Tiger Lily’s heavenly escape to Fremantle screams joy amid Paula Yates documentary

With her intense gaze and hint of a smile, Tiger Lily Hutchence-Geldof has the unmistakable rock star swagger of her father, the late INXS frontman Michael Hutchence.

The 26-year-old has inherited his musical talent, too. Last month, she quietly released her debut album, Tragic Tiger’s Sad Meltdown, a phrase borrowed from a headline about her in the magazine New Idea.

And it is that tongue-in-cheek title that speaks volumes about where her character comes from. For making a joke about the media’s interest in her is, friends say, exactly the kind of thing that her late mother, Paula Yates, would have done.

This week, Paula’s legacy — as a mother, TV presenter, friend and lover — is once again in the spotlight in the wake of the two-part UK documentary, Paula.

It questions how her trailblazing but short life affected those she loved — and whether the toxic mix of drugs, alcohol and grief which killed her took its toll on them, too.

‘Tragic Tiger’ certainly suffered unduly. Just 16 months old when her father killed himself in a Sydney hotel room, she was orphaned three years later when Paula, then 41 and consumed with grief, died following an “incautious” overdose of heroin.

But — having been raised by Bob Geldof, Paula’s ex-husband and the father of her three older children — it seems Tiger Lily is following a much calmer and more wholesome path.

Now she lives in Fremantle, where she has started a career as a musician.

Born Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, she was always known as Tiger Lily but today prefers to use the name Heavenly.

Her life is a paradise of surfing, meditation and yoga — a world away from the gritty London drugs scene that killed both her mother in 2000, and her half-sister Peaches, who also died of a heroin overdose aged 25, in 2014.

Tiger Lily was just four, and alone in the house with her mother, when she found Paula dead. She raised the alarm when a friend of Paula’s phoned, and she told her that she “couldn’t wake Mummy.”

The natural sanctuary for the little girl was Geldof’s home. Tiger Lily already knew the Boomtown Rats star and charity campaigner well, having regularly stayed with him when Paula was struggling in the years after Hutchence’s death.

She was also close to her half-sisters: Fifi, now 39, Peaches, and Pixie, 32. Tiger Lily and Fifi initially shared a bed, clinging to each other in grief. Geldof became her legal guardian and officially adopted her in 2007, determined to raise her far from the showbusiness spotlight.