Connor. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

His appearance on the BBC show in November 1978 came after the Boomtown Rats’ Rat Trap knocked Summer Nights, the hit by Travolta and Olivia Newton-John from the film Grease, from the No 1 spot in the UK charts. Geldof tore up a picture of the pair in celebration.

For the concert Geldof wore a T-shirt featuring O’Connor’s image. He told Irish Web TV the band were “all very sad” following her death. He said they had decided to play a number of their oldest songs in her memory as she was a “big Rats fan” who went to many of their gigs as a young girl. He said: “Sinead lived down the road from me and Garry [Roberts], the guitar player in the band who died about six or seven months ago. We are quite literally down the road. So we’ve known that girl most of her life, really. She was a big Rats fan . . . that’s why we’re doing very early stuff and we dedicate this gig to her. It’s the only thing we can do as musicians. We were friends all the way through. She was signed to the same little record label we were signed to, had the same manager and stuff like that, so there’s a big connection.”

O’Connor found fame in 1990 with her version of the Prince song Nothing Compares 2 U before dropping out of the public eye following the fallout from her Saturday Night Live appearance. She was open about the mental health struggles she faced throughout her life. In 2007 she described living with bipolar disorder during a televised interview with Oprah Winfrey and said she suffered from suicidal thoughts.

“I don’t think I was born with bipolar disorder – I believe it was created as a result of the violence I experienced,” she told Winfrey, in reference to the abuse she suffered from her mother as a child. In 2013 she said she had been misdiagnosed and actually suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of her upbringing. O’Connor had also shared her grief on social media following the death of her son Shane, 17, by suicide last year. She wrote a heartfelt post about it days before she died.

Geldof’s daughter Peaches died aged 25 of a heroin overdose in 2014, more than a decade after her mother, the TV presenter and writer Paula Yates, died at the age of 41 in 2000.

The Times