Fierce (29 page)

At that point we didn’t know a huge amount about
The X Factor —
we didn’t have a clue how massive it would become. We were all pleased that Mum was going to get an opportunity to show a side of her personality that only we had seen. I wanted the world to know how great she was. Also, Mum is a well-respected music manager and to be a mentor was right up her street.

What was so strange about that show was that people suddenly thought they knew her really well. I could see why, she was in their living room every week and because that’s a person’s most comfortable place, they instantly felt a connection. She was great with the younger contestants too, and she wasn’t afraid to give them a hug when it all got too much. I think she found it really hard picking who should go through. She didn’t want to disappoint anyone or ruin their dreams.

Today people come up to Mum in the street and speak to her like she’s their own mum. It’s weird because my TV mum is only a part of what Mum’s like. But I am proud that people like her.

The downside to it was that so many people felt they could make a judgement about her. I’ve lost count of the number of people who have come up to me and criticised her. People don’t realise how much it hurts when people have a go at my mum.

I would always stick up for her. During her last series of
The X Factor
in 2007 when Dannii Minogue joined the show it seemed to me that Dannii didn’t want mum there. Dannii sees it differently but my mum and I felt that Dannii did everything she could to get Mum off the show. It was so hard for me not to say something. I really felt that Mum went onto that show with a great attitude about working with Dannii. Why would Mum want the extra drama of not getting on with someone?

It seems to me that Simon has a great way of getting people to piss each other off and it’s a very clever way to get publicity, so maybe it wasn’t as bad as it seemed, but it was Mum who was having to deal with that shit and that made me really angry.

I think that if the other judge had been someone who was younger and had been more successful in their music career, then I believe it could have been a very different story. Mum just wanted to get along and have a great show. But because Dannii was somebody who I feel feeds on attention, it made it an awful lot harder. I think karma is going to come knocking on Dannii’s door. It’s going to.

M
Y
mum pisses on things; she’s pissed on me, my dad – everyone. The scary thing is, I’ve started to do it. I was in a club in east London a few months after I’d moved back to England and I met a guy. He asked if he could get a lift back with me because his place was just before mine. When I said yes he took that as maybe I was going to go back to his place too. I did actually need to go back to his house because I had to pee really badly. When I walked into his flat he pushed himself on me. I pushed him off and said, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I ran into one of the bedrooms and when I came out he had completely passed out.

So I went into his lounge, pulled my knickers down and pissed on his carpet. I left and got in the car. How dare he think that he had the right to do that? What kind of message did I telepathically give him that it was OK to touch me?

You can thank Mum for that crazy behaviour.

W
HILE
Mum was on
The X Factor
she started working with a publicist called Gary Farrow. He also represents Elton John and other celebrities. Mum arranged for me to meet him at Claridge’s Hotel in London. It’s really posh and a bit fancy. Mum sometimes stays there when she’s working in central London.

I met Gary in one of the private rooms. When I walked in, he had laid out all the negative press cuttings about me from over the years.
They were going back to the days when I’d not behaved properly and given people the wrong impression of me. There were a whole bunch of them all in front of me. He sat me down in front of the press cuttings and said – in his geezer cockney way, ‘Do you really want people to say these things you? Do you really want to be perceived like this?’

‘No, no I don’t.’ I said.

He barked back. ‘Well, listen to me.’

I have become more frightened of him than my own father. When Gary shouts, fuck me, he shouts, but he has played a massive part in helping me sort my shit out and making me the person I am today. I owe him for that. He has helped me work on myself. With Gary’s guidance and with Mum as my manager, I started to get offered some really cool jobs. It was what I’d always wanted – to do stuff without my family. To be known as just Kelly Osbourne. I was up for trying everything. But even I wasn’t prepared for just how well it would all go.

