Endless partying and wild drinking: Who can save Peaches and Pixie Geldof?
By PAUL SCOTT -
More by this author » Last updated at 23:55pm on 16th February 2008
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The early hours of a Saturday morning, and a depressingly familiar scene is unfolding in an all-night West London convenience store.
A leather jacket-wearing yob is brawling with an equally drunken adversary in the confectionery aisle as their moronic cohorts dissolve into bouts of hilarity.
As the cashier dials 999, the companion of one of the combatants watches the evening's entertainment through the smoke rings she is coolly blowing as she sits in the safety of a nearby bus shelter.
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All change: Cigarette in hand, Pixie emerges from a London hotel
Before the police can arrive, the group run off jeering into the night, leaving the shop's staff to clear up the strewn sweets and chocolate bars.
All of which might be unremarkable were it not for the fact that the young woman - a cigarette still clamped between her lips - is 17-year-old Pixie Geldof.
On that occasion, a few weeks ago, Pixie wore a "disguise", as she often does - in this case, a bright red wig and a beret.
It is a ruse the underage Miss Geldof employs regularly to gain entry to the West End nightclubs at which she has become something of a fixture.
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Glitzy: Peaches and Pixie at the Moet and Chandon bar
The ploy is not always successful. Revellers in clubland have become used to seeing Pixie wander the streets in the early hours - often alone - as she tries to sneak into the capital's trendiest clubs and drinking dens.
Her "curse", she is prone to announce airily to friends, is that she is "simply too famous" and club doorman all over the capital are primed to refuse her entry. Hence the disguises.
Not that the schoolgirl daughter of Bob Geldof is easily defeated. This week - celebrating the half-term holiday away from her private school in South-East London - she has been indulging her passions of drinking and partying as she did the rounds of a carousel of gatherings during London Fashion Week.
Glamming it up: Pixie at the Elle Style Awards
The festivities began on Monday with her 18-year-old sister, Peaches, - who last week was seen sporting a new crucifix tattoo on her wrist (one of 12 pieces of body art) - along with Rod Stewart's daughter, Kimberly, at the glitzy Moet & Chandon champagne bar at the National History Museum.
Then it was on to the preview party for an exhibition of Vanity Fair photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, which was also attended by Lily Allen, model Laura Bailey and designer Diane von Furstenberg.
Pixie has also found time to take a front row seat for the catwalk show of Topshop's Unique collection, as well as posing for photographers in vertiginous heels, a micro-mini and barely-there camisole top at the Elle Style Awards.
Showing no signs of being partied out, she and her sister were on the town again on Wednesday at the star-studded launch of the new Central London store of Swedish fashion chain H&M.
The evening ended painfully, however, with Peaches drunkenly ordering the taxi driver taking her and Miss Stewart home to stop, whereupon she attempted to climb a 5ft-high fence into Green Park.
Then, in front of paparazzi, her foot became tangled and a worsefor-wear Peaches crashed to the ground with, thankfully, no obvious signs of serious injury.
All of which has been met with much hilarity from Pixie, despite the fact that she is fast developing a reputation for over-indulgence which threatens to outdo even that of hard-partying Peaches.
Of course, both girls are still teenagers and should be allowed some latitude. And yet worryingly, Pixie's rapidly expanding social circle has propelled her into the orbit of the kind of unsuitable (and older) men who would be the stuff of nightmares for most fathers.
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H&M opening: Pixie (right) with Kelly Osbourne and Kimberly Stewart
Not so Bob Geldof, it seems. Indeed, Geldof senior's apparently relaxed approach to Pixie's increasingly wayward behaviour is raising eyebrows even within his thoroughly modern set of friends.
Consider the rum goings-on at the circus-themed 18th birthday party thrown by Bob for Peaches at Mayfair's Eve Club last March.
Geldof is said to have sat yards away as the then 16-year-old Pixie - who arrived at her sister's party in a bottom-skimming silk dress - enjoyed a "hot embrace" with comedian Noel Fielding.
Not only is Noel best friends with self-confessed sex addict Russell Brand, he is, at 34, twice Pixie's age and has a long-term girlfriend.
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Escapade: Peaches attempts to climb a fence in London's Green Park
But her father is said not to have batted an eyelid as Fielding, who is the star of cult BBC2 comedy The Mighty Boosh, and who had painted his face blue for the occasion, spent the night "snogging" Pixie.
Perhaps Sir Bob would consider such displays of fatherly protectiveness too bourgeois. Likewise, he is said to be "cool" about the gothic-looking Fielding's recent dalliance with reformed drug addict and singer Courtney Love.
Because of his laissez-faire approach to parenting, family friends say the two girls and their elder sister Fifi, 24, have virtually brought themselves up.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, their efforts have not been altogether successful.
Last summer, Pixie was suspended from the private Alleyn's School in South-East London days before taking her GCSEs, when she was allegedly caught smoking and drinking.
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Turning heads: Pixie leaving a book launch at Mulberry
At the same time, she was photographed swigging from a can of lager in a London park while in the arms of a Pete Doherty look-a-like.
Then, two weeks ago she was pictured looking "pale and very wasted" after staying out late at a friend's party in London.
