Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored (60 page)

Nora and I are both of the same opinion that we could never have pets, because that commitment means you can’t travel, you can’t just load up and shift when
you really need to recharge your batteries in a different scenario. We’re gyppos, but without the limitations of a dumb caravan.

It’s not an inactive lifestyle we have. It’s one of never getting too used to your surroundings, because then they get uninteresting and become almost prison-like. It’s nothing
to do with money – it really isn’t, because Nora’s very good at getting cheap flights. That’s one of the most wonderful aspects of Nor’: she won’t have me spend
money foolishly. ‘Why pay that for that, when you can get it for this?’ Absolute discipline, but total mutual respect.

Other times when things get too much, we just go out in our boat till you can’t see land, and then play with the GPS and hopefully find a safe harbour. The engines’ll stop, and
we’ll look at each other – who put the gasoline in last?

You’ve got to bear in mind that in amongst all of this happiness, there’s family members dying on us – not only mine, but Nora’s – and having to deal with all the
pain of that.

Nora’s father ran a newspaper in Germany after the war called
Der Tagesspiegel
. There’s a difficult thing for many people who’re born into a wealthy scenario,
family-wise to get their head around: it doesn’t necessarily mean any of that cash is coming your way any time soon, if ever. In fact, usually, the wealthier the parent, particularly the
father, the more dictatorial and mean they’ll be. If you don’t toe the line, then life ruination be upon you. It’s a serious oppression you have to escape from, and so
that’s what Nora did. Utterly amazing to just kiss all that goodbye and say, ‘Fuck it, I’ll get my own life.’ And she did, and eventually came to England.

Her father put Nora and the rest of the family – her mother
and sister – through hell. He was a very argumentative, abrasive
führerbunker
of a
fella. To my mind, he was someone that really didn’t learn the lessons of World War Two, because he thought he could run a newspaper in the same way as that lot ran the country prior to 1945.
His crowd were the big money people of Germany. He was quite politically tied in to people who in my opinion would be called corrupt.

Her father hated me. He’d read the tabloid rubbish, and being a press man himself he should’ve known better than to believe it. We had no contact, never spoke to him, never made any
attempt and just left it that way. If anything, that whole situation would’ve caused a problem or a rift between me and Nora, but our bond was so tight by that point, that all of these things
were just silly acts of indifference to us.

Rumour has it that Nora inherited unimaginable money. Not true, it’s barely imaginable. She is routinely described in the media as ‘an heiress’, which absolutely has her in
fits. She just finds this hilarious. We’ve got a standing joke that they’ve spelled the word wrong – it’s ‘hair-ess’. H-A-I-R. Because she spends so long combing
it.

However, but for Nora not being able to pack a suitcase in time, we could have been on Pan Am Flight 103 that got blown out of the sky at Lockerbie on 21 December 1988. An hour before we were
supposed to leave for the airport, we were nowhere near finished packing, so we cancelled it and booked it for the next day and just went back to bed, because we’d been up all night trying to
sort out suitcases. We decided that day not to answer the bloody phone either – just too tired from being up all night worrying about packing. By the time we did get round to answering the
phone and checked out the message machine, it was just full of – oh my God! – family and friends presuming we were on that flight.

What a shock that was, knowing that we were minutes away from a wrong decision. We’d have been blown to smithereens, and for what? What point or purpose is the
destruction of another human being? My view of terrorism is quite cold: if they’re going to go to that extreme, don’t be locking them up, give them the death they so wished upon others.
And don’t take your time about it either, push them to the front of the queue. Such savagery and poison, it’s inexplicable.

The first person I spoke to was my brother Martin from America, who was meant to be meeting us at the other end. He was like, ‘Oh my God, thank God!’ ‘
What
did you wake
me up for?’ That’s when I went into the answer messages. So then I woke my dad up, I rang him back and he was extremely grateful, because that’s a terrible thing, and then all my
brothers, and then all my friends. Quite literally, the next two days was spent ringing up and apologizing for not being blown to smithereens, and not telling anyone we’d changed flights. The
lesson I got from it is, tell everyone what you’re doing all the time, and don’t jump on a plane or not jump on a plane without informing everyone of your movements, because it’s
damn well irresponsible to do that, and the pain you can put people through. It’s best they know a thing accurately, rather than let the imagination run wild.

