Sex and love and life and death

Bob Geldof will never update his 1986 biography Is That It? He says he can’t. Because there are too many people who could be hurt, particularly in terms of the past five years. That said, Geldof also insists that his new album Sex, Age And Death – complete with “snapshots” into his psyche and “essences” from his life – tells the tale of that period more effectively than a book could.

There’s certainly no doubt that the stripped-down, raw, emotional power of songs like ‘One For Me’, ‘Scream In Vain’ and ‘Inside Your Head’ mirror the terror and turmoil that followed the end of his marriage to Paula Yates, and the suicide of her lover Michael Hutchence.

On the upside, songs like ‘Pale White Girls’ and ‘10:15’ mark Geldof’s path back to love, with Jeanne Marine. She’s variously described as a “French film star” or his “live-in girlfriend” but what’s even more telling in terms of Geldof’s life at the moment, is that they are both also raising Fifi Trixibelle, Peaches and Pixie – Bob’s daughters with Paula Yates – and Tiger Lily, the child Paula had with Michael Hutchence.

Before the interview proper starts, in a private residence in Soho, Geldof spends at least half an hour talking about the global ramifications of the terrorist attack on New York, which happened earlier the same week. Like many a parent, he is deeply concerned about the specific effect the atrocity will have on children, wondering aloud what words can be used to explain to them such madness. Yet the deeper we travel into what he later jokingly refers to as a “tennis match of a fucking interview” the more I realise Bob Geldof is actually using this, at times, heated exchange to explain himself – to himself. Which also is the impetus behind what undoubtedly is his most powerful solo album yet, Sex, Age And Death.

Joe Jackson: Everybody’s probably asking you about Paula but, first, tell me about ‘10: 15’ which is a very tender, explicit love song to Jeanne.

Bob Geldof: People aren’t talking to me about Paula or Jeanne because I won’t really talk about specific individuals. Or specifics. And I won’t talk about them not for any reasons of prurience. It’s just that I won’t get involved in the pornography of intrusion. But I don’t mind talking about the emotional landscape of Sex, Age And Death. And ‘10:15’ is the last track of a record that deals largely with grief, loss, pain, disappointment, bitterness and anger. Then, at the end, you get this small redemptive note. And it is a snapshot, of a moment of kindness and tenderness in an otherwise hurricane of piteous cruelty.

Does Jeanne have any problem with the explicit nature of the lyric?

No. She cried when she listened to it and read the lyrics. And gave me a hug.

You present yourself as defenceless, even child-like in the song. With Jeanne, you say, saving your soul, soothing you, bathing you, holding you ‘till you fall asleep. It’s not exactly the Bob Geldof the world knows.

Female journalists have said they were almost embarrassed because those lyrics were almost too much. Unnecessarily raw and honest. But it’s just a description of feeling. And I think I’ve always been fairly direct about anything that’s happened to me. The comment about the book was “fucking hell, is he sure he wants to say those things?”

Clive James did suggest that, later in life, you and Paula might regret the explicit nature of some of its revelations, in terms of your kids.

That’s prescient. I don’t regret it in any way. And my kids now are old enough to read it. Peaches did read it and said “God, dad, you’re sick, I don’t believe it!” I don’t know what part she was reading but then Pixie went “What? What is sick?” And Peaches said, “I’m not telling you!” And she’s a year younger than Pixie!

What about Fifi? She’s eighteen.

She read it before.

And did she say anything like ‘dad this is a bit much’?

No. Because I speak to them the way I’m speaking to you. I’m unapologetic about who I am. And what I am. They know who I am. And, generally, I’m melancholic by disposition. I’m not Mr. Chuckles, though I seek that.

Lightness?

Exactly. Joy because I am joyless. And grace because I’m graceless. That was given to me for many years, then it was withdrawn. Joy and light and grace and beauty.

When was it withdrawn?

1995.

When Paula left?

Yeah.

But did your whole emotional landscape really implode, collapse inwards.

Utterly. I was wholly unable to function. As a person. Specifically, as a man. You’ll note the album is littered with words like empty, arid, dry. And that aridity, those oceans of loneliness and deserts of grief, is the area you inhabit for a long, long time.

But was that whole process initiated by Paula leaving, by the end of love after nineteen years or by the time you spent on your own afterwards? What triggered the descent?

When love is withdrawn.

Had it not been withdrawn before Paula left?

I don’t want to go into the story of what happened. I can only say that’s when it happened.

So am I wrong to think love had died before Paula left?

