I Am Ozzy

1. John the Burglar

My father always said I would do something big one day.

‘I’ve got a feeling about you, John Osbourne,’ he’d tell me, after he’d had a few beers. ‘You’re either going to do something very special, or you’re going to go to prison.’

And he was right, my old man.

I was in prison before my eighteenth birthday.

Burglary—that’s what they sent me down for in the end. Or, as the charge sheet said,

‘Breaking and entering and stealing goods to the value of £25.’ That’s about three hundred quid in today’s dough. It wasn’t exactly the Great Train Robbery, put it that way. I was a fucking crap burglar. I kept going back and doing the same job, over and over. I’d scoped out this clothes shop called Sarah Clarke’s, on the street behind my house in Aston. During the first break-in I grabbed a load of hangers and thought, Magic, I’ll be able to sell this stuff down the pub. But I’d forgotten to take a flashlight with me, and it turned out that the clothes I’d nicked were a bunch of babies’ bibs and toddlers’ underpants.

I might as well have tried to sell a turd.

So I went back. This time I nicked a 24-inch telly. But the fucking thing was too heavy for me to carry, and when I was climbing over the back wall it fell on my chest and I couldn’t move for about an hour. I was just lying there in this ditch full of nettles, feeling like a twat. I was like Mr Magoo on drugs, I was. Eventually I got the telly off me but I had to leave it behind.

On my third attempt I managed to nick some shirts. I even had the bright idea to wear a pair of gloves, like a true professional. The only problem was that one of the gloves was missing a thumb, so I left perfect prints all over the place. The cops came to my house a few days later and found the gloves and my pile of swag. ‘A thumbless glove, eh?’ the copper goes to me, as he slaps on the cuffs. ‘Not exactly Einstein, are we?’

About a week later I went to court and was fined forty quid by the judge. That was more dough than I’d ever had in my life. There was no way I could pay it, unless I robbed a bank… or borrowed it from my dad. But my old man wouldn’t help me out. ‘I earn an honest wage,’ he said. ‘Why should I give any of it to you? You need to be taught a fucking lesson.’

‘But Dad—’

‘For your own good, son.’

End of discussion.

The judge sentenced me to three months in Winson Green for ‘non-payment of fines’.

I almost shit my pants when they told me I was going to prison, to be honest with you.

Winson Green was an old Victorian slammer that had been built in 1849. The guards in there were notorious bastards. In fact, the chief inspector of prisons for the entire country later said that Winson Green was the most violent, piss-reeking, lawless fucking hole he’d ever set eyes on. I pleaded with my dad to pay the fine, but he just kept saying that it might finally knock some sense into me, being inside.

Like most kids who get into crime, I’d only ever wanted to be accepted by my mates. I thought it would be cool to be a bad guy, so I tried to be a bad guy. But I soon changed my mind when I got to Winson Green. In the admissions room my heart was pounding so loud and fast I thought it was gonna fly out of my chest and land on the concrete floor. The guards emptied my pockets and put all my stuff in this little plastic bag—wallet, keys, fags—and they had a good old laugh about my long, flowing brown hair.

‘The boys in Block H are gonna love you,’ one of ’em whispered to me. ‘Enjoy the showers, sweetie pie.’

I had no idea what he meant.

But I found out soon enough.

Unless your life’s ambition was to work in a factory, killing yourself with all-night shifts on an assembly line, there wasn’t much to look forward to, growing up in Aston. The only jobs to be had were in the factories. And the houses people lived in had no indoor shitters and were falling down. Because a lot of tanks and trucks and planes had been made in the Midlands during the war, Aston had taken a pounding during the Blitz. On every other street corner when I was a kid there were ‘bomb building sites’—houses that had been flattened by the Germans when they were trying to hit the Castle Bromwich Spitfire factory. For years I thought that’s what playgrounds were called.

I was born in 1948 and grew up at number 14 in the middle of a row of terraced houses on Lodge Road. My father, John Thomas, was a toolmaker and worked nights at the GEC plant on Witton Lane. Everyone called him Jack, which for some reason was a common nickname for John back then. He’d often tell me about the war—like the time he was working in King’s Stanley, Gloucestershire, in the early 1940s. Every night, the Germans were bombing the fuck out of Coventry, which was about fifty miles away. They’d drop high-explosives and parachute mines, and the light from the fires was so bright my dad could read the newspaper during the blackout. When I was a kid I never really understood how heavy-duty that must have been. Imagine it: people went to bed at night not knowing if their houses would still be standing the next morning.

Life after the war wasn’t that much easier, mind you. When my dad got home in the morning after a night’s work at GEC, my mum, Lillian, would start her shift at the Lucas factory. It was a grinding fucking routine, day in, day out. But you didn’t hear them complaining about it.

She was a Catholic, my mum, but she wasn’t religious. None of the Osbournes went to church—although for a while I went to a Church of England Sunday school, ’cos there was fuck-all else to do, and they gave you free tea and biscuits. Didn’t do me much good, all those mornings spent learning Bible stories and drawing pictures of the baby Jesus. I don’t think the vicar would be proud of his ex-pupil, put it that way.

Sunday was the worst day of the week for me. I was the kind of kid who always wanted to have fun, and there wasn’t much of that to be had in Aston. There were just grey skies and corner pubs and sickly looking people who worked like animals on assembly lines. There was a lot of working-class pride, though. People even put those fake stone bricks on the outside of their council houses, to make it look like they were living in fucking Windsor Castle. All they were missing were the moats and the drawbridges. Most of the houses were terraced, like ours, so the stone cladding on one would end where the pebbledash on the next began. It looked so bad.

I was the fourth kid in my family and the first boy. My three older sisters were Jean, Iris and Gillian. I don’t know when my parents found time to go at it with each other, but before long I also got two younger brothers, Paul and Tony. So there were six kids at 14 Lodge Road. It was pandemonium. Like I said, there was no indoor plumbing in the early days, just a bucket to piss in at the end of the bed. Jean, the eldest, eventually got her own bedroom, in an annexe at the back. The rest of us had to share until Jean grew up and got married, when the next in line took her place.

I tried to stay out of my sisters’ way most of the time. They were always fighting with each other, like girls do, and I didn’t want to get caught in the crossfire. But Jean always made a special effort to look out for me. She was almost like another mum, my big sis. Even to this day, we talk on the phone every Sunday, no matter what.

I don’t know what I would have done without Jean, to be honest with you, because I was a very nervous kid. Fear of impending doom ruled my life. I convinced myself that if I stepped on the cracks in the pavement while I was running home, my mother would die. And when my dad was sleeping through the day, I’d start freaking out that he was dead, and I’d have to poke him in the ribs to make sure he was still breathing. He wasn’t too fucking pleased about that, I can tell you. But all of these spooky things kept swirling through my head.

I was terrified most of the time.

Even my first memory is of being scared. It was June 2, 1953: Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation Day. At that time my father was crazy about Al Jolson, the American vaudeville star. My old man would sing Jolson’s songs around the house, he’d recite Jolson’s comedy routines, he’d even dress up like Al Jolson whenever he got the chance.

Now, Al Jolson was most famous for these blackface numbers—the kind of politically incorrect stuff they’d flog you for today. So my father asked my aunty Violet to make a couple of Black and White Minstrel-type suits for me and him to wear during the Coronation celebrations. They were amazing, these suits. Aunty Violet even got us matching white top hats and matching white bow ties and a couple of red-and-white-striped walking canes. But when my dad came downstairs in blackface, I went fucking nuts. I was screaming and crying and wailing, ‘What have you done to him? Give me back my dad!’ I wouldn’t shut up until someone explained that he was just wearing boot polish. Then they tried to put some of it on me, and I went fucking nuts all over again. I would not have any of that stuff on me. I thought it would stick for ever.

‘No! No! No! Noooooooo!’ I screamed.

‘Don’t be such a scaredy-cat, John,’ snapped my dad.

‘No! No! No! Noooooooo!’

I’ve since learned that craziness runs in the family. My grandmother on my father’s side was borderline certifiable. Really fucking nuts. She’d knock me around all the time for no reason. I have this memory of her slapping my thighs over and over again. Then there was my mum’s younger sister, Aunty Edna, who committed suicide by jumping in a canal. She just walked out of the funny farm one day and decided to throw herself in a canal. My grandmother on my mother’s side was a bit Radio Rental, too. She had my granddad’s initials—A. U. for Arthur Unitt—tattooed on her arm. I think about her every time I see one of those gorgeous chicks on the telly with ink all over her body. It looks all right when you’re footloose and fancy free, but, believe me, it doesn’t look too fucking hot when you’re a grandma, and you’ve got a floppy dagger and two wrinkly snakes on your biceps when you’re rocking your grandkids to sleep. But she didn’t give a fuck, my nan. I liked her a lot. She lived until she was ninety-nine.

When I started to drink too much she’d hit me on the arse with a rolled-up copy of the Mirror and go, ‘You’re getting too fat! Stop drinking! You smell like a bloody beer mat!’

My folks were relatively normal in comparison. My dad was strict but he never beat me up or locked me in the coal house or anything. The worst I’d get was a smack if I did anything bad, like when I tried to kneecap my grandfather with a hot poker while he was asleep. But my dad did have big fights with my mother, and I later learned that he slapped her around.

She even took him to court once, apparently, although I knew nothing of that at the time. I’d hear them shouting, but I never knew what any of it was about—money, I suppose. Mind you, no one who lives in the real world spends the whole time going around saying, ‘Oh yes, darling, I understand, let’s talk about our “feelings”, lah-dee-fucking-dah.’ People who say they’ve never had a cross word are living on another fucking planet. And being married was different in those days. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like, working every night while your missus works every day, and still not having any dough to show for it.

He was a good guy, my old man: simple, old-fashioned. Physically, he was built like a featherweight, and he wore these thick, black Ronnie Barker glasses. He would say to me,

‘You might not have a good education, but good manners don’t cost you anything.’ And he practised what he preached: he’d always give up his seat on the bus for a woman or help an old lady across the road.

A good man. I really miss him.

But I can now see that he was a bit of a hypochondriac. Maybe that’s where I got it from.

He always had some kind of trouble with his leg. He’d have bandages wrapped around it all the time but he’d never go and see a doctor. He’d rather have dropped dead than go to a doctor. He was terrified of them, like a lot of people his age were. And he’d never take a day off work. If he ever stayed at home feeling ill, it was time to call the undertaker.

One thing I didn’t inherit from the old man was my addictive personality. My dad would have a few beers when he went out, but he wasn’t an excessive drinker. He used to like Mackeson Stout, of all things. He’d go to the working men’s club, have a laugh with the boys from the factory, and come home singing ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home’. And that was it. I’d never see him rolling around on the floor or pissing his pants or throwing up in the house.

He’d just get merry. Sometimes I’d go with him to the pub on a Sunday then play in the street outside and listen to him singing his head off through the door. And I’d think, Fucking hell, that lemonade my dad drinks must be amazing… I had an incredible imagination. I spent years wondering what beer must be like, until I finally drank some and thought, What the fuck is this shit? My dad would never drink this! But I soon found out how it could make you feel, and I loved anything that could change the way I felt. By the time I was eighteen I could down a pint in five seconds.

My dad wasn’t the only one in our family who liked to sing when he’d had a few. My mum and my sisters did, too. Jean would come home with these Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley records, and they’d all learn them and organise these little family shows on a Saturday night.

My sisters even had some of those Everly Brothers harmonies down pat. The first time I ever performed was at one of those Osbourne get-togethers. I sang Cliff Richard’s ‘Living Doll’, which I’d heard on the radio. Never in a million years did I think I’d end up making a career out of singing. I didn’t think it was possible. As far as I knew, the only way I could make any dough was to go and work in a factory, like everyone else in Aston. Or rob a fucking bank.

And that wasn’t completely out of the question.

Crime came naturally to me. I even had an accomplice—a kid on my street called Patrick Murphy. The Murphys and the Osbournes were tight, even though the Murphy kids were proper Catholics and went to a different school. We started out scrumping apples, me and Pat. We didn’t sell them or anything—we just used to eat the fuckers because we were hungry. Every so often you’d get a rotten one and you’d shit your guts out for days. Not far from where we lived was a place called Trinity Road, which backed on to a lower street, so you could just lean over a wall, turn your shirt into a kind of sling and fill it with apples from the trees on the other side. Once I was standing on the wall like a pregnant fucking apple smuggler and the owner of the land set these two German shepherds on me. They rushed up at me from behind and I fell head first over the wall, into the orchard. Within seconds, my eye swelled up like a big black balloon. My old man went fucking nuts when I went home. Then I went to hospital, and the doctor gave me another bollocking.

It didn’t stop me and Pat, though.

After the apples we moved on to robbing parking meters. Then we got into some petty shoplifting. My folks had six kids and not much dough, and if you’re in that kind of desperate situation, you’ll do whatever you can for your next meal. I’m not proud of it, but I’m not one of those guys who’ll go, ‘Oh, I’m fine now, I’ve got plenty of dough, I’ll just forget about my past.’

It’s what made me who I am.

Another scam we came up with was standing outside Aston Villa’s ground on match days and charging the fans a halfshilling each to ‘mind’ their cars. Everyone would leave their car unlocked in those days, so during the game we’d get inside them and just fuck around. Sometimes we’d try to make extra dough by washing them. That was a brilliant plan until we decided to wash one poor fucker’s car with a wire brush. Half the paint was gone by the time we’d finished. The guy went fucking insane.

I wasn’t really a bad guy, even though I wanted to be. I was just a kid trying to be accepted by the local gangs. We used to have great games, I remember. One street would fight the other by throwing stones down the road and using dustbin lids as shields, like it was the Greeks versus the Romans or something. It was fun until someone got hit in the face with a rock and had to go to the emergency room with blood gushing out of his eye socket. We played war games, too, and made our own bombs: you’d get a load of penny bangers, empty the gunpowder out, flatten one end of a copper tube, drill a hole in the middle, pack it with the gunpowder, fold the other end over, then take the fuse out of one of the bangers and put it in the hole. Then all you had to do was put a match to the fuse and fuck off out of the way, quick.

Bang!

Heh-heh-heh.

Not everything we did was as dodgy as bomb-making, but most of it was just as dangerous.

Me and Pat built this underground den one time, carved out of a hard clay embankment.

We put an old bed frame in there and bits of wood, and there was this hole in the roof for a chimney. Next to it were these rusty oil drums, and we’d jump off the drums onto this piece of old corrugated metal that served as a perfect springboard—Boing!—then we’d land on the roof of the den. We did that for weeks until one day I crashed through the fucking chimney hole and almost broke my neck.

Pat thought I was a goner for a few seconds.

The bomb building sites were the best, though. We’d fuck around on them for hours, building stuff out of the rubble, smashing things, lighting fires. And we were always looking for treasure… our imaginations went crazy. There were also a lot of derelict Victorian houses to play in, because they were doing up Aston at the time. They were magnificent, those old houses—three or four storeys—and you could do all kinds of shit in them. We’d buy a couple cigarettes and lounge around in bombed-out drawing rooms or whatever, having a smoke.

Woodbine or Park Drive, they were our fags of choice. You’d be sitting there in all this dirt and dust, smoking a cigarette and breathing in all this thick, yellow Birmingham smog at the same time.

Ah, them were the days.

I hated school. Hated it.

I can still remember my first day at Prince Albert Juniors in Aston: they had to drag me in there by the scruff of my neck, because I was kicking and screaming so much.

The only thing I ever looked forward to at school was the bell ringing at four o’clock. I couldn’t read properly so I couldn’t get good marks. Nothing would stick in my head, and I couldn’t understand why my brain was such a useless piece of fucking jelly. I’d look at a page in a book and it might as well have been written in Chinese. I felt like I was no good, like I was a born loser. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I found out about my dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. No one knew anything about any of that shit back then. I was in a class of forty kids, and if you didn’t understand, the teachers didn’t try to help—they just let you fuck around. So that’s what I did. And whenever anyone gave me shit for being stupid—like when I had to read out loud—I’d try to entertain the class. I’d think up all sorts of insane things to do to make the other kids laugh.

The only good thing about having dyslexia is that dyslexics are usually very creative people, or so I’ve been told. We think in unusual ways. But it’s a very bad stigma to have, not being able to read like normal people can. To this day I wish I’d had a proper education. I think books are great, I do. To be able to lose yourself in a book is fucking phenomenal.

Everyone should be able to do it. But I’ve been able to get through an entire book only a few times in my life. Every blue moon this thing in my head will release, and I’ll try to read as many books as I can, because when it closes up it goes straight back to the way it was, and I end up just sitting there, staring at Chinese.

For as long as I can remember people called me ‘Ozzy’ at school. I haven’t got a clue who first came up with it, or when, or why. It was just a nickname for Osbourne, I suppose, but it fitted my clownish personality. As soon as it stuck, only my immediate family kept calling me John. I don’t even recognise my birth name now. If someone says, ‘Oi, John! Over ’ere!’ I don’t even look up.

After Prince Albert Juniors, I went to Birchfield Road Secondary Modern in Perry Barr.

They had a uniform there. It wasn’t mandatory, but most of the kids wore it, including my goody two-shoes little brother Paul. He’d turn up every day in the blazer and the grey flannels and the tie and shirt. Me, I’d walk around in fucking welly-boots and jeans and smelly old sweats. The headmaster, Mr Oldham, would give me a bollocking every time he set eyes on me. ‘John Osbourne, tidy yourself up, you’re a disgrace!’ he’d shout down the hallway. ‘Why can’t you be more like your brother?’

The only time Mr Oldham ever said a good word about me was when I told him that one of the older kids had tried to kill the school fish by putting Fairy Liquid in the aquarium. He even praised me in assembly. ‘Because of John Osbourne,’ he said, ‘we were able to apprehend the villain responsible for this dastardly deed.’ What Mr Oldham didn’t know was that it was me who’d tried to kill the school fish by putting dish soap in the aquarium—but I’d chickened out halfway through. I knew everyone would blame me for all the bubbles in the tank, ’cos they blamed me for everything, so I thought if I blamed someone else first, I could get away with it. And it worked.

