Singer Bob Geldof delivers touching speech on love at Hay Festival

Irish singer Bob Geldof delivered a moving speech on the ‘power of love’ on the last day of the Hay Festival, saying what a “detestable” character he had become after the break-up with his wife.

Geldof, 59, admitted that he was left heartbroken when Paula Yates, the television presenter, left him in 1995. However, his life transformed after meeting French actress Jeanne Marine.

The couple today is happily married for 15 years.

“My wife left me, I left her, and I was destroyed by this event,” The Telegraph quoted him as saying.

“I couldn’t get beyond the huge immensity of loss, that universal grief. Pain crowded in my head. I couldn’t find a way over or beyond it. It was too much, the whole thing,” he added.

But, surprisingly, love bloomed in his life once again in the form of his current wife Marine.

“When there is an insistence upon love, there is only one inevitable recourse and that is to respond. The soul gradually gets stitched back together and something resembling a human being gets reconstructed, in this case, me,” Geldof recounted.