A tirade in blue ....... (continued page 2)

The record is his first in eight years, and it marks the first time he has spoken, through 10 new songs, about what he calls "the unsayable": being left by Yates for Michael Hutchence, and their subsequent deaths. Predictable, its arousing more tabloid interest that the previous solo efforts such as the Vegetarians of Love. Many people have forgotten he's a musician rather than a full-time businessman and Knight.

Geldof accepts this. "I know this will attract more attention than usual, but what else could I have written about in the past six years? When Paula Yates left me, I couldn't get up, couldn't sleep - the total emptiness was overwhelming. I was struck by the fact that your heart does break. The ache was so painful I got beta blockers from the doctor, but I was trembling so I stopped taking them after a week. I just stayed in the house because there were millions of press outside and I looked like shit, though I've made a career of that.

Geldof was the last person to speak to Hutchence before the INXS singer hanged himself in 1997. Yates held him partly responsible but he has behaved with dignity, refusing to talk publicly until now about the divorce or its bleak aftermath. He still refuse to discuss his children - the three daughters that he had with Yates, and Tiger Lily, her child with Hutchence. (Last year the courts dismissed a challenge from Hutchence's family and appointed Geldof Tiger Lily's legal guardian.) "It drives the girls mad that boy's don't talk about things, but in my case I actually couldn't," he says, pushing his salad aside and lighting an incongruous cigar. "I'm somebody who's quite verbal, but some things are literally unsayable and remain so. Why music becomes important is that you can articulate the unsayable through a heightened language.

For two years after Yates left in 1995, during which she vilified him and he lost custody of their daughters (sparking yet another public crusade, for better access for estranged fathers), Geldof didn't listen to music. "When love is taken from you, you can't function. I didn't do anything. I didn't even want to go out with girls. I was incapable. I was emasculated, eviscerated." The song $6,000,000 loser is about him reclaiming his manhood. The rest of sex, age & death, however, is relentlessly sad; full of yearning for the 18-year relationship he shared with Yates, grief at what he calls the "Shakespearean tragedy" of her death, and "bewilderment" at Hutchence's suicide.

The key line is ragged blues number Inside your head -" Why put a noose around your neck?" - related to Hutchence. "That song is completely straightforward. Im utterly bewildered by the piteous tragedy and unnecessariness of it, and angry it happened at all" he says, still unreconciled four years later.