How on earth is Kerry Katona still here? The question is meant as a rhetorical one, what with the drugs and the bankruptcies and the gruesome surgeries and the toxic relationships (not least with herself).
It’s the sort of thing you’d say to any legendary showbiz scrapper who seems to have survived against the odds. Yet the woman who first stepped into the public eye at the age of 18 as part of a sweet girl band takes it literally.
She shows me the tattoos on the inside of her wrists, as if she’s an internet influencer sharing a handy ‘hack’ for staying alive.
‘I watched my own mum slit her wrists, saying she had nothing to live for. She made me feel so worthless, and I promised myself I’d never do that to my kids. So I had their names tattooed here so that if I ever got to that point I would see them.’
She says this quite matter-of-factly, as if it’s the most normal thing in the world. How close has she come to not being here?
She references Caroline Flack, the TV presenter whose suicide in 2020 shone a spotlight on the perils of living your life in the public eye, particularly when things are messy at home. They didn’t really know each other, but she and Caroline had exchanged supportive messages before Caroline’s death.
‘I could have been Caroline,’ Kerry says. ‘If I hadn’t had kids, God knows, because many times I wanted to put a noose around my neck. Many times I wanted to drive off a bridge. But the closest I came [to dying] wasn’t deliberate. I overdosed twice on cocaine. But that was a long time ago.’
Kerry is 45 now. It is 27 years since she joined Atomic Kitten. By the age of 20, she’d had a number one with Whole Again. By 21, she was married to Westlife’s Brian McFadden. When he left, her fairytale life – built on the flimsiest of foundations – started to slide.
Kerry Katona reflects on her mother, Caroline Flack and Katie Price in her interview with Jenny Johnston
‘I could have been Caroline,’ Kerry says. ‘If I hadn’t had kids, God knows, because many times I wanted to put a noose around my neck.’ Pictured with her children in 2018
She has been back in the spotlight recently, having taken part in a documentary about girl bands. The takeaway? ‘Fame is actually a f****d up thing,’ she concludes. She says she found bits of it impossible to watch. Why? ‘I thought, “Girl, you have no idea what is ahead of you”.’
For many of the years that she has been in the public eye, Kerry has basically been Britain’s cut-price Britney Spears – a woman falling apart in front of us and, uncomfortably, sometimes for our entertainment.
Darling of the tabloids, Queen of the Chavs, she was once the face of frozen food store Iceland, but came to be mostly famous for her car-crash life. It has been difficult to keep up with her husbands (three), children (five), bankruptcies (two), autobiographies (three) and life dramas (too many to count), but we’ve done our best.
Oh, then there are her surgeries. This is a woman who is missing part of a rib because the doctors took it to plug a hole in her drug-rotted nasal septum.
And the boob jobs? At last reckoning she seems to have had four, but there have been corrective surgeries, too. I think she’s given up counting too, but my goodness she is entertaining about it all.
‘I’m like Etch A Sketch under here, to be honest,’ she says as we kick off our interview. We’re barely past the ‘hello-nice-to-meet-you’ point when she starts explaining how she’s supposed to be on bed rest after her latest op. Her breast implants had tried to escape her body, it seems. She was having sex at the time and felt some slippage in the chest department.
‘What happened was that the scar tissue inside had given way and one of the implants slid through. It wasn’t painful, just strange. Paolo was on top and maybe it was the weight of him. I was kind of like, “Oh ’eck”.’
Paolo, a personal trainer, is her new boyfriend – her first toyboy. He is 11 years younger than she is and she met him earlier this year on the TV show Celebs Go Dating – even though she’d sworn off men for life. Did the bedroom incident stop play? ‘No. The young ’uns these days, Jen,’ she winks.
I ask after her boobs (they seem like friends by now). Have they recovered? ‘My left t** still looks as if it has Bell’s palsy, but it’s only been eight days so we’ll see.’
Of course this is all a bit crass, but it’s also entirely, authentically, Kerry Katona. She reminds me that she started out as a glamour model. ‘All I had when I was growing up were my looks and my shining personality,’ she grins. ‘Those things were my way out.’
In a way, her career has come full circle. A big source of her money now comes from doing OnlyFans content. ‘It’s made me a millionaire. I’m proud of it. I mentioned it on Instagram and someone said “Oh, nice to see a woman with values”, but I’ve always been a glamour model. The magazines I used to do don’t exist any more. Why shouldn’t I go digital?’
Besides, she argues, her stuff is tame, teasing – less explicit than so much of what even mainstream audiences are served up these days. She nearly fell off her sofa at that spicy carriage scene in the period drama Bridgerton. ‘Does anyone talk about the family values of the actors in Bridgerton? If there’s full nudity in there, it’s “Oh, it’s art, darling!” Meanwhile, if I show a bit of nipple, someone says: “Call social services!” ’
She also says sexism is at play. ‘Look at Ant McPartlin. He drives a car, off his head, and crashes it. He could have killed someone. And yet months later he’s got a National Television Award.’
Or take Rod Stewart and all those children with different women. ‘Now, I love Rod. He’s the only famous person that I cried [about] when I met, because I am such a fan. But I watched Piers Morgan interviewing him, and he’s p***ing himself laughing.
‘If that was me up there, saying those things as a woman, social services would be at my door.’
For many of the years that she has been in the public eye, Kerry has basically been Britain’s cut-price Britney Spears – a woman falling apart in front of us
‘Fame is actually a f****d up thing,’ says the star, pictured aged 15
Kerry is best mates with Katie Price, another one-time glamour model who built (and lost) an empire. They met in 2004 on I’m A Celebrity, did panto last year as the wicked step-sisters, and recently completed a UK theatre tour with their show An Evening With Katie Price And Kerry Katona.
