Pixie: ‘Heartbreak makes you appreciate happy more’

In jeans and a baggy Breton top, hair tousled and her young face make-up free, she sat quietly with her relatives from Dun Laoghaire, undisturbed, waiting her turn to take to the stage.

But under the spotlight, even before she begins to sing, a natural charisma is apparent right away in Pixie, the youngest daughter of Bob Geldof and the late Paula Yates. Perching on a stool, she smiles in acknowledgement of the warm but polite applause. It’s shortly before her the launch of her debut album and the majority gathered haven’t heard her music yet.

She says hello and then it’s there for all to see — that elusive presence all those wannabes on X Factor are coached to fake, a tangible star quality that sets her apart from the rest of the performers on the night, each allocated four songs to test out on the hip undergraduate audience.

Add a warm, shimmery voice with an impressive range, to dreamy melodic songs with honest heart-felt lyrics, and you have a quite a lovely listening experience. It should also be a recipe for success but that’s very hard to predict in the over commercialised and fickle world of the music charts. Regardless, Pixie hints she may play Belfast soon as part of her I’m Yours tour. After all her dad will be coming to the Mandela Hall with his Boomtown Rats next March.

“A hit would be a nice side-note but not the be all and end all. That’s not why I make music — it’s what I’ve done since a kid that feels good, because it’s something I can do,” she shrugs, the morning after her mini-gig.

It was only the second time the 26-year-old had played live in the three years since the dissolution of her former band, Violet. I’d been given an invitation to the hush-hush performance, before meeting her the next day in a four-star boutique hotel in Dublin.

The city had been packed the night before and she’d stayed in an Air B&B with the two musicians who accompanied her at Doyle’s bar.

“They wanted to go for drinks afterwards; I just wanted to get to bed,” she says, dispelling the party-girl image the London tabloids have foisted on her. “I don’t sleep very well and I was exhausted after the gig. So much can go wrong and it did.

“I couldn’t hear myself for first two songs. There are so many variables, it throws you.”

We’d been introduced the night before by her Irish PR representative and shook hands, before she took to the stage. I felt her nerves but there was no need: she held the crowd in the palm of her hand.

This morning she greets me in the hotel lounge with a hug and a thank-you for coming to see her sing. In the daylight, I’m struck by how pretty she is. She has perfect olive skin and small fine features, soulful dark eyes and full lips. Not like her mother at all, she takes after the darker Geldof side of the family, some of whom were there to support her the night before, minus Sir Bob himself.

“We used to come to Dun Laoghaire every year for granddad’s birthday,” she remarks, in a well-spoken, quite deep register, acknowledging that it was good to have family at the gig for moral support.

“People expect you to be bad. And a lot of people might think, well, you get doors opened that other people don’t. But those doors come with the caveat of, well, ‘you can come in only if we can judge you based on what your father’s done’. I’d rather the door be closed.

“Really, you could say anything about me and it wouldn’t bother me other than, she’s not talented, it’s just her father’s famous. I’m aware that’s a real thing. But I think that’s a shame.”

She’s a better singer than her father. He said as much, when he was asked if he was planning to sing at his eldest, Fifi Trixibelle’s wedding earlier this year, remarking that both daughters had great voices.

“I sort of speak-sing a lot of the time,” Pixie observes of herself. “In other songs, I blare it out but I like people to lean in to a song, like listening to a whisper.

“I always had a rasp and a wobble in my voice; it breaks. I’ve no idea of how many octaves I can reach — I’m not musically trained but I can go nice and high, and low.”

It’s obvious she doesn’t want to talk about her father’s music, other than commenting, oddly, that the Boomtown Rats were “funky”, and confirming that Bob was speaking in jest when he admonished a festival audience for wearing Primark clothes, when he’d gone and made the effort to dress up in a natty snakeskin suit.

“I can just imagine the way he said that,” she says with a roll of her brown eyes. “Dad’s advice to me was ‘just work hard and do it’. I’m the biggest procrastinator but I like to work. I enjoy it.”

The publicist brings me a cappuccino but Pixie sticks to water.

“Caffeine makes me anxious,” she says, adding that anxiety has affected her since she became an adult. “It really got its claws in. It affects my sleep, too. I don’t sleep well.”

