SHE'S not heard from either of them in years, but Kerry Katona has issued yet another olive branch to former Atomic Kitten bandmates, Liz McLarnon and Natasha Hamilton, saying: “I wish I was closer to the girls”.
However, pals have revealed that despite Kerry’s pleas, there is no chance of the band reuniting and that years of bitter feuding, drunken brawls and vicious slurs have ensured there’s no going back.
Speaking about Spice Girl Mel B’s wedding last week, Kerry was speculating that Victoria Beckham, Geri Horner and Mel C might not have attended due to a fall out and lamented on her own dysfunctional band.
“It would be sad if they weren’t going due to a fallout, as the Spice Girls have so much history,” Kerry, 44, mused in her weekly new! magazine column.
"It’s like me and Atomic Kitten – I do wish I was closer to the girls because we had amazing experiences together. But sometimes it is what it is.”
Now sources close to the situation have revealed the real reason Natasha, 42, and Liz, 44, won’t speak to Kerry - and it’s sure to devastate her.
“The truth is, they simply got fed up with dealing with Kerry,” the insider said.
“She became unreliable, every gig they did she would make some kind of foul mouthed joke and it all became very tiresome and embarrassing for Tash and Liz."
Now, almost a decade after they last spoke, Kerry is desperate to reunite once more - though her wishes are falling on deaf ears.
“Kerry genuinely believes getting the girls back together would be as big as the Oasis reunion,” our insider said. “But it’s just not going to happen.
"Liz is currently expecting her first baby and Tash is trying to make it as a solo star.
"Kerry’s making a fortune on her OnlyFans and doing Celebs Go Dating, and these are things the other two just don’t want to be associated with.”
The girls formed in 1998 but Kerry initially quit the group in 2001 when she fell pregnant with Molly, her first daughter with Westlife star Brian McFadden.
She was replaced by Jenny Frost and the band continued with moderate success. However, an opportunity for Kerry to rejoin the band in 2012, for ITV show The Big Reunion, meant Jenny was out - and Kerry was back in.
According to reports Jenny, now 47, was “devastated” and fell out with Natasha and Liz as a result.
'She’s a toxic c***'
She also got a dig in at Kerry, telling Closer Magazine she’d “rather eat her own kidney with a spoon” than ever work with her.
She later moaned, “I’m not in contact with them any more, which I think is a real shame. But I didn’t like how things were handled with the reunion and Kerry replacing me.”
The Kittens continued in their original format for the next few years, though it wasn’t without copious amounts of drama.
Kerry recalls in her book Whole Again how she and Natasha “got physical” when on a tour of Australia in 2017, both accusing one another of setting up unflattering pap shots.
The girls had to be dragged apart in a pub, with Kerry getting locked out while Natasha screamed obscenities inside.
Kerry later blamed a mystery 'panto injury' for then missing one of the Australia gigs, where Liberty X's Michelle Heaton had temporarily replaced Liz.
The truth is, they simply got fed up with dealing with Kerry
Insider
Kerry also remembered when Liz “punched me in the back of head” after performing on ITV kids show SM:TV.
Writing in her new! column in 2019, Kerry revealed: "I remember some of the fights we had in Atomic Kitten back in the day.
"Once, Liz punched me from behind after we had a little row. I was furious and got my own back.
"I made her get changed in the toilets at SMTV Live, then I stamped on her feet while we were up on stage singing Whole Again."
But the straw that broke the camel’s back came in 2018 when Kerry did a comedy gig with some drag queens, which, in her own words, was “vulgar and in bad taste but hilarious”.
When asked by a queen what Natasha was really like, Kerry joked to a packed house: “she’s a toxic c***”.
“It was all meant in good humour, and if you’d been in the audience you would've known that straight away from my delivery,” she later said.
However, when word got back to Natasha, she didn’t see it that way and just a few weeks later while gigging at Butlins and still fuming, she told Kerry, “I don’t wanna do this anymore.”
When the press got wind of this, headlines splashed with the news that the Kittens were done, but Kerry, believing Natasha would come back after a break, insisted that wasn’t the case.
The truth left Kerry shattered.
Natasha and Liz had continued to gig behind Kerry’s back, without her.
“It broke my heart,” Kerry wrote in her book. “I had no idea what had happened or where I stood. No one would answer my texts and we never spoke in person again.”
Our source explained, “Kerry truly believes Natasha was looking for a reason to lose her and the toxic joke was a perfect excuse. She never, ever, forgave Kerry for that.
Kerry truly believes Natasha was looking for a reason to lose her and the toxic joke was a perfect excuse. She never, ever, forgave Kerry for that
Source
"It was humiliating for her and it’s typical of Kerry, to say something so ridiculous and get herself into trouble. Tash even blocked her on social media, she genuinely doesn’t want anything to do with her.”
In developments that are sure to devastate Kerry further, Natasha recently hinted that the Kittens might get back together yet again - only this time with returning member Jenny, now all their bridges are mended.
"If we did have a reunion, it would be me, Liz and Jenny,” she said in May.
“And we’re all still close. We all speak. We all hang out. So there’s no reason why, if it was for the right thing, and everyone was in the right place, that we could do it.”
Meanwhile there’s still no love loss between Kerry and Jenny, even though Kerry stayed at the hotel Jenny now owns in Ibiza, where she currently lives, while filming Celebs Go Dating.
Keen to get a dig in, Kerry said the hotel and Ibiza was “gorgeous” and that Jenny had “done so well for herself,” but added, “I can’t say I’ve got any desire to go back - it’s not my scene.”
Miaow, indeed.
