Bob Geldof was in touch with the late Sinéad O’Connor shortly before her death — and he said she was experiencing a wide range of emotions in her final days.
“She was a very good friend of mine,” Geldof, 71, told the audience at the Cavan Calling Festival in Cavan, Ireland, on Saturday, July 29, per the Irish Independent. “We were talking right up to a couple of weeks ago.”
Geldof, a singer-songwriter who cofounded Live Aid, said that he and O’Connor had recently been communicating via text messages. “Some of the texts were laden with desperation and despair and sorrow and some were ecstatically happy,” he recalled. “She was like that.”
O’Connor died last week at age 56. Her family confirmed the news on Wednesday, July 26. “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinéad,” they said in a statement to RTE. “Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.”
A cause of death was not immediately confirmed, but British authorities said that they do not suspect foul play. London’s Metropolitan Police said officers responded to “reports of an unresponsive woman at a residential address” in the city, adding that O’Connor was “pronounced dead at the scene.”
The police notified O’Connor’s family after she was found. “The death is not being treated as suspicious,” the statement continued. An autopsy will be performed to determine the cause of O’Connor’s death.
Before his public tribute to O’Connor, Geldof said that he’d known her since she was very young. According to Geldof, O’Connor was a big fan of his band, the Boomtown Rats.
“Sinéad lived down the road from me and Garry [Roberts], the guitar player in the band who died about six or seven months ago. We are quite literally down the road,” Geldof told Irish Web TV. “So, we’ve known that girl most of her life, really. She was a big Rats fan.”
Geldof explained that the band wanted to dedicate their Cavan Calling performance to O’Connor because it felt like “the only thing” they could do to honor her memory. “We were friends all the way through,” he continued. “She was signed to the same little record label we were signed to, by the same guy, had the same manager and stuff like that, so there’s a big connection there.”