No wonder, you can’t help thinking. Her parents divorced when she was five, she lost her mother to a heroin overdose on her 10th birthday, and it has been only two and a half years since her sister Peaches died, also from drugs.

How does she cope?

“I write ... and I’ve started to work out, every now and then,” she says flatly. “And I go free-diving and snorkelling. I love the ocean — I swam with whale sharks and dolphins. Dolphins are so intelligent — they talk and move so fast.

“Whale sharks are enormous, glorious. They’re only as dangerous as dogs.”

She brightens considerably at the mention of Funghi, the famous dolphin in Dingle Bay, and her beloved long-haired chihuahua, Buster, fluttering her fingers as she does at various junctures when she’s singing. She wears a vintage bling ring, incidentally, and no other jewellery I can see.

But she shrinks back and her voice lowers to barely audible when the subject of bereavement comes up.

She looks so child-like and vulnerable, I’m loath to mention it, but she has addressed the issues of sorrow and loss herself in her album, I’m Yours, most directly in Twin Thing, an ethereal guitar-led track with haunting lyrical imagery.

“Into the wave where you’re going, I watch you falling down,” she sings. “Wish I’d known you like my own skin, so I could feel the hurt you were in/Wish we had that twin thing...”

“When I write, I never think anyone’s going to hear it — I forget it’s so personal; I completely zone out,” she says, her voice falling to a whisper. “I didn’t find [that song] difficult to write.

“Loss has happened to everyone I’ve ever met. Every single person on this Earth understands that when the person’s gone, in any capacity — divorce, a death — you wake up and you are smacked with it every day for the rest of your life. You just are.”

She has acknowledged the support of her friends, including Alexa Chung and Nick Grimshaw, in helping her cope in the aftermath of Peaches’ death, by keeping things as normal as possible: watching soaps with her; feeding her pizza; curling up on the couch beside her and having “girly chats” in the house she shares with her long-term boyfriend, musician George Barnett.

The highlight of her performance in Doyle’s was So Strong, a haunting song reminiscent of Lana del Rey and Florence Welch, with its breathy vocals and dark atmospherics, yet catchy, airy melody.

“My heart is like the ocean,” she sings. “So big you think that you can hurt me.”

She confirms the song is about putting on a front in times of crisis.

“What it’s like to be the rock,” she nods. “Yes, I’m the youngest but it’s not necessarily just about being that for family. It’s for all the people I love.

“The album represents every single human I’ve ever loved in my life. It’s songs of love in every form, platonically, family, in romance. I’m a part of these people’s lives and I’m theirs in any capacity they need me.

“Heartbreak can be soul destroying but it makes you appreciate happy more.”

She wouldn’t describe herself as spiritual but says she can find something meaningful in most religions, and hopes there’s an afterlife — “there’s something afoot”. But the here and now is of more interest to her and she’s thrilled when I tell her one of her songs reminds me of Kris Kirstofferson. It turns out he’s a musical hero of hers, along with Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash, and she has a jukebox in her house full of country songs.

Pixie first picked up a guitar aged 13, off  school and in bed with pneumonia. By 16, she was writing songs at home in London with long-time musician friends, and in LA, where she met veteran song-writing legend Linda Perry. (A country-pop track they wrote together, Everything, appears on I’m Yours. Another “delicate” one was scrapped, regretfully for Pixie.)

Another musical influence was Hole singer Courtney Love who gave Pixie a dress and “didn’t disappoint” when they met. She and her band mates named their grunge group ‘Violet’ after a Hole song, and spent 2012 writing songs, recording demos and touring.

“We were a bit shouty,” she admits. “I sounded like an infant — I’m a different beast now. Back then, I struggled to find exactly my sound. I was into heavy grunge, forgetting the stuff I’d grown up on, which was country. I was doing the thing my friends in bands were doing, and getting frustrated.

“And I wasn’t getting signed,” she adds. “Now I look back and think, ‘thank bloody God it didn’t happen’! At 21, 22, I finally got to grips with my own sound and ignored everybody else.”

In 2015, she signed to the independent Stranger Records as a solo artist.

“I hadn’t thought about indie labels because I was worried they might be a bit cool,” she grins. “I come with a package, unfortunately. But I met these three guys (behind Stranger) who were funny and lovely and just got it.

“I didn’t want, ‘so how do you think you’ll be marketed?’ That’s not what you want to hear when you’re trying to write songs. I don’t give a s*** about image, and fame just didn’t come into it. I still try not to think about it.

