It’s a pleasure to meet people on the cusp of proper fame, before their private lives have been turned over by the tabloids and their professional lives sniggered at by the broadsheets, before they’ve gone cynical and/or wary, before they start talking like robots. “Ohmigod, I’m so tired,” says Peaches Geldof when we meet on the steps of the hotel, “I was up till three! I’m, like, so behind on my English?” She sounded like a normal person, a normal schoolgirl anyway. (Indeed, she was due at school at noon, straight after the interview. They’re allowed to come in later on Fridays in the sixth form.) Barely drawing breath for the next hour and a half, Peaches reminded me of meeting Jamie Oliver before he got massive, or Kate Winslet before divorce and Sam Mendes, when those two were still just fresh, free-thinking full-of-beans talents. Except, at 16, she is a good few years younger even than they were then.
To say those 16, almost 17, years have been colourful would be to make light of her loss. When she was eight, her mother, Paula Yates, left her, her two sisters and her father, Bob Geldof, for the Australian rock singer Michael Hutchence. Geldof began a relationship with a French actress, Jeanne Marine. Then Hutchence was found dead, hanging in his hotel room. Then when Peaches was 11, Yates died of a suspected heroin overdose and Peaches’ half-sister, Tiger Lily, came to live with the Geldofs. And somewhere in among all that, she found out Hughie Green was her grandad. And it all took place in public. Over the past couple of years, Peaches herself has been attracting growing press comment, not all of it positive.
Some newspapers are saying she’s set on the same trajectory as her mother: hooked on fame, got her tongue pierced, goes to too many parties, blah blah blah. I can’t see it. She seems in exceptionally good shape for a girl who suffered such a colossal bereavement. Someone – Yates, Geldof, both – has done a good job. Peaches seems level-headed, dutiful, sensible, cautious, conservative even. Doesn’t smoke or drink. Has a henna tattoo of a cross and chain on her wrist (“It lasts for six months”). Watches a load of TV (“low-budget stuff, love Richard Madeley. I think he’s cute”).
And, on Saturday, she lies in bed until 1pm. And she harbours baseless anxieties (“I’m trying to eat better because I’ve put on so much weight!”). And says absurd things (“I don’t think there’s a class hierarchy in Britain any more”). And reads Salinger, Burroughs and Bret Easton Ellis. And takes the mickey out of her dad’s music (“Yeah, Irish punk, go for it! Cool!”). Normal teenage stuff, in other words. Except maybe the bit about “Bono coming round occasionally” and actually having met Bret Easton Ellis. Nor do I buy this idea that she’s unhealthily grown-up. Nor does she. “Well, I am 16, I’m not like, 12!” The self-possession (along with the eccentric name, incidentally) is fairly typical of privately educated West London teenagers, the girls at least. “We’ve had a good education, we’ve been given good parents and we read a lot. Reading has really opened my mind... [but] I know girls who are really intelligent, assured, confident young women,” she says. “My friends think of me as, like, The Blonde who is frivolous and funny.”
Peaches mentions Paula only once. We were discussing her new documentary, Teen America, and she said her one previous visit to the US had been when Yates took her to the set of Sesame Street as a young child. She mentions her father a lot. “He’s, like, hassling me? To work? All the time?” She means school work. “I think he’s happy because I got good results in my GCSEs [last summer]”. What did she get? “I’ve been told I’m not allowed to divulge that information, by my school.” Then she says, “I got an A star in English, so excited?” (I’ll go easy on the superfluous “likes” and emphases and interrogatives from now on – you get the idea.)
