The first question is why do they hate her so? Why is it that when I say the word “Peaches” — to my hairdresser, to any one of my friends, to the guy who owns the fruit stand outside my flat — there spouts forth a long tirade against misspent youth, spoilt little rich girls, “try-hards” and publicity whores.
It’s not normal this hatred, I don’t think. There’s something very controlling and obsessive about it and, of course, it finds its clearest expression on the pages of the Daily Mail: articles written by women in their late forties, mainly, expressing their “concern” for the second-born daughter of Sir Bob and “tragic Paula”, as Paula Yates — a terrifically vibrant and intelligent woman for most of her life — is always now referred to in print. They’re so “worried about her future,” these women. Peaches risks going “down the same path of destruction that led to her mother’s death”.
An article written last year best demonstrates this sanctimonious tone: “It was with a truly heavy heart that I heard the news that Peaches had required emergency treatment after a suspected drugs overdose. When she came round, she verbally attacked the ambulance crew who had rushed to her aid and demanded they ‘respect her privacy’ . . . it has become increasingly apparent that Peaches has been careering down the fast lane of boys, booze and, yes, perhaps even drugs towards an inevitable crash of some kind.”
In the same week, Now magazine gave its readers the chance to “SEE PICS: Peaches Geldof looks a little worse for wear”. Peaches still hasn’t crashed and doesn’t look like she necessarily will. They’ve got it in for her, but why?
Of course, because I’m supposed to be talking about the fashion line that Peaches has just created with the designers PPQ, there are limits to how far we can delve into this infinitely more fascinating subject. Throughout the interview, her manager is standing, arms folded, a few metres behind me, shaking her head at her client every time I veer off subject. Even a very unimaginative question such as “What is it like being in the public eye?” is vetoed by the manager and Peaches has to say, not for the first time: “I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about that.”
It seems unlikely that I will be able to raise the subject of her marriage to Max Drummey, which lasted for six months following their Las Vegas wedding last August.
So we go back to clothes and personal appearance: where she got her belt (Courtney Love, her new best friend, gave it to her), about the inspiration behind the PPQ line (“It’s almost what a Stepford housewife would wear if she lived in the mid-Nineties and listened to [the American punk-rock band] Babes in Toyland”), whether or not she regrets having hacked off her hair extensions (“I love having my ridiculous Rapunzel locks but sometimes you have to give your hair a break”).
It’s dreadfully boring, I think, for both of us. There is a low point when we are talking about the significance of the many tattoos that Peaches has all over her body where she becomes so languid that I worry that we are both about to drift into a coma:
PG: When they’re bad they can be, like, really bad.
SM: That’s true.
PG: But I was careful in that I didn’t get Homer Simpson and stuff.
SM: Yes, that seems like it was a good decision. You’ll always regret a Homer Simpson tattoo.
Part of the reason Peaches is so disengaged is that she’s just got off a plane from New York — “where I was sitting next to the world’s most disgusting, smelly man who talked to me for hours about Tottenham Hotspur while I was trying to watch a movie”. She’s jet-lagged. And she’s also hugely wary, which makes her hold back more than she perhaps otherwise would. When I arrived at the PPQ studio for the interview I noticed her giving me the once-over from her seat on the sofa, after which she more or less ignored me. But later she says: “I find it really difficult to trust people.”
The most surprising thing about her up close is that she’s so young. She’s been around for so long, and is so precocious, that it’s easy to forget she’s barely 20. At 14, she wrote in a newspaper column about how depressed she was to find herself at a party dressed exactly like everyone else. But that, she says now, was “before I really found my niche. It was before I discovered music, before I was turned on to rock’n’roll. I was just dressed in, like, Juicy Couture velour tracksuits and traipsing the Kings Road and that is not a life that one would want to lead.”
Today she is deeply immersed in her Goth look, wearing mostly black, with her delicate, pale-skinned face caked in make-up for the shoot. She’s proud that “it’s obvious I’m not dressing for men. I don’t want to be sexy, I’m, like, covered in tattoos. I have piercings. I’m just grungy and weird and not what is socially accepted as being beautiful, and I think that’s cool.”
Her heroes were mostly big in the Nineties: “The women who were championing things that were different. I loved Winona Ryder in her Beetle Juice and Heathers era, and even when I saw Angelina Jolie on the red carpet, like, years before the Hollywood makeover and everyone was so weirded out because she had long, weird nails and a long, weird dress on. And that’s what I think is amazing. Anti-beauty. I don’t want to dress for men, I think it’s almost like a feminist thing.”
I suppose the person the female columnists really want her to be is someone like Emma Watson, the girl in the Harry Potter films. They are about the same age (Geldof, at 20, is a year older) but conservative, neat little Emma seems to get all the good publicity. Emma is the face of Burberry. Peaches, by contrast, is about to be the face of Courtney Love’s new fashion line, has modelled underwear with a live python and posed very raunchily for photographers such as Stephen Meisel and Juergen Teller.
This is somewhat at odds with her statement about not wanting to be sexy. But I suppose, especially for her peers, it’s important that a girl her age is standing up against the pressure to conform and the “magazines who put women on their covers who are like airbrushed within an inch of their lives. They have veneers, and fake tits and fake tans and they’re talking about their fake marriages and their fake lives”.