“Yes, the paps are as creepy as **** and it’s disgusting, but, although people deserve to have their private time,  it doesn’t bother me.”

I’m Yours was recorded in LA in autumn/winter 2015 with Grammy/Mercury-nominated producer/mixer Tony Hoffer (M83, Beck, Goldfrapp, Air, Ladyhawke, Phoenix), with additional strings from the esteemed composer David Campbell, who worked on Carole King’s Tapestry, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, and has collaborated with the Rolling Stones, Neil Diamond and Radiohead and with Adele, on her mega-selling 21 album.

Campbell is also the superstar Beck’s father. Quite the musical weapon to have in your first album’s armory?

“Holy crap, I was dying!” Pixie exclaims. “I went to his house, went into his bathroom and saw a gift from Leonard Cohen. What? Leonard Cohen is forever!

“I met these people who made this record so much more than I ever imagined it to be.”

Although she describes herself as “naturally quite reserved”, in conversation she’s funny, smart and animated. Her record company’s blurb paints her as typical of her generation; born in 1990, she became a pop-loving kid obsessed with Britney and the Spice Girls, whose “grown-up musical epiphanies” came via The Libertines and the Strokes. She loved Eminem so much, she pinched a traffic cone ‘memento’ from one of his gigs, and then wept at another when Slim Shady threw his towel into the audience.

“And some other b**** got his sweat!” she laughs. “I totally could’ve licked it.”

She became a goth as teenager, viewing the world as “dramatic and desperately sad; I was the most serious person alive”, before getting into grunge. She recalls the first time she was ever in a recording studio, aged 18 in Camden, and celebrating the momentous day with a dramatic tattoo on her forearm, declaring: ‘What will survive of us is love’.

“It’s coming off; It’s ginormous,” she cringes, pulling down the sleeve of her white T-shirt, with its huge Sacred Monster logo. She likes retro 70s clothes and wears low heeled boots with her jeans. She’s taller than I expected, forgetting that she’s a former model.

“I met some interesting people through modelling and I like a nice frock, but I’m not madly into fashion,” she says. “If I wasn’t doing music, I’d work on the ocean. I’m obsessed by the ocean. I watched a documentary about the sea — so vast, so huge and quiet but falling apart on the inside. I thought that was an interesting metaphor…

“I enjoyed biology at school; I still do,” she continues. “I was good at maths and sciences — I used to do equations for fun. But I enjoyed peacefulness of art more. I love to paint but I only lasted three months at art school.”

Apart from music, her other real passion appears to be four-and-a-half year old Buster, “the love of my life”. I tell her about a programme I saw recently, the Secret Life of Dogs, which featured a pooch who seemed to detect its mistress’s breast cancer. Those dark eyes well up at the story — as they do about Funghi getting old — and she whips out her smart phone to show me a close-up of the tiny Buster, staring into the camera.

“I love him, I really, really love him,” she insists. “He’s my favourite thing on the planet. I think animals have souls, absolutely. They understand everything.”

Does Buster pine when she’s away?

“Buster’s a very independent gentleman actually. He’s my best friend, yet we have never spoken. It’s very strange. He understands my moods; he sits in different places, depending.

“He hunches and gets that hang dog expression,” she adds, demonstrating comically. “I can read his body language. I love him.”

She gathers her belongings to nip out for a smoke before her next interview, and the conversation returns to her Dublin debut the previous night. She should be bursting with confidence about her performance and her impressive album. But, refreshingly, she’s not.

“It was the quiet in that place that got me,” she confides. “When I get nervous, my leg starts going and that tremolo in my voice that you mentioned — it’s real! And I can’t chat between songs. I giggle my way through, and I’m not really a giggly person.

“That sort of exposure is terrifying, yup. But nakedness doesn’t scare me. It’s exhilarating, too. Especially after the last three years, of being in a room on your own. I’m not so worried, unless someone says you’re utter s***. But I know the record is good. Yeah, we all want to bounce around sometimes with our roof-top down. But realistically? That’s not always your situation in life. Sometimes you want to hear from people who know about that situation, too.

“I know the album is honest and real.  Music — any art — is about connecting with others. At times, I’ve felt disconnected. I hope some people might find in the album some kind of hope or help or understanding. That’s all I wish for.”