Intelligent, sassy personality who lived in media glare

Peaches Geldof, who has died aged 25, was a media personality, occasional model and columnist. She was the daughter of musician and activist Bob Geldof and the late television presenter Paula Yates.

Geldof died suddenly at her home in southern England, and the postmortem results into her unexplained death have been ruled inconclusive.

Fiercely independent from a young age, Geldof developed a portfolio career of DJ-ing, modelling, television presenting and journalism, all linked to her personality and profile. She once labelled herself “this embarrassing teen icon”.

She appeared to embrace the glare in which she grew up, and she had media in her blood. Her grandfather was television presenter Hughie Green, her mother, Paula Yates, rose to fame on British television, and her father's fame in the Boomtown Rats was superseded only by his organisation of the landmark Live Aid charity concert.

Born in March 1989, Peaches Geldof grew up in Chelsea and Kent. She attended Queen's College in London before moving to Islington.

Geldof embarked on a media career that for a "Millennial" was quite traditional: a column in fashion magazine Elle , and contributions to the Guardian and the Telegraph . Her biggest media presence, however, was in freewheeling interviews and the paparazzi photographs that went from lauding her style to disapproving of her partying.

Her journalism appeared more a flirtation than an ultimate goal as she planned the short-lived magazine Disappear Here from scratch, a process documented by an MTV programme. Nevertheless, the intelligent and sassy Geldof became the de-facto personification of a new school of media personality. She made youth documentaries for Sky One and had a chatshow on ITV2.

Scientologist
Even as she became more established, Geldof's naivety would occasionally surface. Last year, she tweeted the protected names of the women convicted alongside Ian Watkins of the band Lostprophets in a child sex abuse case.

In a television interview in 2009, she appeared oblivious to the controversy that would follow an admission she was a Scientologist.

Her personal life became tabloid fodder almost bordering on cliché. She married a rock musician in Las Vegas and divorced him soon after. Allegations of drug use, which she denied, lost her her contract with an underwear company. Gossip websites alluded to raucous nights out.

Geldof occasionally referenced the childhood trauma of her parents’ split in 1996, and her mother’s death from a heroin overdose in 2000. She was a daily social media user and, before she died, tweeted a photograph of her mother holding her as a baby.

She married Thomas Cohen, frontman of London band S.C.U.M, and they had two sons, Astala (who turns two this month) and Phaedra (who turns one this month).

The flashing paparazzi bulbs outside nightclubs dimmed, and Geldof and family decamped to the sedate setting of Wrotham in Kent. She spoke about "attachment parenting" and had recently begun a column for Mother & Baby magazine.

She is survived by her husband and two sons, her father, Bob, her sisters, Pixie and Fifi Trixibelle, and her half-sister, Tiger Lily.