Sinéad O'Connor: Very good friend and the 'Maud Gonne of our time' says Bob Geldof

Bob Geldof pays tribute to his friend Sinéad O'Connor on stage at the Cavan Calling festival on Saturday night. Picture: Adrian Donohoe.

"Relentless", a "pure voice", and the "Maud Gonne of our time", Bob Geldof said in a tribute to the late Sinéad O'Connor on Saturday night. 

The late singer was a very good friend and childhood neighbour to Geldof — O'Connor had only lived about 75 yards from Geldof's house and used to share the same bus stop going to school. 

O’Connor, who died in London on Wednesday aged 56, was propelled to international stardom in 1990 with her version of 'Nothing Compares 2 U'. 

The Boomtown Rats singer paid tribute to the star during their headline gig at the Cavan Calling Festival in Cavan town on Saturday night.  Geldof told the audience that he "grew up with the O'Connors" and that he knew Sinéad and her brother Joseph.  

"They were great, and she is a pistol," Geldof told the crowds.

"I had to do a thing with The New York Times about her, two years ago, and I tried to tell her about Maud Gonne, Yeats' great muse, love object, revolutionary woman — years ahead of her time — who told the truth, who was a great artist and who was a radical and an activist at the same time," said Geldof. 

"And it's not a good comparison, but I said the sense I have is that Sinéad is the Maud Gonne of our time, and probably just as important in modern Ireland.

She was relentless, she had a voice like none of us had ever heard, so pure." 

Geldof said O'Connor was a very good friend, and he revealed that they had been talking until a couple of weeks ago. 

He described some of her text messages being filled with "desperation and despair, while some were ecstatically happy."

Book of condolences at the Mansion house in Dublin for Sinéad O'Connor following the singer's death. Picture: Collins Photos

Ahead of performing Boomtown Rats single 'Mary of the 4th Form' in her memory, Geldolf told the audience that O'Connor would bring the album that featured the song to school, which would "drive the nuns nuts" and that she had pinned a photo of him on the school noticeboard. 

"It was her favourite Rats song, and she loved this band," said  Geldof. "She came to many, many, many, gigs as a girl."

O'Connor sparked controversy and made headlines in 1992 when she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II on US TV show Saturday Night Live in protest at the Catholic Church.

But at the Cavan gig, Geldof said he believed the reason she had torn up the picture of the Pope was because he [Geldof] tore up the picture of John Travolta on Top of the Pops. 

"It was a little more extreme than tearing up f**king disco," he said.

Tearing up the Vatican is a whole other thing, but more correct actually, I should have done it.  

"She saw us on the Late Late kicking off about the Church and all that stuff, and she was thrilled by it. So, we love her very much. 

"It's impossible, some of us watched her this afternoon on the web and we were just speechless on how beautiful, how brilliant she was."