When we found all this out, we were so nervous about it that we changed airlines. There was no way we were going Pan Am, not anywhere, not ever again. We’d flown Pan Am a lot in them days.
Then of course all the rumours coming out in the press didn’t help: that Pan Am was secretly ferrying around American spies and the CIA and assassination squads for the American government.
The whole thing was just, ‘Oh God!’ This is a world not of our making, but unfortunately it’s one that all of us have to live in. The spiteful, precious political
views of a few. I’m very, very wary of extremist political or religious agendas; they are the world’s most stupid and dangerous people.

Ultimately, you’re at the mercy of life’s luck, and sooner or later your luck runs out, whether that be a killer disease or a car-crash victim situation, or whatever. Or maybe you
just run out of steam and croak it. But in the meantime enjoy it to the full. All the problems Nora and I go through, they’re just problems – nothing can take the sun away.

We’re the closest that I can imagine any two people ever being. It’s beyond words. It’s one of those situations that’s very difficult to describe. I’ve tried in
songs, like on ‘Grave Ride’ from
Psycho’s Path
: I used the backdrop of that horrible Bosnian war to explain my bond, and how the situation of a war, a calamity, separating
us would be so earth-shatteringly destroying to me. I don’t know if it’s quite the greatest thing ever written, but it’s a song that makes me cry, and I don’t like to
attempt to do it live because I know it would really hurt.

The idea of losing Nora is unbearable. And we’re coming of the age now that we have to consider death, because all my peers are dying around me left, right and centre! I look at all of
them, and I think, none of them have done anything like what I’ve got up to, and they’re all kicking the bucket rather sharpish. I must have sustainability, and that has to be because
of the positive influence of having Nora in my life. She is such a positive person.

Our worry is, how we are going to manage to die together, because if one goes before the other, it’s going to be absolutely murder on the survivor. But the way we look at it, in terms of
statistics, women have a greater longevity, so we should die at exactly the same time. That would be just perfect.

I
t was Rambo, my now full-time manager, who conned me into being a contestant on
I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!
They’d actually tried to get me onto this British TV reality show before, but I’d backed away and didn’t even want to consider it – in fact, I never even bothered to watch a
single episode. Warning bells went off in my head – it’s just fading celebrities wanting to get on TV for any old reason, like game-show panellists.

After numerous rejections I finally said, ‘Oh, all right!’ I had no idea what I’d committed to, other than family and friends wittering on about a bunch of C-listers being
imprisoned in the Australian jungle. Rambo, the git, kept saying, ‘Nah, it’ll be good, John, it’s something different, it will make a change from touring.’ So I went into it
wide-eyed, and dumb as a plank of wood.

Of course, there was instant uproar: ‘What a sell-out, he just wants to be famous!’ ‘No! I’m already
infamous
! I’m doing this for
me
and my love of
nature, you daft a’peths!’ But thank God for people like Johnny Rambo because, after a huge amount of arguments, he ultimately reminds you that you’ve got to challenge
yourself.

When me and Rambo arrived in Australia to do the show in January 2004, there’d been a fake story put out in the press that I’d caused a scene at the airport
in LA and hadn’t boarded. All made up, absolute nonsense. Gold Coast airport was swamped with paparazzi and when we eventually made our way to the hotel, of course they’d given up the
rooms that they’d reserved for us, so I wasn’t staying at the same hotel as the rest of the cast – the Versace, on the Gold Coast. Fine, anywhere will do. Plastic Roman and
Grecian statues really aren’t my taste. It took them all day and way into that evening to find Rambo and me a pair of rooms, so what was poor old Johnny to do? The bars were open.

