Jackie O Henderson breaks down as she discusses her healing journey after admitting to secret drug and alcohol addiction: 'I never felt good enough'
Jackie 'O' Henderson tearfully broke down live on-air on Wednesday morning as she discussed her ongoing healing journey.
The radio star, 50, was speaking to American self-help podcaster Gabby Bernstein about ways to improve your mindset when she made the tearful admission.
'I never felt good enough.... It takes a long time to do that. And then it all came up and it was like a bloody pressure cooker and everything came out. Sometimes I think we have core beliefs that we're not even aware of,' Jackie began.
Gabby asked Jackie what it was she was insecure about and if she was looking to 'manifest' a romantic partner due to still being single at 50.
Jackie responded with 'yep' and admitted her single status was something she felt insecure about, in addition to working hard to maintain her sobriety.
'I know it takes a long time to do that. You know, to heal. I feel like I've been working on it for two and a half years, constantly,' she said.
Gabby told the veteran presenter that while the healing process was a 'lifetime journey', she could make a commitment to better living each and every day.
Jackie previously shared her own personal story with addiction with listeners during The Kyle and Jackie O Show back in October.
Fighting back tears, Jackie shared that she checked into rehab facility the Betty Ford Clinic in California in November 2022, when she took an extended break from The Kyle and Jackie O Show that she previously claimed was due to long Covid.
Known for treating Hollywood stars including Keith Urban, Robert Downey Jr. and Lindsay Lohan, Betty Ford charges anywhere from $45,000 to $90,000 AUD for a month-long stay, depending on the program.
Jackie revealed on-air that her long-time friend Gemma had been instrumental into getting her into rehab.
She emotionally credited Gemma with saving her life by persuading her to check into the clinic.
She recalled: 'It came to a head and [Gemma] was such a great friend. She said ''I'm sorry Jackie, but you're not going to taper off this, it will never work. I'm checking you into rehab at the end of the week... we're going''.'
'I said "don't be ridiculous, that is such overkill. I don't have a problem that bad that I need to go to Betty Ford".'
'And she said "no, we're going and we're doing it" and I thank God she did that,' Jackie admitted.
'Thank God there was someone out there like her. I believe she saved my life.'
Jackie said they caught a night flight out of Australia and boarded at the 'last moment' to avoid being seen and then jetted over to LA, where Gemma stayed with her for two days before she checked into the clinic.
She said Gemma accompanied her and helped her to get on the plane 'undetected' as she discussed keeping her addiction a secret for two 'long and painful years'.
At the time, Kyle - who was unaware of Jackie's drug addiction - told their listeners Jackie was taking a break after contracting Covid.
Instead, she was secretly flown out of Australia to be treated for 28 days at the world famous rehab facility for an addiction to painkillers, sleeping pills and alcohol.
At the height of her addiction, Jackie took around 10-12 Stilnox/Zolpidem sleeping pills and 24 Panadeine Forte a day and would take them while drinking alcohol.
Stilnox users are warned not to drink alcohol as it can slow the respiratory system and make it difficult to wake up.
Jackie said Betty Ford told her not to change 'anything' about her usage before arriving as it could be 'dangerous' so she was still taking the pills the day she flew out to the US.
She also said she went 'back and forth' deciding whether to share the news publicly before detailing the extent of her addiction in her memoir The Whole Truth.
If you're looking for support for alcohol and drug use, reach out to Odyssey House NSW on 1800 397 739.
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The Independent
42 minutes ago
- The Independent
Resurfaced footage shows Brian Wilson describing songwriting process as ‘coming from the heart'
Brian Wilson describes his songwriting process as 'coming from the heart' in resurfaced footage following his death. The Beach Boys co-founder has passed away at the age of 82, with the news shared on X by his children on Wednesday (11 June). Footage recorded in 2006 for the 40th Anniversary edition of Pet Sounds shows the singer, who wrote hits such as Surfin' USA, Good Vibrations, and God Only Knows, expressing his belief that good songs 'come from deep inside the soul'. Speaking to record producer George Martin, he said: 'I believe that songwriting is an unconscious thing. I don't believe anyone can concentrate on music and write music, it comes from a higher place, I'm almost sure of that.'
