Sir Bob Geldof have revealed he received texts “laden with desperation and despair” from Sinéad O’Connor weeks before her death.
The Boomtown Rats frontman paid tribute to the Nothing Compares 2 U singer onstage during the band’s performance at the Cavan Calling festival in Ireland on Saturday.
In a speech, Geldof told the audience about the importance of keeping going in the wake of tragedies before giving an insight into O’Connor’s messages before she died last week.
“There’s no other option, as all of you know, than to just keep on. Many, many times Sinead was full of a terrible loneliness and a terrible despair,” he said, reports DublinLive. “She was a very good friend of mine. We were talking right up to a couple of weeks ago. Some of her texts were laden with desperation and despair and sorrow and some were ecstatically happy. She was like that.”
O’Connor died 18 months after her 17-year-old son Shane took his own life, while Geldof lost his ex-wife Paula Yates and their daughter Peaches Geldof to heroin overdoses in 2000 and 2014, respectively.
The 71-year-old, who wore a T-shirt bearing O’Connor’s image for the performance, then made a joke about the singer ripping up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live.
“She tore up the picture of the Pope because she saw me tear up the picture of John Travolta on Top of the Pops. It was a little more extreme than tearing up f**king disco,” he quipped. “Tearing up the Vatican is a whole other thing but more correct actually. I should have done it.”
Elsewhere on Saturday, the Foo Fighters and Alanis Morissette teamed up to perform O’Connor’s song Mandinka in her honour at the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan.
O’Connor was found unresponsive at her flat in London and pronounced dead at the scene on 26 July. An autopsy will be carried out to determine the cause of death, which is not being treated as suspicious.