Sir Bob Geldof has said he failed as a father for failing to prevent his daughter Peaches dying of a heroin overdose earlier this year.
The musician and activist said he “blamed himself” for the death of the 25-year-old mother of two young boys, who had started using the drug again in the months before her death.
“You’re the father who is responsible and clearly failed,” Geldof told ITV News. “For anybody watching, who has a dead kid and you’re a parent. You go back, you go back, you go back, you go back, you go back, you go over, you go over. What could you have done? You do as much as you can.”
Peaches was found dead by her husband Tom Cohen at their home in Wrotham, Kent, on 7 April.
Geldof said he had been aware of his daughter’s use of heroin: “Course I knew about it and we did more than talk about it.”
An inquest heard that Peaches had started using heroin again in February, after taking the substitute drug methadone for two and a half years.
Although the 25-year-old, who had worked as a journalist, model and television presenter, had been “super bright”, there was also a frantic element to her character, Geldof said.
She had a “very errant mind that could focus intensely on a book which she would consume and just absorb it. But the rest was a franticness – she knew what life was supposed to be and God bless her she tried very hard to get there. And she didn’t make it.”
He said newspaper attacks on his daughters following the death of their mother Paula Yates in 2000 had also “damaged” them.
Performing with the Boomtown Rats helped Geldof to escape the grief of losing his daughter. “I put on my snakeskin suit and I can be this other thing,” he said.
“It is utterly cathartic. Those two hours and I am drained. In every sense it empties, it drains my mind. On stage I’m lost in this thing and it’s a very brief respite.”
The organiser of the Live Aid concerts in response to famine in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s said that victims of Ebola in west Africa were “dying of poverty again” because the developed world had “no interest in the poor”.
“In west Africa they are dying of poverty,” Geldof said. “We can contain it we believe, we hope, with our doctors and nurses and hospitals and systems in Madrid and Texas. But they don’t have that. Why? Because they’ve no money. They are dying of poverty again. And we paid no interest. Why? Because we really don’t pay much interest in the poor.”
The death toll from the outbreak has reached almost 4,500, with as many as 70% of those infected in west Africa dying from the disease.