The next morning, there was a meeting, and the day after we went straight into it. That first meeting was ridiculous, because everybody was embarrassed to be in everybody else’s company,
and at the same time we were being fitted for our jungle clothing. I can tell you: not one of us would admit our real waist size. It was all done out in the open! Very hard. There was a great deal
of whispering with the wardrobe woman. You’d bark out, ‘Oh, I’m 34 waist,’ then whisper, ‘Really, I’m 38!’ And of course her being Australian, she’d
yell, ‘Whassat?
38?
’

They told me I could only bring one luxury item into the camp, so I decided on a jar of Vaseline. I knew the ants could bite the living daylights out of you, if you let them, so the idea was to
rub the legs of my bunk with Vaseline so they couldn’t crawl up to do so. I knew everyone would take it wrong, and raise an eyebrow, but it was such a good tip they passed it on to the other
celebrities, and a couple of them followed suit.

The whole thing immediately felt like a set-up. It stunk of agenda. They’d put me in with people like BBC TV’s former royal correspondent, Jennie Bond, and Lord Brocket – the
living embodiment of the upper-class black sheep. I didn’t know at the time that this is the bloke that hid all them Ferraris in a lake. What a dastardly cad!

I had no idea what to expect other than I’d feel like the odd one
out, which is my normal state of affairs anyway. I got serious after-burns from their zip-slide on
the way in. I thought, ‘Oh bollocks, is it too late to leave, because this looks like daft shit!’ It was just a collection of people all moaning about their sorry lot out there. The
whining and the whingeing and the weeping and the wailing and the gnashing of teeth. ‘My God, you mugs, haven’t you ever roughed it? Look, the whole thing’s a calamity, a farce,
but the money goes to charity. What the hell are you moaning about?’

I didn’t
not
get on with anybody. It was a bunch of socially inept people that somehow managed to like each other until competition raised its ugly head. I liked the girl Kerry
Katona very much, I loved her energy, but I’ve got nothing to say about the so-called ‘glamour model’, Jordan, one way or the other – just nothing. As I said at the time,
‘It doesn’t contribute.’ She wouldn’t lift a finger: ‘
Uuuuugh
, there’s no
wat-aaaah
.’ ‘Well, boil some!’ ‘The fire’s
gone out . . .’ ‘Well, you’re next to it, sort it out!’ She can’t actually connect the dots. With her, there’s nothing there, so there’s nothing to bother
about.

I liked the guy she started seeing in there, Peter Andre, the pop singer. Although it seems a ridiculous persona he has there, I think it’s fairly genuine. He really is ridiculous! And
happy – he brings no harm or hurt to people.

Their music-making was a horrible sham. For me, the moment of absolute terror was around the campfire, when somehow or other somebody pulled out an acoustic guitar. Oh no, camp songs!
That’s the very last thing on God’s earth I want, so I just walked off into the wilderness in the dark. I could still hear it from way off out: Jordan rehearsing her new hit single,
with help from Andre. I thought, what a set-up that is. Their perception of what they think music is, and to think I was going to share in this moment with them – impossible! It all felt very
contrived and unnatural. How indeed did a bloody acoustic guitar turn up? Cue Camera Two, introduce the prop!

By that point it began to dawn on me that, although it’s nice and
wild out here and all of that, and the animals are real – and the lizards and the insects,
they’re all
seriously
real – the situation is
not
, and I was losing interest in it. It just seemed like foolish escapades.

So how do I entertain myself in a situation like that, when there’s allegedly nothing to do? I go and get firewood, I go and get water, I keep the fire running, I boil the water, I keep
the water trough full. For me, that’s great, it’s an activity. I view myself as indolent, and that’s actually the thing that makes me get up and do things. ‘Bad Johnny! This
relaxation will kill you, get up and do something!’ I do have conversations with myself, and in a situation like that I found that I had the most thrilling ones.

The actual camp itself was fairly dreary and overcast because it was surrounded by high trees, so you had no idea what time of day it was. That was, for me, very frustrating. I loved wandering
away and just knowing that every beast around could bite and cause me a serious problem. I liked it – I didn’t think I’d be able to do that. Fantastic – the wildlife, the
snakes, and knowing these are all killer things, but just letting them swish by. They’d look up at you and let you know, ‘Don’t fuck with me.’ And indeed I didn’t, and
so had a great affinity there.

Having the cameras on you all day and all night, on the other hand, was a very good lesson in how to let go of that false perception you have of yourself, and not feel the need to protect
yourself, and just
be yourself
. You have no choice. We were on camera twenty-four hours a day – get used to it! What a great training camp it was.