‘People said: “Don’t touch Kate. Don’t go near her.” What is wrong with them? I’ve been where Kate has been. I’ve done the drugs, divorces, bankruptcy. Our lives are very mirrored. Why would I not support her? No one supported me.’ Is she worried about Kate? She looks fragile, I say. She has lost a lot of weight.
‘Have you read the headlines about her ex-husband? [Katie’s ex Kieran Hayler is currently in court, facing charges – which he denies – of raping a 13-year-old girl.] You’d lose weight, but Kate is not fragile. She’s the strongest woman I know.
‘She’s also more sober, more together, than anyone gives her credit for. And she will get her empire back. I am in awe of her.’
Less so of Katie’s exes. ‘None of them would have been anything without her. Peter Andre would have been no one without her. They clung on to her coat-tails.’ She and Katie hang out together. Doing what, I wonder? ‘I think people would be surprised about how boring we are. Last time she was here we sat in our jammies and watched crime on TV.’
Are they alike? ‘Well, she’s really laidback about everything – including parenting. I’m more strict. And I’m more fiery. I’m more likely to headbutt someone.’
Frankly, you’d want to headbutt the whole world if you’d had the childhood Kerry Katona had.
She lives in a blingtastic new build in a leafier corner of Cheshire these days (‘rented but I want to buy’) and drives a Lamborghini, but she grew up in grittier Warrington. She spent some of her early years in care, some with her mum, who was responsible for introducing her to drugs when she was just 14. ‘It was speed. I thought it was sherbet,’ she says.
She tells me that ‘normal’ for her was knowing that dinner would be stale ketchup sandwiches again. She relates the story of ‘seeing my mum’s fella, who told us he was Freddy Krueger, stab her. I pulled the knife out.’ There was a period in witness protection.
Little wonder she thought she’d stepped into a fairytale when she was asked to join Atomic Kitten.
We can shudder now at the fact that the publicist Max Clifford, who died while serving a prison sentence for sex offences, was the closest thing she had to a dad but, at the time, this was her escape.
Kerry with her Atomic Kitten bandmates Liz McClarnon, left, and Natasha Hamilton, right
Kerry is best mates with Katie Price. Having met in 2004 on I’m A Celebrity, they did panto last year as the wicked step-sisters and recently completed a UK theatre tour with their show An Evening With Katie Price And Kerry Katona
Of course, she was ill-prepared for it. She tells me about being in a restaurant and not having a clue about how to even read the menu.Her bandmate Liz McClarnon ordered fajitas and she’d never even heard the word. She thought Liz had said foetuses. ‘I thought she was ordering dead babies.’
By 21, she’d married McFadden, the father of her eldest two girls – Molly, now 24, and Lilly-Sue, 22. ‘I thought that was it, for ever and ever,’ she says, smiling at her own naivety. ‘I only wanted to get married and have a family. I wasn’t even that into Brian at first but then I fell madly in love with him. It’s just that he made me laugh.’
But Brian cheated on her with a lap dancer at his stag do. ‘Then he didn’t love me any more, and fell in love with another woman and went to Australia. And then I got the blame, because the women always do, don’t they?’
Husband number two was Mark Croft, a drug dealer. The marriage was more about accessing cocaine than love, she admits. She spent £1.4 million buying Mark, the father of her second two children – Heidi, 18, and Max, 17 – fast cars.
Could it get any worse? Yes. Her third husband was George Kay, who died in 2019 from an overdose, amid an acrimonious split (‘We were still married, so technically I’m a widow,’ says Kerry). He had been abusive, she claims.
She’s still furious that the group Fathers 4 Justice claimed she had ‘blood on her hands’ because she had been denying him access to their daughter Dylan-Jorge (DJ), 11. She tells me today that there was no shock when George died, because of the way he had been living. ‘I thought he would either be murdered, have a drug overdose or commit suicide.’
Her conscience is clear, for the record. ‘Telling DJ her father was dead was the hardest conversation I’ve ever had to have, but George was a troubled soul. He wanted to inject DJ with heroin, then kill me and kill himself. Why the hell would I hand her over to him?
‘He used to spit in my face, beat me up. It’s one of my biggest regrets that my kids heard that, saw the bruises. Mostly I’ve been able to protect them from the bad things in my life. I swore they’d never see the things I saw. They never saw me do drugs.’
Even she throws her arms up at how much utter chaos there has been in her life, but says it simply happened like that. ‘It’s not as if I set out to have five children with three men. I was never a bad person,’ she says. ‘I was just lost. I made bad decisions.’ She is clean now, full of chat about yoga and manifesting and gratitude journals. She goes to therapy.
Is this a good time to talk about Paolo Margaglione, who has now moved in with his two children?
She says he makes her ‘happier than I’ve ever been’. He is ‘kind and thoughtful’ – which seems like a novelty to her.
How on earth can she trust her own judgment, though? ‘Oh, believe me, I’ve looked for the red flags. My friends, my family, too. We haven’t found any! My kids encouraged me to go for it with him. I was the Ice Queen. I wasn’t going there, but it was Heidi who said, “You deserve to be happy”.’
Her eldest three children are now adults. She says that Heidi is at Katie Price’s house even as we speak – filming with Katie’s daughter Princess for a new reality TV show – but she also mentions that Lilly is an accountant.
Pardon? This is not – as Kerry knows better than anyone – what people might expect from any daughter of hers. She is taking it as a win. ‘My kids have been brought up phenomenal,’ she says. ‘They’ve never had a ketchup sandwich in their lives. They order lobster and linguine when they go to a restaurant.
‘They all went to private school. My Heidi got five As and a distinction. Molly is doing her bachelor’s degree. People who meet them are always surprised. That’s my greatest achievement right there. You think you know me. You got it all wrong.’