There was one teacher I liked: Mr Cherrington. He was a local-history buff and he once took us to this place called Pimple Hill, the site of an old castle in Birmingham. It was fucking great. He talked about forts and burial grounds and medieval torture devices. It was the best lesson I ever had, but I still didn’t get good marks because I couldn’t write any of it down. Funnily enough, the only thing I got gold stars for at Birchfield Road was ‘heavy metalwork’. I suppose that was ’cos my dad was a toolmaker and it came naturally to me. I even won first prize in a class competition for a metal window catch. It didn’t stop me fucking around, though. The teacher, Mr Lane, would end up slapping me on the arse with this big piece of wood. He would hit me so hard I thought my arse was going to fall off. He was actually a nice guy, Mr Lane. Terrible racist, though. Fucking hell, the things he’d say… you’d get put in jail for it today.

My favourite prank in heavy metalwork was to get a penny and spend three or four minutes making it really hot with a blowtorch, and then leave it on Mr Lane’s desk, so that he’d see it and pick it up out of curiosity.

First you’d hear: ‘Waaaaahhhhhh!’

Then: ‘Osbourne, you little bastard!’

Heh-heh-heh.

The old hot-penny trick. Priceless, man.

I got bullied for a while when I was younger. Some older kids used to wait for me on the way home from school and pull my trousers down and fuck around with me. I was maybe eleven or twelve at the time. It was a bad scene. They didn’t fuck me or wank me off or any of that stuff—it was just boys playing boys’ games—but it made me feel ashamed, and it freaked me out because I couldn’t tell my parents. There was a lot of teasing in my family—which is normal when you’ve got six kids in one little terraced house—but it meant I didn’t feel I could ask anyone for help. I felt like it was all my fault.

At least it made me determined that when I grew up and had my own kids, I’d tell them,

‘Don’t ever be afraid to come to your mum and dad with any problems. You know what’s right and you know what’s wrong, and if somebody ever messes with parts of your body that you don’t think are cool, just tell us.’ And believe me, if I ever found out that anything dodgy was happening to one of my own, there’d be fucking blood.

Eventually I worked out a way to get around the bullies. I found the biggest kid in the playground and clowned around until I made him laugh. By doing that he became my friend. He was built like a cross between a brick shithouse and Mount fucking Snowdon. If you fucked around with him you’d be drinking your school dinners through a straw for the next month and a half. But deep down he was a gentle giant. The bullies left me well alone once we became pals, which was a relief because I was as crap at fighting as I was at reading.

One kid at school who never beat me up was Tony Iommi. He was in the year above me, and everyone knew him ’cos he could play the guitar. He might not have beaten me up, but I still felt intimidated by him: he was a big guy, and good-looking, and all the girls fancied him.

And no one could beat Tony Iommi in a fight. You could not put the guy down. As he was older than me he might have kicked me in the bollocks a few times and given me some shit, but nothing more than that. What I remember most about him from school is the day when we were allowed to bring our Christmas presents to class. Tony showed up with this bright red electric guitar. I remember thinking it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen in my life. I’d always wanted to play an instrument myself, but my folks didn’t have the dough to buy me one, and I didn’t have the patience to learn anyway. My attention span was five seconds. But Tony could really play. He was incredible, just one of those naturally talented guys: you could have given him some Mongolian bagpipes and he’d have learned how to do a blues riff on them in a couple of hours. At school I always wondered what would happen to Tony Iommi.

But it would be a few more years before our paths would cross again.

As I got older, I started to spend less time in class and more in the boys’ toilets, smoking. I smoked so much I was always turning up late for morning registration, which was taken by the school rugby teacher, Mr Jones. He hated me. He was always putting me in detention and picking on me in front of the other kids. His favourite thing in the whole world was to beat me with a shoe. He’d tell me to go to the tennis-shoe rack at the back of the classroom and pick out the biggest one and bring it to him. Then he’d go and inspect the rack, and if he found a bigger shoe I’d get whacked on the arse twice as many times. He was the worst bully in the whole place.

Another thing Mr Jones would do is, he’d get all the kids to stand in a row every morning in the classroom, and then he’d walk up and down behind us, looking at our necks to make sure we were washing ourselves in the morning. If he thought you had a dirty neck, he’d rub a white towel over it—and if it came up soiled, he’d drag you by the collar over to the sink in the corner and scrub you down like an animal.

He was the worst bully in the whole school, Mr Jones was.

It didn’t take me long to realise that my folks had less dough than most other families. We certainly weren’t having holidays in Majorca every summer—not with six little Osbournes to clothe and feed. I never even saw the sea until I was fourteen. That was thanks to my aunty Ada, who lived in Sunderland. And I didn’t see an ocean—with the kind of water that doesn’t have Geordie turds floating in it and won’t give you hypothermia in three fucking seconds—until I was well into my twenties.

There were other ways I could tell we were broke. Like the squares of newspaper we had to use instead of toilet roll. And the welly-boots I had to wear in the summer ’cos I had no shoes. And the fact that my mum never bought me underwear. There was also this dodgy bloke who’d come round to the house all the time, asking for money. We called him the ‘knock-knock’ man. He was a door-to-door salesman, basically, and he’d sell my mum all this stuff out of his catalogue using some dodgy loan shark scheme, then come around every week to collect the payments. But my mum never had the cash, so she’d send me to the door to tell him she wasn’t at home. I got sick of it eventually. ‘Mum says she ain’t in,’ I’d say.

Years later, I made up for it by opening the door to the knock-knock man and settling my mum’s bill in full. Then I told him to fuck off and never come back again. But it didn’t do any good. Two weeks later I came home to find my mum getting a brand new three-piece suite delivered. It didn’t take much imagination to work out where she’d got it from.

Money was so tight when I was a kid; one of the worst days of my entire childhood was when my mum gave me ten shillings on my birthday to go and buy myself a flashlight—it was the kind that could light up in different colours—and on the way home I lost the change. I must have spent at least four or five hours searching every last ditch and drain hole in Aston for those few coins. The funny thing is, I can’t even remember now what my mum said when I got home. All I can remember is being fucking terrified.

It’s not that life at 14 Lodge Road was bad. But it was hardly fucking domestic bliss, either.

My mother was no Julia Child, for a start.

Every Sunday she’d be sweating in the kitchen, making lunch, and we’d all be dreading the final result. But you couldn’t complain. One time, I’m eating this cabbage and it tastes like soap. Jean sees the look on my face, so she jabs me in the ribs and goes, ‘Don’t say a word.’

But I’m sick to my guts and I don’t want to die from fucking cabbage poisoning. I’m just about to say something when my dad gets back from the pub, hangs up his coat, and sits down in front of his dinner. He picks up his fork, stabs it down into the cabbage, and when he lifts it up to his mouth there’s this lump of tangled wire on the end of it! God bless my old mum, she’d boiled a Brillo pad!

We all ran to the bog to make ourselves throw up.

Another time my mum made me some boiled-egg sandwiches for a packed lunch. I opened up the bread and there was cigarette ash and bits of shell in it.

Cheers, Mum.

All I can say is, school dinners saved my life. That was one small part of my shitty fucking education that I liked. They were magic, school dinners were. You got a main course and a pudding. It was incredible. Nowadays, you pick up something and you automatically go, ‘Oh, that’s got two hundred calories,’ or, ‘Oh, that’s got eight grams of saturated fat.’ But there was no such thing as a fucking calorie back then. There was only food on yer plate. And there was never enough of it, as far as I was concerned.

Every morning I’d try to think of an excuse to skive off school. So no one believed me when my excuses were real.

Like the time I heard a ghost.

I’m in the kitchen, about to leave the house. It’s winter and freezing cold, and we don’t have hot water on tap, so I’m boiling the kettle and getting ready to fill the sink to do the dishes. Then I hear this voice going, ‘Osbourne, Osbourne, Osbourne.’

Because my father worked nights in those days, he would get us ready for school in the morning, before he went to bed. So I turned to my old man and said, ‘Dad! Dad! I can hear someone shouting our name! I think it’s a ghost! I think our house is haunted!’

He looked up from his paper.

‘Nice try, son,’ he said. ‘You’re going to school, ghost or no ghost. Hurry up with the dishes.’

But the voice wouldn’t go away.

‘Osbourne, Osbourne, Osbourne.’

‘But, Dad!’ I shouted. ‘There’s a voice! There is, there is. Listen!’

Finally my dad heard it, too.

‘Osbourne, Osbourne, Osbourne.’

It seemed to be coming from the garden. So we both legged it outside—me without any shoes—but the garden was empty. Then we heard the voice again, louder this time.

‘Osbourne, Osbourne, Osbourne.’ It was coming from the other side of the fence. So we peer over into the garden next door and there’s our neighbour, an old lady who lived alone, lying on the ground on a patch of ice. She must have slipped and fallen, and didn’t have any way of getting help. If it hadn’t been for us, she would have frozen to death. So me and my dad climb over the fence and lift her into her living room, which we’d never been in before, even though we’d lived next door to this woman for as long as anyone could remember. It was just the saddest thing. The old lady had been married with kids during the war but her husband had been sent off to France and had been shot by the Nazis. On top of that, her kids had died in a bomb shelter. But she lived as though they were all still alive. There were photographs everywhere and clothes laid out and children’s toys and everything. The entire house was frozen in time. It was the most heartbreaking thing I’d ever seen. I remember my mum bawling her eyes out after she came out of that place later in the day.

It’s amazing, isn’t it? You can live a few inches away from your next-door neighbour and never know a thing about them.

I was late for school that day, but Mr Jones didn’t care why, because I was late for school every day. It was just another excuse for him to make my life hell. One morning—it might have been the day we found the old lady on the ice, but I can’t be sure—I was so late for registration that it had ended, and there was already a new class filing in.

It was a special day for me at school, because my dad had given me a bunch of metal rods from the GEC factory so I could make some screwdrivers in Mr Lane’s heavy metalwork class. The rods were in my satchel, and I couldn’t wait to get them out and show them to my mates.

But the day was ruined almost before it had begun. I remember standing there in front of Mr Jones’s desk as he went fucking insane at me as the kids from the other class were taking their seats. I was so embarrassed, I wanted to crawl into a hole and never come out.

‘OSBOURNE!’ he shouted. ‘YOU’RE A DISGRACE TO YOURSELF AND TO THIS SCHOOL. BRING ME A SHOE.’

The room went so quiet you could have heard a mouse fart.

‘But, sir!’

‘BRING ME A SHOE, OSBOURNE. AND MAKE SURE IT’S THE BIGGEST, OR I’M GOING TO HIT YOUR BACKSIDE SO BLOODY HARD YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO SIT DOWN AGAIN FOR A MONTH.’

I looked around at all these strange faces staring at me. I wanted to fucking die, man. The kids were in the next year up from me and were just staring at me like I was a fucking freak. I put my head down and did the walk of shame to the back of the class. Someone tried to trip me up. Then another kid pushed his bag in front of me so I had to walk around it. My whole body was shaking and numb, and my fucking face was on fire. I didn’t want to cry in front of all these older kids, but I could already feel myself beginning to blubber. I went to the rack and found a shoe—I was so nervous with everyone looking at me that I couldn’t even tell which one was the biggest—and I carried it back to where Mr Jones was standing. I gave it to him without looking up.

‘YOU CALL THIS THE BIGGEST?’ goes Mr Jones. Then he strides to the back of the class, looks at the rack, comes back with another, bigger shoe, and orders me to bend over.

Everyone’s still staring. At this point I’m trying incredibly hard to stop myself bawling and there’s fucking snot running out of my nose, so I wipe my face with the back of my hand.

‘I SAID BEND OVER, OSBOURNE.’

So I do as he says. Then he lifts up his arm as far as it’ll go and brings down this fucking size-ten shoe as hard as he can.

‘ARRRGGGHHHHHH!!’

It hurts like a motherfucker. Then the bastard does it again. And again. But by the third or fourth time I’ve fucking had enough. I suddenly get angry. Just blind fucking rage. So, as he brings the shoe down for another wallop, I reach into my satchel and take out my dad’s metal rods and throw them as hard as I can at Mr Jones’s fat, sweaty face. I was never any good at sport, but for those two seconds I could have bowled for the English cricket team. Mr Jones staggers backwards with blood spurting out of his nose and I realise what I’ve done. The class gasps. Oh, fuuuuuck. And I’m off, legging it as fast as I can, out of the classroom, down the corridor, out of the school, up the fucking driveway, through the gates, and all the way back to 14 Lodge Road. I run straight upstairs to where my father’s sleeping and shake him awake. Then I burst into tears.

He went mental.

Not with me, thank God, but with Mr Jones. He marched straight back to school and demanded to see Mr Oldham. You could hear the shouting from the other end of the school. Mr Oldham said he had no idea about Mr Jones and the tennis shoes, but promised to look into the situation. My father said fucking right he should look into the situation.

I never got another beating again after that.

I wasn’t exactly a Romeo at school—most chicks thought I was insane—but for a while I had a girlfriend called Jane. She went to the all-girls school up the road. I was nuts about her.

Big time. Whenever we were due to meet, I’d first go to the boys’ toilets at school and rub soap into my hair to slick it back, so she’d think I was cool. But one day it started to rain, and by the time I arrived my head looked like a bubble bath, with all this soap dripping down my forehead and into my eyes. She took one look at me and went, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

Dumped. On the spot. I was fucking heartbroken. Then, a few years later, I saw her coming out of a club in Aston when she was off her face, and I wondered what I’d been so upset about.

There were other girls, but most of the time it never came to anything. I soon found out how painful it is when you see a girl you fancy walking around with another guy. Getting stood up wasn’t much fun, either. One time, I planned to meet this chick outside the Crown and Cushion in Perry Barr. It was pissing down with rain when I got there at seven-thirty, and she was nowhere to be seen. I told myself, ‘Oh, she’ll be here in half an hour.’ So I waited until eight. No sign. I’ll gave it another half an hour. Still no sign. I was there until ten o’clock in the end. Then I just walked home, soaking wet and feeling so sad and rejected. Now that I’m a parent, of course, I just think, What the fuck was wrong with me? I wouldn’t let my daughter go out in the lashing rain to meet some kid from school.

It was all only puppy love in those days. You felt like you were being a grown-up, but you weren’t. Another time, when I was about fourteen, I took this girl to the movies. I thought I was Jack the Lad, so I decided to smoke to impress her. I’d been smoking for a while by then, but not like heavy-duty. This night I’ve got five fags and a penny book of matches in my pocket.

So I’m sitting in this movie theatre, trying to be a big shot, and suddenly I break out in a fucking cold sweat. I’m thinking, What the fuck’s up with me? Then I burp and taste vomit. I run to the bathroom and lock myself in a stall and cough my fucking guts up. I was so fucking sick, man. I dragged myself out of the exit and went straight home, throwing up the whole way. I don’t know what happened to the chick, but at least she got a box of Maltesers out of it.

That wasn’t my only bad experience with cigarettes, growing up. Another night around that time, I remember smoking a fag in my bedroom at Lodge Road, then pinching the end of it so I could have the rest in the morning. I woke up a few hours later choking. Smoke everywhere.

Fucking hell, I thought, I’ve set the house on fire! But then I looked down at the ashtray by my bed and saw that my cigarette wasn’t even lit. What I didn’t know is that my dad had come home a bit merry that night and had also been smoking inside the house. But instead of putting out his cigarette he’d dropped it down the back of the settee, and now all the foam in the cushions was smouldering and giving off this horrendous black smoke.

Next thing I knew I was legging it downstairs to the living room to find my dad looking hungover and guilty, and my mum with tears streaming down her face, doubled over, coughing.

‘Jack Osbourne,’ she was saying, between splutters. ‘What the bloody hell did you d—’

Then she coughed so hard, her false teeth literally flew out of her mouth and smashed through the window, letting in this freezing cold wind from outside, which fanned the flames—making the couch go up like a fucking bonfire. I didn’t know whether to laugh or shit myself.

Anyway, somehow me and my dad managed to put the fire out while my mum went out into the garden to look for her choppers.

But the house didn’t smell right for weeks.

It didn’t put me off smoking, mind you. I was convinced it made me look cool. And maybe I was right, ’cos a few weeks after the fire, I got my merry end away for the first time. I’d only just discovered that my penis wasn’t just for pissing through and I was banging it all over the fucking place. Jacking off, tossing everywhere. I couldn’t sleep for milking the old maggot.

Anyhow, I was at a dance in a pub in Aston. This was before I was drinking, so maybe it was a birthday party or something in a back room. There was an older girl there—I can’t for the life of me remember her name, I swear to God—and she danced with me for a bit. Then she took me back to her parents’ house and shagged the shit out of me all night. I had no fucking idea why she decided to pick me. Maybe she felt a bit horny and I was the only spare dick in the room. Who knows? But I wasn’t complaining. Of course, I wanted more after that. I wanted seconds. So, the next day, I went running back to her house like a dog sniffing around the old pole again.

But she just blurted out, ‘What the fuck do you want?’

‘How about another shag?’

‘Fuck off.’

That was the end of our beautiful romance.

I was fifteen when I left school. And what did I get to show for my ten years in the British education system? A piece of paper which said,

That was fucking it. Not a single qualification. Nothing. I had two career choices: manual labour or manual labour. The first thing I did was look for jobs in the back of the Birmingham Evening Mail. That week they happened to be running a special feature on occupations for people who’d just left school. I looked at them all—milkman, bin man, assembly-line worker, brickie, street cleaner, bus driver, that kind of thing—and decided on plumbing, because at least it was a trade. And I’d been told that I wouldn’t get anywhere in life without a trade. By the time I got the job I wanted it was late in the year and starting to get cold. I didn’t realise that plumbers work their arses off in the middle of winter, when all the pipes burst. So you spend most of your time bending over a manhole when it’s minus five degrees, freezing your fucking nut sack off. I didn’t last a week. It wasn’t the cold that did me in, though. I got fired for scrumping apples during my lunch break.