The Guardian
44 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Whether wistful or euphoric, Brian Wilson made pop's most overwhelmingly beautiful music
It's fair to say that no one who bought the Beach Boys debut single in 1961 would have realised they were in the presence of genius. Surfin' sounded exactly like what it was: one of dozens of cheap, hastily-recorded singles released on a tiny independent label to cash in on the burgeoning craze for surf music, albeit a regionally-successful example of type. You might easily have expected to never hear of the band who made it again. But the 19-year-old Brian Wilson was determined – he was the taskmaster that had relentlessly drilled his unwilling younger brothers Carl and Dennis into learning to harmonise – and a quick learner. The leap in quality between Surfin' and its 1962 follow-up Surfin' Safari was striking. The leap between Surfin' Safari and Wilson's glorious re-write of Chuck Berry's Sweet Little Sixteen, Surfin' USA – released nine months later – was staggering. Surfin' USA was a pivotal record in the Beach Boys' career, the moment where they began selling the world an idealised notion of Californian youth as a carefree, sun-kissed paradise of beauty, athleticism and unending material luxury. It was set to music that was still essentially primitive – three chords; guitars, bass and drums with only a brief splash of reedy organ for colour – but so thick with beautifully arranged harmony vocals, it felt weirdly sumptuous. Indeed, it was so irresistible that no one seemed to notice the Beach Boys themselves bore no resemblance to the tanned teen Adonises they were singing about: the band's heartthrob, the unreasonably handsome Dennis, was hidden away at the back of the stage behind his drumkit, leaving audiences looking at his two rather less glamorous brothers, their prematurely balding cousin Mike Love and the diminutive, jug-eared guitarist Al Jardine. Nor, as it turned out, had the Wilson brothers ever enjoyed the kind of carefree youth they sang about. Their horrendous father Murray, a thwarted songwriter, was a tyrant who, in Brian Wilson's words 'brutalized' and 'terrorised' his family: most notoriously, he was reputed to have beaten his eldest son about the head so severely as a child, it left him permanently deaf in one ear. 'Murray Wilson was a dick,' Mike Love once noted, flatly. 'I'm glad he wasn't my father.' You could perhaps tell that all was not well in the Wilsons' world by the fact that, left to his own devices, Brian Wilson kept coming up with songs that told a completely different story to the big hits. In October 1963, The Beach Boys released Be True To Your School, their third US Top 10 hit of the year, a fabulously overblown bit of swaggering Californian braggadocio, replete with cheerleader backing vocals and an arrangement that mimicked a marching band: 'whatsamatta buddy, ain't ya heard of my school? It's No 1 in the state'. But on the B-side was In My Room: it was slow and desperately sad, filled with worries and fears and a yearning for solitude. Wilson kept turning out the hits, each one more perfectly-turned than the last, responding to the challenged posed by the arrival of the Beatles and the British Invasion with ever-more complex vocal harmonies and increasingly sophisticated arrangements: Fun Fun Fun, I Get Around, Dance Dance Dance. But he also kept slipping songs like In My Room onto B-sides and albums: The Warmth of the Sun, She Knows Me Too Well, the extraordinary Don't Worry Baby, on which Wilson, incredibly, managed to alchemise a song about a hot rod race into a heartbreaking, impossibly beautiful meditation on insecurity, self-doubt and the redemptive power of love. It was as if Wilson couldn't stop his own sadness seeping out, a state of affairs that might well have been compounded by the astonishing pressure placed on him as the band's chief songwriter, arranger and producer (between 1963 and 1965, he delivered nine albums in under three years, a workload that helped drive him to the first of a succession of nervous breakdowns). You could hear it in the breathtaking introduction to California Girls – 22 seconds of misty autumnal melancholy appended to a sunlit song about the attractiveness of women from different regions of the USAmerica – and it seemed to overwhelm him entirely on side two of 1965's Beach Boys Today!, the first album he made after being released from touring duties. Permanently ensconced in the studio, his arrangements