Fierce (23 page)

I’m not ashamed of it in any way, but my God it’s a harsh reflection, put it that way. In the video, I had a really blunt bob with a fringe and was running around a recording studio with my band in the background! Oh my God, I’m so embarrassed! I was skidding around on my knees on the floor and generally just dicking around and slamming my microphone on the floor. Oh and then I ate the head off a chocolate bat or something. Of course I knew I was lucky to get an album, but I’m sure some people will be surprised to hear that I really didn’t think that much of it. It was given to me. Half of me thought, ‘These people are really fucking stupid for thinking that just because the show is popular people are going to buy my album. And then the other half of me was thinking, ‘I might become the biggest pop star in the world.’

The first time I performed live was at the MTV Movie Awards in June 2002 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. I was singing ‘Papa Don’t Preach’. I ran down the stairs and on to the stage. My mum, who was still very sick and so terribly frail, was in the audience with the people from her office. Jack was recording it and was running around all over the place with a hand-held video camera.

It was the first time Mum had ever seen me perform in front of a
live audience and her face was a picture. She had her hands over her mouth in excitement – and nerves, probably.

I’d dyed half of my hair bright pink and the other half was black. At the time I thought I looked so cool; I was wearing a bright pink shirt and a black blazer. I just jumped around a lot. I was nervous. But really what was going through my head was, ‘OK, you can do this. The song is three-and-a-half minutes. In three-and-a-half minutes you’ll be able to take pills and you won’t be able to remember if you fuck up anyway.’ I wouldn’t have dreamed of taking any painkillers before I went on stage. Not then, anyway.

By then, I’d come to rely on taking painkillers to get me through difficult times or numb a feeling I didn’t want to have.

When I jumped on to the stage I was excited and there was a part of me that thought, ‘This is fucking amazing.’ But then I looked out at the audience of A-list celebrities sitting on the front row staring back at me. I kept thinking ‘You’ll never be as good as them, you’ll never be as skinny as them … There was Ben Affleck, Vin Diesel and Natalie Portman – a whole bunch of big names.

It’s so crazy how I’m really confident in some ways, but in other ways I feel so insecure. Maybe that’s why I didn’t cope with my singing career very well.

Shut Up
came out in November 2006 and debuted at number one on
Billboard’s
‘Heatseekers’ chart in America – that was pretty cool. I felt proud, but I still wasn’t happy. Of course there were the usual people slagging it off.

Soon after, I left Epic and signed with Sanctuary. I recorded my
second album,
Sleeping in the Nothing
, which came out in 2005. It was less pop punk and more eighties and I loved it. ‘One Word’ was the first song released. It could have done better than the first one but I fucked it up. I was stupid. I wasn’t sticking to obligations or commitments. I didn’t honour my commitment and that was foolish. I was letting myself down in every way I could. Maybe if I’d put more into it, it could have done better. A lot of people have come up to me since and said how much they liked that album, so that’s good. I liked it too. But I just didn’t realise how much I liked it at the time.

The record companies had a set idea of what they wanted me to be like and at the time of my first album, the singer Avril Lavigne was huge. Because I came from the ‘rock scene’ I was expected to have a similar image, but it really wasn’t me. They wanted me to be the girl who rocked out and gave the middle finger. I wanted to be more of a pop person – I wanted to be more like the Disney stars who came out and sang pop songs. They always looked like they were having lots of fun. I should have turned around and said I was unhappy with the image they wanted me to have, but I didn’t.

Of course I love my dad and appreciate his music, but I was the biggest pop-music fan ever – I still am. I loved New Kids on the Block, Bananarama and the Backstreet Boys. I was also the biggest Pet Shop Boys fan – I used to call them the Ketchup Boys. Whenever their music videos came on TV I would watch them.

The one thing in England I can’t stand is the whole NME Indie scene. The women think that if they buy leggings from Topshop and get their hair done at Toni & Guy they fit in with that scene. But the
guys take on this whole role of, ‘Oh yeah, I’m going to be Liam fucking Gallagher.’

I once made this guy cry who thought he was someone special, giving it the whole, ‘Yeah, I’m into Oasis …’ I was at The Hawley Arms pub in Camden, north London and this guy suddenly came out with, ‘Your mum is a cunt.’ He was a big guy in all the tight gear, giving it large.