Old habits die hard.

My next job was less ambitious. It was at an industrial plant outside Aston. This place made car parts, and I was in charge of a big fucking degreasing machine. You’d get baskets full of bits—rods, springs, levers, whatever—and you dropped them into this vat of bubbling chemicals which cleaned them. The chemicals were toxic and there was a sign on top of the machine which said, ‘EXTREME HAZARD! PROTECTIVE MASKS MUST BE WORN AT ALL TIMES. NEVER LEAN OVER THE TANK.’

I remember asking what was in the vat and someone told me it was methylene chloride. I thought to myself, Hmm, I wonder if you can get a buzz off that stuff? So one day I pull down my mask and lean over the tank, just for a second. And I go, ‘Whooooooaaaah!’ It was like sniffing glue… times a fucking hundred. So every morning I started taking a whiff of the old degreasing machine. It was a lot cheaper than going down the pub. Then I started doing it twice a day. Then three times a day. Then every five fucking minutes. Trouble was, every time I leant over the vat I got a big black greasy face. So it didn’t take long for the other guys in the plant to work out what was going on. I’d be taking a tea break and they’d see my face covered in all this black stuff and they’d go, ‘You’ve been at that fucking degreasing machine again, haven’t you? You’ll fucking kill yourself, man.’

‘What do you mean?’ I’d say, all innocent.

‘It’s fucking toxic, Ozzy.’

‘That’s why I wear a protective mask at all times and never lean over the tank, just like the sign says.’

‘Bollocks. Stop doing it, Ozzy. You’ll kill yourself.’

After a few weeks it got to the point where I was just out of my brains all the time, wobbling around the place, singing songs. I even started to have hallucinations. But I kept doing it—I couldn’t stop myself. Then, one day I went missing for a while. They found me slumped over the tank, passed out. ‘Get ’im an ambulance,’ said the supervisor. ‘And don’t ever let that idiot back in this place again.’

My parents went nuts when they found out I’d been fired again. I was still living at 14

Lodge Road, and they expected me to chip in for the rent, even though I tried to spend as little time at home as possible. So my mum talked to her bosses and sorted me out with a job at the Lucas factory, where she could keep an eye on me. ‘It’s an apprenticeship, John,’ she said. ‘Most people your age would give their right arm for this kind of opportunity. You’ll have a skill. You’re going to be a trained car horn tuner.’

My heart sank.

A car horn tuner?

In those days, the working person’s mentality went like this: you got what little education you could, you found an apprenticeship, they gave you a shit job, and then you took pride in it, even though it was a shit job. And then you did that same shit job for the rest of your life.

Your shit job was everything. A lot of people in Birmingham never even made it to retirement.

They just dropped down dead on the factory floor.

I needed to get the fuck out before I got stuck in the same trap. But I had no idea how to leave Aston. I tried to do this ‘emigrate to Australia’ thing, but I couldn’t afford the ten-quid fare. I even tried to join the army, but they wouldn’t have me. The bloke in the uniform took one look at my ugly mug and said, ‘Sorry, we want subjects, not objects.’

So I took the job in the factory. I told my friend Pat that I’d got a gig in the music business.

‘What do you mean, the music business?’ he said.

‘Tuning stuff,’ I told him, vaguely.

‘What kind of stuff?’

‘Mind your own fucking business.’

On my first day at the Lucas plant the supervisor showed me into this sound-proofed room, where I’d do my shift. My job was to pick up the car horns as they came along a conveyor belt and put them into this helmet-shaped machine. Then you’d hook them up to an electrical current and adjust them with a screwdriver, so they went, ‘BAGH, BOOO, WEEE, URRH, BEEOOP.’ Nine hundred a day—that’s how many car horns they wanted tuned. They kept count, because every time you did one you clicked a button. There were five of us in the room, so that’s five car horns burping and beeping and booping all at the same time, from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon.

You came out of that fucking place with your ears ringing so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think.

This was my day:

Pick up horn.

Attach connectors.

Adjust with screwdriver.

BAGH, BOOO, WEEE, URRH, BEEOOP.

Put horn back on belt.

Click the button.

Pick up horn.

Attach connectors.

Adjust with screwdriver.

BAGH, BOOO, WEEE, URRH, BEEOOP.

Put horn back on belt.

Click the button.

Pick up horn.

Attach connectors.

Adjust with screwdriver.

BAGH, BOOO, WEEE, URRH, BEEOOP.

Put horn back on belt.

Click the button.

While I was doing this, my mum would be watching me proudly through this glass screen.

But after a couple of hours of listening to that fucking din I was starting to go insane. I was ready to murder someone. So I started to click the button twice for every horn I did, thinking I could knock off early. Anything to get out of that fucking booth. When I realised I was getting away with it, I started to click three times. Then four. Then five.

This went on for a few hours until I heard a tap-tap and a squeal of feedback from somewhere above me. The conveyor belt juddered to a halt. Then this angry voice comes over the Tannoy:

‘OSBOURNE. SUPERVISOR’S OFFICE. NOW.’

They wanted to know how come I’d done five hundred car horns in twenty minutes. I told them there was obviously something wrong with the clicker. They told me they weren’t born fucking yesterday and that the only thing wrong with the clicker was the fucking idiot operating it, and that if I did it again, I’d be thrown out on my fucking arse, end of story. Did I understand? I said, ‘Yeah, I understand,’ and sloped back to my little booth.

Pick up horn.

Attach connectors.

Adjust with screwdriver.

BAGH, BOOO, WEEE, URRH, BEEOOP.

Put horn back on belt.

Click the button.

After a few more weeks of this bullshit I decided to strike up a conversation with the old guy next to me, Harry.

‘How long have you be working ’ere?’ I asked him.

‘Eh?’

‘How long you been ’ere?’

‘Stop whispering, son.’

‘HOW LONG HAVE YOU WORKED HERE?’ I shouted. Harry had obviously gone completely deaf from listening to car horns all day.

‘Twenty-nine years and seven months,’ he said with a grin.

‘You’re kidding me.’

‘Eh?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Stop whispering, son.’

‘THAT’S A LONG FUCKING TIME, HARRY.’

‘You know what the best thing is?’

I raised my hands and shook my head.

‘In five months’ time, I’ll get my gold watch. I’ll have been here thirty years!’

The thought of thirty years in that room made me want the Russians to drop the bomb and get it over with.

‘If you wanted a gold watch that badly,’ I said. ‘You should have nicked one from the fucking jeweller’s. Even if you got caught, you’d only do a tenth of the time that you’ve done in this shithole.’

‘Say again, son?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Eh?’

‘NOTHING.’

I’d had enough. I threw down my screwdriver, walked out of the door, past my mum, out of the factory gate, and straight to the nearest pub.That was the end of my first job in the music business.

The idea of getting a real job in the music business was a fucking joke. It was just one of those impossible things, like becoming an astronaut or a stuntman, or shagging Elizabeth Taylor. Still, ever since the time I’d sung ‘Living Doll’ at our family shindig, I’d been thinking about starting a band. I even went around for a while boasting that I was a member of a group called the Black Panthers. Bollocks, I was. My ‘band’ was an empty guitar case with ‘The Black Panthers’ written on the side (I’d used some emulsion paint which I’d found in the garden shed). It was all in my imagination. I used to tell people I had a dog, too: it was a Hush Puppy that I’d found in a dumpster, which I put on the end of a leash. I’d walk around the streets of Aston with my empty guitar case, pulling this old fucking shoe behind me, thinking I was some kind of Mississippi bluesman. Everyone else thought I was fucking insane.

When I wasn’t spending time with my imaginary band and my Hush-Puppy dog, I used to hang around with the Teddy Boys. It was a bit before my time, the Teddy Boy scene, so I never got into the long coats and the brothel creepers and all that shit. But I liked the music they played on the jukebox. I went around singing ‘Hey Paula’ by Paul & Paula for weeks. Those old tunes were great. Then I got into the mod stuff—I used to like the slim-fit mohair suits.

Then I was a rocker, with the leather jackets and the studded belts. I’d switch back and forth all the fucking time. I was just looking for adventure, me. Anything that didn’t involve working in a factory.

Then the Beatles happened.

All of a sudden, these four moptop Liverpudlians were all over the radio and the telly. Using my last pay cheque from the job at the Lucas plant, I bought their second LP, With the Beatles.

The moment I got it home, everything changed.

A light went on in my head when I heard that record. It just sucked me in. Lennon and McCartney’s harmonies were like magic. They took me away from Aston and into this fantasy Beatleworld. I couldn’t stop listening to those fourteen songs (eight were originals, six were covers, including a version of Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’). It might sound over-the-top to say it now, but for the first time I felt as though my life had meaning. I played that record over and over again on my dad’s big, polished radiogram, which was a combination of a valve radio and an old-fashioned phonograph, made to look like a piece of furniture, which took pride of place in our living room. Then I’d go to the Silver Blades ice rink and they’d be playing it on the Tannoy system there. Sometimes I would just walk around with the album under my arm, I was so fucking pleased with it. Soon I began to collect anything with ‘The Beatles’ written on it. Photographs. Posters. Cards. Anything. It would all go up on the bedroom wall. My brothers didn’t mind—they were mad about the Beatles, too.

But not half as mad as me.

Obviously, I had to save up some dough to buy the Beatles’ first album, Please Please Me. Then, when A Hard Day’s Night came out, I was one of the first in the queue at the record shop to buy that. Thanks to Beatlemania, it seemed all right that I didn’t want to work in a factory. John Lennon and Paul McCartney hadn’t wanted to work in a factory either! And they were just like me—working-class kids from the back streets of a run-down, far-from-London industrial town. The only difference was that their town was Liverpool, not Aston. I reckoned if they could be in a band, then maybe I could, too. I was eight years younger than Lennon and six years younger than McCartney, so I still had plenty of time to get my first big break.

Trouble was, I had no idea how to get a big break. Apart from Tony Iommi—who I’d never seen again since leaving school—I didn’t even know anyone who could play a musical instrument. So, instead, I decided to grow my hair long and get some tattoos. At least I’d look the part.

The hair was easy. The tattoos stung like a fucking bastard.

First it was a dagger on my arm. Then I learned how to do them myself with a needle and some Indian ink. All you needed was a big enough blob of ink on the end of the needle and then you’d poke it far enough through the skin to make it permanent. When I was seventeen, I spent a whole afternoon in Sutton Park—a posh area of Birmingham—spelling out ‘O-Z-Z-Y’ across my knuckles. I went home that night feeling really fucking pleased with myself.

My dad wasn’t so happy. He went white when he saw me.

‘Son, you look like a fucking idiot,’ he said.

In 1964 something totally unexpected happened.

I got a job I enjoyed.

It turned out that although I was no good at plumbing or tuning car horns or working on building sites or doing any of the other half a dozen shit jobs I’d been fired from, I was a natural at killing animals. They say that when the average person sees the inside of a slaughterhouse, they become a vegetarian. Not me. Having said that, though, it was an education. I quickly learned that there aren’t any little nugget-shaped chickens, or little hamburger-shaped cows. Animals are big fucking smelly things. I think that anyone who eats meat should visit a slaughterhouse at least once in their life, just to see what goes on. It’s a bloody, filthy, putrid fucking business.

The slaughterhouse that hired me was in Digbeth, one of the older parts of Birmingham.

My first job was puke remover. They showed me to this big pile of sheep’s stomachs in the corner, and I had to cut them open, one by one, and remove all the puke from inside. I was throwing up like a son of a bitch the entire first day. And it didn’t get any better for a long time.

I threw up every hour or so for a solid four weeks. My stomach muscles were on fire, man.

Sometimes the other guys would have a laugh by giving me the stomach of a condemned animal—like a crippled old sheep that was unfit for human consumption or something. One time I picked up this dodgy stomach and it just burst in my hands—all this fucking pus and blood squirted into my face. They all thought that was extremely fucking funny.

But I grew to like the slaughterhouse. I got used to the smell, and once I’d proved myself as puke remover they promoted me to cow killer.

What a fucking job that was. I’ll tell you something: if you ever get kicked by a cow, you’ll know about it. When one of them got me in the marbles I thought I was going to cough up my left ball.

The process starts with a gang of five or six guys roping the animal into the kill room. It walks up this ramp and I’m standing at the other end with a pressurised bolt gun. The gun is loaded with a blank cartridge, which creates enough pressure to fire out a big spike, like a round chisel, straight into the cow’s brain. It’s designed to make sure the animal doesn’t feel any pain—apart from at the moment when it gets this big fucking bolt through its head—but doesn’t actually kill it. Trouble is, you have to be up close and personal with the cow to use the bolt gun, and if you get an animal that’s pissed off, you won’t be able to knock it out the first time. But there’s no escape for either of you. I can’t tell you how many man-on-cow death matches I had in the Digbeth slaughterhouse. I had to shoot one bull five or six times before it went down. Fuck me, he was pissed off. At one point I thought I’d be the one who’d end up in a bun, covered in ketchup.

Once you’ve knocked out the cow you shackle its legs and attach them to a kind of moving rail, which pulls the animal upside down and carries it down the processing line. Then someone cuts its throat and the blood drains out into a chute underneath. So, eventually, the animal dies through loss of blood. One time, this cow was still conscious when I shackled it to the rail, but I didn’t know it. Just as it was swinging upside down it fucking hoofed me in the arse and I went flying head first down the blood chute. When they got me out, I looked like fucking afterbirth. My clothes were soaked in blood, my shoes were full of blood, and my hair was matted with blood. I even got a mouthful of the stuff. And it’s not just blood in the chute.

There are all kinds of other unmentionable substances in that fucking thing. No one would sit next to me on the bus for weeks, I reeked so bad.

I had lots of different jobs at Digbeth. I specialised in tripe for a while: cutting out the cow’s stomach, putting it in this big wheelbarrow, then letting it soak overnight. I also had a job as a heel-puller—in other words, getting the hoofs off the cows. Tripe’s one thing, but I don’t know who the fuck would ever eat a fucking hoof. I also had a stint killing pigs. They say that the only thing wasted on a pig is the squeal, and it’s true. Every single part of those things gets turned into some kind of product, one way or another. My job was to get tongs with sponges on the end of them, dip them in water, put them on the pig’s head, press a button on the handle, and make sure the pig zonked out. Again, it didn’t always work first time, but no one gave a shit. The guys would fuck around with the pigs sometimes, commit all sorts of atrocities. In was like Auschwitz in that place on a bad day, the evil that went on. Sometimes the pigs would get dropped into a vat of boiling water before they’d even been knocked out. Or they’d still be awake when they were put through a furnace that burned all the hair off their backs. I regret a lot of that stuff now. Killing a pig for a good old fry-up is one thing. But there’s no excuse for being cruel, even if you’re a bored teenage kid.

You get a different perspective on meat after you’ve worked in a slaughterhouse for a while. I remember going camping once after Digbeth, and I was cooking these steaks on a barbecue. Some cows from the next field came over to me, sniffing around, like they knew something was up. I started to feel really weird about the steaks. ‘I’m sure it’s no relation,’ I said to them, but they still didn’t fuck off. They ruined the fucking meal in the end. It doesn’t feel right, eating beef when you’re in the company of a cow.

I loved my job at Digbeth, though. The guys I worked with were fucking crazy and always up for a laugh. And once your kills were done you were free to go home. So, if you started early, you could be out by nine or ten o’clock in the morning. I remember we used to get paid on Thursdays and go straight to the pub. Which was always an excuse to practise my favourite practical joke—dropping cows’ eyeballs into people’s drinks. I’d sneak them out of the slaughterhouse by the dozen for the very purpose. The best thing was to find a young sensitive-looking chick, and when she went to the bog, put an eyeball on top of her can of Coke.

They would go crazy when they saw that shit. One time, the landlord threw me out for making someone vomit all over his swirly carpet. So I got another eyeball, stood outside the doorway, and popped it open with a knife. That made another two or three people come out in sympathy, which for some reason I thought was fucking brilliant.

Another great thing about Digbeth was the all-night club across the street called the Midnight City. They played soul music in there, so after staggering out of the pub at closing time I could dance until five in the morning, speeding my balls off on Dexedrine. Then I’d go straight back to the slaughterhouse and kill more cows. I’d keep that up all through the weekend until Sunday night, when I went back to 14 Lodge Road.

It was magic.

I lasted about eighteen months at the slaughterhouse. Having been a puke remover and a cow killer and a tripe hanger and a hoof puller and pig stunner, my final job was fat collector.

An animal has what’s known as caul fat around its stomach—kind of like a beer belly—and my job was to cut it out, stretch it and hang it up on these poles overnight to dry it out, so you could bag it when you came in the next morning. Most of it was used in girls’ make-up. But before you hung it up to dry, you had to clean it. They had this big tank of boiling-hot water, and the trick was to clean the fat using the steam, then wash it off, put it on a rack, and hang it over the poles.

But the guys in the slaughterhouse would fuck around with each other, like they always did. They’d cut the strings on your butcher’s apron as you were leaning over the tank, so you’d get this spray of blood and shit and fuck-knows-what-else all down your clothes. I got sick of them doing that to me, and I got a bee up my arse about one guy in particular. So, I’m leaning over the tank and this guy sneaks up behind me and cuts my apron strings. Without thinking, I just turn around and whack him over the head with one of the fat poles. I just lost my cool, man. It was quite a heavy scene. I whacked him a few times, and there was blood spurting out of his face. They had to send him to hospital in the end.

That was the end of the slaughterhouse for me.

‘Fuck off and don’t come back,’ said the boss.

That’s why I became John the Burglar. I just couldn’t face another factory job. The thought of Harry and his gold watch and the two-quid-a-week wage was too much to handle.

But I soon learned my lesson when they sent me to Winson Green. An hour is a long time in that fucking place, never mind three months. The first thing I did was ask someone what the guards had meant about my long flowing hair and the showers. Then I spent the rest of the week begging for a pair of scissors so I could look less like a girl. Every morning during wash-time I’d have my hand over my balls and my back pressed to the wall, I was so fucking scared. If I dropped the soap, it stayed on the fucking floor.

