Geldof Girl on the Rise; Musician and Muse – Pixie Geldof is Breaking Through. Words: Lauren Murphy

Forget what you think you know about Pixie Geldof. Forget the surname. Forget the famously ‘tragedy-stricken’ family. Forget the celebrity friends and the front row seats at London Fashion Week. Most of all, forget the infamous ‘wild child’ label.

‘Wild!’ the 26-year-old howls, throwing her head back and laughing maniacally when we meet in the penthouse of the uber-cool Dean Hotel in Dublin, the city’s afternoon traffic bustling past as she perches cross-legged on a sofa.

‘That was a word that was used a lot. I did find it quite funny, because I really, genuinely wasn’t wild; I was very, very normal. And I’m even more boring now than I was then.’ She frowns. ‘I remember finding that quite confusing because I thought “How do I stop that? How do I make people see who I actually am? Because they keep saying I’m this way, and I’m not.” And then,’ she says, her face brightening again, ‘it occurred to me to… not care.’

Pixie Geldof – or Little Pixie, to give her the full birth name courtesy of parents Bob Geldof and the late Paula Yates – has been ascribed certain labels for much of her young life. In person, however, she is likably upfront and matter-of-fact; strikingly beautiful in a natural way, not to mention whip-smart – you get the impression that she takes most of her surreal life with a generous pinch of salt.

She has been a regular visitor to our shores since she was born, but this visit is no casual trip to her paternal homestead. Instead, she is here to discuss the latest chapter of her creative life, i.e. her debut solo album I’m Yours – a collection of beautifully touching songs that has already seen her declared a ‘swoonsome pop siren’.

Having packed more into her young life than most people her age, it was always somewhat inevitable that she would channel her experiences creatively in some way. When she was younger, a career in academia was never really on the cards, although she did harbour an ambition to be a lawyer when she was 12 because ‘I like to argue and that’s what everyone always told me: “You’d be a great lawyer”.’

She claims that she was ‘a bit of a smart-arse’ as a teenager but enjoys learning more now and ‘becomes obsessive about specific subjects’. (We spend a good five minutes discussing marine biology and her fixation with the ocean and sharks.) .

Her burgeoning interest in music in her mid-teens took a backseat when the modelling world beckoned, and she spent an incredibly successful few years walking for the likes of Vivienne Westwood, Henry Holland and Jeremy Scott, and fronting ad campaigns for Levi’s, Diesel, Agent Provocateur and more.

‘My friend was a model and I met her agent, I think on my 16th birthday,’ she explains. ‘She was a very lovely woman, and she said, “Hey, do you want to come into the office and have a chat? I think you could do it.” And I was like, “Alright”. I asked my dad, and he said “If you keep your schoolwork good” and all, and I promised I would.

I thought it was interesting; I liked photography a lot and I thought I could meet so many cool people, and it could be great. And also,’ she smirks, ‘when you’re 16 years old and someone says “Do you wanna have your photo taken and get some cash?” you’re like, “Yeah, absolutely I do!’.’

Her modelling career did ‘relatively well’, as she puts it, but it had always come with a finite timespan. ‘It was a really great experience,’ she reflects. ‘It was rad, but… it wasn’t “the thing”. I always knew it was gonna end, that I would stop and get very, very serious about music.’

Geldof had been dabbling in playing guitar and writing songs since she was 13 and her dad had shown her a ‘few chords on the guitar’. Once the modelling career slowed down, she turned back to music, at first fronting rock band Violet.

‘Violet was this exact project, pretty much; just me going under a different name,’ she says, nodding. ‘It was an experiment to see how people reacted [to not using her own name], and partly it was just because I liked the name “Violet” and I always liked the idea of being in a band. Then it got to a point where I went “Hold the phone: this feels like I’m letting people dictate whether or not I can have my own name.”

And I decided to not allow that to be the case. I’m very, very proud of my family and I’m very proud of my father and what he’s accomplished in his life, and I don’t feel the need to hide from the fact that my surname is Geldof – because I think it’s a great one.’

I’m Yours is boldly, brazenly Pixie Geldof, with no smokescreen or pseudonym to hide behind. Several of the album’s songs plunder personal depths, with twisted, heartache-strewn love songs like Sweet Thing and Let the Rain Come (although she has been in a ‘very happy relationship’ with boyfriend George Barnett, a musician in art-rock band These New Puritans, for five years).

Then there’s Twin Thing, a song written about the sudden death of her sister Peaches in 2014 after an accidental drug overdose. Lines like ‘Thought I would know at the first sign that you’d started giving in’ and ‘Lying awake, knowing I missed it all, knowing I let you down’, suggest that guilt about her death weighs heavily on her younger sister, two years on.

She pauses, sighing. ‘I think guilt comes with grief; they’re very hand-in-hand,’ she agrees, choosing her words carefully. ‘I think that when someone dies unexpectedly – and very often when they die before their time – it is hard not to reflect on something that you may have done, or could have done. I always hear people say that when you’re a twin, they have this thing where they dream about each other and they wake up and they can sense that something’s happened. So it’s a song about wishing that that had been real for us and that I could have…. I dunno.’ She trails off, suddenly sombre.

‘It’s a very sad song, but I hope that it helps someone because I know that there are people that have been through the same thing. It’s a very disconnecting thing; I couldn’t connect with anything anymore. Grief is a battle – it’s a war – and it does not fade. It really doesn’t. So to find something or hear something that gives you even one second’s sense of peace is worth it, and that’s why I put it on the record.’

You might imagine that it doesn’t take much for Geldof to tap into sadness, given that there has been plenty of it in her life since her mother, Paula Yates died (also of a drug overdose) on her 10th birthday. Yet she genuinely seems like a happy-go-lucky, balanced individual, despite the various twists that her life has taken. Talk turns back to fame. Having grown up in the public eye through no choosing of her own, she is quick to answer when I ask if that is something she would want for her own children.

‘No’, she says, firmly. ‘No. The shame of it is being told who you are before you know who you are. That was the thing I struggled with; people assuming about me before they knew me, and before I even had a chance to be myself. That was the hard thing, and for my kid, no, I wouldn’t want that. I think everyone has a right to just grow up; everyone has a right to make mistakes, and to look bad, and to have those things be in private. When you’re a teenager, you make some very odd choices with your appearance, and for that to not be forever documented… y’know, it’s a basic right, and you don’t get those. So, it’s odd.’

Now that the ball is rolling on her music career proper – and with a very fine album that has been eight years in the works under her belt, no less – she says that her ambitions are very simple: tour this record and get to make another one. She unleashes another one of those hearty belly-laughs when I suggest that she may have to work harder to prove herself because of her surname and the implications of ‘skipping the queue’ because of it.

‘It doesn’t happen,’ she chortles. ‘The music industry’s insane, and they don’t have that money anymore – that world of being able to throw money at a ‘celebutante’ because of a certain whatever – because you won’t be able to recoup anymore.

There aren’t album sales, no one will go see you play live if you’re just shit – so it doesn’t happen, luckily. Which is great, so I can rest easy. I know that there are gonna be people who think that way, and I’m very at peace with that but I think it’s a shame for the album, I think it’s a shame for me and I think it’s a shame for them – because they might really like it, and they don’t know.

But I hope not. I hope that people listen to it and like it if they like it, and don’t like it because of the right reasons. I hope that people have an open mind and are willing to accept it, and not just piss it away because of some silly thing like a surname. It means nothing,’ she grins, shaking her arms into her leather jacket and shrugging it on as she prepares to head for the airport, and home to London. ‘It’s just six letters.’

Photographed for Magpie.ie by Aaron Hurley
Styling: Courtney Smith