The youngest Geldof girl tries out the latest trends and talks family, fashion and her band, Violet
When Pixie Geldof's band started getting written about last year, several journalists reported that the band name, Violet, was the middle name of the famous lead singer, which is not true. The name Violet was, as it happens, taken in homage to the Hole song of that name; Pixie Geldof's middle name is, technically, Pixie. (Her full name is Little Pixie Geldof. Take a moment.) It was just one of many millions of snippets of assumption and misinformation that snowball unchecked on the internet, but there is something telling about it: however much Pixie might like to keep her being in Violet distinct from her being the daughter of Bob Geldof and Paula Yates, the world can't or won't separate the two.
Violet have released a couple of singles, played some small-ish gigs, and – so far – been pretty warmly welcomed by reviewers. When I arrive to meet Pixie, the band are rehearsing in a tiny Hackney studio for a gig that night at the Notting Hill Arts Club. The boys in the band are standard-issue east London musicians (fishermen's sweaters, beards, sarcasm); Pixie is a goofy mix of girlish ingenue and frontman swagger. She wears her hair in a delicate, Jean Seberg crop, but is dressed in a huge green parka of Gallagher proportions; her fierce sandals are sky-high, but her speaking voice has something of her dad's gruffness. ("I sound like a really nasal bloke," is how she puts it, cheerily.)
Geldof writes Violet's songs, all but one of which are about heartbreak. On What You Gave To Me, she sings, "I want to hear you say/That you're not coming back, and it won't be OK/While I drink a bottle of wine/A little closure." She is very open about the fact that the songs are about her first relationship, and subsequent broken heart, five years ago. She tells me that apart from Y.O.U, which is about her current relationship, the songs are "about the torment of first love. I was 17, and I was just broken up. I wrote songs because I thought, maybe he'll hear them and love me again, but also because I didn't know what else to do with myself. I remember feeling like every single part of my body was physically hurting."
Paula Yates, Pixie's mother, never recovered her equilibrium after the death of her lover Michael Hutchence and died of a heroin overdose three years later, on Pixie's 10th birthday. It was a shocking final act to the scandal of the affair that ended her marriage to Bob Geldof.
While Pixie chats about teenage heartbreak, she fiddles with her mug and I can see, on the inside of her left wrist, a tattoo of her mum's name; on her other arm is inked, in gothic script, "What will survive of us is love." Listening to her talk, it is difficult not to hear the echo of how heartbreak left this little girl without a mother. Having grown up defined in the public eye by a tragedy she was too young to understand, writing her own lyrics about first love and loss is perhaps a way for Pixie to take control of her own public image. And yet hers is a backstory that Pixie knows "will never go away. And I don't want it to – I'm proud of my family. They are wonderful. I've got nothing to be ashamed of. The people who should be ashamed are the people who talk about it as if it's some kind of a black mark against our name. I've had tough parts of my life, but who hasn't? It's who I am. It's fine.
"At some point, hopefully, people will start referring to me as a singer," she says. "I'm not the world's best singer, but I can sing. I'm not Bob Dylan, but I can write a song. And if you don't like it, that's absolutely fucking fine by me. Just don't listen, right?" The Geldof chin juts out and she looks, and sounds, very much her father's daughter. Her dad "never discouraged me from music, but he always made it very clear that it was hard and that one in a million people make it and that nowadays no one makes any money, anyway. He would have preferred me to get a degree, but he's supportive because he knows this is what I'm really about."
During her teenage years, Pixie "wanted everything to be very dark". She was obsessed with Hole, Nirvana, Mazzy Star ("The saddest music in the world, but also the most beautiful") and from there with country music of the 50s and 60s "that bands like Nirvana were so influenced by. Those two kinds of music go hand in hand. I like the women best. Patsy Cline and Tammy Wynette: those are my heroines. When I'm sad, I just want to cry it out. Tammy understands, you know?"
A wild-child phase when she and her sister Peaches were christened the Boomtown Brats was, she says, exaggerated by the tabloids. "When I was 16, I went out a bit, but it was mostly to the pub on my street. It really wasn't all that shocking. I mean, I never missed curfew – I was always home by 10. With my dad, it was all about trust. He expected good grades and homework done and curfew met. When I was 16, he was like, if you're home by 10 and it's not every night, OK. But I knew I had to keep my end of the deal. It was an important lesson."
These days, she says, "I don't even really drink. I don't like the taste of alcohol. I'm really boring. When I'm with the boys in the band, they'll be like, 'Shots o'clock!' and I'm all, 'Night, I'm off to bed.'" (I can't help suspecting that if this is true, her teen partying phase was perhaps more intense than she now admits. You don't get to be that jaded with partying at 22 otherwise, do you?) She lives in Clapton with her boyfriend George, drummer in These New Puritans, her best friend Ashley Williams, a rapidly up‑and‑coming fashion designer who counts Rihanna among her fans, and Buster Sniff, a long-haired chihuahua. For Pixie's birthday, George bought her a jukebox loaded with her favourite music. ("So we wake up to Dolly every morning. How sick is that?")
Pixie's eldest sister, 30-year-old Fifi Trixibelle, lives in south London; Peaches, who is just 18 months older than Pixie, lives in Whitechapel with her husband and a baby son who continues the family tradition of kooky baby names by being called Astala. Their youngest sister Tiger (full name: Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily), who was adopted by Geldof after being orphaned by the deaths of Hutchence and Yates, "is still at home with Dad. I called home the other night and Dad said he was taking Tiger to see the Stones. I was like, 'Dad, it's a school night!' And he's like, 'Yeah, but she's got to see the Stones.' And he's right." Sixteen-year-old Tiger is "a total sweetheart. I was worried she would turn out all, you know, rock, but she hasn't. She's very well behaved and a lovely person, very kind. And so beautiful. I'm watching her like a hawk, that one."