Fierce (21 page)

He’d spent years with my dad and witnessed how Dad would always get mobbed by masses of fans. But even he was blown away by the sheer numbers, including journalists and photographers who had turned up. It was less than a month after that first episode of
The Osbournes
. It was completely insane.

On that morning in Hollywood, I didn’t have a fucking clue what to do. I just stood there frozen to the spot. No one suddenly appears out of nowhere when you find fame and starts to teach you what to do. Maybe in years to come, there will be a special ‘What to do when you get famous’ school.

The flashes from the cameras were going crazy, they were practically blinding me. I didn’t know where to look or what to do with my body or hands or anything! A TV reporter stuck a camera in front of my face and I just talked. About what, I couldn’t fucking tell you. No one had prepared me for the instant fame.

Mum’s best friend Lynn was with me and she was brimming with tears. She told me afterwards that she’d felt so proud of me. But I didn’t really know what I’d done. I’d just talked, which is something I’m very good at.

If you notice, in pictures (I still do it today) I always look like I’ve just smelt a shit because I’ve got this expression I do when I’m really nervous. I sort of move my nostrils in a funny way. Whenever I’ve looked at other people on the red carpet they’re really going for it. They stick their arses out. Then they look over their shoulder and give a cheeky grin. Who teaches them how to do that shit? I could never be like that. I don’t want to be like that. The most I can do is
put my hand on my hip.

Because I was binge-eating, I’d put on some weight, which just made me feel even more self-conscious. I couldn’t tell you how much, but my clothes felt a bit tighter. I was not big by any means, but I was miserable. I’d started to hate the way I looked.

I don’t agree with faddy diets. I never have and I never will. When I was at school I was the one person who was never on some crazy diet. There would be girls who were only eating fruit or following some fad diet where they were only allowed liquids. But to some extent, I think trying different diets is a part of growing up.

But having seen my mum suffer so much with weight over the years had made me never want to go on a diet. I just wasn’t interested in following some crazy plan where I only ate vegetables before noon or something else equally fucking ridiculous!

My mum has been bulimic and anorexic. For years she yo-yo dieted. She has done every diet you can think of: Slim Fast, where you only drink shakes and then one ‘regular meal’ per day; Atkins, where you don’t eat carbohydrates. There was another one where she would only do milkshakes. Then she went through a phase where someone would
deliver food to our house. They were all short-term solutions that didn’t deal with a bigger issue. As a kid, seeing her suffer bothered me. I didn’t want my mum to be unhappy. But seeing her go through all that made me promise myself that I would never put myself in the same situation.

Before we started doing
The Osbournes
, my mum had heard of an operation you could have that effectively made an overweight person’s stomach smaller to stop their intake of food and help them get thinner. She was desperate to do it – she was effectively agreeing to be a guinea pig.

She sat me, Dad, Jack and Aimee down one evening and explained to us that she was going to get a gastric band. Actually, first she was going to get the one where they actually cut your stomach and make it smaller. It’s the gastric bypass.

But when she went to see the specialist and they said that she would have to fill out a form saying that if she died it wasn’t their fault, she decided not to do it.

So then she did some more investigating and put herself forward to be the test dummy for the band. And we were all, as any children would be, scared and worried about it. She invited the doctor to our house in LA and we all sat together and discussed it. We understood it, because the doctor explained it really well. Part of us didn’t want her to do it but we wanted her to be happy, so we said she should do it.

On the morning of the operation, my dad went with her to the hospital, Cedars-Sinai. She didn’t want me, Jack or Aimee to go with her.

Within weeks, she started to lose the weight really quickly and it
made her really happy and it changed things a lot. I always say that my mum is the centre of our family and people react to her. So if she is in a bad mood, it pisses off my dad and then us, and before you know it, we’re all in a bad mood. And it works in the same way when she is happy. Well, losing all this weight made her really happy, so that was good for us too.

M
Y
mum is addicted to having plastic surgery. She really is. I hate it when she gets work done. I always have.