becoming increasingly complex and demanding – outtakes reveal his extraordinary precocity, a man barely into his 20s commanding some of America's greatest session musicians like a general – he came up with a suite of gorgeous, sighing ballads that stands both as Wilson's first extended masterpiece and a dry run for the following year's Pet Sounds. So much has been written about the latter album – his bandmates' increasing disquiet at the turn Wilson's music was taking, its relative commercial failure in the US, its impact on a gobsmacked Paul McCartney and John Lennon, its subsequent canonisation and regular citation as the Greatest Album Ever Made – that its story has become over-familiar, which doesn't mean that the music on it can't still knock you off your feet: the limpid beauty of Caroline No and God Only Knows; the impossibly thrilling moment, 52 seconds in, when I'm Waiting For the Day suddenly surges back into life; the yearning, pleading desperation that lies at the heart of I Know There's An Answer and I Guess I Just Wasn't Made For These Times. Whatever the US sales figures, Wilson seemed to know precisely how good Pet Sounds was: emboldened, his production style became ever more audacious. He began experimenting with splicing different pieces of music he called 'feels' together into songs, concealing the tape joins with reverb. Often the feels were deliberately recorded at different studios by different musicians, who had no idea what the finished track would sound like: no one had ever worked like this before. The 1966 single Good Vibrations lasted for three and half minutes, but took six months – and depending on whose estimate you believe, between $10,000 and $75,000 – to make. But whatever pains were staked in its recording were worth it. Good Vibrations remains not just Wilson's masterpiece, but one of the towering achievements in all pop history. It was impossibly complex – even Wikipedia's summary of its structure takes up over 1,200 words and contains diagrams – but its constant emotional shifts from wistfulness to charging euphoria flowed perfectly. It sounded incredible coming out of a transistor radio, and sold nearly 300,000 copies in four days in the US alone: it was a record, as one critic put it, that you could bathe in. What happened next is a matter of record: his already precarious mental health further shaken by the LSD he'd started taking in search of even greater inspiration, Wilson abandoned the ensuing album Smile unfinished. It's an article of faith among his devotees that had it been completed and released, it would have permanently changed the course of pop history, but listening to the version finally assembled as part of a lavish 2011 box set, you wonder if that would have been the case. Smile was certainly filled with extraordinary music: the heart-stopping beauty of Surf's Up; Wind Chimes' eerie evocation of the unsettling side of the LSD experience; the album's awesome opening sweep, from the wordless, ethereal Our Prayer to the dark, lurching rumble of Do You Like Worms? to a wilfully episodic version of Heroes and Villians that, depending on your perspective, either pushed the 'feel' technique to new heights of daring or to breaking point, where the song started to sound disjointed in a way Good Vibrations simply had not. But it also sounded absolutely nothing like the kind of psychedelia that was selling in 1967. Instead of phasing effects and backwards tapes and lyrics about peace and love there was doo-wop, yodelling, barbershop singing, ragtime, references to pre-rock and roll crooning and the cod-Polynesian Tiki culture that had swept Hollywood in the 1950s: straight-arrow American pop culture – the kind of stuff the emergent hippy counterculture dismissed as hopelessly square – filtered through an lysergic lens. Whether Smile would or wouldn't have been a success on release is besides the point: its abandonment in 1967 prompted a decline in both Wilson's health and the Beach Boys' commercial standing. They spent the rest of the decade scrabbling around trying to make up lost ground, and – increasingly – to get their former leader engaged in making music at all. There's a great deal to commend the Beach Boys' late 60s albums – Wild Honey's raw fusion of their trademark sound with soul is a delight; both 1968's understated Friends and 1969's 20:20 were liberally sprinkled with highlights, Wilson's gorgeous Time To Get Alone and Wake the World Among them; his brothers Carl and Dennis were increasingly