`Do I really care? I feel lucky that I'm a member of a generation that doesn't give a f . . . about 40. To be honest, it's a miracle I've made it at all."
Writing in the women's magazine Aura earlier this year, Paula Yates who died on September 17th aged 40, approached her impending birthday with characteristic bravado and defiance. But behind the bold words lay the wreckage of her recently, incorrigibly, luckless life: the apparent suicide of her lover Michael Hutchence in a Sydney hotel room, the revelation that former Opportunity Knocks presenter Hughie Green was her father, a viscous and protracted custody battle with her ex-husband Bob Geldof.
The woman once described as "a smart girl who made a career out of pretending to be an airhead" was said to have spiralled into despair; lonely, afraid of the future, and nursing an increasingly fractured sense of self.
Paula Yates was born in Colwyn Bay, and brought up in the north Wales village of Rowen, near Llandudno. In her autobiography, she described her mother, the Bluebell dancer and actress, Helene Thornton-Bosment, as "absent" for large portions of her childhood. An only child, she wrote that as a girl she would sleep outside her mother's door in case she left in the night. The man she believed to be her father, the presenter of the religious programme Stars on Sunday, Jess Yates, left the family when Paula was eight, and her mother later admitted to a string of affairs.
After an itinerant childhood, overshadowed by abandonment and infidelity, she claimed to have experimented with sex and heroin at an early age. She left school at 16 and moved to London, where she became involved in the emerging punk scene. Besotted with Bob Geldof, then the lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, after meeting him at a party, she followed the band around on tour before beginning a relationship with him.
The pair eventually married in Las Vegas in 1986, having been together for 10 years. Nicknamed "the princess of punk" by tabloids, and "the limpet" by Geldof's friends, she appeared to revel in the outrageous and the exhibitionist, posing naked in London's Reform Club for Penthouse magazine, and publishing a book of photographs, called Rock Stars In Their Underpants, which was described by Andy Warhol as "the greatest work of art in the last decade".
After a brief foray into music journalism, in 1982 she began co-presenting the cutting edge music show The Tube with Jools Holland. Renowned for her dizzy, flirtatious television persona, Paula Yates seldom received credit for the qualities that made her a more substantial person. Widely read, with a quick wit and sharp intelligence, she was also a devoted partner and mother to her extravagantly-named children, Fifi Trixibelle, Honeyblossom Peaches and Little Pixie.
In 1992, she began presenting Channel 4's Big Breakfast, made by Geldof's television company, Planet 24. It was her speciality to conduct her celebrity interviews from a bed, and it was there that she met Australian musician Michael Hutchence, of the band INXS, whom she described as "God's gift to women". She left Geldof for Hutchence a year later, and they divorced in 1996.
Paula Yates's and Hutchence's daughter Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily was born in August 1996. She was gloriously happy with her new life, but her relationship with Geldof remained acrimonious and, following her arrest for alleged drug offences, he won temporary custody of his three children. Paula Yates later said that she felt like the victim of a witch hunt: "Bob is still perceived as St Bob and me as his wayward wife."
She was devastated when Hutchence was found hanged by his belt in a hotel room in Sydney in November 1997. She refused to accept the inquest verdict of suicide, insisting that Hutchence must have died when a sexual game of autoerotic asphyxiation went wrong. Meanwhile, DNA tests confirmed that Hughie Green was her real father, although she had been conceived within weeks of her mother's marriage to Jess Yates. As one friend observed at the time, "in the space of a month, Paula has lost her future, and her past".
A year later, she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital with depression, She lost custody of Fifi, Peaches and Pixie, and two months later apparently tried to hang herself. She was then admitted to a rehabilitation clinic. Legal wrangling over her lover's estate continued, and Hutchence's father, Kelland, made an abortive attempt to win custody of his grand-daughter.
Paula Yates embarked on a series of ill-advised affairs, including one with a former heroin addict who later sold his story to the newspapers, claiming she slept with Hutchence's ashes.
Her lippy, ludicrous public image made her an easy target for derision. She loved the spotlight, and her fame by association. Anonymity never suited her. She was irrepressible and eccentric, and in many ways represented all that is silly about modern celebrity. But it is her indomitable spirit that people remember, and her wholeheartedness in life and love. In a magazine interview last year, she said: "It's only the mothering instinct that makes you willing to suffer every day. I know it sounds like a Victorian novel, but it's true. Right now I still think living is a noble gesture."
Paula Yates is survived by her four daughters.
Paula Yates: born 1960; died, September 2000