Frustrated now, she screws up her eyes and laments: “It’s all just completely faaaaaaake,” in her meandering half-English, half-American accent that is partly the result of spending so much time in the States, and partly, she says, because she’s taken on some of her father’s Irish accent. In fact she looks much more like him than she does like her mother, and rants like him too: “You don’t need to ape Cheryl Cole or whatever! And I don’t think you need to have huge boobs to be sexy because it’s not hot to grab a piece of hard silicone.”
All the Paula Yates comparisons seem a little far-fetched, in fact. She is miles away from her highly strung, self-consciously and almost bionically sexual mother: “My father was a punk and my mother was a rockabilly and I think it’s in my blood to not want to be put into a box.” The daisy chain she’s had tattoed all over her body is in memory of her mother: “Because when I was little I used to sit in the garden in my country house and I used to make them with her.”
To do my duty here as regards Peaches’s involvement with the label PPQ, I’ll let her say a few words: “I was like dating a guy who was signed to a record label they had and so I was in and out of the shop and it got to the point where I owned everything they had and it was a natural progression.” She was there every step of the way, she says, from where the material was going to be sourced, to choosing the colours and mood boards that were sent back and forth transatlantically. (When she’s in London she stays for next to nothing at the Mayfair Hotel, of which she is an ambassador, rather than the family home, reportedly due to a row with her father — another subject that we can’t talk about.) “What you see is a really organic collaboration between us. It’s my favourite label,” she says taking me through a rack of clothes. “It’s not like I’ve latched on to some brand fleetingly, like a lot of quote unquote celebrities do. This brand is like my family. Amy [Molyneaux, who co-founded the British label with Percy Parker] is like one of my best friends.”
The subject of family, of friends, and particularly of boyfriends, comes up again and again. It rather gives the impression of somebody who is looking for a family, or rather the comfort of a family, everywhere she goes. Boyfriends, more than the press, she says, have made her conscious of the futility of some of her less successful projects: the reality-TV programme in which she disastrously tried to launch a magazine with no experience and far too much attitude; a DJ project with a friend. Her aim now is to “do stuff that’s got artistic merit”.
For two years before her marriage she went out with somebody called Fred Bloode-Royale, who plays in a band called Ox.Eagle.Lion. Man. “And he used to always be really mean to me, like, ‘You’re a terrible person because you have no artistic relevance, you need to have integrity’. And I was always trying to prove to him that I had integrity. Because he was a musician and he was, like, ‘I’m an artist and I’m, like, writing really important music’. And, you know, we dated for almost two years and it gave me a really big complex about trying to prove myself.”
She says she’s grateful for that experience now, “because I have a work ethic inside of me because of it”. A bit of a work ethic, anyway, provided that she’s interested. “If I’m not interested I’m very blasé and I’m terrible with deadlines.” In response to those among her critics who want to know what she does all day: she writes columns — for Nylon and the Evening Standard, does some modelling, some television presenting. . . “And I’m doing a movie in October.” A publisher has just signed her up to write a book of short stories, which would have been interesting to talk to her about — but that was made impossible by her manager’s head-shaking.
I think the most significant thing that she does, however, is tweet. On Twitter she has 30,000 “followers”, and I’m sure that it’s a mark of the unbridgeable age gap between Peaches and everyone who writes about her that it is incomprehensible to understand why Twitter may be important at all. Personally I’ve no idea why anyone would be interested in reading ruminations such as: “Shaved. Can’t stand being hairy down there!” or “I would really appreciate it if men with no necks would stop coming up to me in weird dive bars from now on.” Or “I wonder what the worlds [sic] biggest pringle looks like? Maybe we should all group together and create it.” But younger people do. And younger people listen to her when she promotes an up-and-coming band on Twitter or goes on and on about how much she loves PPQ, so perhaps her real role is connecting young people to the creative people that she loves.
The other day Peaches was in Boots buying Tampax and a photographer with a long lens captured the moment for posterity. She says she finds this “completely voyeuristic” even though, more often than not, it is Peaches who, for example, turns up to the premiere of Brüno wearing a wedding dress, for which she will inevitably later be criticised in the tabloids. “People who read the Daily Mail should really be thinking about what newspaper they should be buying because that newspaper . . . only focuses on the negative: they’re scared of youth and they’re scared of women; they’re scared of ethnic minorities and homosexuals. I feel sorry for the people who are forced to write this stuff for money.”
For my part, I feel sorry that so many subjects are now off-limits in interviews. It’s a shame, because I would have liked to have asked whether, in Courtney Love or people like Pamela Des Barres, the former groupie who wrote I’m With the Band and with whom Peaches managed to get in touch “because social networking has opened up opportunities to get in contact with these people”, she is actually searching for mother figures.
And I think it is a particular shame because I’m sure that she would have given articulate answers to these questions, for she is a thoughtful person who is much more interesting when she's speaking about things that really move her. I would have liked to ask about her childhood memories and her relationship with her father. But the figure of Peaches’s manager is bearing down on us now. I’ve had my hour and Peaches trots off to get changed for the photographer and turns back into the defensive, slightly obnoxious person who will increasingly mark all her dealings with the press.