developing as songwriters in their own right. But with their resident genius only intermittently engaged, they were clearly no longer at the vanguard of pop. Curiously, their most prescient release was the 1968 single Do It Again, an attempt to recreate their old surf music-themed sound that you might have called craven were the results not so infectiously joyous. It pre-empted the vogue for nostalgia that variously gave us American Graffiti, Grease, a rock'n'roll revival and Don McLean's famous assertion that 'the music' had died with Buddy Holly – that ostensibly more innocent era looked appealing as the 60s first curdled into darkness and violence, then turned into the grim 1970s. Rumours about Brian Wilson's mental health became ever more lurid, but as the 70s began the Beach Boys made a succession of fantastic albums – Sunflower, Surf's Up and Holland – all of which contained songs that suggested that, however unwell he was, Wilson's creative abilities were far from extinguished: This Whole World, All I Wanna Do, Sail On Sailor and the frankly astonishing 'Til I Die, a harrowing and surprisingly clear-eyed expression of his misery set to melody as divine as anything on Pet Sounds. None of them sold. They eventually found a niche as a revival act, bolstered by shows that depended on their stockpile of unimpeachable 60s hits: at the height of his 70s fame, Elton John unwisely booked the Beach Boys as a support act and, by his own account, they blew him offstage. In search of a new album to match their live reputation, they employed a dubious psychiatrist called Eugene Landy, and embarked on an ill-advised Brian's Back campaign – Mike Love even wrote a thoroughly ghastly song of the same name – which propelled 1976's 16 Big Ones into the Top 10, but no one in their right minds would have claimed its contents were anything close to Wilson at his peak and no one who read the profoundly disturbing interviews he gave to support it could have claimed his mental health was repaired. By the early 80s, Wilson was clearly more unwell than ever: vastly overweight, he cut a distracted, unsettling figure onstage. In desperation, Landy was re-employed, and by 1988, a svelte Brian Wilson re-emerged seemingly miraculously cured and touting an eponymous solo album. There was still plenty to be concerned about, not least the fact that Landy was now apparently Wilson's 'executive producer', business partner and occasional co-songwriter, but it contained a couple of great songs in Love And Mercy and Melt Away: such was the general delight at Wilson's unexpected reappearance that it got rather better reviews than its contents deserved, a pattern that was to be repeated many times in the ensuing years. In truth, nothing on Brian Wilson's subsequent solo albums really came close to his 60s peak, even after he was disentangled from Eugene Landy's clutches. His best latterday work is probably the moving suite of songs that concluded the 2012 Beach Boys reunion album, That's Why God Made the Radio, filled with intimations of aging and mortality. But it scarcely mattered. In the late 90s, a band was assembled around him that, incredibly, could replicate the complex arrangements of his 60s productions live. They began touring, playing Pet Sounds in its entirety, to deservedly rapturous response – the shows they played at London's Royal Festival Hall in 2002 were an utterly euphoric underlining of Wilson's songwriting genius. It was a move that proved curiously influential: within a few years, you couldn't move for legendary artists performing their most celebrated albums live. They enabled him to complete a new version of Smile, provoking more shows performing the album in full. Incredible as it would once have seemed, Brian Wilson spent most of the 21st century as a touring artist, a dependable bringer of joy to festivals and high-profile shows. Occasionally, concerns were raised about Wilson's wellbeing – he could appear disengaged and confused onstage – but in interviews he insisted that it was where he wanted to be. It was a happy ending of sorts to a story that, at one point, seemed destined to end horribly. But, for a moment, let's try and forget the story – the myth of Brian Wilson, if you like – entirely. Instead, just play Good Vibrations, or Don't Worry Baby, or California Girls, or Caroline No, and marvel at what he achieved, rather than what lurked behind those achievements. Pop music as perfect as pop music is ever likely to get: music you can bathe in.