At the moment Peaches Geldof is still more famous for her parents than for herself. The longer it stays like that the better, such is the corrosive effect of celebrity on the young. No doubt she is keen to emerge from their shadow, though she doesn’t say so. She does seem to have inherited their taste for the limelight, and she’s a natural on TV, although she says, “I don’t want to end up doing TV presenting work – for me to do it would be the easy way.” She’s also inherited her parents’ facility with words, a talent that might carry her through the next few difficult years and into a normal life in her twenties. “My first article came out when I was 14 and obviously I got where I was because of my surname.” But the idea that she is some kind of British Paris Hilton won’t run. Not rich enough, for one thing. Not that she’s exactly underprivileged. When I asked her if she was religious, for instance, she said, “We have a church attached to our country house in Kent. I was baptised there as a child…”
She wants to do her AS levels (History of Art, Classical Civilisation, Politics and English), then her A levels, then take a gap year with her boyfriend, go to New York University to study English and journalism, then become a full-time writer.
I’m sure she’ll make a good journalist, and on her own merits. She’s bright, yet unintellectual, with a gift for the punchy phrase. Jane Austen, for instance, is “boring feminist crap”. What’s wrong with being feminist? “I don’t like feminists. I like the mild feminists – go for it – but not crazy I-hate-men feminists.” She thinks “the Brontës are boring” too. Despite brimming over with opinions, she isn’t, she insists, the voice of a generation. “God, I hate that, being pigeonholed into being this teen spokesperson. I’m just one girl.”
Her father has kept a tight rein on her burgeoning career. “If I get offers from Now or heat he won’t let me do it. If I write something he always wants to read it and if he thinks it’s too controversial he won’t let me say it.” (Which means Geldof must have okayed her calling Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine “upper-class bitches with no fashion sense”.) Neither will her father let Peaches have an agent. “He doesn’t want me to get exploited.”
I say I’m surprised she’d only been to the US once before filming Teen America, I’d imagined the family flitting back and forth. “No, I’d never really been to America and I’d never travelled on my own without my family. OK, so recently I’ve been going to Spain to see my boyfriend [Llewellyn Graves, 22, DJ, grandson of the poet], but apart from that I hadn’t travelled alone.” She spent two weeks interviewing rich kids in Orange County, gang members in Santa Ana, sexual abstinence pledgers in Texas and so forth. Prior to that, her view of America had largely been formed by TV. “I thought it was a land of opportunity where beautiful skinny girls hang out with their jock boyfriends and everyone has loads of money.” She didn’t really think that, did she? “I had that impression because that’s what’s portrayed, this fantasy of affluence.”
I’d imagined someone like Bob Geldof would have put her straight on that, but, apparently, no. Similarly, prior to making her first documentary, on teens in Britain, she had also been ignorant of large parts of her own country. “Before, I never really thought I had a good life. I was just spoilt, I think, and then I went to Bolton into the sink estates – you could just sense the desolation, the desperation.” I asked if she’d ever been to Africa. “No… No, wait, have I been to Africa? Yeah, I’ve been to South Africa on holiday, I went with my family to do a shoot for Hello!, which is quite cheesy but an all-expenses paid holiday, why pass on that?” She thought apartheid was “just as strong as it was before”.
We talked about the gang members she had met in California. “When I interviewed those boys I cried afterwards.” Had she come across that side of life in London? “Yeah, even in Chelsea. It sounds ridiculous but I’ve had my phone taken off me, like, five times? Groups of boys coming up and saying, ‘Gimme your phone, gimme your phone’. Now, I’ve taken to carrying a fat brick with me, because you just get it out and they’re like, ‘Are you joking?’ and they walk off. Like a really old-school Nokia.” Oh, I say, a brick is a phone, I thought you meant an actual brick. She giggles. “No, I’m not that violent.”
She says it’s true her father is strict, relatively speaking. “At the weekend my dad likes me to be in at 1am. Which I understand because London can be very dangerous.” She says that if Geldof “thinks I’m getting spoilt, he’ll tell me and I’ll acknowledge that. I’m glad he only gave me £10 pocket money.” Really, I say, I thought it was 50p? “That was when I was 12. He gives Pixie £10 a week, which is pretty reasonable. She’s 15. I make money from working. I have friends who are given £200 pocket money.” What? I squeak. A week? “Yeah, and they have become spoilt and jaded by it.”