I
WAS
asked to be a guest judge on the new Sky One show,
Project Catwalk
, hosted by Liz Hurley. It wasn’t like other reality TV shows. The contestants had to have genuine talent. The premise of the show was to find a clothes designer. Each week the contestants were given a different theme and they had to design and make the garment before displaying it for the first time on the runway. The least popular was voted off. It was highly pressurised for the contestants. If you weren’t talented, you couldn’t be on. It absolutely amazed me what they were capable of doing – I was in awe. I loved being a guest judge; I love clothes. So when, after the first series, Liz decided she didn’t want to do it any more and the producers of the show asked me if I wanted to present it, straight away I said, ‘Fuck, yeah!’ It was my dream job.

I really wanted TV-presenting experience. I had also been asked to be a host on the Channel 4 show,
Popworld
, with Alexa Chung and Alex Zane. It launched their careers. But it was very time-consuming,
for very little money. I would have had to spend most of the week and evenings working on the show, even though it was a weekly programme. If I was being honest, I didn’t want to interview bands either. If I like a song, I like it. I don’t want to over-intellectualise or dissect a song with questions like, ‘What does this lyric mean to you?’ It bores me. It really does.

But
Project Catwalk
was great. I made some really good friends on that show. I thought the designer Ben de Lisi was amazing. He was one of the judges and the contestants’ mentor. He probably felt like I was stepping on his turf a bit when I joined the show. At times I got the impression he didn’t like me for that reason. We never had words, but I thought he became a bit of a diva towards the end. But he probably thought the same thing about me too.

That show was a massive learning curve for me. It wasn’t a case of me rocking up and reading the autocue and then going home. Because of my dyslexia, I had to memorise everything on cards. The show took three months to record and I was learning twenty-eight pages of text a day. It’s funny how the brain compensates. I discovered from doing that show that I have a bloody good memory, which is a fucking good job. The show ran for two series. I was so sad when it came to an end in 2008, but I was also really proud. Shows come and go. But I look back on it as a really great experience.

Before
Project Catwalk
, back in 2006, I was also approached by Ginger Productions, who made Jack’s show,
Adrenaline Junkie
, about a concept for a show they had come up with called
Turning Japanese
. It involved me going to live in Japan for four weeks and immersing
myself in their culture. They thought I would be good for it and I thought, ‘Yeah, cool.’

Mum’s make-up artist Jude came with me, and I’m so grateful he did, because it was a lonely experience at times. Being in Japan is such an intense experience. Two days can feel like two months. I’ve never been anywhere in the world where I stood on a street among thousands of people going about their business and felt so incredibly lonely and isolated. Japanese culture is very specific. I felt very conscious I wasn’t bowing at the right time or saying the right thing. Well, I knew I wasn’t saying the right thing, I couldn’t speak a word of Japanese and that was unbelievably tough.

The film
Lost in Translation
, which is about two people visiting Tokyo and sometimes feeling incredibly lost, is scarily accurate. The jet-lag was horrendous, so I would often wake up at 3 a.m. and sit for hours looking out over the sprawling skyscrapers. I couldn’t use my mobile, I couldn’t read the underground system, no one understood me – it was scary! I felt like I couldn’t do anything for myself because I had to go through a translator for everything – even when I needed a new toothbrush. I have never felt more lonely in all my life.

The Osbournes
was a really big show out there, but they had always known me for having pink hair. My hair was blonde when I went to Japan so they assumed I was a prostitute! People were literally asking me all the time, ‘Are you a hooker?’ I couldn’t believe it.

I tried all these different jobs while I was out there, but my favourite was working at a sex hotel – maybe that’s why people thought I was a fucking prostitute! It was a hotel where people booked the room by the
hour so they could fuck. They all live with their mothers in Japan and the houses are so tiny that it’s really unacceptable to bring someone back and sleep with them. So they brought women to the hotel and I’d check them in. Then they would ring down for room service and I would have to take it up. Nearly every single one ordered beer and a Pot Noodle! I get the beer, but a Pot Noodle after sex?