Soundtrack to my Life: "Shut Up" by Kelly Osbourne

Artist: Kelly Osbourne
Track: Shut Up/Label: Epic/Album: Shut Up/Release: 8th February 203/Highest Chart Position: 31

“Okay you might fucking well hate me, but I’m here for another half an hour so get used to it. The only thing I suck is your mums fat cock.”

Sunday June 22nd Snickers Game On at The Millenium Dome, Greenwich, London.

“Why are we going to see this again?” The Big Man asks me as we walk from the second stage to the main stage. He is referring to one Kelly Osbourne, daughter of Ozzy.

“Rolf, three years ago... the jokers at Mean Fiddler thought it would be a good idea to put on a pre-teen pop duo called Daphne and Celeste in some kind of cruel publicity stunt onto the Reading Festival main stage between... wait for it... two punk bands, ‘A’ and Blink 182, who were themselves followed by two of the heaviest acts on the planet, Rage Against the Machine and Slipknot.”

Reading has been known for traditionally showing their appreciation for the meagre line-ups of the past of throwing piss bottles towards the stage in the past but to be honest, that hasn’t happened for a while. The rock press have joked about it years and the tradition has filtered into live reviews of bands that have sucked for many years, but really thats where it has originated. My first major outdoor gig was in 1993 and that was the one and only thing I was worried about to be honest, being hit by a piss bottle.

“Anyway... you can imagine the sort of people that were milling around the festival site. Not fans of this genre of music and the organisers knew that.”

“What happened?” he asked me.

“It was referred to as the largest bottling off since Meatloaf in 1988... and he was one of the headliners...”

That was a good year for bottlings. The first night was a fucking stormer. Headliners were The Ramones and Iggy Pop. The second was the Loaf and fucking Starship... I wonder if the weekenders thought they were a bit cheated. Hothouse Flowers on the Sunday nearly never came on at all.

“He made it to the encore before storming off but for the pop duo from America, I think it may have been the chorus to their song that ‘Ugly’ that did it for them that day,”

“How’s that then?”

“Well, as well as the song repeating ‘you’re mama says your ugly...’ over again, the chorus goes, ‘U.G.L.Y’, you ain’t got no alibi, you’re ugly’... Yeah, pretty much downhill after that...”

What I didn’t admit to Rolf at the time was that the only other song they managed to get out that day, ‘Ooh, Stick You’ did just that. That Summer, I couldn’t get it out of my head. It was so damn catchy. It was purely awful, yankee euro-pop of the first degree, embraced by the bullies in the schools of America that the songs were written to parody. I guess it was some ironic brilliance on their part, reminiscant of Kurt Cobain’s feelings to his song, ‘In Bloom’, when he showed his antipathy for the jocks while they sang his songs.



To be fair to Kelly, I think she was totally set up. This equally forboding, publicity demising effort at putting her on the bill of a skateboard festival bill with such luminaries as The Vandals, Sick of it All and Cypress Hill was a total media circus. Granted, the stage on Kelly’s day were such bands as Reef and Electric Six, who were more chart-orientated and headliners INME, who were tipped to be great but then, weren’t but there was something not quite right with the whole day.

Firstly, compared to the band before Kelly, the sound had clearly been altered somehow. We were in the best sound vantage point where we were and we could hardly hear her vocals at all and the guitar and the drums were far too loud for the oddly shaped tent room. I would have put this down to inexperience as this was the first event of this kind to be staged here but then Electric Six and Reef earlier in the day had sounded fine.

I firmly believed someone had tampered with her sound. Then there were the unusual amount of water bottles that were hurled at the Osbourne daughter. I had commented to Rolf how great it was that they had free water handed out at the event, which we both took advantage of.

He said to me, “They’re always promoting something at these things, aren’t they?” but I had never seen people with rucksacks offering free bottles of branded water (I forget which kind it was now) at an event like this and they were giving away them by the handful. Plus, I hadn’t seen anything of them the rest of the day and they were nowhere to be seen on the second day when we were drenched with sweat, bouncing up and down to the dope fuelled tunes of Cypress Hill. They just appeared as the bands were changing, awaiting for one Kelly O.