You’re wrong. Or, at least, I wasn’t aware of it.

Yet the last time I talked to you, in ’89, there was a rumour you were seeing someone else. So am I also wrong to suspect your life with Paula was beginning to fall apart even then?

Totally wrong.

Likewise the claim that you both had other lovers?

That’s not true either. But I don’t want to talk about that stuff.

But you write about it on the album, Bob. For example, in the opening track, ‘One For Me’, where you mock Paula. How do – (Cuts across) You’re being a bit tabloidy here. Because you know – or think you know the story – you will then read into the lyrics all that stuff. But I won’t talk about our lives together. Yet you’re wrong about what you just said. All the stuff you’ve said.

What? The suggestion that you each had other lovers while married?

Everything you said.

But it’s not just me that’s saying this. Paula herself was quoted as saying, during the divorce proceedings, that you had at least six extramarital love affairs. So I’m just trying to get a true sense of you and Paula, as a man and woman together, a true sense of the real emotional landscape behind your new album.

I won’t talk about us as a man and woman together. But you’re wrong in terms of much of what you said about us. You’ll just have to accept that.

Tell me why, in the lyric of ‘One For Me’, you mock Paula? Even though you don’t mention her by name.

That’s a song of disappointment. You understand someone totally – more than any other person on the planet – and then events occur and suddenly you see this other person who is not at all the individual you were with for nineteen years. And you go ‘what’s that?’ ‘What about the grace and the joy and the light?’ That’s the atmosphere of this record. And the point is that, literally, I can’t talk about these things. They are unsayable for me.

Music is a higher language because it can articulate feeling. It can articulate the unspeakable. So you get synopsised emotions in lyrics, which, unlike poetry can be completely unspecific because underlying it all is this other instrument of language – which is the music. So you understand, to a greater depth, an expression or a phrase. Therefore you can, through songs – even pop songs – talk about inchoate things, like emotion. So when I say to you the record is about grief, loss, pain, disappointment, bewilderment, anger, that’s what it is. And ‘One For Me’ – and I’m not being superficial or coy – is about fucking disappointment.

You have to look at the songs in totality. In ‘New Routine’ there’s a line about a place “past nowhere/and the void between them”. That is the landscape I inhabited. And when we were making the record, Pete (Briquette, co writer of many songs and former member of Boomtown Rats) would say ‘Bob, what are we making here? What is this record?’ And I’d say ‘it’s nothing, all the tones should be flat because that’s what it feels like’. A pictorial image of the album would be ‘2 am, weary.’ Not exhausted, because that’s physical. But ‘weary’ which is a metaphysical state. You’re just there, just breathing. That’s what we’re talking about here.

Fair enough but, as I say, in ‘One For Me’ you mock Paula – say things like “you don’t even need to take your clothes off anymore/You’re a bit too old for that stuff anyway” or describe her as “mutton” dished up as “lamb in ghostly guises” Let’s face facts here, you are attacking the mother of your children. How do you explain that to them?

(Angrily) So what? It’s none of your business. The kids hear the record and think it’s just a bunch of songs by dad, who’s shite anyway. They don’t relate to that at all.

And, Fifi, at eighteen, doesn’t break down the lyrics and say ‘why did you write that, dad?’

No. They just hear nice songs and generally they’re more into Eminem and think this is seriously lame and what am I twatting on about. And one of them, specifically, thought that song was about something else. When I asked her what she thought it was, she went off on her own explanation. Exactly as a punter hearing it would. But not you, with you being so fucking specific – which you are wrong to be.

Wrong to think the song is about Paula?

In lots of ways, yes. I didn’t sit down and write the song, saying ‘that’s one of the emotions I feel, do it’. I don’t even know when I began this record. I know when it stopped, because you cut the record. The point was that my mate, Howard – who you met earlier and is probably my best friend – and other male friends, just gathered about me. Yet Howie moved into the house. I don’t even remember when. I was living a pretty peripatetic lifestyle. But for two years he stayed with me and took care of me. Pete was the same. I’ve known Pete since 1975, extremely well. And the only thing he could do, he thought, was be there. So he arrived with recording stuff under his arm and said ‘if you feel like it, I’ll be in the basement.’ I’d say ‘yeah’ not even aware these guys were there.