The Sun
2 hours ago
- The Sun
How Beach Boys ‘genius' Brian Wilson brought sun-kissed California to world with some of the greatest songs ever made
GOD Only Knows how Brian Wilson created pop's most sublime tunes. The death of The Beach Boys icon at 82 marks the passing of one of the few artists who genuinely deserved to be called a 'genius'. 8 8 8 He was the composer, performer and producer Sir Paul McCartney looked up to. Despite penning all those era-defining songs with John Lennon in The Beatles, Macca placed God Only Knows above them all — and admitted that 'it reduces me to tears every time I hear it'. He performed the song with Brian in 2002 and, as you won't be surprised to hear, 'broke down' during the sound check. Among Brian's other best known songs, mainly co-writes, were Good Vibrations, Surfin' USA, I Get Around and Wouldn't It be Nice. Last night, his children said in a statement: 'We are heartbroken to announce that our beloved father Brian Wilson has passed away. 'We are at a loss for words right now. We realise that we are sharing our grief with the world. Love & Mercy.' His daughter Daria added: 'I don't know what to say. I loved him in ways I can't explain. He was my dad.' Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards Ronnie Wood said he was 'in mourning'. John Lennon's son Sean Ono Lennon described the loss of 'our American Mozart'. And Nancy Sinatra said: 'His cherished music will live forever as he travels through the Universe and beyond. Brian Wilson's last ever performance of iconic Beach Boys hit just two years before his death aged 82 "God bless you, sweet Brian. 'One of the biggest thrills of my life was singing 'California Girls' with Brian.' Brian was born in Inglewood, southern California, in 1942, the first son of Audree and Murry Wilson. From a very early age, he was recognised for his musical gifts. He had perfect pitch and could sing back phrases sung to him as a baby. Brian had a difficult relationship with his dad. He, along with his siblings, suffered psychological and physical abuse by their father. The singer's 2016 memoir, I am Brian Wilson, paints Murry as 'violent' and 'cruel', but also suggests that some claims against him were exaggerated or unfounded. Murry had remembered how, after hearing only a few verses of The Caissons Go Rolling Along, Brian, then an infant, was able to reproduce the tune. At 12, the Wilson family acquired an upright piano, which Brian spent hours and hours teaching himself to play. 8 8 He and his younger brothers, Carl and Dennis, got into the pop sounds of the day — R&B, rock 'n' roll and doo-wop. Despite being partly deaf in one ear, Brian joined Carl and their cousin Mike Love to form a high school group, Carl and the Passions, later bringing in Dennis and Al Jardine to form the Pendletones. Brian co-wrote the group's first song, Surfin', which, in turn, inspired their record label to change their name to The Beach Boys. The rest, as they say, is history, As the chief inspirational force, he brought the sun-kissed Californian lifestyle — surfing, fast cars and parties — to a world emerging from post-war austerity into the Swinging Sixties. The band had adopted a clean-cut, college-boy image, sang about dreamy California Girls and be- came the West Coast's answer to The Beatles. Brian married his first wife, Marilyn, in 1964 and marital strains were to influence the lyrical direction of his masterpiece, The Beach Boys' eleventh album, Pet Sounds. Later that year, Brian had suffered a panic attack on a flight just hours after appearing on TV show Shindig! This prompted him to give up live appearances to concentrate on writing and production. His giant artistic strides began. It's also worth noting that this was the era of psychedelic drugs, notably LSD, and Brian was one of countless musicians to try them out, curious about their effect on songwriting. So came a huge change of tack in his career, leading to his rare mastery of instrumentation, harmony and recording technology. In his later years, Wilson was a man of few words who let his music do the talking. 'A SPIRITUAL RECORD' He struggled with mental illness and found interviews uncomfortable. But, during the times I met him, I found him polite and gracious and steadfastly sincere. In 2016, during a promotional visit to London, I asked Wilson to describe his happiest memory of making Pet Sounds — to some, the greatest album of all time. 