With her intense gaze and a hint of a smile, Tiger Lily Hutchence-Geldof has the unmistakable rock star swagger of her father, the late INXS frontman Michael Hutchence.
The 26-year-old has also inherited his musical talents. Last month, he quietly released her debut album, Tragic Tiger’s Sad Meltdown, a line taken from a headline about her in an Australian magazine.
And it’s that tongue-in-cheek title that says a lot about his character’s origin.
Because making a joke about the media’s interest in her is, her friends say, exactly the kind of thing her late mother, Paula Yates, would have done.
This week, Paula’s legacy – as a mother, TV presenter, friend and lover – returns to the spotlight following Channel 4’s two-part documentary, Paula.
Tiger Lily Hutchence-Geldof, pictured here in 2014, appears to have inherited her late father’s musical talents, INXS frontman Michael Hutchence.
NEW LIFE: Tiger Lily enjoys the beach in Perth, Australia. He lives in the bohemian seaside town of Fremantle, south of Perth, where he has launched a career as a musician.
She questions how her pioneering but short life affected those she loved, and whether the toxic mix of drugs, alcohol and pain that killed her took its toll on them as well.
‘Tragic Tiger’ certainly suffered unduly. He was just 16 months old when his father committed suicide in a Sydney hotel room. She was orphaned three years later when Paula, then 41 and consumed with grief, died after a “reckless” heroin overdose.
But, having been raised by Bob Geldof, Paula’s ex-husband and father of her three eldest children, it seems Tiger Lily is following a much calmer and healthier path.
Now based in Hutchence’s native Australia, she lives in the bohemian seaside town of Fremantle, south of Perth, where she began a career as a musician.
Born Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, she was always known as Tiger Lily, but today she prefers to use the name Heavenly.
Her life is a haven of surfing, meditation and yoga, a world away from the London drug scene that killed both her mother in 2000 and her half-sister Peaches, who also died of a heroin overdose at age 25. in 2014.
Tiger Lily was just four years old and home alone with her mother when she found Paula dead. She raised the alarm when a friend of Paula’s phoned and told her that she “couldn’t wake up mom.”
The natural sanctuary of the little girl was the house of Geldof.
Tiger Lily was already well acquainted with the Boomtown Rats star and charity activist, having regularly stayed with him when Paula was struggling in the years after Hutchence’s death.
She was also close with her half-sisters: Fifi, now 39, Peaches and Pixie, 32 (pictured)
She was also close with her half-sisters: Fifi, now 39, Peaches and Pixie, 32. Initially, Tiger Lily and Fifi shared a bed, holding each other in grief. Geldof became her legal guardian and officially adopted her in 2007, determined to raise her away from the showbiz spotlight.
In her £12,000-a-year sixth form in South West London, she was known for her bohemian spirit, the only girl who wasn’t afraid of growing armpit hair. Efforts by her to lure her into the London social scene as her sister Pixie hers, who is best friends with DJ Nick Grimshaw and model Daisy Lowe, failed.
Having dabbled in acting and acting at a New York university, she returned to London and studied for a BA at Goldsmiths College in south-east London.
It was after graduating in 2019 that he decided to move to Australia, where he has been privately reclaiming his Hutchence lineage, reconnecting with his friends and family. It has been said that she did not realize that Hutchence was her father until she was ten years old.
A source said Tiger Lily had started contacting his family earlier and contacted Michael’s sister Tina in 2017 through a go-between.
Tina, a retired makeup artist living in California, had a fractured relationship with Geldof, and is said to have tried, ultimately unsuccessfully, to pursue legal action to gain access to her niece as a baby.
Tina did not respond when contacted this week. Tiger Lily is also believed to have made contact with her father’s INXS bandmates, including guitarist Tim Farriss and some of her Australian cousins.
The desire to leave the UK and all its painful memories behind, particularly Peaches’ death, is understandable.
