Bob Geldof's grief when Paula Yates left him was "worse" than when she died

Reflecting on Paula's death from an overdose in 2000, he told RTE1: "It was not as bad - people are probably going to go nuts on me now and I hope, I wish they won't - it was not the feeling of loss. The grief, the agony, was not as bad as when Paula left me. That was worse.

"That required something else in me and, honest to god, I just didn't want to wake up again. You deal with these chasms of grief, these universes of loss, these abysses of pain and not understanding anything.

"If you make the decision - I'm going to live because I have children and I'm going to make sure they're okay - the soul has no proposition except to bind itself together to somehow push itself back. This obliterated thing. And the only way to do that is somehow through love."

Bob - who had Fifi, 32, the late Peaches, and Pixie, 35, with Paula, and also adopted her and Michael's daughter Tiger, 29, following their deaths - went on to find love again with Jeanne Marine, but he admitted in the immediate aftermath of his first marriage ending, he "hated every woman".

He said: "I didn't want to see another woman in my life. I hated every woman. And whether I liked it or not, it took a while, but my soul demanded love.

"It came to me, and I was unwilling, and I resisted - never again, never again - because I will not survive again. I resisted, I resisted. But you have no choice.

"You allow it in, and once it weasels its way in, you begin to be less hateful as a person. You begin to bind again, and you become human again."

Meanwhile, Bob admitted he fears he "failed" when it came to breaking the news of Paula's death to her daughters.

He recalled: "I put down the phone as if it was just a phone call and Fifi said, 'What? Don't tell me, mum something-something.' And I said 'no, no'...

"I remembered the directness of my father [when my mother died], and that's precisely what a child needs - tell me exactly, no obfuscations.

"I just went up and I did what my father did. And they reacted differently.

"I think I failed, actually. I think I didn't do it right. That's bugged me subsequently."

But the I Don't Like Mondays hitmaker is glad he took Paula's daughters to see her body, especially as he wasn't allowed at his own mother's funeral when she died when he was eight.

He said: "I brought them to see her body, which is the thing you do now. And they saw it as an inert thing. Mum wasn't there. And it's like the wakes in Ireland, the person just simply has gone.'

"I think that the psychiatrists or psychologists were right... it was the right thing to do.

"They got to understand, especially Tiger - she got to understand her mum had gone, and understood the logic of life and death."