Yet I didn’t even want to hear any music. But Pete was doing stuff for Tricky, doing a lot of sequences. So when I began to even want to hear music again, that was perfect. This monotonous but quite clever stuff. He also played a lot of new music for me, which was fantastic. Not only that, my friends are the Underworld and I’d written stuff with Rick and Carl on my last album, The Happy Club. So that’s what I wanted, stuff with no beginnings, middles or ends. Because this whole thing didn’t seem to have any beginning middle or end. And eventually, a music sensibility began to creep back and I’d come up with a scrap of lyric, or an idea, that’d often make Pete say, ’Is this a song or what?’ But that was the last facility to creep back because it is so innate. As opposed to a facility like business, which doesn’t mean anything and came back earlier. It’s an empirical thing, you do a deal and that’s it.

What about the facility for passion?

Passion or sex? Sex is a facility.

Both.

That wasn’t there at all.

So you were incapacitated at a core level?

Utterly. That’s correct.

You couldn’t function sexually?

. Howard was making me eat but I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t getting up. And I was losing incredible amounts of weight. So I started freaking out. Then the doctor gave me Betablockers, but I didn’t like what they did so I went off them after a month. This feeling was located in your gut, which, again, is a metaphysical place, as opposed to your stomach. And I would extract this ball, where the pain was. And put it in my hands, look at it and say ‘this is who you are, I know you now.’ But literally, below your legs didn’t seem to be there. And that lasted a long time.

How do you reconnect with your body after what seems to be a psychic rupture?

It’s a gradual return of a facility. Female friends helped.

Including Jeanne, I presume, who was with you at this point?

No. Not really. She wasn’t with me then. That was a gradual thing that happened over this period. But female friends would come along and made me feel – I’m not a good looking person – desirable again. They absolutely understand that I felt love would never come to me again, felt ugly, undesirable, all those things. And they’d say ‘you look a mess’ choose clothes for me, tell me ‘you’re going out’. And we’d get a fancy car and I’d swan into some big party with a beautiful girl on each arm, knowing full well the paparazzi would be going fucking mad! So the man thing came back. Even though you feel like shit and knew these lovely women were doing that for you. But there was a part of me that was quite proud, that I had a beautiful woman on each arm. So I’d put on the show and it all came good in the end.

Meaning you began to function sexually again?

What happened was that some of these girls would start being tender with me, just touching me.

Easing you back into sensibility.

That was exactly it. But even that felt like an electric shock. The song ‘Pale White Girls’ comes out of this whole experience. It was one of those moments of being patched back together. A real room, I was lying there, curtains blowing, cold winter’s night and I didn’t understand why they didn’t have the heating on. But I was with someone. And the person I was with – because I was alone now – and because I was in desperation, I didn’t know if I wanted to pursue this. But she did, because she was lonely. And she was beautiful. And ludicrously ghost-like and pale in this moonlit light. So there was this scratching for love, from both of us. Limbs reaching out, circling and it got to be liquid like it gets in those moments. And she was liquid. There was a languid quality to the night. But I did think ‘I don’t want this.’

That’s why Jeanne is so great. Because she was French and didn’t know that much about me and didn’t give a fuck. It wasn’t (affects voice of crazed fan) ‘what is I Don’t Like Mondays all about, Bob?’ She didn’t care. She just liked this cripple, part boy, part man. Yet I didn’t understand it. She is so beautiful. Why would she want this ugly, deformed, crippled soul? But she did. And accepted all those myriad inadequacies, glooms and fogs that come with him. Jeanne took it from zero. Less than zero. And took all the baggage that came with it. But she was overwhelmed by what happened in Britain, with the tabloids. These people following me into France, me having to dodge them. She was dismayed at that but took it all on board. Yet prior to that there all these other kind people. But they all were as needy and as desperate.

You say you see yourself as “not good looking” but many did see you as a sex symbol and in your biography there is that pretty revealing line about how when you became a rock star “the world – and its legs – opened for me.” So how did all that collapse simply because one woman left?

I don’t know. It just did.

Why hadn’t your self image been strong as a result of all the other women?

I never had a strong self image. Here was this beautiful girl I met before the Rats even made their first record and I was this lanky, loud-mouth and off we went off on this wild ride together. So my entire good life had been shared with this beautiful girl.

Which might suggest your self image based on your position in the relationship with Paula and something you only had to consider when her love was withdrawn.

Maybe you’re right. These are difficult questions

But your self image did dissolve after Paula left.

It’s wasn’t just my self image. It was my entire self. (pauses) What you’re saying strikes me as true and real. And why I’m hesitating in answering these questions is because I am taking the time to think about everything you’re saying. All I knew of, as I said earlier, light and grace and joy and beauty – was associated with this person because I shared it all with them. When that goes it changes you utterly.

