Paula Yates 1960-2000

To an extent she lived by the media. As a presenter of the pioneering rock show The Tube, and subsequently the Big Breakfast, she was part of the circus. But that doesn t even remotely justify the way she was treated by other elements of the media first by so-called rock papers during the early stages of her marriage to Boomtown Rat, Bob Geldof, or later, when the tabloids began to latch onto the burgeoning celebrity of the couple. And frequently made their life hell.
One abiding facet of my hotpress interview with Paula, which comes back to haunt me, as I write these words, is the memory of the shadows that surfaced in her eyes when I reminded her of those headlines some fuckheads from Sounds and Melody Maker wrote to accompany her photograph when she was pregnant with her first child. One read 'Abortion of The Year'; the other: 'One Geldof Bastard Is Enough .
"That, to me, was the worst kind of violation, by the media, I've ever encountered" she said at the time. "I remember reading 'Abortion of the Year'and all I could do was cry, cry and cry because I was heavily pregnant and it was my first baby. You're so vulnerable at a time like that, you don't need to be reading such comments in the tabloids or, as was the case there, in the music papers."
Paula used the phrase "the worst kind of violation." What was involved, in fact, was a kind of rape and it was perpetrated by tthe media. And the 'rapists' we, journalists didn't withdraw even after Paula's daughter, Fifi Trixibelle, was born.
During our 1989 hotpress interview, Bob Geldof said "tabloid" photographers and journalists would chase his wife and daughter down the streets, fire flashbulbs in the child's face and ring the family doorbell late at night "looking for a quote." Indeed, Geldof expressed the fear that Fifi might be "damaged, in the long run, by such abuse".
Let's not forget that Paula Yates herself was only fourteen when she first became fodder for the media. Back in 1974, the News Of The World upped its sales figures by "revealing" that her "father" Jesse Yates, host of the BBC TV religious programme Songs Of Praise, was having an extramarital affair. "The News Of The World destroyed my father's life," Paula said. So, since I was 14 years old, I've had that feeling of knowing what it's like to be paranoid. I remember sitting in my bedroom and they (the press) were up a ladder, pushing pieces of paper in my window, wanting me to talk about my father. It was horrific."
Quite. But here's why the irony is even more savage. Paula Yates, in the period between that interview and her death, discovered that Jesse Yates was not actually her dad. She was, in fact, the daughter of TV presenter Hughie Green. That revelation, it's said, "traumatised" Paula.
Now and here I must get personal as the son of a man whose life was similarly "traumatised" by the circumstances of his birth and later, coincidentally enough, died as a result of mixing vodka with drugs, I would be the worst kind of hypocrite, to pass judgement on the actual causes of Paula's death. The woman I met was a fine, feisty, attractive and intelligent individual. Clearly she had her demons. But the media certainly played a huge part in stirring them up.
'Vodka, Heroin. Then She Choked To Death" the front-page of the Evening Herald screamed the day after Paula died.
Well, let's hope whoever came up with that deeply insensitive headline never loses a loved one in similar circumstances.
The sooner journalists and the media accept that we are all culpable when it comes to parasitically feeding off the private lives of others, the better. And I do not mean only the tabloids.The Guardian and the Irish Times the latter, sadly, taking its leads, in more ways than one, from the former on the day after Paula Yates' death, delivered the tabloid-like headline: 'Yates experimented with sex and heroin at an early age.' Perhaps she did. But so too, perhaps, did the editorial staff of such newspapers, who might now prefer to pretend they were "innocents" in contrast with Paula Yates.
Indeed, the question I put to former Sunday Times Culture magazine editor, John Ryan in a recent hotpress interview, about the tabloid tendency to "deliver the story at all costs" could be applied to us all. That's why though I personally don't pray I would sincerely hope now that the daughters of Paula Yates, the children she had with both Bob Geldof and Michael Hutchence, will now be left in peace to live and grow without the intrusion of a ruthless and uncaring media into their lives. b
And may Paula Yates rest in peace.