Extreme sorrow is like all very very intense emotions, very interesting if you yourself are not the one sufferring through it. A friend of mine died last week and her son completely collapsed at the funeral and while empathy is important, part of me wants to watch sorrow like a movie: it isn’t that I enjoy someone elses heartbreak, far from it, but I want to see what it looks like. Sometimes, you are walking on the street and you’ll see somebody crying on their cell and I want to stand and watch.
Bob Geldof’s daughter Peaches died of a drug overdose earlier this year and I’ve found his horror fascinating: a study in the most intense grief imaginable, a senseless, self inflicted death and a suffering rock star shattered beyond belief. Has something bad happened to you? Where you wake up and you think of it, go to sleep think of it, always there, it is in the back of your mind and then it takes you over and it is never ending…
As a music lover, I flip out over intensity: I’ll forgive a lot if the emotions being expressed are very very deep and I guess that is why I find other people’s horrors interesting, bewildering, it captures my imagination and I’ve written about people who have had their children time many times.
But people have to go on living and on May 14th, 2014, Bob Geldof went back on stage with the Boomtown Rats and began trying to put his life back together again. And that is interesting as well, it is fascinating to see how people are forced to cope. Geldof said: “It’s that thing people say – some other part of you comes out. And I guess that’s right. In that regard, it’s very cathartic. There’s a lot of things going on in my head at the moment and you can just purge them and the crowd allow you to do that. I’ll sleep well tonight which is the first time in weeks I’ve slept well.”
I’ve been writing about the “music is dying” nonsense and yet music isn’t dying because music doesn’t die and Geldof, these words are huge. They are the resonate truth of music and performance and just the dream of one man who says something that resonates through space, it is like the vibrations in the wind. Sleep well, Bob.