She has got this miraculous way of saying to us, ‘Oh, I am just going in for a routine operation.’ There is nothing fucking routine about getting your tits done, Mum!

My mum and Botox – seriously! When she used to be bulimic she would leave the table after dinner to go and throw up. We knew what she was up to. We didn’t like it, but there was nothing we could do about it. But the thing that used to really annoy us was that she’d come back and have blood all over her forehead from where her Botox injections had strained as she’d been sick. And she’d still deny it. We’d say, ‘Mum, you’ve had Botox again.’

She would reply, ‘No I didn’t.’

‘Yes you did – your head is fucking bleeding,’ we’d all say in unison.

Gay cousin Terry had a friend who did fillers and Botox at your home. During a visit to see one of my aunties in Birmingham, my mum decided to have her lips plumped. I am not joking; you know when you see shows on TV about surgery disasters? She could have
appeared on one of those. She looked like one of those babies whose parents buy them a dummy with big lips painted on the outside so it looks like the baby has big lips. She looked just like that. My dad’s sisters could not stop laughing.

Later that day, we travelled to see Mum’s friend Elton John at his home in London. We were all sitting around his dining room table. He did really well, but then he just couldn’t keep it to himself. He said, ‘Sharon, what the fuck has happened to your lips?’ We all just burst out laughing. He sent her to a doctor to get it fixed.

I’m forever turning to my mum and saying to her, ‘What’s wrong, mum? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

Her eyebrows will be raised and she’ll have a look of shock on her face. She’ll say ‘No Kelly, the botox went wrong again.’

I will have plastic surgery one day, simply because I don’t want to get saggy. I don’t want droopy tits or one of those horrible chicken chins. You know when someone has too much fat hanging from under their chin and you can sort of flick it?

Now, I wouldn’t even think of it. It would hurt too much and what if it messed up? No, I’m not ready for any of that yet.

My mum hasn’t put me off some surgery, but she has opened my eyes to it. I think my mum has been incredibly lucky with her surgery. She does look amazing. But if she doesn’t stop she is going to look like cat woman, I kid you not! It’s an addiction – one hundred per cent.

A
FTER
the first season of
The Osbournes
, we were approached to do an album of our favourite songs. I thought it was a cool idea, but I really didn’t think anything more about it. It was just something my mum was sorting out.

Then my mum came up with this idea that Aimee would sing one of the songs on the album. Aimee didn’t want to do it, so she suggested I did it. The Madonna song ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ was picked out. It was my mum’s idea and somehow I got involved in singing it.

There was a selection of songs on
The Osbourne Family Album
like ‘Dreamer’ by my dad, ‘Drive’ by The Cars, ‘You Really Got Me’ by The Kinks, ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon and a whole bunch of other songs.

I went to a studio in Venice, which is a district in western Los Angeles, to record the single. Venice is known for its beaches and has vendors and performers along the front. I met up with a couple of guys from an American band called Incubus, who were going to
help produce it. It was so weird because even though I had been in the studio loads of times with my dad, I was so fucking nervous. I’d always been on the other side – I’d never stood there with the headphones on. People find it strange when I say that the whole recording process was new to me. But it really was. I mean, if my father had been a welder I wouldn’t have instantly been able to pick up a torch and known how to use it, would I?

I wasn’t taking myself too seriously on that first day. I wasn’t standing there wearing my earphone over one ear and the other resting on my cheek like I’d seen so many other recording artists do thinking, ‘Hey, I’m going to be the next big thing in pop music.’

It was fun. It was bullshit. I opened my mouth, I could sing, it seemed, and it went on to the album. And then it very quickly became really real and to me that was a whole different ball game …

After
The Family Album
came out and people heard my version of Madonna’s song, I got offered a million dollars for a record deal from Epic Records. I thought, I don’t give a shit about this, but I would be so fucking stupid if I didn’t take that money.

I co-wrote a few of the songs with the team. This is the thing I can’t stand about a lot of artists today. They say they write everything by themselves – they fucking don’t. They don’t do that. Most songs are co-written. At least I’m honest enough to admit it.