As soon as she came on, the boos started. The band launched into their first song, fronted by Kelly in her new blonde spiky mop.

I noticed straight away the vocals and mentioned it to Rolf. He agreed. She was starting to sound more and more like Brody from The Distillers, but I still couldn’t hear her properly, even when she started hurling abuse back at the crowd, which she was initially cheered for. It seemed like she took the taunts a little personal though. Through her hit, “Shut Up” the crowd sang “Fuck Off” in place of designated title in the chorus, to which she uttered the previous comments about sucking a parental unit’s penis. Elegant. This was prompted though by the constant tirades of “You Suck” by the audience all the way through and between the first few songs.

I think it was when she was starting to taunt the crowd back that the crowd really turned on her. That and watching the posing, inexperienced band react badly from the stage, taking it upon themselves (as session noodlers) to berate the crowd too, much to Kelly’s delight. The over-reaction was quite silly and that was what clearly prompted the eventual early exit.

There was only one solution to this madness.

I looked at The Big Man and he looked at me. He positioned himself behind me and bent over to put his head between my legs, whisking me up, high above the heads of the rest of the crowd as I tried to balance myself upon his shoulders. He momentarily unbalanced himself and came back down, before vaulting me back up.

“You know what to do, Farls”

I had to take my moment. The crowd in the immediate area around me knew what I should do also. I straightened myself up while Kelly was in the middle of one of her taunts and I lifted up the middle fingers on both hands towards the direction of the stage. As I did this, I suddenly realised how close we were to the front of the stage. We wereat least 50 metres from the band, a position that was even bettered the night before during the Cypress Hill set. Rolf had this knack of grabbing me and marching his body weight forward through the crowd and here he had done us both proud without me even noticing. Kelly reacted rather badly. She stopped her obscenities for a moment and turned scarlet as the whole crowd saw me, a little fan flipping her two special birds, and broke out in a chorus of laughter. All she could manage was one in return, which was met with a barrage of plastic.

As Kelly launched into her next song, she dodged even more bottles, they rained down upon her, pelting the young female drummer and hitting Kelly a number of times. The people seemed to be fuelled by my taunting of the singer and didn’t relent until she stormed off stage, giving the mouthy, show off guitarist one last Evian in the face as he spouted of something about how small our cocks were.

Really, if you weren’t such a Motley Crue LA poseur in the first place, we wouldn’t have bottled you. They didn’t quite seem to grasp that over here, you gain respect. You have to earn it. You have to work your way up the ranks in this business and pay your dues and that doesn’t include a major recording artists daughter getting a multi album deal based on the premise of geneology. That’s not cricket. We don’t want to see you or your hired session musos strutting their peacock stuff around the stage at a major main stage billing when its like your third gig together when the likes of The Vandals and Sick of it All, whose integrities you should inspire to perhaps one day perhaps even come near to, are on the second stage (and to some respects drawing larger crowds than yours) and are tearing it a new one while they are there.

The rock press (not surprisingly with their allegiances to Ozzy and Sharon) neglected to even mention the bad reception and instead praised Kelly for her determination over “a few people trying to spoil things” but what they neglected to mention was that the half an hour that Kelly mentioned onstage in completing despite the poor reaction to her, was in fact only ten further minutes.

The Shut Up album didn’t do so well afther that, it failed to reach 150,000 copies in America and Kelly and her father left Sony for Sanctuary Records. Her second album, Sleeping in the Nothing despite being recorded with top producer, Linda Perry was released in June 2005 to luke warm response. It peaked in the UK chart at 57 and after one week disappeared and in the US, only sold 9,000 copies after entering the Billboard Top 200 at Number 117. Kelly has since moved into the world of acting and fashion and seems to have abandoned whatever hopes she had of becoming a credible music artist.

At least for the time being she has shut up.