I met Lil Peep in summer 2016. Travis Mills, who used to have a radio show on Beats 1, came to see me at my LA office and said, “I think this guy is really interesting”. He showed me a photo of Gus [Lil Peep’s real name was Gustav Åhr] in a rowing boat with “Cry Baby” tattooed on the side of his face. That struck me really hard, it was instant. Then Travis played me a Lil Peep track, Nineteen, produced by a friend he met online, Smokesac, and within seconds I knew he was something very special.

It took a while to track him down, but eventually Gus came in to see me and my colleagues Adam Mersel and Travis Mills at my office. He was very self-effacing and a bit anxious. We talked about his background. He had grown up in Long Island and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a music career – he was living in a squat on Skid Row when we met him. He was estranged from his father but very close to his mother, brother and grandparents. He told me he’d felt isolated at school, he felt different from other people. I quickly realised he was acutely intelligent – he didn’t have a college education but he was very well-read and intellectually curious. He was raised in an environment and surrounded by a family who had a great depth of knowledge.

We both knew we were going to work together, but for the next three or four weeks he led us on a sort of dance – he’d disappear, pop up to do some underground show, and disappear again. He was testing me, but I never gave up. Eventually we tracked him down and he said, “Let’s make it happen, let’s work together.”

He was a true original. Spotify couldn't find the place to put his music … They knew he was special and unique

We became his advisers and business partners. My colleagues and I would introduce him to people in the fashion and music business and give him financial and moral support to help him realise his vision. Everywhere I went, I told people about Lil Peep. He’d listen to advice, and wanted to meet other creative people, but he was his own man, there was nothing manufactured about him. Once I said, “It looks like you’ve got some fans in Russia, why don’t we go there and do a gig?” He agreed straight away and bought a book, How to Learn Russian, and put Russian subtitles on his videos so his fans there could follow his lyrics. We had no clue what would happen, but when he arrived in Moscow there were fans at the airport. He ended up playing to 2,000 people.

He was a true original. Spotify couldn’t find the place to put his music: it wasn’t rap, it wasn’t rock, it wasn’t alternative. So they created a whole playlist for Peep called Teardrop. They knew he was special and unique.

There are a couple of reasons he got those tattoos on his face. First, he knew that once he got them there was no turning back, he was committed to being an artist. That takes a lot of courage. The second thing, his grandmother told me later, was that he’d always felt like an outsider and he wanted to understand how it was to feel like a minority. He said he could spot the difference between the people who saw the tattoos and the people who saw him. That’s how he would connect with people, from the way they reacted. It wasn’t a mindless defacing of his face, there was nothing mindless about it. It was measured and it was a commitment.

He would take drugs recreationally. He was not an addict. He died from taking a laced pill he was given with a huge dose of [the pain medication] fentanyl in it. He was given something he thought was one thing and turned out to be something else. This was clearly not something he was planning.

It never entered my head that it would happen. I was in London when I heard. My husband came into the bedroom at 6am. He started opening the blinds, bringing light into the room, and kept saying, “It’s very sad.” When he told me Gus was dead, my first reaction was total disbelief. Then I had this enormous burst of anger, and then a terrible sense that the floor had dropped from under me. My reaction was, “Where’s he gone, how can I find him?”

The last time I saw him was at his 21st birthday in New York, two weeks before he died. We got a cake and met him in his dressing room after a show at the Highline. He was having the time of his life. He was creatively inspired and very excited about the future and all the music he was going to put out. I think he was going to sell out stadiums. He’d already established himself as an icon. Everyone knew he was going to be a very important artist, including Gus. And that’s exactly what Lil Peep was.