Born at the end of the 1980s, Peaches Geldof was too young technically to have been a "wild child" – the label invented by the tabloids earlier in the decade for teenage celebrity daughters famous for precocious lifestyles. However, in all but name, Peaches, who has died unexpectedly aged 25, was a wild child, spending her teens indulging a love of parties and tattoos. Yet there was intelligence and ambition under the hedonism, with the consequence that the life of a socialite was not going to be enough. She wrote newspaper columns, including one for the Guardian, worked in TV and became an advocate of "attachment parenting", eloquently debating the issue with Apprentice star Katie Hopkins on ITV last autumn.
Peaches was the mother of two young sons by then, and married to the rock musician Thomas Cohen. The joy she derived from them transformed her life, and by the time she appeared with Hopkins on This Morning, the only visible link to the old Peaches was the tangle of blond hair – now artfully arranged into soft waves. Her love for her family echoed that of her mother, Paula Yates, whose photograph she posted on Instagram on Sunday. It showed Yates holding a toddler-aged Peaches, with the caption "Me and my mum".
She was the second of Yates's three daughters with Bob Geldof, and the one who seemed most closely to resemble her mother. A fiercely bright woman who also at times hid it under a frothy party-girl exterior, Yates left Geldof in 1995 to live with INXS frontman Michael Hutchence, whom she had met 10 years earlier while working on the music programme the Tube. Her divorce from Geldof was acrimonious and Peaches was said to have been deeply affected by it.
Yates died of a heroin overdose in 2000, at the age of 41, three years after Hutchence apparently killed himself. Peaches was 11, and though she later dismissed comparisons with her mother – "I could have let myself spiral, but all the time I remembered what happened to my mum," she said poignantly in 2012 – she also admitted: "I haven't felt like a teenager since I was 12. I've felt like I was 30 since I was 13."
Following her birth in London, she was given the name Peaches Honeyblossom, which she found "ridiculous", she once admitted on Twitter (she was an impulsive tweeter, narrowly escaping criminal charges last year after broadcasting the names of the women convicted with Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins of sexual offences against children). Growing up as the colourfully named offspring of a rock star and TV presenter had its challenges. "At school people would say: 'Hey Peaches, were your parents bananas?" she recalled, but doors were inevitably opened for her.
She grew up in rural Kent and London, and combined studying at Queen's college, Harley Street, central London, with bold early strikes at her own career. At 14, she was writing for both Elle Girl and the Daily Telegraph; by 16 she had investigated "the British teenage experience" in a self-written TV documentary called Peaches Geldof: Teenage Mind.
Before she was 20, she had co-edited, with James Brown, the founder of Loaded, a "women's mag that appeals to men" called Disappear Here. After this, she was the "face and body" of Miss Ultimo lingerie, but was sacked after allegations of drug use – which she denied – appeared online. Several years later, she said: "I did experiment with drugs, I did get drunk … but I was never that wild."
Her personal life was, for a while, just as torrid. She married the American rock singer Max Drummey in Las Vegas in 2008, after knowing him for just a month; they split up six months later. She became a Scientologist, telling the Radio 1 DJ Fearne Cotton: "I was confused about what path to go through and feel like I needed a spiritual path." What seemed to bring greater fulfilment was meeting Cohen, of the London band SCUM, and having her sons, Astala and Phaedra, who turn two and one later this month. "I want to be a good wife, a good mother, a good person," she said after Astala's birth, and to that end she scaled back her public life. Leaving the celebrity bubble behind, she and her family moved to the village of Wrotham, in Kent.
She is survived by her husband, sons, father and sisters.