I wasn’t going to be doing any bending over.

But I was worried about more than a rogering. People got killed in that place if they pissed off the wrong guy. There were fights every day, and I was shit at fighting. So I did exactly what I’d done at Birchfield Road with the bullies: I found the biggest, baddest fuckers in the exercise yard and I made ’em laugh by doing crazy things.

That was my protection.

The inside of the prison was just how I’d imagined it would be, with clanging doors and rattling keys, and different levels for different categories of prisoners, each with its own balcony overlooking the central area. I was locked up in the ‘YP Wing’, which stood for Young Offenders, and on the level above us were adult prisoners who were on remand waiting for trial or sentencing. Murderers, rapists, bank robbers—every kind of undesirable you could imagine was up there. The stuff they could smuggle in was amazing. They had beer, cigarettes, all kinds of shit—although any type of tobacco was very highly prized. Smoking helped kill the boredom, which was your worst enemy on the inside. Even soggy old cigarette butts were worth a fucking fortune in there.

Getting tattoos done was another way to make the time pass more quickly. One of the guys showed me how to do it without a proper needle or any Indian ink. He drew a picture of The Saint on my arm with a ballpoint pen—I’d been a fan of the show since it started in 1962—and then he used a sewing pin he’d nicked from the workroom and some melted grate polish to poke in the tattoo over the top.

I started tattooing myself all over the place after I came out of Winson Green. I even put a smiley face on each of my knees to cheer myself up when I was sitting on the bog in the morning. Another thing I learned inside was how to split matches. They were a scarce commodity, so the guys had worked out a way to make four out of one by splitting them with a pin.

I remember thinking, If they’re clever enough to do that, how come these people aren’t all fucking millionaires?

My most vivid memory of Winson Green is the time when Bradley came in. He was a notorious child molester, and he’d been given a cell on the level above the YP Wing. They put this big sign outside his door which said, ‘RULE 43’. That meant he had to have a twenty-four-hour-a-day guard, to protect him from the other inmates. They’d have strung him up from a light fixture, given half the chance. But the guards hated Bradley as much as the cons did—he was on remand for seventeen offences of sexually abusing kids, including his own—and they did their best to make sure his life was hell on earth. One time I saw this fucking huge guy with a tattoo of a snake on his face beat the shit of Bradley, and the guards just looked the other way, didn’t even say anything. The first punch alone must have broken Bradley’s nose. There was all this blood and snot and cartilage running down into his mouth and he was fucking howling with pain.

My job in prison was to dole out the food. The inmates would come in with these trays that had little compartments moulded into them, and I’d spoon out the sloppy tripe and peas or whatever disgusting fucking shit they were cooking that day. Whenever Bradley came in, the guard on duty would go to me, ‘Osbourne, don’t give ’im anything worth a shit.’ So I’d give him almost nothing. Bradley would have to be escorted into the canteen by himself to make sure nothing happened to him, but it didn’t always work. I remember one time, when he’d been given hardly any food for weeks, he said to the guy who was serving the porridge, ‘Can I have some more, please?’ The guy with the porridge just looked at him. Then he dipped the big, heavy prison ladle back in the pot, took it out, swung it back, and smashed it into Bradley’s face. I’ll never forget the sound of that fucking porridge ladle burying itself into his head.

Thwack! His nose hadn’t even healed up from the previous attack, and it just exploded again.

Bradley was crying and screaming and staggering around, but the guard just whacked him on the arse with his stick and told him to move along the fucking line. It was heavy-duty.

Bradley refused to come out of his cell again after that.

This became a problem for the guards, because prison regulations meant you had to have a cell search every night and empty your bucket of shit and polish the floor every morning. So when the prison chief noticed that Bradley wasn’t coming out to eat, all these fucking whistles and bells started going off. I was in the kitchen at the time. This guard comes up to me and one of the other guys and goes, ‘You and you, I want you to get that disgusting piece of shit out of his cell and into the bath. Then I want you to scrub him.’

I don’t know how long they’d let Bradley fester in his cell before sounding the alarm, but it must have been a few days, judging by the state of it. The slop bucket he was supposed to use as a bog was knocked over and there was piss and shit everywhere. Bradley himself was covered in it, too. So we dragged him out and into this bath of cold water. Then we used the brooms for the yard to scrub him down. His whole face was swollen and black, his nose was a fucking mess, and he was shivering and crying. I felt sorry for the guy at the end of the day.

People say child molesters get a soft time inside. Believe me, they don’t. I’m surprised Bradley didn’t just top himself. Maybe he was too chicken. Maybe he just didn’t have any spare razor blades.

On one of my last days in Winson Green I was walking around the exercise yard and I saw a guy I recognised.

‘Hey, Tommy!’ I shouted.

Tommy looked up, smiled, and walked over to me, flapping his arms for warmth while smoking a fag.

‘Ozzy?’ he goes. ‘Fucking hell, man, it’s you!’

Tommy had worked with me at the Digbeth slaughterhouse. He was one of the guys who roped in the cows before I shot them with the bolt gun. He asked me how long I was in for, and I told him I’d been given three months, but because of my work in the kitchen and my help with Bradley they were going to let me out after six weeks.

‘Good behaviour,’ I said. ‘How long are you in for?’

‘Four,’ he replied, taking another puff on his fag.

‘Weeks?’

‘Years.’

‘Fucking hell, Tommy. What did you do, mug the Queen?’

‘Robbed a bunch of caffs.’

‘How much dough?’

‘Fuck-all, man. But I got a couple of hundred packets of fags and some chocolate bars and whatnot.’

‘Four years for some fags and chocolate?’

‘Third offence. Judge said I hadn’t learned my lesson.’

‘Fucking hell, Tommy.’

A whistle blew and one of the guards told us to get moving.

‘See you around then, Ozzy.’

‘Yeah, see you around, Tommy.’

My old man had done the right thing by not paying my fine. There was no fucking way I ever wanted to go back to prison after Winson Green, and I never did. Jail, yes. Prison, not a chance.

Having said that, I did have a couple of close calls.

I’m not proud of the fact that I did time, but it was a part of my life, y’know? So I don’t try to pretend it never happened, like some people do. If it hadn’t been for those six weeks inside, fuck knows what I would have ended up doing. Maybe I’d have turned out like my mate Pat, my apple-scrumping partner from Lodge Road. He just kept getting involved with heavier and heavier things. Got mixed up with a really bad crowd. Drugs, I think it was. I didn’t know the details, because I never asked. When I got out of the nick I drifted away from Pat, because I didn’t want any more to do with all that dodgy stuff. But every now and again I’d meet up with him and we’d have a bit of a drink and whatever. He was a good guy, man. People are always so quick to put people down, but Patrick Murphy was all right. He just made some bad choices, and then it was too late.

Eventually he turned Queen’s Evidence, which means you take a reduced sentence for ratting on someone who’s more important. Then, when you get out of prison, they give you a new identity. They sent him off to live in Southend or some out-of-the-way place. He was under police protection twenty-four hours a day. But after years of waiting for him to come out of the slammer, his wife broke down and asked for a divorce. Pat goes into his garage, starts up his car, puts a hosepipe over the exhaust, and feeds it through the driver’s window. Then he gets inside and waits until the carbon monoxide kills him.

He was only in his early thirties.

When I heard, I phoned his sister, Mary, and asked if he had been loaded when he’d killed himself. She said they hadn’t found anything: he’d just done it, stone-cold sober.

It was the middle of winter 1966 when I got out of the nick. Fucking hell, man, it was cold.

The guards felt bad for me, so they gave me this old coat to wear, but it stank of mothballs.

Then they got the plastic bag with my things in it and tipped it out on to the table. Wallet, keys, fags. I remember thinking, What must it be like to get your stuff back after thirty years, when it’s like a time capsule from an alternative universe? After I signed some forms they unlocked the door, pulled back this barbed-wire-covered gate, and I walked out into the street.

I was a free man, and I’d survived prison without being arse raped or beaten to a pulp.

So how come I felt so fucking sad?

2. Ozzy Zig Needs Gig

Knock-knock.

I poked my head through the curtains in the living room and saw a big-nosed bloke with long hair and a moustache standing outside on the doorstep. He looked like a cross between Guy Fawkes and Jesus of Nazareth. And was that a pair of…? Fuck me, it was. He was wearing velvet trousers.

‘JOHN! Get the door!’

My mum could wake up half of Aston cemetery at the volume she shouted. Ever since I’d got out of the nick, she’d been breaking my balls. Every two seconds, it was ‘John, do this.

John, do that.’ But I didn’t want to answer the door too fast. I needed a moment to sort my head out, get my nerves under control. This bloke looked like he was serious.

This could be important.

Knock-knock.

‘JOHN OSBOURNE! GET THE BLOODY—!’

‘I’m getting it!’ I stomped down the hallway, twisted the latch on the front door, and yanked it open. ‘Are you… “Ozzy Zig”?’ said Guy Fawkes, in a thick Brummie accent.

‘Who wants to know?’ I said, folding my arms.

‘Terry Butler,’ he said. ‘I saw your ad.’

That was exactly what I’d hoped he was going to say. Truth was, I’d been waiting a long time for this moment. I’d dreamed about it. I’d fantasised about it. I’d had conversations with myself on the shitter about it. One day, I thought, people might write newspaper articles about my ad in the window of Ringway Music, saying it was the turning point in the life of John Michael Osbourne, ex-car horn tuner. ‘Tell me, Mr Osbourne,’ I’d be asked by Robin Day on the BBC, ‘when you were growing up in Aston, did you ever think that a simple advert in a music shop window would lead to you becoming the fifth member of the Beatles, and your sister Iris getting married to Paul McCartney?’ And I’d answer, ‘Never in a million years, Robin, never in a million years.’

It was a fucking awesome ad. ‘OZZY ZIG NEEDS GIG’, it said in felt-tip capital letters. Underneath I’d written, ‘Experienced front man, owns own PA system’, and then I’d put the address (14 Lodge Road) where I could be reached between six and nine on week nights. As long as I wasn’t down the pub, trying to scrounge a drink off someone. Or at the Silver Blades ice rink. Or somewhere else.

We didn’t have a telephone in those days.

Don’t ask me where the ‘Zig’ in ‘Ozzy Zig’ came from. It just popped into my head one day. After I got out of the nick, I was always dreaming up new ways to promote myself as a singer. The odds of making it might have been a million to one—even that was optimistic—but I was up for anything that could save me from the fate of Harry and his gold watch. Besides, bands like the Move, Traffic and the Moody Blues were proving that you didn’t have to be from Liverpool to be successful. People were talking about ‘Brumbeat’ being the next

‘Merseybeat’. Whatever the fuck that meant.

I ain’t gonna pretend I can remember every word of the conversation I had with the strange, velvet-trousered bloke on my doorstep that night, but it I’m pretty sure it went something like:

‘So you got a gig for me then, Terence?’

‘The lads call me Geezer.’

‘Geezer?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You taking the piss?’

‘No.’

‘As in “That smelly old geezer just shit his pants”?’

‘That’s a very funny joke for a man who goes around calling himself “Ozzy Zig”. And what’s up with that bum fluff on yer head, man? It looks like you had an accident with a lawnmower. You can’t go on stage looking like that.’

In fact, I’d shaved my head during one of my mod phases, but by then I was a rocker again, so I was trying to grow it back. I was pretty self-conscious about it, to be honest with you, so I didn’t appreciate Geezer pointing it out. I almost came back at him with a joke about his massive nose, but in the end I thought the better of it and just said, ‘So have you got a gig for me or not?’

‘You heard of Rare Breed?’

‘Course I have. You’re the ones with the strobe light and the hippy bloke with the bongos or whatever, right?’

‘That’s us. Only we just lost our singer.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘The ad said you’ve got your own PA system,’ said Geezer, getting straight to the point.

‘That’s right.’

‘You sang in any bands before?’

‘Course I fucking have.’

‘Well, the job’s yours then.’

And that was how I first met Geezer.

Or at least that’s how I remember it going down. I was an ornery little bastard in those days. You learn to be like that when you’re looking for a break. I was also getting very restless: a lot of the things that had never bothered me that much before had really started to piss me off. Like still living with my folks at 14 Lodge Road. Like still not having any dough. Like still not being in a band.

The hippy-dippy shit that was all over the radio after I got out of Winson Green was also winding me up, big time. All these polo-necked wankers from grammar schools were going out and buying songs like ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)’.

Flowers in your hair? Do me a fucking favour.

They even started playing some of that shit in the pubs around Aston. You’d be sitting there with your pint and your fags and your pickled egg, in this yellow-walled shithole of a boozer, staggering to the pisser and back every five minutes, with everyone knackered, broke and dying from asbestos poisoning or whatever toxic shit they were breathing in every day.

Then, all of a sudden, you’d hear all this hippy crap about ‘gentle people’ going to love-ins at Haight–Ashbury, whatever the fuck Haight–Ashbury was.

Who gave a dog’s arse about what people were doing in San Francisco, anyway? The only flowers anyone saw in Aston were the ones they threw in the hole after you when you croaked it at the age of fifty-three ’cos you’d worked yourself to death.

I hated those hippy-dippy songs, man.

Really hated them.

They were playing one when a fight broke out in the pub one time. I remember this bloke getting me in a headlock and trying to punch my teeth out, and all I can hear on the jukebox is this kumbaya bullshit being tapped out on a fucking glockenspiel while some knob-end with a voice like his marbles are in a vice warbles on about ‘strange vibrations’. Meanwhile, the bloke who’s trying to kill me drags me out into the street, and he’s jabbing me in the face, and I can feel my eye swelling up and blood spurting out of my nose, and I’m trying to reach around so I punch the fucker back, anything just to get him off me, and there’s a circle of blokes around us shouting, ‘FINISH IT, FINISH IT.’ Then, CRRRAAAAAASSSSSHHHHHH!

When I open my eyes I’m lying half-conscious in a pile of broken glass, big lumps of flesh torn out of my arms and legs, my jeans and jumper in shreds, people screaming, blood everywhere. Somehow, during the fight we’d both lost our balance and fallen backwards through a plate-glass shop window. The pain was unbelievable. Then I saw this severed head lying beside me and I almost crapped my pants. Luckily it was from one of the shop mannequins, not a real head. Then I heard sirens. Then everything went black.

I spent most of the night in hospital being stitched up. The glass ripped off so much skin that I lost half a tattoo, and the doctors told me the scars on my head would be there for life.

That wouldn’t be a problem though, as long as I didn’t become a baldie. On the bus back home the next day I remember humming the tune to ‘San Francisco’ and thinking, I should write my own fucking anti-hippy song. I even came up with a title: ‘Aston (Be Sure to Wear Some Glass in Your Face)’.

The funny thing is, I was never much of a fighter. Better a live coward than a dead hero, that was my motto. But for some reason I just kept getting caught up in all these scuffles during those early days. I must have looked like I was up for it, I suppose. My last big fight was in another pub, out near Digbeth. I’ve no idea how it started, but I remember glasses and ashtrays and chairs flying all over the place. I was pissed-up, so when this guy fell backwards into me, I gave him a good old shove in the other direction. But the bloke picked himself up, went bright red in the face, and said to me, ‘You didn’t want to do that, sunshine.’

‘Do what?’ I said, all innocent.

‘Don’t play that fucking game with me.’

‘How about this game then?’ I said, and tried to chin the cunt. Now that would have been a reasonable thing to do, had it not been for a couple of things: first, I fell over when I took the swing; and second, the bloke was an off-duty copper. Next thing I knew I was lying face-down with a mouthful of pub carpet and all I could hear was this voice above me going, ‘You just assaulted a police officer, you little prick. You’re nicked.’

As soon as I heard that, I jumped up and legged it. But the copper ran after me and pulled some rugby move that sent me crashing down on to the pavement. A week later I was in court with a fat lip and two black eyes. Luckily, the fine was only a couple of quid, which I could just about afford. But it made me think: Did I really want to go back to prison?

My boxing days were over after that.

When my old man found out I was trying to join a band, he offered to help me buy a PA system. To this day, I’ve no idea why: he could hardly afford to put food on the table, never mind take out a £250 loan on an amplifier and two speakers. But in those days you couldn’t call yourself a singer without your own PA. You might as well have tried to get a gig as a drummer without a kit. Even my old man knew that. So he took me down to George Clay’s music shop by the Rum Runner nightclub in Birmingham and we picked out this fifty-watt Vox system. I hope my father knew how grateful I was for him doing that. I mean, he didn’t even like the music I spent my whole time listening to.

He’d say to me, ‘Let me tell you something about the Beatles, son. They won’t last five minutes. They ain’t got no tunes. You can’t sing that bleedin’ racket down the pub.’

It killed me that he thought the Beatles had ‘no tunes’. ‘Taxman’? ‘When I’m Sixty-four’?

You’d have to be deaf not to appreciate those melodies.

I just couldn’t understand what was wrong with him. Still, I wasn’t going to argue—not after he’d forked out £250.

Sure enough, as soon as people found out I had my own PA, I was Mr Fucking Popular.

The first band that invited me to join was called Music Machine, and it was led by a bloke named Mickey Breeze.

‘Ambitious’ wasn’t a word you would have used to describe us. Our big dream was to play in a pub so we could earn some beer money. The trouble was, to play in a pub you needed to be able to play. And we never got around to learning how to do that, because we were always in the pub, talking about how one day we could play in a pub and earn some beer money. Music Machine never played a single gig, as far as I can remember.

Then, after a few months of going nowhere, we finally got something done: we changed our name. From then on, Music Machine was The Approach. Didn’t make any difference, though. All we’d ever do is have these endless tune-ups, then I’d sing in this high-pitched voice as the others tried to remember the chords to some hokey cover version. I used to joke that you could tell I’d worked in a slaughterhouse, ’cos I did such a good job at slaughtering songs like ‘(Sitting on the) Dock of the Bay’. Mind you, at least I was able to keep a tune and reach the high notes without windows breaking and the local tomcats trying to mate with me, which was a start. And what I lacked in technique, I made up for in enthusiasm. I knew from my classroom stunts at Birchfield Road that I could entertain people, but to do that I needed gigs. But The Approach could barely get a rehearsal together, never mind a show.

