How motherhood and marriage could help Tiger Lily Hutchence move on from her turbulent past

Telegraph

17-04-2025

There was a time when Paula Yates and her family were seldom far away from the tabloid headlines. 'I love it when you're on the front page of the papers because it means I've got the day off,' Princess Diana once told the late television presenter, who was known for her irreverent and gutsy style. Yates was synonymous with a newly edgy and anarchic strand of British television, via The Tube and then The Big Breakfast: her celebrity relationships and rock and roll lifestyle provided endless fodder for a fame-hungry public.
But while Yates dominated the less forgiving 1990s' spotlight, her surviving daughters now lead a more private existence. Last weekend, her youngest, Tiger Lily Hutchence, reportedly married her boyfriend of two years, film-maker Ben Archer, yet theirs was apparently not a lavish do, rather a low-key reception at an east London restaurant – albeit one apparently attended by the bride's adoptive father Bob Geldof and godfather Nick Cave. Tiger Lily is also pregnant with her first child.
As she reaches this milestone moment, it's tempting to view her story as a redemptive one. After the tragic death of the parents – Yates died of a heroin overdose in 2000, three years after Tiger Lily's father, the rock star Michael Hutchence, died by suicide – has Tiger Lily found her own peace?
What snippets there are of her on social media suggest so: in July 2023, Archer posted a series of pictures on Instagram of Tiger Lily (full name Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily Hutchence Geldof) looking distinctly… normal. Doing normal-ish things, like holding a puppy while pulling a face, and posing in fancy dress in what looks like a community hall. When Archer, the son of an investment banker, seemed to discreetly announce her pregnancy early this year, via a flyer for an art exhibition, Tiger Lily was involved with, it certainly seemed like happy families: 'My love @heavenlytiger is doing a show,' Archer posted sweetly on Instagram earlier this year. She replied: 'Wahooo love you,' with a hatching chicken emoji.)
After the drama that followed much of the rest of the family around, it seems almost surprising to find, a quarter of a century later, Tiger Lily seeming to live a quiet, low-key existence at odds with the usual 'nepo baby' image.
Fame was, of course, thrust upon her by an accident of birth. She was four years old when her mother died, leaving her an orphan. That year, it was Geldof – the Boomtown Rats star who married Yates in 1986 – who won custody of her. The young orphan was the half-sister of his daughters Fifi Trixibelle, Peaches and Pixie and it was ruled that she should continue to stay with them. Mrs Justice Hogg rejected a counter-application for custody by Hutchence's half-sister, Tina Shorr, who wanted to care for her at her home in Burbank, California.
Hutchence's mother, Patricia Glassop, meanwhile, also reportedly battled to see more of her granddaughter, and was said to blame Bob Geldof for 'keep[ing] her from her family'.
Yet Hutchence's father, Kelland, welcomed the decision to award Geldof custody at the time, saying, 'We feel she should be with her sisters… This little girl has never been happier.' She is understood to have enjoyed a closeness with the Geldof girls, even sharing a bed with Fifi at first.
Bob Geldof is reported to have paid for Tiger Lily's private schooling; after leaving school, she is said to have tried her hand at acting at a college in New York, before graduating from Goldsmiths College in south east London.
But a more peaceful existence seemed to come calling: she later moved to bohemian Fremantle in western Australia, where she was said to enjoy such wholesome pursuits as surfing, yoga and meditation.
Then there's the music. She also apparently enjoyed performing in bars in Perth with friends, and in 2022 she released an album, under the name Heavenly, with the title Tragic Tiger's Sad Meltdown – a phrase she took from a magazine headline about her.
If her mother's life was ultimately 'tragic', so too was her sister Peaches ', also a television presenter and also killed by a heroin overdose, at the age of 25 in 2014. In her album title, then, Tiger Lily attempts to wrest back her own narrative; to take back control. But the album is also an act of mourning, a tribute. 'Most of the songs are about my sister, Peaches, who I lost as a teenager, so singing them aloud felt very potent,' she said of the record.
An album from the daughter of Michael Hutchence was hardly surprising, but by most accounts she has not been propped up by her late father's fortune, earned via his success with the band INXS and which seems to have mysteriously vanished. Documentary maker Richard Lowenstein spoke to her in 2019 and later recounted the conversation to Australia's Herald Sun newspaper.
'I said, 'Where's the money from your dad's estate?' and she said, 'I've never received anything from anyone. I had a meeting once with an accountant that was so bad I didn't want to do it again.''
Hutchence's wealth, it has been claimed, was consumed by partying, gifts and huge legal bills. But it has been the subject of scrutiny: the Paradise Papers in 2017 (which revealed millions of confidential documents relating to offshore investments) indicated that his business manager, Colin Diamond, had lawfully sought to establish a company called Helipad Plain two years earlier, in the tax haven of Mauritius, to exploit 'sound recordings, images, films, and related material embodying the performance of Michael Hutchence' for the 20th anniversary of the singer's 1997 death.
In an email exchange revealed in the leak of files from an offshore law firm, Diamond's lawyer said Diamond was the beneficial owner of Hutchence's material. When asked by a journalist where Hutchence's money went, Diamond replied: 'None of your business. That's the point; it's private. Don't you guys get it? It's private.' Diamond has claimed that Hutchence had transferred all the rights to INXS's material to his company, Chardonnay, four years before his death.
Meanwhile, Tiger Lily was contending with unsubstantiated rumours that she was living in a London 'squat'. So without her father's fortune, but with the support of Geldof, she has made her own way. Before settling down with Archer, she previously dated Nick Allbrook, a musician and former member of the popular band Tame Impala; and continued to keep her creative side ticking along: the show Archer championed on Instagram was an exhibition of her own artwork at Big Yin Gallery in Hastings, in collaboration with the artist Lily Gutierrez.
'Tiger is a musician and art psychotherapist, her work combines the investigation of maternal nature and roles with her own strength and playfulness,' says the gallery's website.
Her and Gutierrez's work is 'saying what society tells us to stay silent about, it's finding relief through letting stories and art live, letting them go and purifying oneself in the process.'
Tiger Lily, perhaps, has let the old stories go. Whatever marriage and motherhood bring, she'll hopefully find that sought-after purification.