'Well, I loved making God Only Knows with my brother Carl. He had a good voice,' he replied, fifty years after its release. It was his understated but heartfelt way of paying tribute to his youngest sibling, blessed with an angelic voice, who had died from cancer in 1998. He told me he had been striving to 'make a choir, a nice choir' with Pet Sounds. Through Carl and the rest of the group's glorious lead and harmony singing, he succeeded. Brian was responsible for the sweeping symphonic arrangements and wall-of-sound production that doffed a hat to Phil Spector's girl group work — but he took it to whole new places. He gave the album weird and wonderful sound effects — bicycle bells, trains, Hawaiian strings, Coke cans and barking dogs among them. 'And we had little toy instruments,' recalled Brian. 'We just thought we'd put them in there for the kids. I knew it would be a very special album,' he continued, before exclaiming, 'I just knew it!'. 8 8 In his memoir, I Am Brian Wilson, he elaborated further: 'I love the whole Pet Sounds record. 'I got a full vision out of it in the studio. "After that, I said to myself that I had completed the greatest album I will ever produce. 'It was a spiritual record. When I was making it, I looked around at the musicians and the singers and I could see their halos.' He also talked about the impact of The Beatles: 'I met Paul McCartney later in the Sixties, in a studio. I was almost always in a studio back then. 'We had a little chat about music. "Everyone knows now that God Only Knows was Paul's favourite song — not only his favourite Beach Boys song, but one of his favourite songs, period. "It's the kind of thing people write in liner notes and say on talk shows. "When people read it, they kind of look at that sentence and keep going. "But think about how much it mattered to me when I first heard it. 'I was the person who wrote God Only Knows and here was another person — the person who wrote Yesterday and And I Love Her and so many other songs — saying it was his favourite. 'It really blew my mind. He wasn't the only Beatle who felt that way. 'John Lennon called me after Pet Sounds — phoned me up, I think the British say — to tell me how much he loved the record.' I'm in a better frame of mind these days. It feels great . . . it's like I see some light. Things make sense to me again Brian Wilson It's sad to think that Wilson, this architect of the band's unique sunlit sound, went on to suffer years in the darkness in the Seventies and Eighties. Mental illness allied to drug abuse left Brian lost in a world of his own from which few believed he would return. But his rehabilitation began in 1988 with his self-titled first solo album. It continued with I Just Wasn't Made For These Times (1995), Orange Crate Art (1995 with long-time collaborator Van Dyke Parks), Imagination (1998) and Gettin' In Over My Head (2004). That same year, he finally realised his lost masterpiece SMiLE. 'That was amazing,' Brian told me. "I never ever imagined it coming out until my manager and (second) wife (Melinda) said: 'You ought to try to finish it.'' He also released a Pet Sounds Live album, but I asked whether he would consider playing the album again in its entirety in concert. 'I don't think we'll be doing that again,' he said with quite alarming frankness. 'We just thought we drove it into the ground.' Last year, it was revealed Brian was suffering from dementia. A conservatorship was awarded to his family, his publicist and manager after Melinda, his wife of 29 years, had died. 8 At the time of her passing, Brian said, 'Melinda was more than my wife. She was my saviour. "She gave me the emotional security. I needed to have a career. "She encouraged me to make the music that was closest to my heart. "She was my anchor.' I remember speaking to Brian on his 66th birthday in 2008, when, in the company of Melinda, life was looking up for this American music icon. Sporting a full head of brushed back grey hair, he spoke movingly about his situation. 'I walk every day for exercise so I can keep alive', he said. 'My state of being has been elevated because I've been exercising and writing songs. 'I'm in a better frame of mind these days. It feels great . . . it's like I see some light. Things make sense to me again.' Not just God, but the whole world, knows how special you were.
