A tirade in blue ....... (continued page 3)

Some of the anger is reserved for his ex-wife, who made him the country's most famous cuckold when she began her affair with Hutchence on live television. She interviewed celebrities from a bed on the Big Breakfast, the show produced by planet 24, and the Australian singer was a guest. Within months of their on-air flirtation, Yates left Geldof, who takes belated revenge on One for me. " You don't even need to get your cloths off any more/You're a bit too old for that stuff now anyway", are just some of its spiteful observations.

"I have no memory at all of when I began the album or when coherent phrases began to come back to me or when I began to want to listen to music again. When I started writing again (all the songs were written before Yates died last September), my friend Pete Briquette from the Boomtown rats began following me around with musical equipment. I'd hit a bass note occasionally, then beaty bits would eventually follow, and then as I became more enthused by music I took a job at Xfm. I was getting hugely enthusiastic by then, and in between Djing I'd go in and do a few bits in the recording studio"

In this disjointed way, he finally completed Sex, Age & Death. Its hollow, weary core and minimal arrangements wont make the play list on mainstream radio, but the album proves he's still a musical contender. That's important to Geldof. He is better known these days as an entrepreneur, campaigner and 'honorary mum" (as voted by readers of Prima magazine), but in his own mind, he is foremost a musician. As he sees it, it's only his "wildly episodic life" that has stopped him consolidating the success that began with in 1997 with the Boomtown Rats, who had two No 1 singles (Rat trap and I don't like Mondays).

Exhaling a cloud of cigar smoke, he says, " J haven't had choices. Post-live Aid was a nightmare. I became ubiquitous, and that's been a death blow to my musical ambitions". Where does he keep the medal he received from the Queen Elizabeth when he became an Honorary Knight?. He beams for the first time. "My medals! I love wearing them to Eltons John's annual bash because mine are nicer than his. I'm a Chevalier, a knight, a sheik and a prince Tuareg in Western Sudan. I look like Idi Amin when I've got them all on.
He admits he has won many awards, as well as a Nobel peace prize nomination for Live Aid., that he's forgotten some of them; he keeps them in a cupboard, filed away alongside the Worlds Best Dad mugs his kids gave him for Fathers Day. This seems appropriate: his family is his backbone. He says life would be pointless without his daughters and Jeanne, whom he name checks on the closing song, 10;15.

What ever peace he may have attained from making the album - and he didn't find it to be the catharsis he expected - it would mean nothing without them. "They keep me going when things go wrong, and with my life, I have empirical evidence that things do go wrong," he says.

As it happens, he's in the midst of a new, slightly smaller crisis involving his girlfriend. 'The minute she turned 36, she started talking about having a baby and I just don't know if I can go through that again". But wouldn't he enjoy the patter of little feet around his South London mansion block?. "God, you're joking," he groans. "I can't stand the idea of nappies again, and the crying. I'm exhausted"

End.

The Guardian