Maybe in a more conventional family, such reports would raise alarm bells, as would the impressionable Pixie's relationship with the uncouth Donny Tourette, the 26-year-old former Celebrity Big Brother contestant and singer with punk band Towers of London.
Tourette, whose spiky peroxide hairstyle has earned him the soubriquet "Bog Brush", is known for his equally lavatorial language and for his boast that he and his bandmates have made conquests of more than 500 women.
Despite - or perhaps because of - his obvious unsuitability, the heavy- drinking Liverpool-born Tourette, whose real name is Patrick Brannan, regularly squires Pixie on nights out in town, as well as being the on-off boyfriend of her sister Peaches.
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Dubious role model? Peaches (left) at a Vivienne Westwood fashion show
Friends say Peaches, who is 18 months older than Pixie, has become a role model to her younger sibling.
It's fair to say that Pixie could have chosen more wisely, because Peaches, too, has fallen victim to youthful excess.
Eighteen months ago, Bob Geldof was forced to defend his daughter publicly when mobile phone pictures taken at a party appeared to show a bleary-eyed Peaches with a white paper cone - described at the time by the media as a "makeshift drugs-snorting device" - up her nose. She denied taking drugs.
Then last year she was reported to have taken &£6,000 of designer items while she was posing for a magazine photo-shoot, after telling the magazine the clothes had been stolen while she was in a changing room.
Her version of events was undermined when she was seen four days later wearing the missing merchandise. A shamefaced Peaches was forced to return the clothes.
That embarrassing incident had echoes of the day last year when she was questioned for 40 minutes by security staff at an Oxford Street clothes shop when she walked out wearing a coat that she had neglected to pay for.
She claimed she had paid for it and that an assistant had forgotten to remove the security tag.
But later, when she could not produce a receipt, she quietly made arrangements with the shop to pay for the item.
Of course, it should not be forgotten that both girls lost their mother Paula Yates, a heroin addict, in September 2000 - she died on Pixie's tenth birthday.
This trauma must have deeply affected her daughters. The problem is, the girls have no one to guide them.
Those friends who have gently tried to counsel the prickly Bob Geldof as to the dangers of the company Pixie is keeping have found their warnings falling on deaf ears.
Some former friends of the Boomtown Rats singer have even received legal letters from the 56-year-old Geldof for voicing their concerns publicly over the way he is bringing up his children.
Bob Geldof and Paula Yates
The truth is that while Bob undoubtedly loves his children (as well as his three daughters by Miss Yates he has also brought up the television presenter's 11-year-old daughter, Tiger Lily, from her affair with INXS singer Michael Hutchence), the girls have become used to sharing their father with his boundless ambition.
Added to his ongoing charity work for Africa, multi-millionaire Geldof runs his successful TV company Ten Alps, as well as continuing his attempts to recreate the success of his early music career.
When it comes to the latter, the words "flogging" and "dead horse" come to mind, but, nonetheless, his determination to revive his pop star status means he is often away on tour.
Not, it should be said, that even when he is at home he can be described as a hands-on father.
In recent months, Pixie has effectively been living alone in a self-contained flat below the apartment in Battersea, South London, where Geldof and his long-term girlfriend, French actress Jeanne Marine, live with Tiger Lily.
Fifi, who keeps by far the lowest profile of the sisters and works quietly in PR, has long since moved out.
Likewise, Peaches, who has put going to university on hold while she dedicates herself to partying and a would-be career as a television presenter, has moved into a shared flat with friends in fashionable Islington, North London.
Although Pixie's flat shares an internal staircase with her father's, she has her own front door and is said to come and go pretty much as she pleases.
As to what she hopes to do when she leaves school next year, it is said she is keen to follow Peaches, who has modelled for Australian fashion company Dotti, on to the catwalk.
With her feline surliness, loose-limbed elegance and her mother's peroxide elfin hairstyle, she has certainly had no shortage of offers.
Friends say she is brighter than the somewhat immature Peaches, but is prone to dark moods like her father.
"She's always been a bit angry," a family friend said last night. "Maybe it was losing her mother like that. She is very strong-willed. I know a few people have tried to speak to Bob about her because she needs a lot of guidance and is very vulnerable."
Last year, Michael Hutchence's mother, Patricia Glassop (Tiger Lily's grandmother), accused Geldof of being a bad father who brought up his children "like hippies" and who has "no control over anything his daughters do in public".
She claimed Peaches and Pixie were "bad role models" to Tiger Lily, whose rock star father was found hanging in his Sydney hotel room ten years ago, following what was thought to have been an auto-erotic game that went wrong.
No doubt the accusation was not welcomed by Geldof, though he would be hard-pressed to deny that his daughters are a handful.
"Bob," says a friend, "occasionally blows up and tries to lay down the law with Pixie, but it never lasts. I think he sees in her the stubborn, rebellious streak he loved about Paula."
Peaches and Pixie - for all their wayward youthful exuberance - may well grow up to be exemplary citizens. It is to be hoped so. In the meantime, is it asking too much that Sir Bob, for all his charisma and genius, provides a mite more parental guidance?
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