April 24 1959 - 17 September 2020

Paula was a surprisingly entertaining writer, after the death of Michael Hutchence I wanted to find out more about this woman . I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect much. But I was pleasantly surprised. She has an entertaining style of writing.

The ultimate rock chick paid for her access-all-areas pass to life with the loss of her lover, Michael Hutchence, and of her own identity when she discovered her real father was not Jess Yates, as she had thought, but Hughie Green, a man she loathed.

From early on in her life Paula Yates had to learn survival skills early in life to catch the attention of two self-absorbed and neglectful parents. Her mother, Helene Thornton, dreamed of being a film star and set her daughter an example of seductive and manipulative female glamour. Her supposed father suffered from depression.

Her mother taught her the consuming importance of attracting men as she trailed Paula behind through hotel rooms in pursuit of the latest lover. When she went through a hippie period in Majorca, Paula tagged along and at twelve years old she was vamping boys and trying drugs. She was surviving the best and only way she knew, the only way she’d been shown.

The gifts from Paula’s good fairies - and they were many - were her childlike blonde beauty, her quick wits and sharp tongue, her charm, her megawatt flirtatiousness, her sexual as well as her professional drive, her nerve.

She shocked the young Bob Geldof with her unabashed sexual advances and everyone who saw her interview Michael Hutchence in bed, long before she actually became his girlfriend, remembers the potent sexual chemistry.

Since Hutchence’s death, and the shocking discovery about her father, Paula’s life had been a struggle. There has been depression, attempted suicide, time in the Priory.

She was very good at joking. This was what had always worked for her, the party face, the stories and witty repartee, the cheekiness and playfulness. But it was the public stock-in-trade of a person who knew great loneliness, desertion and betrayal as a child and who, in the end, must have felt that her life had collapsed around her. It was so sad that it ended this way, this soon, before she could have another crack at happiness.

1959 Paula Yates born to former Bluebell Girl Heller Toren. Her father is thought to be TV presenter Jess Yates. Birthplace: Colwyn Bay, North Wales, United Kingdom

1976 Moves to London and meets Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof. His friends dub her "the limpet"

1978 Poses naked for Penthouse and publishes Rock Stars in Their Underpants, hailed by Andy Warhol as "the greatest work of art in the last decade"

1982 Co-hosts C4 music show The Tube with Jools Holland. Runs until 1987

1984 Writes and presents the TV series Baby, Baby on C4 after her first daughter Fifi Trixibelle is born

June 1986 Marries Geldof in Las Vegas after 10 years together.

Oct 1990 After the birth of her second daughter Peaches, Yates writes a book on motherhood.

1992 Starts celebrity interviews - often conducted on a bed - for C4’s The Big Breakfast.

1994 Pixie Geldof is born