Tiger Lily and Peaches were very close. A video posted online shows her playing the piano with Melisande Gutierrez, the daughter of Peaches’ best friend, Lily. And in the liner notes to her album, Tiger Lily reveals that “most” of the songs are about Peaches.
Pictured: As a baby with parents Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates
“It was really moving to create with such freedom and understanding,” he writes.
“Most of the songs are about my sister Peaches, who I lost as a teenager, so singing them out loud felt very powerful, but my band always made me feel hugged.”
It is certainly in Australia that Tiger Lily has felt brave enough to spread her wings as an artist. She was, until recently, in a relationship with Nick Allbrook, the former bassist for the Australian band Tame Impala, who works as a landscape gardener. Now single, she has been enjoying the alternative folk music scene locally, performing with friends in local bars in nearby Perth.
She observes: “I had always been shy about singing with others, but moving around the world and my ex-boyfriend Nick had given me some courage.
‘Something about living closer to nature meant I felt creative and open-hearted. It was as if the wide open landscape of Australia had finally given my heart enough space to open up properly.’ Surprisingly, there is no fortune to sustain his new creative endeavors. She was set to receive three lump sums, each of £12 million, from the Hutchence estate when she turned 18, 21 and 25.
In the event, sources say there was money for education and nannies, but nothing beyond that. And Geldof has always been very clear that she expects her children to be on their own when they are adults. As Fifi said: ‘There is no golden lily. Dad was raised to earn his own money and he has instilled that in us.
Filmmaker Richard Lowenstein, who met Tiger Lily in 2019, said: “I think the only thing that worries her quite a bit is that there doesn’t seem to be any legal recognition or even financial recognition that she’s her father’s daughter.” daughter. The entire estate has disappeared.
“I was saying, ‘Maybe you’ll still get it when you’re 25,’ but she stopped laughing and said she had already given up.” She literally she’s gone.
Hutchence’s estate and her trust were controlled by her former lawyer and Tiger Lily’s godfather, Colin Diamond, who has said that Hutchence’s wealth was “devoured by parties, gifts and huge legal bills”, meaning she died penniless. .
Lowenstein added: “She met (him) and he handed her an envelope with £500 (AUD$900) in it and said, ‘There you go, that’ll help you.’ I think Bob shook his head in horror and they both just walked off.
Lowenstein said he was pleased to have been able to give her an acoustic guitar that had belonged to her father, which left her “incredibly emotional.”
What about her remaining sisters, Fifi and Pixie? Fifi, who is the oldest of the Yates-Geldof girls, just like Tiger Lily, is not one of the most prominent. Now 39, she lives quietly in the London suburbs with her husband Andrew Robertson and her many dogs.
He has suffered from depression for much of his life, brought on by his parents’ invective divorce.
Fifi was not on good terms with Paula when she died, and hints that her mother’s alcohol and drug use may have been to blame.
He once told an interviewer: ‘We had a tempestuous relationship, to say the least. I don’t think he knew her that well.
‘If the situation that was happening then, I won’t elaborate, was happening today, then not speaking would happen again. I don’t regret it and still haven’t.
He had a wild period after his A-levels, following Paula’s death. ‘I absolutely lost my s*** for about a year. There was a lot of drinking and drug use.
‘I was a foolish, hurt, stupid, reckless teenager. I think if I hadn’t met my ex-boyfriend at 19 or 20, she would be dead by now.’
Sister Pixie lives in North London with her husband, drummer George Barnett, and their daughter, who was born in 2021. She has had a long modeling career, supports marine conservation, and has also worked as a DJ.
Her circle of friends includes Harry Styles and Princess Eugenie (she was a guest at Eugenie’s wedding).
A friend says, ‘I think she’s sober. I heard that a while ago. She is totally fed up with the showbiz scene and hardly ever goes out.
None, it seems, is prepared to make the same mistakes that their mother and sister did.
And for Tiger Lily, who lived in the shadow of such a tragedy, the “sad collapse” may never come.
That is arguably the best possible legacy Paula could hope for.