So that’s why I put up the ad in Ringway Music. The shop was in the Bull Ring, a concrete mega-mall they’d just finished building in the middle of Birmingham. It was a fucking eyesore from day one, that place. The only way you could get to it was through these subway tunnels that stank of piss and had muggers and dealers and bums hanging around all the time.

But no one cared: the Bull Ring was a new place to meet your mates, so people went there.

And Ringway Music—which basically sold the same kind of stuff as George Clay’s—was the best thing about it. All the cool-looking kids would hang around outside, smoking fags, eating chips, arguing about the records they were listening to at the time. All I needed was to get in with that crowd, I thought, and I’d be fucking set. So I wrote the ad and, sure enough, a few weeks later, Geezer came knocking.

Now, he’s not your average bloke, Geezer. For a start, he never uses foul language. He always has his nose in a book about Chinese poetry or ancient Greek warfare or some other heavy-duty shit. Doesn’t eat meat, either. The only time I ever saw him touch the stuff was when we were stranded in Belgium one time and almost dying of hunger, and someone gave him a hot dog. He was in hospital the next day. Meat just doesn’t agree with him—he’s not one for a good old bacon sarnie. When I first met him he was also smoking a lot of dope.

You’d be out with him at a club, say, and he’d start talking about wormholes in the vibration of consciousness, or some other fucking loony shit. But he also had a very dry sense of humour.

I’d always be clowning around with him, just trying to get him to lose his cool and crack up laughing, which would set me off, then we’d be fucking sniggering away for hours.

Geezer played rhythm guitar in Rare Breed, and he wasn’t bad at all. But more important than that, he looked the part, with his Jesus hair and his Guy Fawkes moustache. He could afford all the very latest stitches too, could Geezer. He’d been to grammar school, so he had a real job as a trainee accountant at one of the factories. They paid him fuck-all, but he was still probably earning more dough than me, even though he was a year younger. And he must have blown almost all of it on clothes. Style-wise, nothing was too out-there for Geezer. He’d turn up to rehearsals in lime green bell bottoms and silver platform boots. I’d just look at him and say, ‘Why the fuck would you ever want to wear that?’

I wasn’t exactly a conservative dresser myself, mind you. I’d walk around in an old pyjama top for a shirt with a hot-water tap on a piece of string for a necklace. I tell you, it wasn’t easy trying to look like a rock star with no fucking dough. You had to use your imagination. And I never wore shoes—not even in winter. People would ask me where I got my ‘fashion inspiration’ from and I’d tell them: ‘By being a dirty broke bastard and never taking a bath.’

Most people reckoned I’d walked straight out of the funny farm. But they’d look at Geezer and think: I bet he’s in a band. He had it all. He’s such a clever guy, he probably could have had his own company with his name above the door: Geezer & Geezer Ltd. But the most impressive thing he could do was write lyrics: really fucking intense lyrics about wars and super-heroes and black magic and a load of other mind-blowing stuff. The first time he showed me them I just said, ‘Geezer, we’ve gotta start writing our own songs so we can use these words. They’re amazing.’

We became pretty tight, me and Geezer. I’ll always remember when we were walking around the Bull Ring in the spring or early summer of 1968, and all of a sudden this bloke with long, frizzy blond hair and the tightest trousers you’ve ever seen pops out of nowhere and slaps Geezer on the back.

‘Geezer fucking Butler!’

Geezer turned around and said, ‘Rob! How are you, man?’

‘Oh, y’know… could be worse.’

‘Rob, this is Ozzy Zig,’ said Geezer. ‘Ozzy, this is Robert Plant—he used to sing with the Band of Joy.’

‘Oh yeah,’ I said, recognising the face. ‘I went to one of your shows. Fucking awesome voice, man.’

‘Thanks,’ said Plant, flashing me this big, charming smile.

‘So, what you been up to?’ asked Geezer.

‘Well, since you mention it, I’ve been offered a job.’

‘Nice. What’s the gig?’

‘The Yardbirds.’

‘Whoah! Congratulations, man. That’s huge. But didn’t they split up?’

‘Yeah, but Jimmy—y’know the guitarist, Jimmy Page—he’s still around. So is the bass player. And they’ve got contractual obligations in Scandinavia, so they want to put something together.’

‘That’s great,’ said Geezer.

‘Well, I’m not sure I’m gonna to be taking the gig, to be honest,’ said Plant, shrugging. ‘I’ve got some pretty good stuff going on here, y’know? Matter of fact, I’ve just put a new band together.’

‘Oh, er… cool,’ said Geezer. ‘What’s the name?’

‘Hobbstweedle,’ said Plant.

Later, when Plant was gone, I asked Geezer if the bloke was out of his fucking mind. ‘Is he seriously going to pass up a gig with Jimmy Page for that Hobbsbollocks thing?’ I asked.

Geezer shrugged. ‘I think he’s just worried it won’t work out,’ he said. ‘But he’ll do it, as long as they change the name. They can’t go around calling themselves the “New Yardbirds” for long.’

‘It’s better than fucking Hobbstweedle.’

‘Good point.’

Bumping into someone like Robert Plant wasn’t unusual when you were with the Geezer.

He seemed to know everyone. He was part of the cool crowd, so he went to the right parties, took the right drugs, hung out with the right movers and shakers. It was a real eye-opener, and I loved being part of it. Still, there was a big problem hanging over us: our band, Rare Breed, was shit. We made Hobbstweedle look like The fucking Who. When I joined they were set on being ‘experimental’: they had all these trippy stage props and a strobe light, like they were trying to be the next Pink Floyd. Now, there was nothing wrong with trying to be the next Pink Floyd—later on, I would enjoy dropping a few tabs of mind detergent while listening to

‘Interstellar Overdrive’—but we couldn’t pull it off. Pink Floyd was music for rich college kids, and we were the exact fucking opposite of that. So Rare Breed wasn’t going anywhere, and me and Geezer both knew it. Rehearsals were just one long argument about when the bongo solo should come in. Worst of all, there was this bloke in the band who called himself Brick, and he fancied himself as a bit of a San Francisco hippy type.

‘Brick’s a dick,’ I kept telling Geezer.

‘Aw, he’s all right.’

‘No, Brick’s a dick.’

‘Give it a rest, Ozzy.’

‘He’s a dick, that Brick.’

And so on.

I got on fine with the other members of the band. But with Brick on the scene and me getting increasingly pissed off, Rare Breed was never going to last. Even Geezer started to lose his patience after a while.

The only gig I can remember playing in those very early days—and I think it was with Rare Breed, but it could have been under a different name, with different band members, ’cos line-ups changed so often back then—was the Birmingham Fire Station’s Christmas party.

The audience consisted of two firemen, a bucket and a ladder. We made enough dough for half a shandy (beer mixed with lemonade), split six ways.

But that gig made an impression on me, because it was the first time I ever experienced stage fright.

And fucking hell, man, did I get a bad case of the brown trousers.

To say that I suffer from pre-show nerves is like saying that when you get hit by an atom bomb it hurts a bit. I was absolutely fucking petrified when I got up on that stage. Sweaty.

Mouth drier than a Mormon wedding. Numb legs. Racing heart. Trembling hands. The fucking works, man. I literally almost pissed myself. I’d never felt anything like it in my life. I remember downing a pint beforehand to try to calm myself down, but it didn’t work. I would have had twenty pints if I’d had enough dough. In the end I croaked my way through a couple of numbers until we blew out one of the speakers of the PA. Then we fucked off home. I didn’t tell my old man about the speaker. I just swapped it with the one in his radiogram.

I’d buy him a new one when I got a job, I told myself. And it seemed like I would have to get a job, because, judging by the fire station gig, there was no way I was ever going to make it in the music business.

A couple of days later, I decided to pack in singing for good.

I remember saying to Geezer down the pub, ‘I’ve had enough, man, this ain’t going nowhere.’

Geezer just frowned and twiddled his thumbs. Then, in a dejected voice, he said: ‘They’ve offered me a promotion at work. I’m going to be number three in the accounting department.’

‘Well, that’s it then, isn’t it?’ I said.

‘Suppose.’

We finished our drinks, shook hands, and went our separate ways. ‘See you around, Geezer,’ I said.

‘Take it easy, Ozzy Zig.’

Knock-knock.

I poked my head through the curtains in the living room and saw a dodgy-looking bloke with long hair and a moustache standing outside on the doorstep. What the fuck was this, déjà vu? But no, despite the hair and the tash, the bloke didn’t look anything like Geezer. He looked… homeless. And there was another bloke standing next to him. He also had long hair and a king-sized ferret on his upper lip. But he was taller, and he looked a bit like… Nah, it couldn’t be. Not him. Parked behind them on the street was an old blue Commer van with a big rusty hole above the wheel arch and faded lettering on the side that said ‘Mythology’.

‘JOHN! Get the door!’

‘I’m getting it!’

It had been a few months since I’d left Rare Breed. I was twenty now, and had given up all hope of being a singer or ever getting out of Aston. PA system or no PA system, it wasn’t going to happen. I’d convinced myself that there was no point in even trying, because I was just going to fail, like I had at school, at work, and at everything else I’d ever tried. ‘You ain’t no good as a singer,’ I told myself. ‘You can’t even play an instrument, so what hope d’you have?’ It was Self-Pity City at 14 Lodge Road. I’d already talked to my mum about trying to get my old job back at the Lucas plant. She was seeing what she could do. And I’d told the owner of Ringway Music to take down my ‘OZZY ZIG NEEDS GIG’ sign. Stupid fucking name, anyway—Geezer was right about that. All in all, there was no reason whatsoever why two long-haired blokes should be standing on my doorstep at nine o’clock on a Tuesday night.

Could they be mates of Geezer? Did they have something to do with Rare Breed? It didn’t make any sense.

Knock-knock.

Knock-knock.

Knock-knock-knock-knock.

I twisted the latch and pulled. An awkward pause. Then the shorter and scruffier bloke asked, ‘Are you… Ozzy Zig?’

Before I could answer, the bigger guy leaned forwards and squinted at me. Now I knew for certain who he was. And he knew me, too. I froze. He groaned. ‘Aw, fucking hell,’ he said. ‘It’s you.’

I couldn’t believe it. The bloke on my doorstep was Tony Iommi: the good-looking kid from the year above me at Birchfield Road, who’d brought his electric guitar to school one Christmas, driving the teachers crazy with the noise. I hadn’t seen him for about five years, but I’d heard about him. He’d become a bit of an Aston legend since leaving school. All the kids knew who he was. If you wanted to be in a band with anyone, it was Tony. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to feel the same way about me.

‘C’mon, Bill,’ he said to the homeless-looking bloke. ‘This is a waste of time. Let’s go.’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Bill. ‘Who is this guy?’

‘I’ll tell you one thing: his name ain’t “Ozzy Zig”. And he ain’t no singer, either. He’s Ozzy Osbourne and he’s an idiot. C’mon, let’s get out of here.’

‘Hang on a minute,’ I interrupted. ‘How did you get this address? How d’you know about Ozzy Zig?’

‘“Ozzy Zig Needs Gig,”’ said Bill, with a shrug.

‘I told ’em to take that fucking sign down months ago.’

‘Well, you should go and tell them again, ’cos it was up there today.’

‘At Ringway Music?’

‘In the window.’

I tried not to look too pleased.

‘Tony,’ said Bill, ‘can’t we give this guy a break? He seems all right.’

‘Give him a break?’ Tony had already lost patience. ‘He was the school clown! I’m not being in a band with that fucking moron.’

I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just stood there staring at my feet.

‘Beggars can’t be choosers, Tony,’ hissed Bill. ‘That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?’

But Tony just huffed and started to walk back towards the van.

Bill shook his head and shrugged at me, as if to say, ‘Sorry, mate. Nothing more I can do.’

That seemed to be that. But then something caught my eye. It was Tony’s right hand.

There was something wrong with it.

‘Fucking hell, Tony,’ I said. ‘What happened to your fingers, man?’

It turned out I wasn’t the only one who’d had a rough time with jobs after being turfed out of school at the age of fifteen. While I was poisoning myself with the degreasing machine and going deaf testing car horns, Tony was working as an apprentice sheet-metal worker. Later, he told me his education mainly involved learning how to use an electric welder.

Now, they’re lethal fucking things, electric welders. The biggest risk is being exposed to ultraviolet radiation, which can literally melt the skin off your body before you even know it, or burn holes in your eyeballs. You can also get killed by electric shocks, or end up poisoned by exposure to the toxic rust-proofing shit they put on the panels. Anyway, Tony was doing this welding job during the day and playing in a band called the Rocking Chevrolets on the club circuit at night, waiting for his big break. He was always talented, but hammering out all those numbers by Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Eddie Cochran every night made him shit fucking hot. Eventually an agent spotted him and offered him a professional gig over in Germany, so Tony decided to quit his job in the factory. He thought he’d made it.

Then it all went wrong.

On Tony’s last day in the workshop, the bloke who was supposed to press and cut the metal before it was welded didn’t show up. So Tony had to do it. I still don’t know exactly what happened—if Tony didn’t know how to use the machine properly, or if it was broken, or whatever—but this fucking massive metal press ended up ripping off the tips of the middle and ring fingers on his right hand. Tony is left handed, so they were his fretboard fingers. It makes me shiver just to think about it, even now. You can’t imagine what a bad scene it must have been, with all the blood and the howling and the scrambling around on the floor trying to find the tips of his fingers, and then Tony being told by the doctors in the emergency room that he’d never be able to play again. He saw dozens of specialists over the next few months, and they all told him the same thing: ‘Son, your days in a rock ’n’ roll band are finished, end of fucking story, find something else to do.’ He must have thought it was all over. It would have been like me getting shot in the throat.

Tony suffered from terrible depression for a long time after the accident. I don’t know how he even got out of bed in the morning. Then, one day, his old shop foreman brought him a record by Django Reinhardt, the Belgian Gypsy jazz guitarist who played all his solos using just two fingers on his fretting hand because he’d burned the others in a fire.

And Tony thought, Well, if old Django can do it, so can I.

At first he tried playing right-handed, but that didn’t work. So he went back to left-handed, trying to play the fretboard with just two fingers, but he didn’t like that, either. Finally he figured out what to do. He made a couple of thimbles for his injured fingers out of a melted-down Fairy Liquid bottle, sanded them down until they were roughly the same size as his old fingertips, and then glued these little leather pads on the ends to improve his grip on the strings. He loosened the strings a bit too, so he wouldn’t have to put so much pressure on them.

Then he just learned to play the guitar again from scratch, even though he had no feeling in two fingers. To this day, I’ve no idea how he does it. Everywhere he goes, he carries around a bag full of homemade thimbles and leather patches, and he always keeps a soldering iron on hand to make adjustments. Every time I see him play, it hits me how much he had to over-come. I have so much awe and respect for Tony Iommi because of that. Also, in a strange way, I suppose the accident helped him, because when he learned to play again he developed a unique style that no one has ever been able to copy. And fucking hell, man, they’ve tried.

After the accident Tony played in a band called the Rest. But his heart wasn’t in it. He thought all the hype about ‘Brumbeat’ was bollocks and he wanted out, so when he was offered an audition with a band called Mythology up in Carlisle, you couldn’t see him for dust.

He even convinced the Rest’s singer to go up there with him. Once the guys in Mythology had heard the two of them in action, they couldn’t sign them up fast enough. Then, a couple of months later, Mythology’s drummer quit. So Tony called up his old mate Bill Ward from Aston, who was only too happy to take the job.

I never went to a Mythology gig, but I’m told they brought the house down wherever they went: they had this dirty, swampy, heavy blues sound, and they’d cover songs by bands like Buffalo Springfield, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers—whose new guitarist at the time was Eric Clapton, who’d just quit the Yardbirds, giving Jimmy Page his big break. It was a classic era for rock ’n’ roll, and it was all going gangbusters for Mythology. The band quickly built a massive following in Cumberland, playing sold-out shows all over the place, supporting acts like Gary Walker, of the Walker Brothers. But then they started to run into trouble with the law. That’s what happened in those days if you had long hair and moustaches and tight leather trousers. From what I heard, the first time they got done was for using the label from a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale in place of a tax disc on their tour van. The next time was a lot more heavy-duty, though, and it finished them off. Their dope dealer—a student from Leeds, I think—got busted. Then the cops drew up a list of the guy’s clients, got a search warrant, and raided Mythology’s flat at Compton House in Carlisle.

It was bad news, man.

All four members of the band were done for possession of marijuana. That might not sound like such a big deal now, but in those days it was fucking horrendous. Not so much because of the punishment—they all pleaded guilty and were fined just fifteen quid each—but because of the stigma. No one would book a band that had been done for drugs, ’cos they thought you were a bad crowd. And no one wanted any trouble with the law, not when they had licences that could be revoked. By the summer of 1968, Mythology’s gigs had dried up to the point where they were all flat broke. They could barely even afford food. Tony and Bill had two choices: give up full-time music and get proper jobs in Carlisle like their bandmates were planning to do; or fuck off back to Aston, where they could live at their folks’ places while they tried to save their careers. They chose Aston, which is how they ended up on my doorstep.

I’ve no idea what I said to Tony outside my house that night to make him change his mind and give me a chance. The fact that I had a PA system probably helped. And maybe he realised that it had been five years since school, and that we’d both grown up a lot since then.

Well, perhaps I hadn’t grown up too much, but at least I knew I never wanted to go back to prison or work in a factory again. I think Tony felt the same way after his drugs bust and his accident at the metalworks. And although his folks made a decent living—they owned a little corner shop on Park Lane—he’d left Birchfield Road with a no-hope future just like mine.

Without music, we were both fucked.