Was your self image, sexually, specifically affected by the fact that Paula left you for Michael Hutchence who she then publicly described as “the Taj Mahal of crotches” – which must have humiliated you as a man.

I wasn’t aware of that at the time. Because I didn’t read any of that stuff. So none of that impinged on me. But when I was made aware of it I thought ‘who are you? You’re better than that! This is naff.’ And that feeling, too, comes across in ‘One For Me’.

But surely your collapse wasn’t simply a consequence of ‘she left me and I’m falling apart’. Was it also accentuated by feelings of guilt and recrimination at your own fuck-ups in the marriage?

No.

None at all.

No.

Do you think you were the ideal partner?

I thought we were great together.

Right up until Paula left?

Yes.

It’s said you thought her affair with Hutchence was just a “fling” and she’d come back.

I can’t go into specifics.

But you are writing about specifics on the album.

I talk about me. But I don’t talk about tabloid speculation and tittle-tattle.

Bob, I know you have reasons to detest the tabloids, but, to tell you the truth, in preparation for this interview I read reams of press reports from The Sunday Independent, Irish Times, Observer, Guardian, and many of those articles claimed, for example, that Paula said you were violent, broody, self-centred and stingy. All those allegations could make any fair-minded person think ‘it’s not just Paula’s fault, or even Paula and Michael’s fault, the Geldof marriage fell apart. Bob has to shoulder some of the blame himself.’

The only thing I will say to all that is that I am not the least bit violent. I can’t recall ever hitting a single individual. Man or woman. And if there is anyone out there who could counter-claim that I’d like to meet them.

Some would say that withdrawing within yourself can be, if not violence, then emotional cruelty.

I see what you’re saying but the only people who can say if it is, or isn’t, are the people who are around you.

There also was the claim that you were filled with guilt when Paula died, felt you should have been there for her.

I didn’t say that, who said I did?

Not a tabloid.

(Angrily) That’s absolute nonsense. What do you mean ‘not a tabloid’? That this makes it right? That’s fucking ridiculous.

Maybe I’m wrong but I’d suspect that something I’d read in a ‘quality’ newspaper might be more sensitive, insightful and maybe even more truthful, than what I’d find in the tabloids. And that was a quote I read. If you say it’s not true so be it.

Well, I’m telling you , it’s absolutely not true at all.

And you saw no flaws in yourself as Paula’s husband?

I am totally flawed. Perennially flawed. I’ve said to you, I’m melancholic by disposition. I’m sure I’m very difficult to live with. Because of my make-up and personality.

But are you a domineering husband, dad, lover? Is what you say ‘law’ and everyone else better go along with that?

That’s personal stuff and I don’t want to get into that. I don’t want to get into bouts of deep self-analysis here, either. But I am a strict father. Not that they pay much fucking attention to it!

So Fifi at eighteen, for example, couldn’t come to you and say she gave head to a rock star in the back of a limousine? Even though Paula gave head to you in that setting when she was around the same age?

A daughter wouldn’t say that to any father. If she said she was going off with a rock star I’d say (laughs) ‘let me put you straight about this particular profession, darling!’

A profession in which rock stars can hang themselves and rock chicks die drug-related deaths.

Exactly.

You do refer to Michael Hutchence hanging himself in ‘Inside Your Head’. With lyrics like “So why put a noose around your neck/What the fuck is going on/Inside your head?” – it seems to be fuelled by the kind of anger you once told me has fired your psyche nearly all your life.

Even if anger didn’t fire my psyche, don’t you think anger would be present in the circumstances I’m talking about?

Definitely, if only at what seems to have been the needless loss of life.

That more than anything else. And so ‘Inside Your Head’ is a song of bewilderment. There is no anger directed at any of the characters or individuals involved in our story. ‘Inside Your Head’ is absolute bewilderment at the piteous cruelty and tragedy that befell us all. It’s ‘what the fuck is going on?’ Or, as I say at another point in the song, “someone out there is taking the piss”. In other words ‘this can’t be happening’. Like you just quoted me something from some other fucking profile claiming Paula said something and my only response to that is ‘what the fuck is going on inside your head!’ But what this song is, is just a cry of anger that any of this could happen at all. Especially the way it ended.

But who are you addressing the song to? The ghost of Paula, the ghost of Hutchence?

Not, not the ghost of Paula. Paula wasn’t dead when any of these songs were written and that’s important to remember.

Either way, in terms of its sense of rage, the song does remind me of say, ‘Mother’, from Lennon’s Primal Therapy album.