I turned around to him and said, ‘Just because I can’t help the cunt I came out of, you can’t help the cunt you came out of. You’re a dick!’

The whole pub fell silent and everyone just turned around and looked at us. He just burst into tears and blurted out, ‘You can’t call my mum a cunt.’ I shouted back, ‘Now you know how it feels, you can’t call my mum a cunt.’

I suddenly remembered where I was and put my hand to my mouth. I thought, ‘You can’t say the C word across a pub!’ No one, least of all him, expected the girl who looks like a Cabbage Patch Kid to turn around and say something back, but why shouldn’t I? Who do these people think they are? I’ll tell you something, tight trousers don’t make you tough!

People don’t realise how much it hurts whensomeone has a go at my mum and dad. I think they think because we did
The Osbournes
it gives them the right to say all of that shit.

A
FTER
a while we had some good news – my mum seemed to be getting much better. She was finally winning her battle with the cancer.

One of her friends had given her this bracelet that had numbers all the way around. After each chemotherapy session, she would rip off a number. I remember going to visit her in hospital one day and seeing she had only one number left. She seemed so much brighter and that’s when I knew that she was going to be OK.

We had all been so worried, but we were also so proud of the way she had fought it. My mum really is an inspiration.

But even though we’d had some happy news, unfortunately it was followed by some sad news that affected us all so badly.

We were devastated when our great family friend, Bobby, lost his own battle with cancer. I found out while I was supporting the singer Robbie Williams on his three-month tour of Europe. When I knew that Mum was getting better, I’d accepted the chance to perform before Robbie every night.

I have never seen anyone perform like him. He was amazing. These were big arenas in front of hundreds of thousands of people, and every night he got on that stage and captivated the audience. Grabbing and keeping the attention of so many people is not easy, especially when you’re the only person on the stage. But he did it. Robbie’s a cool guy. If we were staying in a venue for two nights, we’d always have a party under the stage after the first gig. It was so much fun.

But it was while we were in Denmark that I found out about dear, dear Bobby. Like my uncle Tony, Bobby was part of the family. He was Scottish and a roadie who had worked with my dad from his Black Sabbath days. Everyone in the music industry knew who he was and if there was a book about the world’s best tour managers he would be
in it – at number one, probably.

I was getting ready to go on stage when Big Dave, my ‘manny’, knocked on my dressing room door. When I opened it he said, ‘Kelly, I need you to sit down.’

My first reaction was, ‘Oh my God, my mum has taken a turn for the worse. Oh my God, she’s died.’

Big Dave looked at me and said, ‘Bobby has passed away.’ I was just numb. I couldn’t speak. Big Dave said, ‘Kelly, did you understand? Bobby has died.’ Then whoosh, it just hit me.

Bobby had died on the road, touring with my dad, just as he’d wanted. Mum and Dad were so upset. They loved him so much. In fact, I didn’t know anyone who didn’t think he was great.

Bobby had looked after me a lot when I was growing up – Uncle Tony and Bobby were like second dads to me. He worked until the end and that would have made him happy, I know. I went out on stage that night and performed for him.

His son works with our family today and he’s training to do just what his dad did. I know Bobby would have been so proud.

P
ERFORMING
with Robbie was a high point of my music career. It was an honour to tour with him and his fans were so lovely to me.

Being on the road was fun too. My mum’s best friend, Lynn, was with me. One night a friend had come to see me in Edinburgh. We were staying on the top floor of this big glass-fronted hotel and my friend and I had got pissed in the hotel’s ‘honesty bar’. I’m sorry, but
no one is going to be honest in an honesty bar. What everyone does is they go to the area where all the drinks are and pretend they’re just having an orange juice. Then they hope no one sees them when they grab the vodka bottle and pour a shot in! By the end of the night, we were all calling it the ‘dishonesty bar’. Far more appropriate.

We left the bar and started messing around with the video camera we’d got. We went up to Lynn’s room on the top floor and banged on the door before running away. She threw open the door. Oh my God, I have never seen anyone so angry in all of my life. She was screaming hysterically, ‘I thought someone was trying to break in through my window and I was going to get raped.’

‘Lynn,’ I said. ‘We’re on the fucking top floor. Who was going to rape you? Spiderman?’

My life was always full of highs and lows. And while it was brilliant touring with Robbie, I was about to come back to earth with a bump when my addiction to painkillers became a bigger problem than I could have envisaged.