Bill also helped to calm Tony down. He’s the nicest bloke you’ll ever meet, Bill. A phenomenal drummer—as I would soon find out—but also a solid, down-to-earth guy. You could tell that by the way he dressed: he was the anti-Geezer when it came to fashion. If you didn’t know better, you’d think he was living in a cardboard box on the hard shoulder of the M6. In all the time I’ve known him, he’s never changed, either. Years later, I went on Concorde for the first time with Bill. He was late, and I was sitting on board thinking, Where the fuck is he?

Eventually he strolled into the cabin wearing an old man’s over-coat and carrying two Tesco bags full of cans of cider. I looked him up and down and said, ‘Bill, you do know that they provide drinks on Concorde, don’t you? You don’t have to bring your own Tesco cider?’ He replied, ‘Oh, I don’t want to put them to any trouble.’

That’s Bill Ward for you.

After Tony had warmed up a bit, we spent the rest of the night sitting in the back of the van, smoking fags, telling stories about prison and Carlisle and drugs busts and severed fingers and Mr Jones from school and how to slaughter cows with a bolt gun and what blues records we’d been listening to lately. Then we started to plot our next move.

‘Before we do anything else, we’re going to need a name and a bass player,’ said Tony.

‘I don’t know any bass players,’ I said. ‘But I know a bloke called Geezer who plays rhythm guitar.’

Tony and Bill looked at me. Then at each other. ‘Geezer Butler?’ they said in unison.

‘Yeah.’

‘That bloke’s crazy,’ said Bill. ‘Last time I saw him he was off his nut in Midnight City.’

‘That’s because Geezer’s already a rock star in his own head,’ I said. ‘Which is a good thing. And he doesn’t eat meat, so it’ll save us money on the road. And he’s a qualified accountant.’

‘Ozzy’s right.’ Tony nodded. ‘Geezer’s a good bloke.’

‘I’ll go round his house tomorrow and ask him if he wants to do the honours,’ I said. ‘He’ll need some time to learn to play the bass, but how hard can it be, eh? There’s only four fucking strings.’

‘And what about a name?’ said Tony.

The three of us looked at each other.

‘We should all take a couple of days to think about it,’ I said. ‘I dunno about you two, but I’ve got a special place where I go to get ideas for important stuff like this. It’s never failed me yet.’

Forty-eight hours later I blurted out: ‘I’ve got it!’

‘Must have been that dodgy bird you poked the other night,’ said Geezer. ‘Has your whelk turned green yet?’

Tony and Bill snickered into their plates of egg and chips. We were sitting in a greasy spoon caff in Aston. So far, everyone was getting along famously.

‘Very funny, Geezer,’ I said, waving an eggy fork at him. ‘I mean the name for our band.’

The snickering died down.

‘Go on then,’ said Tony.

‘Well, I was on the shitter last night, and…’

‘That’s your special place?’ spluttered Bill, blobs of mushed-up egg and HP sauce flying out of his mouth.

‘Where the fuck did you think it was, Bill?’ I said. ‘The hanging gardens of fucking Babylon? So, I’m on the shitter, and I’ve got this right old cliffhanger of a Richard the Third coming down the pipe—’

Geezer groaned.

‘—and I’m looking straight ahead at this shelf in front of me. My mum’s put a tin of talcum powder on there, right? She loves that stuff. When you go to the bog after she’s taken a bath it looks like Santa’s fucking grotto in there. Anyway, it’s that cheap brand of talc, the one with the black and white polka dots on the side…’

‘Polka Tulk,’ said Tony.

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Polka Tulk!’ I looked around the table, grinning. ‘Fucking brilliant, eh?’

‘I don’t get it,’ said Bill, his mouth still full. ‘What’s your mum’s smelly old armpits got to do with our band?’

‘The Polka Tulk Blues Band,’ I said. ‘That’s our name!’

The table went so quiet you could almost hear the steam rising from the four mugs of tea in front of us.

‘Anyone got a better idea?’ said Tony.

Silence.

‘It’s settled then,’ he said. ‘We’re the Polka Tulk Blues Band—in honour of Ozzy’s mum’s smelly old armpits.’

‘Oi!’ I said. ‘Enough of that! I won’t have a fucking word said against my mum’s smelly old armpits.’

Bill roared with laughter, and more blobs of egg and sauce flew out of his mouth.

‘You two are just animals,’ said Geezer.

The name wasn’t the only decision we had to make. Also put to the vote was whether we needed more band members. In the end we agreed that the kind of songs we’d be playing—dirty, heavy, Deep South blues—tended to work better with a lot of instruments, so ideally we could use a saxophonist and a bottleneck guitarist to give us a fuller sound. Tony knew a sax player called Alan Clark, and a mate of mine from school, Jimmy Phillips, could play bottleneck.

To be honest with you, we also wanted to copy the line-up of Fleetwood Mac, whose second album—Mr Wonderful—had just come out and blown us all away. Tony was especially taken with Fleetwood Mac’s guitarist, Peter Green. Like Clapton before him, Green had played for a while with John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers, but he was now a fully qualified rock god in his own right. That seemed to be how guitarists made the big time: they joined an established act, then they left to front their own projects. Fortunately for us, Tony had been taken off the market by his injury just when he was about to be snapped up by a big-name act.

Their loss was our gain.

That weekend, we met up for our first rehearsal at a community centre in Six Ways, one of the older and shittier parts of Ashton. There was only one problem: we could barely hear the PA above the noise of the A34 underpass outside. Making the din even worse were the cars and trucks circling the massive concrete roundabout they’d just built on top of the fucking thing. They were pouring so much concrete in Aston in those days that we might as well have bought some fur hats and started calling each other comrade. I mean, for fuck’s sake, the place was grey enough as it was without adding more fucking grey everywhere.

To cheer things up a bit, I went out one night with an aerosol can—I’d had a few beers—and did some ‘decorating’. One of the things I graffitied on a wall by the roundabout was ‘Iron Void’. Fuck knows what was going on in my head.

The rehearsals went all right, considering I’d never sung with a proper band before. Basically, the lads would just jam, and then Tony would give me a nod when he thought I should sing. For lyrics, I just came out with whatever bollocks was in my head at the time.

It wasn’t easy for Geezer, either. He didn’t have enough dough at the time to buy a bass, so he did the best he could with his Telecaster—you can’t put bass strings on a normal guitar, ’cos it would snap the neck. I think Tony was worried about Geezer at first, but it turned out that he was a fucking awesome bass player—a total natural. And he looked more like a rock star than anyone else in the band.

Our first gig was up in Carlisle, thanks to Tony’s old Mythology contacts. That meant driving two hundred miles up the M6 in Tony’s rusty old shitbox of a van, with the motorway stopping and starting all the time, ’cos they hadn’t finished tarmacking it. The van’s suspension had died along with the dinosaurs, so whenever we went round a corner everyone had to lean in the opposite direction to stop the wheel arch from scraping on the tire. We soon learned that it’s almost impossible to lean in the opposite direction of a turn, so this horrible smell of burning rubber kept wafting into the cabin, sparks were flying all over the place, and you could hear this violent grinding noise as the wheel gradually etched a big fucking hole in the body-work. ‘It’s a good job you know how to use a welder,’ I said to Tony. Another problem was the windscreen wipers: they didn’t work. Well, they did for a bit, but it was raining so hard that by the time we’d reached Stafford the motor had conked out. So Tony had to pull over to the hard shoulder in the pissing rain while me and Bill fed a piece of string out of the window, tied it to the wiper, then strung it back through the other window. That way we could wipe the windscreen manually, with me tugging on one end of the string, then Bill tugging on the other.

All the way to fucking Carlisle.

But the eight-hour drive was worth it.

When we finally arrived in Carlisle, I just couldn’t stop staring at the flyer for our first official gig. It said:

This is it, I said to myself.

It’s finally happening.

The gig itself was amazing, apart from almost crapping my pants with stage fright. It was afterwards that the trouble started. We were packing up our stuff—roadies were a luxury we couldn’t afford—and this giant of a bloke with bright red hair and some kind of pus-filled rash on his face came up to me. He was holding a pint glass and his troll of a chick was standing next to him. ‘Oi, you,’ he went. ‘D’you like my girlfriend?’

‘Say again?’ I said.

‘You ’eard me. D’you like my girlfriend? You were looking at her. Fancy giving her one, do you?’

‘You must have got me mixed up with someone else,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t looking at anything.’

‘You were looking at her. I saw ya. With my own two fucking eyes. Fancy having a go, do you?’

By now, the bloke was so close to me that I could smell the sweat on his T-shirt. He was enormous, and he had a head on him like a fucking anvil. He was even bigger than my old mate, the bully-basher from Birchfield Road. There was no way out. I knew exactly what was going to happen next. I’d either say, ‘No, honestly mate, I don’t like your girlfriend,’ and he’d reply, ‘You calling her ugly, are you, you Brummie cunt?’ then rip my head off. Or I’d go,

‘Funny you should say that, ’cos I was just thinking how much I’d love to give your girlfriend a good old seeing to,’ and he’d reply, ‘Yeah, I thought so, you Brummie cunt,’ then rip my head off.

I was fucked, either way.

Then I had an idea: maybe if I got someone else involved, it would take the pressure off.

‘Hey, Bill,’ I shouted over to the other side of stage. ‘Come over here a second, will yer?’

Bill strolled over, hands in pockets, whistling. ‘What’s up, Ozzy?’

‘D’you want to shag his girlfriend?’ I said, pointing at the troll in question.

‘What?’

‘His bird. D’you think she’s a bit of a slag, or would you give it a go?’

‘Ozzy, are you fucking insa—’

That was when the bloke went fucking stage-five apeshit. He roared, threw down his pint—beer and shards of glass went everywhere—then he lunged towards me, but I ducked out of the way. Uh-oh, I thought. This could get nasty. Then he tried to take a swing at Bill, who had a look on his face like he was tied to a railway track and the Flying Scotsman was coming down the line. At this point I was sure that one or both of us would be spending the next month in hospital, but I hadn’t counted on what Tony would do next. He saw what was going on, ran over to the giant redhead, gave him a shove, and told him to fuck off out of it. Now Tony was smaller than the red-head, a lot smaller, but he was an incredible fighter. The redhead didn’t know that, of course, so he went for Tony’s throat. They wrestled for a bit, the redhead got some jabs in, but then Tony just cracked him full-on in the face and kept pounding away—bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!—until the bloke went down like the Titanic.

Crraaaassssshhhh!

I watched, mouth wide open, as Tony shook the pain out of his fist, wiped the blood off his face, then calmly carried on packing up his equipment. No one said a word.

Later, when we were in the van on the way to our next gig down the road in Workington, I thanked him for saving our arses. He just waved me away, told me not to mention it again.

Bill, on the other hand, didn’t speak to me for a week.

Can’t say I blame him.

When we got back to Aston, Tony said he wasn’t happy with Alan and Jimmy. Jimmy fucked around too much in rehearsals, he said, and there wasn’t any point in having a saxophone player if we didn’t have a full brass section. And no one wanted a full brass section—we’d need a double-decker tour bus, for starters, and we’d never make any dough after splitting the takings on the door with half a dozen trombonists and trumpeters.

So that was it: Alan and Jimmy were out, and the Polka Tulk Blues Band became a fourpiece. But Tony still wasn’t happy. ‘It’s the name,’ he said, during a rehearsal break. ‘It’s crap.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’ I protested.

‘Every time I hear it, all I can picture is you, with your trousers round your ankles, taking a fucking dump.’

‘Well, you lot think of something then,’ I huffed.

‘Actually,’ announced Bill, ‘I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about this and I’ve got an idea.’

‘Go on,’ said Tony.

‘You’ve got to imagine it written on a big poster. Like a bill-board or something.’

‘I’m imagining it,’ said Tony.

Bill took a deep breath. Then he said, ‘Earth.’

Tony and Geezer looked at each other and shrugged. I ignored them and pretended to look worried.

‘Are you OK, Bill?’ I said, narrowing my eyes.

‘I’m fine. What do you mean?’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m fucking sure.’

‘It’s just… I thought I heard you throw up just then.’

‘What?’

‘UUUUUURRRRRRRRFFFFFF!’

‘Fuck you, Ozzy.’

‘UUUUUURRRRRRRRFFFFFF!’

‘Just give it some fucking thought, will you? It’s simple, powerful, no bullshit, just five letters—E-A-R-T-H.’

‘Bill, honestly mate, I think you should go and see a doctor. I think you just threw up again.

UUUURRRRR—’

‘Ozzy, cut it out,’ snapped Tony. ‘It’s better than Polka fucking Tulk.’

‘I agree,’ said Geezer.

That was that.

Officially, we didn’t have a band leader. Unofficially, we all knew it was Tony. He was the oldest, the tallest, the best fighter, the best-looking, the most experienced, and the most obviously talented. He’d really started to look the part, too. He’d gone out and bought this black suede cowboy jacket with tassels on the arms, which the chicks loved. We all knew that Tony belonged right up there with the likes of Clapton and Hendrix. Pound for pound, he could match any of them. He was our ticket to the big time.

Maybe that’s why I felt so intimidated by him, even after we became friends. Or maybe it was just because he’s such a private and reserved person. You never really know what’s going on inside Tony Iommi’s head. He’s the total opposite of me, in other words: no one’s ever in any doubt about what’s going on in the pile of old jelly inside my thick skull.

I didn’t feel intimidated by Geezer, even though he’d been to a proper school and actually knew stuff. As for Bill, he was the fall-guy. We’d always be playing pranks on him. He’d get drunk and pass out and we’d leave him on a park bench somewhere with a newspaper over him, and we’d think it was the funniest thing that had ever happened in the world. He was such a nice guy, he just seemed to be asking for it.

Me? I was still the clown. The madman. The loudmouth who’d do anything for a dare. The others would always get me to do the stuff they didn’t want to do—like asking for directions when we were on the road and trying to find the way to some new venue. One time we were in Bournemouth and there was a guy walking across the road with a roll of carpet under his arm. They’re all shouting, ‘Go on, Ozzy, ask ’im, ask ’im.’ So I wind down the window of the van and go, ‘Oi! Mister! Can you tell us the way to the M1?’ He turns around and says, ‘No.

Fuck off, cunt.’ Another time we’re in London, and I shout out to this bloke, ‘Excuse me, chief, but d’you know the way to the Marquee?’ He says, ‘Chief? Chief? Do I look like a fucking Indian?’

Fucking priceless, man. We had such a laugh. And that was the thing with us: we always had a sense of humour. It’s what made us work together so well—at first, anyway. If you don’t have a sense of humour when you’re in a band, you end up like fucking Emerson, Lake and Palmer, making eight-disc LPs so you can all have your own three-hour fucking solos.

And who wants to listen to that bollocks?

If it hadn’t been for Tony’s parents, I’m not sure we’d have made it through the rest of 1968 without starving to death. We were so broke, we’d steal raw vegetables from allotment gardens in the middle of the night, just for something to eat. One time, me and Bill found ten pence, and it was like we’d won the fucking lottery. We couldn’t decide what to buy with it: four bags of chips, or ten fags and a box of matches.

We went for the fags in the end.

Tony’s mum and dad were our only safety net. They’d give us sandwiches from the shop, tins of beans, the odd pack of Player’s No. 6, even petrol money from the till. And it’s not like they were rich: they owned a corner shop in Aston, not Harrods of Knightsbridge. I loved Tony’s mum, Sylvie—she was a lovely lady. Tony’s old man was great, too. He was one of those guys who would buy old cars and do them up. That’s why we always had a van to get around in.

And we needed one, because we never turned down gigs—ever—not even when the pay was only a few quid for a two-hour set, split four ways, before costs. We needed everything we could get. Even Geezer had given up his day job by then, and Earth was the one shot we had at making sure we never had to go back to the factories. We had to make it work—there was no choice.

We were incredibly single-minded. The craziest thing we did—and this was Tony’s idea, I think—was to find out whenever a big-name band was coming into town, load up the van with all our stuff, and then just wait outside the venue on the off-chance they might not show up.

The odds weren’t worth thinking about, but if it ever happened, we reckoned we’d get a chance to show off in front of a few thousand punters… even if they were pissed off and throwing bottles because we weren’t the band they’d blown a couple of days’ wages to see.

And y’know what? It worked.

Once.

The big-name band was Jethro Tull. I can’t remember where they were supposed to be playing—it might have been in Birmingham, or somewhere like Stafford—but they didn’t show up. And there we were, outside in the blue Commer van, ready to spring into action.

Tony went in to see the venue manager.

‘Has the band not showed up yet?’ he asked, ten minutes after they were supposed to go on.

‘Don’t fucking start, sunshine,’ came the pissed-off reply. Obviously the manager was having a bad night. ‘They’re not here, I don’t know why, I don’t know how, but they’re not here, and, yes, we’ve called their hotel. Five times. Come back tomorrow and we’ll give you a refund.’

‘I’m not looking for a refund,’ said Tony. ‘I just wanted to let you know that me and my band were driving by the venue—by chance, y’know?—and, well, if your main act hasn’t shown up, we can fill in.’

‘Fill in?’

‘Yeah.’

‘For Jethro Tull?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What’s the name of your band, son?’

‘Earth.’

‘Urf?’

‘Earth.’

‘Urph?’

‘As in the planet.’

‘Oh, right. Hmm. I think I might have actually heard of you lot. Crazy singer. Blues covers.

Right?’

‘Yeah. And a few originals.’

‘Where’s your equipment?’

‘In the van. Outside.’

‘Are you a Boy Scout or something?’

‘Eh?’

‘You seem very well prepared.’

‘Oh, er… yeah.’

‘Well, you’re on in fifteen minutes. I’ll pay you ten quid. And watch out for those bottles, the mob’s upset.’

Once the deal was done, Tony ran out of the venue with this huge grin on his face, giving us the double thumbs up. ‘We’re on in fifteen minutes!’ he shouted. ‘Fifteen minutes!’

The jolt of adrenaline was indescribable. It was so intense, I almost forgot about my stage fright. And the gig was a fucking triumph. The crowd grumbled for the first few minutes, and I had to dodge a couple of lobbed missiles, but we ended up blowing them away.