I hadn’t thought about that. Someone else said ‘is your album this generation’s Blood On The Tracks?’. I said ‘what generation? I’m nearly fucking fifty!’ But I do know Lennon’s Primal Therapy album.

And presumably, Lennon’s ‘How Do You Sleep?’ from Imagine, which ‘Inside Your Head’ could also be compared to.

But that was directed at Paul McCartney. This isn’t directed at anyone specifically. In fact, the lines could pertain to me in the song. And often do.

You didn’t put a noose around your neck, Bob.

No, that does pertain to – but it’s ‘why!’

As in, saying ‘Michael Hutchence, why would you hang yourself?’

That’s what I’m saying.

Paula reportedly said ‘you may as well have strangled him yourself’ and the coroner apparently said Hutchence’s death was, at least, aggravated by having argued with you…

(Cuts across) Stop. Stop. I’ve just done the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times, Mare Claire, The Big Issues and, just before you arrived, The Irish Times. And you’re the only one who’s coming back at me with guff from other newspaper, and what they speculate. I’m fucking telling you what I felt.

I also interviewed Paula, wrote the hotpress obituary for the woman, and researched her life and death for that, so I must reject you saying that what I’m quoting is “guff from other newspapers.”

But I bet you your research was 99% shite. It’s not your fault, as a journalist, but the sources you were depending upon.

Maybe. But, as I say, there was – in many newspapers – reports of Paula’s claim that “you may as well have strangled him yourself”. And maybe even people who admire Bob Geldof, and care for you will, when they hear you sing to Hutchence, “what the fuck is going on/Inside your head?” think ‘perhaps you, yourself, Bob are part of the reason he hanged himself.’ Or ‘where is the verse in the song about that possibility, Bob?”

But what you are saying is not true. And I won’t go into why it’s not true.

Why you may be part of the reason?

Why I’m not.

Because, ultimately, Michael Hutchence, hanged himself while trying to heighten his own auto-erotic sensations?

Whatever.

But when you were making this album did Pete, for example, say to you “Bob, this is going to open up the floodgates to such questions after years of you staying quiet on the subject?”.

No. And I am still staying quiet. I’m only talking about what I went through.

So surely it’s legitimate to ask if you felt guilty about Paula’s death. Or Hutchence’s death?

No, it’s not. Because that is, as I say, the pornography of intrusion. Besides, when I’m talking to you, who am I addressing? You? Your readers?

Whatever, you have addressed these issues in songs.

But I’m addressing myself in these songs. This record is for me. And what you think about it, I don’t mind. The record doesn’t demand that you go into that world. I don’t imagine why you would bother to do that. But if you do, don’t you understand the difference between art and something you seek always to reduce to the empirical? The two are inextricably divided.

Obviously. But you have said that from the beginning of your career, with the Rats, many of your songs were like diary entries. So this album will also be read as another musical chapter of autobiography. Maybe even the next instalment of Is That It?

And people would be right to read it that way. The title Sex, Age And Death is shorthand for experience. This could only have been written in the last five years. I wish it wasn’t. I wish I’d have been able to write another record. In other words, I wish that this experience never happened. But it did. And the truth is that all you can write about is what you experience. It helps, of course, to see Picasso’s A Woman Weeping and know it’s Dora Maat. And to know what happened between them, because then the painting becomes personal – and, please, I am not equating myself with the genius of Picasso – but, other than that, it is a profound piece of art. You stare at and you have an absolutely intuitive understanding of what it means. Hopefully, too, someone in Germany, who has no knowledge of “Tabloid Bob” will pick this album up and what they’ll get, hopefully, is a sense of its universality.

Even so, if a deeper knowledge of Picasso and Dora Maat or Lennon and his mother, in terms of his primal album or Dylan and Sarah, can make a work more resonant, you must understand where I’m coming from in trying to get a true psychological setting for the songs on your new album?

But every single context you have given me has been utterly wrong. I understand that’s not your fault. Because you’ve read what you believe to be papers of record. But what record? I said nothing. And there was an obvious reason – and agenda – when other people said things, that you must take on board. The psychological setting for these songs is what happened to me in the last five years. In my head. Or the feeling.

You say all these songs were written before Paula died; have you written about her death? Will you? In a song, or another volume of autobiography?

I respect your right to ask these questions but they are wildly inappropriate. But, no.

But, Bob, surely you accept that the thousands of people who read Is That It? – and were impressed by its honesty – would like to read a similar tome about the past five years in your life? Maybe even more so than the ten “snapshots” on this album?

