This is where: "I was sat next to Prince Andrew at a dinner and this American actress in her twenties was sat there, too, talking about how hard her job was. She turned to Prince Andrew and said, ‘So what do you do?’ He’s a gentleman, he couldn’t be rude. So he said, ‘Well actually, my mother runs England.’ What else could he say? But I died. I told her that she had better go and compose herself, and fast."
In her 22nd year, Osbourne has been cultivating a brave new life. Her music career may be on the skids, but these days she has an army of admiring, fashionably attired teenage girls in her wake. The truth is, she’s a bit of a hit with the hipsters. She can be seen in all the right places: carousing in Camden’s grimiest pubs; bopping to baby-faced indie bands in Brixton; parading polka-dot prom dresses on Monday nights at the End; pouring herself into basques for the Cafe Royal on Tuesdays; slumming it with crusties in east London. She has her own fashion line, Stiletto Heels, for which she has big plans. There is a new ad campaign for Accessorize. It is all as far away as she can get from the bovine life of a Malibu rich kid.
But what of the in-between time? The year the Osbournes finished was the year she released her debut album, Shut Up, which included a cover of Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach. Her record label described it as "a candy-coated razor blade", but it bombed. Since then, there has been another album (a better effort, but also a commercial flop); a role in a teenage drama, Life as We Know It (she was brilliant); first, second and third loves; two stints in rehab; countless family dramas and a lot more mouthing off.
Advertisement
Mouthing off is Osbourne’s modus operandi, for which we should be grateful. There is nobody else in showbiz as disarmingly open as she is about what actually goes on inside the hallowed halls of fame. She is like an embedded reporter, our girl on the inside. That her favourite of all expletives is a***hole — it litters her conversation — indicates how she feels about the whole Hollywood merry-go-round. "Just because they’ve got a Louis Vuitton bag and a pair of Manolo Blahniks, they think that they’re in. Well, they can f*** off if they think that. Then again, that’s LA. It’s a golden sea of dreams."
She has no time for the conspiracy of silence surrounding the coterie of skinny blonde bimbettes that populate the pages of American gossip magazines. What goes through Osbourne’s mind when she hears that another starlet has landed up in hospital with "exhaustion"? "Some celebrity saying, ‘I’ve never touched drugs in my life’? I just think, oh, f*** off. I’ve done drugs with you. I can’t stand that. I think it’s stupid. Anyway, what goes around comes around. I really believe that."
Osbourne knows a thing or two about drugs. She was doing opiates from 13, and claimed to have been off her head throughout the recording of all four Osbournes series. By 2004, she was said to have been sucking codeine lollipops, having become immune to the pills. She has done time at Promises, the rehab facility near her family home in Malibu, and at another, Las Encinas, down the road in Pasadena. "When I was into drugs, it was only because I was miserable. There were all these things going on around me, things I didn’t want to do, and I was powerless to stop any of it." On the one hand, being young, pretty, screamingly famous and loaded might be rather nice. On the other, spending your formative years under the scrutiny of 6m weekly MTV viewers could also bring on, well, a lifetime of bad moods. Increasingly, it has emerged that Osbourne’s experience was much closer to the latter, that the collateral damage has been greater than Ozzy and Sharon ever anticipated.
For example, she has had terrible trouble with boys. Her first love, Bert McCracken of the rock band, the Used, dumped her ignominiously and broke her heart. Other relationships haven’t fared better. Somehow, the blokes always get the fame thing wrong. "I make the same, terrible mistake every time. I think I’m with someone confident and lairy, when they’re actually insecure, with a huge ego. So they’ll call to say, ‘Hey, there’s a movie premiere tonight, we should go.’ And I say, ‘Why? I’d rather go to a shithole pub.’ Or they’ll say that they saw their picture in a magazine. And I’ll be like, ‘Yeah, and ...?’" This is what fame does. It sends the people around you mad. Then they send you mad. Even therapists can be afflicted. "The last one I had said, ‘You’re a drug addict because of your parents.’ ‘That’s bollocks,’ I said. You can’t blame someone else for the way you are."
Her moral compass is plainly at odds with the instant-gratification ethos of California. It’s a big reason why she’s been spending so much time in London recently. The 40-year-old inside a 21-year-old’s body despairs that her LA friends would rather shop at Fred Segal than read James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. And that little girls are dressing like Paris Hilton. "Me and Mum went to an awards show recently. There was a little girl there, and Mum said, ‘How old are you?’ and she said, ‘I’m 11.’ And she had on a miniskirt, a tank top that barely covered her boobs, or lack thereof, 4in heels and long, bleached-blonde hair. Paris Hilton is who she is. Paris doesn’t hold up a sign saying, ‘Everybody dress like me’, but she is a bad influence." Is it Paris’s fault? "No! It’s up to the parents to stop their child dressing like a 5p hooker. If the parents say no, you cannot wear that, then ... ." Then they’ll probably wear it anyway.
Advertisement
"Yeah, you’re right." A big, world-weary sigh. This is the paradox of the Osbourne family. They are at once completely out to lunch and resoundingly sane. It is the out-to-lunch bit that ferried them into the spotlight, and kept them there. It is their fundamental earthiness — coupled with what are evidently unlimited supplies of family love — that has saved them. So far, anyway. Osbourne is taking life easy for now (someone told her to "just have fun and be young for a while"), and is enjoying dressing up, particularly for the Accessorize shoot — she tells me she loves the pictures. She reportedly went through a phase of wearing a corset 24 hours a day, but her style is resolutely original: "I don’t want to be a conformist. Even when I was small, I never let anyone tell me what to wear. I love Topshop, but I get embarrassed turning up at an event wearing something I bought there, only to find five other people wearing it, too."
Should she ever — and at this point it seems unlikely — need advice, she has plenty of fashion buddies on hand to help. A fortnight ago, she and her brother, Jack, attended fellow rehab graduate Kate Moss’s 32nd birthday party (20-year-old Jack and she are "good friends"). Osbourne is deliciously nonplussed at the thought of being on fashion’s oh-so-exclusive inside track. "Most of them are ridiculous. They’re like, ‘Darling, that Comme des Garçons top is divine.’ But they’re just following the trends, too." Lucky for us she isn’t.