One of the best things about it was that Ian Anderson—Tull’s lead singer, who was famous for playing the flute with this bug-eyed look on his face while standing on one leg, like a court jester—finally turned up when we were halfway through the set. The band’s bus had broken down on the M6, or something like that, and they’d had no way to contact the venue to warn them. I think Anderson had hitch-hiked there by himself to apologise. So there I was, screaming into the mic, and when I looked up I saw Anderson standing at the back of the hall, nodding his head, looking like he was really into the music. It was fucking fabulous.

We came off stage buzzing. The venue manager couldn’t have been happier. Even Anderson seemed grateful. And after that, all the bookers knew our name—even if they couldn’t say it.

Over the next few weeks everything started to take off for us. The gigs got bigger, our playing got tighter, and some local managers began sniffing around. One guy in particular took an interest in us: his name was Jim Simpson and he’d been the trumpet player in a fairly well-known Birmingham band called Locomotive. Jim had given up being a musician to set up a management company called Big Bear, which was John Peel’s nickname for him, ’cos he was this stocky, hairy, red-faced bloke, who ambled around Birmingham like a big, tame grizzly. He’d also opened a club on the floor above the Crown pub on Station Street, calling it Henry’s Blues House. It was one of our favourite hang-outs. One of the earliest shows I remember seeing there was a jam with Robert Plant and John Bonham, probably just before they went off to Scandinavia. It gave me fucking goosebumps, man.

Then, near the end of 1968, Jim invited us to play at the club with Ten Years After, who were a huge blues act at the time. Alvin Lee, the band’s guitarist and singer, would later became a good friend of ours. It was a great night—as much of a turning point for Earth as the Jethro Tull gig had been. A few days later, after a few beers, Jim told me and Bill that he was thinking about managing us. Big Bear was already looking after Locomotive and two other local bands, Bakerloo Blues Line, and Tea and Symphony. It was a huge moment. Having Jim on our side would mean a lot more work and a much more realistic chance of making a living out of music without having to rely on handouts from Tony’s parents. We could go to London and play the Marquee Club. We could tour Europe.

The sky was the fucking limit.

The next day, me and Bill couldn’t wait to tell Tony. We’d booked the rehearsal room at Six Ways, and the second Tony walked in I said, ‘You’ll never fucking guess what…’

But when I told him about the possible deal, he just said, ‘Oh’, then looked at the floor. He seemed upset and distracted.

‘Are you all right, Tony?’ I asked.

‘I’ve got some news,’ he said quietly.

My heart just about stopped beating. I turned white. I thought his mum or dad must have died. Something terrible, anyway, for him not to be excited about us getting a manager.

‘What is it?’

‘Ian Anderson got in touch with me,’ he said, still looking at the floor. ‘Tull’s guitarist just quit. He asked me to replace him—and I said yes. I’m sorry, lads. I can’t turn it down. We’re going to be playing with the Rolling Stones in Wembley on the tenth of December.’

Stunned silence.

It was all over. We’d been so close, and now we were a million light years away.

‘Tony,’ I said eventually, swallowing hard. ‘That’s fucking great, man. It’s what you’ve always wanted.’

‘Congratulations, Tony,’ said Geezer, putting down his guitar and walking over to slap him on the back.

‘Yeah,’ said Bill. ‘If anyone deserves it, you do. I hope they know how lucky they are.’

‘Thanks, lads,’ said Tony, sounding like he was trying not to choke up. ‘You’re going to do great, with or without me. You’ll see.’

I can say with my hand on my heart that we weren’t bull-shitting Tony when we said all that stuff. We’d been through a lot together over the last few months, and all three of us were genuinely pleased for him.

Even though it was the worst fucking news we’d ever heard in our lives.

3. The Witch and the Nazi

We were all devastated.

There was only one Tony Iommi, and we knew it.

It had just worked with Tony. Maybe it was because all four of us had grown up within a few streets of each other. Or maybe it was because we were all broke and desperate and knew exactly what our lives would be like without rock ’n’ roll. Either way, we understood each other. It was obvious to anyone who saw us play.

After getting home from the rehearsal where Tony broke the news, I remember lying on the bed at 14 Lodge Road with my head in my hands. My dad came into the room and sat down next to me. ‘Go and have a drink with your pals, son,’ he said, pressing a ten-bob note into my hand. I must have looked pretty fucking upset for him to do that, given all the unpaid bills on the kitchen table that my mum was crying over. ‘The world doesn’t revolve around Tony,’ he said. ‘There’ll be other guitarists.’

He was a good guy, my old man. But this time he was wrong. There were no other guitarists.

Not like Tony.

So I went down the pub with Bill, and we got completely lollied. Bill was on the cider, as usual: the farm stuff, basically one step removed from poison. He would mix it with black-currant juice to take the edge off. They sold it for two bob a pint in those days, which was the only reason why anyone drank it. But Bill kept at it, years after he could afford champagne.

He really took cider to heart, did Bill. When you had a few pints of that stuff it wasn’t like being drunk, it was like having a head injury.

Tony was the main topic of conversation that night, and I can honestly say that we weren’t jealous of what he was doing. We were just heartbroken. As much as we both liked Jethro Tull, we thought Earth could be better—a hundred times better. Before he left, Tony had been coming up with all these heavy-duty riffs of his own—heavier than anything I’d heard anywhere before—and Geezer had started to write far-out lyrics to go with them. As for me and Bill, we’d been improving with every gig. And unlike a lot of the one-hit-wonder Top-Forty bands at the time, we weren’t fake. We hadn’t been put together by some suit-and-tie in a smoky office in London somewhere. We weren’t one star, a cool name, and a bunch of session players who changed with every tour.

We were the real fucking deal.

Tony left in December 1968.

It was so cold that winter that I started to have flashbacks to the time when I’d worked as a plumber, bending over manholes while my arse-crack frosted over. Without Tony, me and the lads had fuck-all to do apart from sit around all day, moan, and drink cups of tea. All our gigs had been cancelled, and we’d given up our day jobs long ago, which meant none of us had any dough, so even going down the pub wasn’t an option.

No one wanted to think about getting ‘real’ work, though.

‘In 1968, John Osbourne was an up-and-coming rock ’n’ roll star,’ I would say in this fake movie-announcer voice as I wandered around the house. ‘In 1969, he was an up-and-coming garbageman.’

The one thing we had to look forward to was seeing Tony on the telly. The BBC was going to broadcast the gig in London with the Rolling Stones. It was going to be called ‘The Rolling Stones’ Rock ’n’ Roll Circus’. Nothing like it had ever been done before: the Stones would basically play a private show with a few of their rock star pals at Intertel Studios in Wembley, where the set would be made to look like a circus ring with a big top over it. Jethro Tull would open. Then The Who would play. Mick Jagger had even talked John Lennon into doing a version of ‘Yer Blues’ with a one-off band called the Dirty Mac—featuring Eric Clapton on guitar, Mitch Mitchell on drums and Keith Richards on bass. I didn’t even know Richards could play bass. The press was going nuts about it, because it was going to be the first time Lennon had done a gig since the Beatles’ last show in 1966. (Someone told me later that one of those posh BBC producers called up Lennon and asked him what kind of amplifier he wanted to use, and he just replied, ‘One that works.’ Fucking priceless, man. I wish I could have met that guy.)

In the end, though, the BBC never broadcast the thing. The Stones killed it. I heard that Jagger wasn’t too pleased about how the Stones had sounded during the gig. It was twenty-eight years before the footage was finally shown, at the New York Film Festival. If you ever get to see it, Tony’s the one in the white hat with the king-sized ferret on his upper lip. He does a great job of playing ‘Song for Jeffrey’, although there doesn’t seem to be much chemistry between him and Ian Anderson.

Maybe that’s why he decided to quit after four days.

‘What d’you mean, you quit?’ asked Geezer, at an emergency meeting down the pub a few days before Christmas.

‘It wasn’t my scene,’ said Tony, with a shrug.

The drinks were on him.

‘How can being in Jethro Tull not be your scene?’ said Geezer. ‘You played a gig with John Lennon, man!’

‘I want to be in my own band. I don’t want to be someone else’s employee.’

‘So Ian Anderson’s a tosser, then?’ I asked, getting to the point.

‘No—he’s all right,’ said Tony. ‘He just wasn’t… We didn’t have a laugh, y’know? It wasn’t like this.’

Bill, already on his third pint of cider, looked like he was about to burst into tears.

‘So are we back together?’ said Geezer, trying not to lose his cool by grinning too much.

‘If you’ll have me.’

‘OK. But can we please now find another name?’ I said.

‘Look, forget about the name,’ said Tony. ‘We just need to agree that we’re all serious. We can’t fuck around any more. I’ve seen how guys like Jethro Tull work. And they work, man: four days of rehearsals for one show. We need to start doing that. And we need to start writing our own songs and playing them, even if we get boos. The punters will soon get to know them. It’s the only way we’re going to make a name for ourselves. And we need to think about an album. Let’s go and talk to Jim Simpson in the morning.’

Everyone nodded seriously.

None of us could believe our fucking luck, to be honest with you. Was Tony insane? No one in their right mind would give up the kind of gig he’d just walked away from. Even Robert Plant had eventually gone off to join Jimmy Page in the New Yardbirds, leaving Hobbsbollocks in the dust. And I can’t tell you that I’d have done the same thing if I’d been in Tony’s position. As much as I was heartbroken when Earth split up, if I’d been the one walking into a band with national recognition, headliner status and a record deal, it would have been, ‘Oh, er, see ya!’ The bottom line was you had to take your hat off to Tony Iommi. He knew what he wanted, and he obviously believed that he could get it without taking a ride on Ian Anderson’s coat tails.

All we had to do was prove he’d made the right decision.

‘OK, lads,’ said Tony, draining his pint and slamming the glass back down on the table.

‘Let’s get to work.’

One of the first things Jim Simpson did as our manager was pack us off on a ‘European tour’. This meant loading our gear into Tony’s van—which by now had been upgraded from a Commer to a Transit—driving it on to a ferry at Harwich, sailing across the North Sea to the Hook of Holland, then hoping the engine would start again when it was time to get off. The temperature in Denmark would be twenty below freezing. From the Hook of Holland, the plan was to drive to Copenhagen, where our first gig had been booked.

I remember taking my entire wardrobe with me on that trip. It consisted of one shirt on a wire hanger, and one pair of underpants in a carrier bag. I was wearing everything else: jeans, second-hand Air Force overcoat, Henry’s Blues House T-shirt, lace-up boots.

Day one, the van broke down. It was so cold the accelerator cable froze, so when Tony put his foot down it snapped in half. Which meant we were stranded in the middle of fucking nowhere, halfway to Copenhagen. There was a blizzard outside, but Tony said it was my job—as the band’s ‘public representative’—to go and find some help. So out I walked into this field, snow blowing into my face, two icicles of snot hanging out of my nose, until finally I saw the lights of a farmhouse up ahead. Then I fell into a trench. After finally pulling myself out of the fucking thing, I waded through the snow until I reached the front door, then knocked loudly.

‘Halløj?’ said the big, red-faced Eskimo bloke who opened the door.

‘Oh, thank fuck,’ I said, out of breath and sniffling. ‘Our van’s knackered. Can you gis a tow?’

‘Halløj?’

I didn’t know any Danish, so I pointed towards the road, and said, ‘Van. El kaputski. Ya?’

The guy just looked at me and started to pick wax out of his ear. Then he said, ‘Bobby Charlton, ja?’

‘Eh?’

‘Bobby Charlton, betydningsfuld skuespiller, ja?’

‘Sorry mate, speako Englishki?’

‘Det forstår jeg ikke,’ he said, with a shrug.

‘Eh?’

We stood there and looked at each other for a second.

Then he went, ‘Undskyld, farvel,’ and shut the door in my face. I gave it a good old kick and set off back through the waist-high snow. I was so cold, my hands were turning blue.

When I reached the road I saw a car coming and almost threw myself in front of it. Turned out it was the Danish cops—friendly ones, thank God. They gave me a sip from a flask they kept in the glove box. I don’t know what was in that thing, but it warmed me up soon enough. Then they organised a tow-truck to take us to a garage in the next village.

Good guys, those Danish cops.

When they waved us off, they told us to send their regards to Bobby Charlton.

‘We’ll tell him you said hello,’ promised Geezer.

Day two, the van broke down.

This time it was due to a dodgy petrol gauge—the tank ran dry without us knowing it. So off I went to get help again. But this time I had a better idea. We’d conked out next to a little white church, and outside was what I guessed was the vicar’s car. I thought he wouldn’t mind being a good Samaritan, so I disconnected the hose from the van’s engine and used it to siphon fuel from his tank to ours. It worked brilliantly, apart from the fact that I got a mouthful of petrol when it came spurting out of the tube. I had toxic, highly flammable burps for the rest of the day.

Every time it happened I’d screw up my face and have to spit petrol and lumps of vomit out of the window.

‘Urgh,’ I’d say. ‘I fucking hate four star.’

Between gigs we started to jam out some ideas for songs. It was Tony who first suggested we do something that sounded evil. There was a cinema called the Orient outside the community centre where we rehearsed in Six Ways, and whenever it showed a horror film the queue would go all the way down the street and around the corner. ‘Isn’t it strange how people will pay money to frighten themselves?’ I remember Tony saying one day. ‘Maybe we should stop doing blues and write scary music instead.’

Me and Bill thought it was a great idea, so off we went and wrote some lyrics that ended up becoming the song ‘Black Sabbath’. It’s basically about a bloke who sees a figure in black coming to take him off to the lake of fire.

Then Tony came up with this scary-sounding riff. I moaned out a tune over the top of it, and the end result was fucking awesome—the best thing we’d ever done, by a mile. I’ve since been told that Tony’s riff is based on what’s known as the ‘Devil’s interval’, or the ‘tritone’. Apparently, churches banned it from being used in religious music during the Middle Ages because it scared the crap out of people. The organist would start to play it and everyone would run away ’cos they thought the Devil was going to pop up from behind the altar.

As for the title of the song, it was Geezer who came up with that. He got it from a Boris Karloff film that had been out for a while. I don’t think Geezer had ever seen the film, to be honest with you. I certainly hadn’t—it was years before I even knew there was a film. It’s funny, really, because in spite of our new direction we were still quite a straightforward twelve-bar blues band. If you listened closely, you could also hear a lot of jazz influences in our sound—like Bill’s swing-style intro to one of our other early numbers, ‘Wicked World’. It’s just that we played at eight hundred times the volume of a jazz band.

Today you hear people saying that we invented heavy metal with the song ‘Black Sabbath’. But I’ve always had a bee up my arse about the term ‘heavy metal’. To me, it doesn’t say anything musically, especially now that you’ve got seventies heavy metal, eighties heavy metal, nineties heavy metal and new-millennium heavy metal—which are all completely different, even though people talk about them like they’re all the same. In fact, the first time I heard the words ‘heavy’ and ‘metal’ used together was in the lyrics of ‘Born to be Wild’. The press just latched on to it after that. We certainly didn’t come up with it ourselves. As far as we were concerned, we were just a blues band that had decided to write some scary music.

But then, long after we stopped writing scary music, people would still say, ‘Oh, they’re a heavy metal band, so all they must sing about is Satan and the end of the world.’ That’s why I came to loathe the term.

I don’t remember where we first played ‘Black Sabbath’, but I can sure as hell remember the audience’s reaction: all the girls ran out of the venue, screaming. ‘Isn’t the whole point of being in a band to get a shag, not to make chicks run away?’ I complained to the others, afterwards.

‘They’ll get used to it,’ Geezer told me.

Another memorable performance of ‘Black Sabbath’ was in a town hall near Manchester.

The manager was there to greet us in a suit and tie when we climbed out of the van. You should have seen the look on his face when he saw us.

‘Is that what you’re going to wear on stage?’ he asked me, staring at my bare feet and pyjama top.

‘Oh no,’ I said, in this fake-shocked voice. ‘I always perform in gold spandex. Have you ever seen an Elvis gig? Well, I look a bit like him—but of course my tits are much smaller.’

‘Oh,’ he went.

We set up our gear for the tune-up and Tony launched into the opening riff of ‘Black Sabbath’—doh, doh, doooohnnnn—but before I’d got through the first line of lyrics the manager had run on to the stage, red in the face, and was shouting, ‘STOP, STOP, STOP! Are you fucking serious? This isn’t Top-Forty pop covers! Who are you people?’

‘Earth,’ said Tony, shrugging. ‘You booked us, remember?’

‘I didn’t book this. I thought you were going to play “Mellow Yellow” and “California Dreamin’”.’

‘Who—us?’ laughed Tony.

‘That’s what your manager told me!’

‘Jim Simpson told you that?’

‘Who the hell’s Jim Simpson?’

‘Ah,’ said Tony, finally working out what had happened. He turned to us and said, ‘Lads, I think we might not be the only band called Earth.’

He was right: there was another Earth on the C-list gig circuit. But they didn’t play satanic music. They played pop and Motown covers. The promotional flyer that Jim Simpson had printed for us had probably only added to the confusion: it made us look like a bunch of hippies, with each of our portraits hand drawn in little clouds around a big sun and ‘Earth’ spelled out in wobbly psychedelic lettering.

‘I told you it was a crap name,’ I said. ‘Can we please now think of something that doesn’t sound like—’

‘Look,’ interrupted the manger. ‘Here’s twenty quid for the trouble of comin’ all the way up ’ere. Now fuck off, eh? Oh, and the little hobo is right—you should change yer name. Although I don’t know why anyone in their right mind would ever want to listen to that shite.’

‘Dear Mum,’ I wrote, a few weeks later,

It was August 9, 1969: the day of the Charles Manson murders in Los Angeles. But we weren’t looking at the news. In those days it was almost impossible to get an English paper in Europe, and even if you did find one, it would be three or four weeks old. Besides, we were too focused on our next gig to pay much attention to the outside world.