This is a higher form of talking about all that. I, absolutely, think (that listening to this album) you would get a far better understanding, intuitively, about what the story is. Because this, as I say, is the story of feeling. Whereas you, as I told you earlier, are an empiricist and read things, believe them then cobble together what you think is a total understanding of the story. But that doesn’t make it true. You could take every tabloid paper and write a biography of me and I would probably be interested in it but I will not recognise 78% of the events in that book. Or the motivations. Or quotes. I wouldn’t recognise it as being any part of my life. Because it would be utterly false. “Tabloid Bob” is a character who lives out there. And because he is a separate character to me, anything that can be attributed to him.

Would you say the same is true of, say a “hotpress Bob” in terms of even the Geldof I interviewed before? Or the person I perceive from knowing every album you made?

I do think you have what is, fundamentally, a wrong understanding of me, specifically, and Paula, somewhat. But you do know me enough to know I will try, honestly, to answer your questions. But what do you mean by a question like ‘will you write a song about Paula’s death?’ I might. Yet how do I know or not? I might write a song about the feeling of her death but you mightn’t even recognise it as being about that. As for writing another biography, I couldn’t. Because there are too many people who are still alive and might be hurt by it. And there are some things I can’t talk about because of various contracts.

Contracts with publishers?

Whatever. Or deals I’ve done. So I couldn’t be as honest as I was in the first book. And with regards to the events of the last five years I just wouldn’t be. Out of a sense of honour. All you need to know – (laughs) This sounds like Keats’ ‘Truth is beauty’! But that is true! All you need to know is that a boy and a girl were together for nineteen years and in that there are volumes.

You have said this album is about Bob Geldof, after years of being silent, finally trying to articulate “the unsayable.” Wasn’t there a time – you mentioned Keats there – when he and poets like Yeats were the only ones who could help you articulate the unsayable. Even to yourself.

Yes. And Philip Larkin, for that bleak emptiness. And as for Yeats, obviously that last section of the lyric of ‘10:15’ has echoes of that Yeats poem that has the line “when I am old and by my fireside; I say, “when I am old and tired and grey”. So those poems did help. Even the ones we all had to learn by heart back in school. “I will arise and go now”. Just that idea of ‘take me out there.’ Essentially, I wanted to disappear to the furthest corner of the grey world but you can’t. Especially when you have children.

How do you function as a father when you are so annihilated by loss, so low?

You keep things together but even that is more of a strain. Totally. You put on a public face – or try to – and get ahead with what you have to do.

Surely trying to help your daughters deal with their mother’s death is even more difficult when you are bereft inside?

It is. And ‘bereft’ is the word I’ve been missing.

You can have it, to compensate for all the grief I’ve been giving you today!

(Laughs) Thank you.

You said earlier you weren’t even listening to music at one stage but, at a later point, did any pop music help you articulate the pain? Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind maybe?

That wouldn’t be one of my favourite Dylan record, so, no. And through more contemporary music did help me get back to making music, no pop music really got through to me at the early stages.

How about classical? As in wordless music, which many of us turn to at times like that, when words seem redundant

Jeanne brought me into classical music. That’s her big contribution to the Geldof cultural learning! She puts it on but I don’t know who it is.

Now that your own album is finished, do you listen to that at all?

No. I can’t. I put it on once and couldn’t get through the ten tracks. Yet I did hear myself explained. And I needed that. I needed to put a shape to the experience. And to the last six years. Because I had been rambling around inside myself, not knowing what to say. So when I hear it back my psyche says ‘that’s right.’ It’s like sending a postcard back to yourself.

So do you feel you are finally reconciled to the tripartite forces referred to in the title of your album?

Yeah.

All? Even death?

That was easy. That was reconciled years and years ago because my mom bailed out when I was seven.

Was it really reconciled? Mightn’t the loss of Paula also have triggered long suppressed feelings about the death of your mother?

Actually, yes. I do think that had a lot to do with what I went through.

So it was the pain of that primal loss you were finally feeling too?

Yes. That might explain the profundity of the sense of loss. And how extreme it was. But I’m fed up with my life being extreme. I await the next episode. With trepidation. I will step into the next scene, which seems to be written by other people, yet I’m fucking fearful now. And tired.

Bob, you’re coming up to fifty, isn’t it about time you started taking control of your own life and writing your own “scenes”?

Maybe. But no one can be that in control of life.

Maybe the truth is that you never really lost control of your life until Paula