KYLE Sandilands has revealed in an in-depth interview his greatest failings, why he’s fat and he knows why “some people think I’m an a***hole”.
The controversial breakfast radio star opened up about his image, how he’s easily led and why he makes questionable remarks on KiiS FM’s Kyle and Jackie O show.
Sandilands, 45, also said that despite existing medical problems he was not prepared to do anything about his weight “until I’m older and feel like I’ve got nothing left to do”.
And while the man who is arguably Australia’s best known radio star has written about his dysfunctional childhood, he opened up on ABC-TV’s “A Brush with Fame” about his fame and his secret vices.
“If I could really live it over again I’d change nothing, because all roads lead to this,” he told the show’s host, comedian and painter Anh Do.
“[My] general humour on air or off air is a bit blue and a bit crude. That’s just what I find funny, so I can understand that some people think I’m an a***hole.
“I don’t find knock knock jokes funny, I find something that’s a bit naughty funny.
“I think people that listen to the show regularly, that listen a lot realise I’m not a bad person.
“Some bad things have happened. We have made some dumb mistakes here and there and that’s bound to happen when you speak on radio every day for three or four hours.”
Speaking about the portrait Do was painting of Sandilands during the interview, the radio star said: “I hope he captures the sensitive side of me that a lot of people don’t think I have ... I can cry and everything, you know.”
In a frank discussion with Do about his excessive spending habits, such as buying an $80,000 “big Miami Vice drug dealer looking boat on the internet”, and eating habits, Sandilands revealed he has high blood pressure.
“It’s ... nothing. I am on medication for it. They say it’s the silent killer,” he said.
“My doctor says ‘if you’d just lose a little bit of weight. Stop being so fat!’
“And I’m like ‘it’s easier said than done. I carry my emotions around in my weight doctor’ [and he says] ‘stop lying!’.
“I could do something about it. I probably will do when I’m older.”
Posing in Do’s studio, Sandilands joked about not having a “best feature” for his palette knife and oils portrait and talked about the survival eating habits he learned living on the streets of Brisbane.
Asked by Do about his “intense childhood” with his brother Chris while their parents argued to the point that police were called to the house, he said it had seemed normal to him.
“Back then it was the 70s. I think it was quite a normal thing ... husbands and wives at war with each other,” he said.
He and his brother Chris “were in our own little land, so we sort of separated ourselves from it, you know playing matchbox cars and building forts”.
But when their mother Pam decided to leave with her sons, their father Peter was in regular pursuit forcing Kyle and his brother to move from school to school.
“I was always the kid in the wrong school uniform always trying to assimilate, so that’s pretty much when I became the class clown.”
Eventually both his mother and father remarried, Pam to a man with whom Kyle had a “tumultuous” relationship.
“Him and my Mum got on very well. He treated her like a queen, which was wonderful from where I sat. I loved the fact that she was happy and being treated nice.
“But he was quite old school with discipline ... quite an enforcer.”
When the couple went away for a lawn bowls weekend when Kyle was 15 years old, his teenage mates bent his “rubber arm” and convinced him to have a party.
Hundreds of children descended on Kyle’s home. “It was debaucherous,” he said.
When he was convinced, again, to take his stepfather’s car for a spin (“we were all 15, no-one had a licence”, he returned to find his mother home early.
Teenagers were having sex in the parents’ bed and one drunken kid was passed out on the dining room table.
Kyle fled the scene on his bike. “Because they were so strict, in my mind I’d done my dash there. I was only a stupid 15 year-old-kid, but I really did think this is permanent.”
He became a “real street rat”, living behind a supermarket and then in a horse float at a petrol station, where by night he listened to the night time broadcasters over speakers above the bowers and “fell in love with radio”.
“Every morning there would be creates of bread delivered, crates of milk in the loading dock out the back, so I’d take a loaf of bread and a carton of milk and eat that dry bread," he said.
“Still to this day I’ll guzzle milk out the carton and take three or four slices of dry bread and munch on that.”
An aunt eventually retrieved Sandilands from the street and took him to Townsville. He was so obsessed with becoming a police officer, he began impersonating a cop with fake police badges, but was arrested for unlawful use of a motor vehicle and placed on probation.
“Working for Meals on Wheels and for Down syndrome kids, that was a big change in my life and I think the empathy for other people kicked in,” he told Do.
“Whereas I think before it was all about me, coming up with stupid fantasies to protect any emotions I might have been squashing.
“I think that opened my eyes that other people were going through tougher things than me.”
He briefly became a private investigator, but could not abide tailing insurance fraud thieves.
“I didn’t really like that because I don’t mind a good scam. I don’t mind people getting away with something, I think that’s the street rat in me.”
Sandilands’ road to radio fame was via radio marketing and promotions jobs, while he was told his voice was “too squeaky” for a broadcaster.
It took him more than eight years to get on air, and then he left Queensland and came to Sydney in 1999.
Radio 2Day FM hired him as the Hot30 co-host with Jackie O for $255,000 a year.
On the Austereo network the pair established the Kyle and Jackie O show, which drew controversy for its on air stunts and huge ratings.
They were poached by Kiis FM in a multi-million dollar deal and currently front Sydney’s number one FM radio show.
Asked by Do about how he handled his considerable income, Sandilands admitted he was “very bad” with money.
“I think I am good with it but my business manager tells me ... he’s always having a heart attack and jumping up and down.
“Like I will buy a 45 foot Scarab on the internet ... a big Miami Vice drug dealer looking boat on the internet.
“And I will say I bought this thing but I don’t know how to pay for it and he will be like ‘stop buying things’.
“I never have any money stress but I have that feeling deep in my gut or deep in me somewhere is living back in that cardboard box.
“I think that’s what drives me.”
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