We’d done shows before at the Star Club—which was on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, where all the dodgy hookers stand around in their skimpy dresses and fishnets—so we knew roughly what to expect. This time, though, we had a ‘residency’, which meant they would pay us a wage and put us up in this bombed-out shithole of a room above the stage—it had been gutted by fire more than a few times—and in return we’d have to play as many as seven sets a day, in between gigs from visiting bands.

It was a lot of fun, but it was fucking gruelling, man. Every day we’d start at noon and end at two in the morning. You’d do speed, pills, dope, beer—anything you could lay your hands on—just to stay awake. Someone once added up how many shows we did in the Star Club, and it turned out that we’d played more than the Beatles. Mind you, 1969 was seven years after the Beatles’ heyday, and the place had gone down the shitter a bit. In fact, we were one of the last British bands to do a residency there: the place closed its doors for good on New Year’s Eve of that year.

Then it burned down.

Even so, it was the best training you could ever ask for, playing at the Star Club. A gig’s not like a rehearsal: you’ve got to see it through, even if you’re loaded, which we were, most of the time. It’s not that I needed any training to be the person I am on stage. I’m a lunatic by nature, and lunatics don’t need training—they just are. But the Star Club helped us nail all the new songs we’d written, like ‘The Wizard’, ‘N.I.B.’ (named after Bill’s beard, which we thought looked like the nib of a pen), ‘War Pigs’, ‘Rat Salad’ and ‘Fairies Wear Boots’ (to this day, I have no idea what that song’s about, even though people tell me that I wrote the lyrics). The Star Club also helped me get over my stage fright. Once I’d loosened up a bit, I’d just do crazier and crazier things to keep myself amused. And the lads encouraged me. When the crowd was obviously bored, Tony would shout over to me, ‘Go and organise a raffle, Ozzy.’ That would be my cue to do something fucking mental, to get everyone’s attention. One time, I found this can of purple paint backstage, and when I got the call from Tony I dipped my nose in it. Which would have been fine, if the paint hadn’t been fucking indelible.

I couldn’t get that shit off me for weeks. People would come up to me and go, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you, man?’ Or, more often, they wouldn’t come up to me at all, ’cos they thought I was mad.

We all had our moments at the Star Club. One night, Tony is so out of his skull on dope that he decides he’s gonna play the flute, but he’s lost his sense of distance, so he rests the flute on his chin instead of his lip. So for the entire song he’s just standing there, blowing into a microphone, with the flute nowhere near his mouth, and the audience is going, What the fuck?

Priceless, man.

The trick to having a really good time at the Star Club was to find some local German chick and then stay at her apartment, so you didn’t have to share a bunk bed with one of your farty, ball-scratching bandmates. We didn’t care what the chicks looked like—I mean, we weren’t exactly much to behold ourselves. And if they bought you beers and gave you fags, that was a bonus. And if they didn’t buy you beers and give you fags, you did your best to rob them. In fact, on more than one occasion we used Tony as a honey trap—’cos he was the one all the chicks wanted to bang. What would happen is, he’d go upstairs to our room and start fumbling around with some groupie on one of the bunks, and I’d crawl over on my elbows—commando-style—to where she’d left her handbag, and swipe whatever dough I could find. I aint proud of it, but we had to fucking eat somehow.

We used to give these chicks nicknames, which, looking back now, was a bit cruel. More than a bit cruel, in some cases. For example, I shacked up with one girl who everyone called

‘The Witch’, ’cos she had a nose on her that was even bigger than Geezer’s.

We didn’t last long, me and The Witch. The morning after she took me back to her place, she got up, made herself a cup of coffee, and said, ‘I’m going off to work now. You can stay here, but don’t touch anything, OK?’ Of course, that’s a fatal thing to say to me. So, the second she’s out of the door I’m rummaging around in her cupboards, wondering what she doesn’t want me to find. And sure enough, at the back of the wardrobe, I come across this perfectly ironed Nazi uniform. It must have been her dad’s or something. Anyway, I’m thinking, Fucking-A, man, I’ve hit the motherlode here. So I put on the uniform, find the drinks cabinet, and before long I’m strutting around the living room, barking out orders to the furniture in this comedy German accent, smoking cigarettes, and getting loaded. I love all that wartime military stuff, me.

After an hour or so of doing that I took off the uniform, put it back in the wardrobe, made sure it was folded up perfectly, and pretended like nothing had happened. But when The Witch came back just before noon, she knew something was up. She went straight over to the wardrobe, threw open the doors, checked the uniform, and went fucking nuts.

Next thing I knew I was on the end of her broom, flying out of the door.

When we got back to England, we had a meeting at Jim Simpson’s house to tell him about our change of name to Black Sabbath. He didn’t seem too keen, although to be honest with you I think he was distracted by my purple nose. He didn’t say anything about it, but I could tell it was on his mind, ’cos he kept staring at me with this worried look on his face. He must have thought I’d picked up some rare disease over in Germany or something. I seem to remember that Alvin Lee from Ten Years After was at that meeting, too. And he was even less keen on the name Black Sabbath than Jim was. ‘I don’t think you’ll get anywhere with that, lads,’ he told us. The exact order of what happened next is a bit of a blur, to be honest with you. All I know is that Jim had done a deal with a bloke called Tony Hall, who owned a freelance A&R/production company. He agreed to help us make an album as long as he got something back if we turned out to be a success—or something like that. I’m no good with business, me. I’m the last person to ask when it comes to contracts and dough and all that.

Anyway, Tony Hall said he thought we were ‘a great little blues band’, but that we needed a debut single—even though bands like ours rarely put out singles in those days. He played us this song called ‘Evil Woman’ by an American group called Crow, and asked if we wanted to cover it. He could tell we weren’t that into the idea, so suggested we could make the guitars heavier. We still didn’t really want to do it, but Tony offered to pay for some time at Trident Studios in Soho, so we thought, Fuck it, why not?

It was a bit embarrassing in the end. We didn’t have a clue what we were doing, so we just set up our equipment, hit the record button, and played our live set. The only vaguely professional thing about us was the fact that one of the roadies had spelled out ‘Black Sabbath’

with black electrician’s tape on the front of Bill’s bass drum.

Producing us was a guy called Gus Dudgeon. We were in awe of him because he’d worked with Eric Clapton, the Moody Blues and the Rolling Stones. Looking back, Gus was very good to us, although he also laid down the law a bit, and we weren’t used to being told what to do. Still, you couldn’t argue with the results—the bloke was a genius. After working on

‘Evil Woman’ he went on to produce some of Elton John’s biggest hits of the seventies and eighties. It was terribly sad when he and his wife Sheila were killed in a car accident in 2002.

Gus was one of those guys who made a huge contribution to British music, even though he wasn’t a household name. And although we might not have fully appreciated it at the time, we were incredibly lucky to have him help us so early on in our career.

We played a few clubs while we were down in London. At one of those gigs the DJ put on a record before we went on stage, and it just blew me away. Something about the singer’s voice sounded familiar. Then it came to me: it was Robert Plant. So I went over to the DJ and said, ‘Is that the New Yardbirds’ record you’re playing?’

‘No, it’s a new band called Led Zeppelin.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, man. I swear.’

We played our gig, but I couldn’t get the record out of my mind, so afterwards I went back to the DJ and asked him, ‘Are you sure it’s not the New Yardbirds? I know that singer, and he ain’t in a band called Led Zeppelin. Does it say who the band members are on the sleeve?’

He read out the names: ‘Jimmy Page, John Bonham, John Paul Jones, Robert Plant.’

I couldn’t believe it: the New Yardbirds must have changed their name to Led Zeppelin…

and they’d made the best record I’d heard in years. In the van on the way home, I remember saying to Tony, ‘Did you hear how heavy that Led Zeppelin album sounded?’

Without missing a beat, he replied, ‘We’ll be heavier.’

By the end of 1969 we were desperate for anything that could take us to the next level.

But we were still on the same C-list gig circuit, night after night. Our last gig of the year was on December 24 in Cumberland—we were still getting a lot of work up there—at Wigton Market Hall. As it happened, there was a women’s mental hospital right next door to the venue, and every year the doctors would let the patients out for a Christmas dance. We didn’t know anything about that, but even if we had, I doubt any of us would have guessed that the funny farm would choose a Black Sabbath gig for its annual outing. But it did. So we’re halfway through ‘N.I.B.’ when all these loony chicks come piling in through the door at the back of the hall, and by the end of the song a riot has broken out. You should have seen it: these chicks were punching the guys, and then the guys’ girlfriends were chinning the mental chicks right back. It was pandemonium. By the time the police showed up there were loads of women lying around on the floor with black eyes and bloody noses and split lips.

Then they started to sing ‘Give Peace a Chance’.

Meanwhile, we were just standing there on stage, amps buzzing. I looked at Tony, and Tony looked at me.

‘This is fucking nuts,’ I mouthed to him.

He just shrugged, turned up his amp, and started to play ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’.

In January 1970, it finally happened.

We got a record deal.

For a few months, Jim Simpson had been shopping us around by inviting all these big-wigs from London to come to our gigs. But no one was interested. Then one night a guy from Philips drove up to Birmingham to see us play at Henry’s Blues House and decided to take a bet on us. The name Black Sabbath made a big difference, I think. At the time there was an occult author called Dennis Wheatley whose books were all over the bestseller lists, Hammer Horror films were doing massive business at the cinemas, and the Manson murders were all over the telly, so anything with a ‘dark’ edge was in big demand. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure we could’ve done it on the strength of the music alone. But sometimes, when it comes to getting a deal, all these little things have to come together at the right time.

You need a bit of luck, basically.

Another thing that helped was the fact that Philips was setting up a new ‘underground’ label called Vertigo when we were looking for a deal. We were a perfect fit. But the funny thing was that Vertigo wasn’t even up and running in time for our first single, ‘Evil Woman’, so it was originally released on another Philips label, Fontana, before being reissued on Vertigo a few weeks later.

Not that it made any fucking difference: the song went down like a concrete turd both times. But we didn’t care,

because the BBC played it on Radio 1.

Once.

At six o’clock in the morning.

I was so nervous, I got up at five and drank about eight cups of tea. ‘They won’t play it,’ I kept telling myself, ‘They won’t play it…’

But then:

It’s impossible to describe what it feels like to hear yourself on Radio 1 for the first time. It was magic, squared. I ran around the house screaming, ‘I’m on the radio! I’m on the fucking radio!’ until my mum stomped downstairs in her nightie and told me to shut up. ‘Evil woman,’ I sang to her, at full volume, ‘Don’t you play your games with me!’ Then I was off, out of the door, singing my head off all the way down Lodge Road.

But if being played on Radio 1 was good, it was nothing compared with the advance we got from Philips: £105 each!

I’d never even had ten quid to call my own before, never mind a hundred. It would have taken me a whole year of tuning car horns at the Lucas factory to earn that kind of dough. I thought I was Jack the Lad that week. The first thing I bought was a bottle of Brut aftershave to make myself smell better. Then I got a new pair of shoes, ’cos I’d destroyed my old ones in Denmark. The rest I gave to my mum to pay the bills. But then I kept scrounging it back off her, so I could go down the pub and celebrate.

Then it was back to work.

As far as I can remember, we didn’t have any demos to speak of, and there was no official talk about making an album. Jim just told us one day that we’d been booked for a week of gigs in Zurich, and that on our way down there, we should stop off at Regent Sound studios in Soho and record some tracks with a producer called Rodger Bain and his engineer, Tom Allom. So that’s what we did. Like before, we just set up our gear and played what amounted to a live set without the audience. Once we’d finished, we spent a couple of hours double-tracking some of the guitar and the vocals, and that was that. Done. We were in the pub in time for last orders. It can’t have taken any longer than twelve hours in total.

That’s how albums should be made, in my opinion. I don’t give a fuck if you’re making the next Bridge Over Troubled Water—taking five or ten or fifteen years to make an album, like Guns N’ Roses did, is just fucking ridiculous, end of story. By that time, your career’s died, been resurrected, and then died again.

In our case, mind you, we didn’t have the luxury of taking our time. It wasn’t an option. So we just went in there and did it. And then the next day we set off for Zurich in the Transit to do a residency at a joint called the Hirschen Club. We hadn’t even heard Rodger and Tom’s final mix when we left Soho, never mind seen the album cover. That’s how the music business was run in those days. As a band, you had less say in what was going on than the guy who cleaned out the shitter in the record company’s executive suite. I remember it being a long, long way to Switzerland in the back of a Transit van. To kill time, we smoked dope. Shitloads of it. When we finally got to Zurich, we were so fucking hungry we found one of those posh Swiss caffs and held a competition to see who could eat the most banana splits in the shortest time. I managed to get twenty-five of the fuckers down my throat before the owner chucked us out. My whole face was covered in cream by the end of it. I could have had a couple more of them, too.

Then we had to go and find the Hirschen Club, which turned out to be even sleazier than the Star Club. They had this tiny little stage with the bar just a few feet away, and it was dark and there were hookers hanging around all over the place. The four of us had to share one crappy room upstairs, so getting a chick with her own place was the order of the day.

One night, these two girls in fishnets invited me and Geezer back to their apartment. They were obviously on the game, but I was up for anything that would spare me from another night of sharing a bed with Bill, who spent the whole time complaining about my smelly feet.

So when they sweetened the deal by saying they had some dope, I said, ‘Fuck it, let’s go.’ But Geezer wasn’t so sure. ‘They’re hookers, Ozzy,’ he kept saying. ‘You’ll catch something nasty. Let’s find some other chicks.’

‘I ain’t gonna bonk either of ’em,’ I said. ‘I just wanna get out of this fucking place.’

‘I’ll believe that when I see it,’ said Geezer. ‘The dark-haired chick isn’t so bad-looking.

After a few beers and a few puffs of the magic weed, she’ll have her way with me.’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘if she makes a move on yer, I’ll kick her up the arse and we’ll leave, all right?’

‘Promise?’

‘If she makes one move towards your knob, Geezer, I’ll pull her off you and we’ll fuck off.’

‘All right.’

So we go back to their place. It’s all dimly lit, and Geezer’s on one side of the room with the dark-haired chick, and I’m on the other side with the ugly one, and we’re smoking weed and listening to the album by Blind Faith, the ‘supergroup’ formed by Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Steve Winwood and Ric Grech. For a while it’s all serene and trippy—the music’s playing and everyone’s snogging and fumbling around. Then, all of a sudden, this deep Brummie voice rises out of the mist of dope smoke.

‘Oi, Ozzy,’ says Geezer. ‘Time to put the boot in.’

I looked over and this hooker was straddling him as he lay there with his eyes closed and this pained expression on his face. I honestly thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen in my life.

I don’t even know if he shagged her in the end. I just remember laughing and laughing and laughing until I cried.

Jim Simpson wanted to see us at his house as soon as we got back from Switzerland.

‘I’ve got something you need to see,’ he said, in this ominous voice.

So that afternoon we all met up in his living room and sat there, twiddling our thumbs, wondering what the fuck he was going to say. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out the finished record of Black Sabbath. We were speechless. The cover was a spooky-looking fifteenth-century watermill (I later found out it was the Mapledurham Watermill on the River Thames in Oxfordshire), with all these dead leaves around it and a sickly looking woman with long dark hair, dressed in black robes, standing in the middle of the frame with a scary look on her face. It was amazing. Then, when you opened the gatefold sleeve, there was just black everywhere and an inverted cross with a creepy poem written inside it. We’d had no input with the artwork, so the inverted cross—a symbol of Satanism, we later found out—had nothing to do with us. But the stories that you hear about us being unhappy with it are total bullshit. As far as I can remember, we were immediately blown away by the cover. We just stood there, staring at it, and going, ‘Fucking hell, man, this is fucking unbelievable.’

Then Jim went over to his record player and put it on. I almost burst into tears, it sounded so great. While we’d been in Switzerland, Rodger and Tom had put these sound effects of a thunderstorm and a tolling bell over the opening riff of the title track, so it sounded like something from a film. The overall effect was fabulous. I still get chills whenever I hear it.

On Friday the thirteenth of February 1970, Black Sabbath went on sale.

I felt like I’d just been born.

But the critics fucking hated it.

Still, one of the few good things about being dyslexic is that when I say I don’t read reviews, I mean I don’t read reviews. But that didn’t stop the others from poring over what the press had to say about us. Of all the bad reviews of Black Sabbath, the worst was probably written by Lester Bangs at Rolling Stone. He was the same age as me, but I didn’t know that at the time. In fact, I’d never even heard of him before, and once the others told me what he’d written I wished I still hadn’t. I remember Geezer reading out words like ‘claptrap’, ‘wooden’ and ‘dogged’. The last line was something like, ‘They’re just like Cream, but worse’, which I didn’t understand, because I thought Cream were one of the best bands in the world.

Bangs died twelve years later, when he was only thirty-three, and I’ve heard people say he was a genius when it came to words, but as far as we were concerned he was just another pretentious dickhead. And from then we never got on with Rolling Stone. But y’know what?

Being trashed by Rolling Stone was kind of cool, because they were the Establishment.

Those music magazines were all staffed by college kids who thought they were clever—which, to be fair, they probably were. Meanwhile, we’d been kicked out of school at fifteen and had worked in factories and slaughtered animals for a living, but then we’d made something of ourselves, even though the whole system was against us. So how upset could we be when clever people said we were no good?

The important thing was someone thought we were good, ’cos Black Sabbath went straight to number eight in Britain and number twenty-three in America.

And the Rolling Stone treatment prepared us for what was to come. I don’t think we ever got a good review for anything we did. Which is why I never bother with reviews. Whenever I hear someone getting upset about reviews, I just say to them, ‘Look, it’s their job to criticise. That’s why they’re called critics.’ Mind you, some people just get so wound up they can’t control themselves. I remember one time in Glasgow this critic showed up at our hotel, and Tony goes over to him and says, ‘I wanna have a word with you, sunshine.’ I didn’t know it at the time, but the guy had just written a hit-piece on Tony, describing him as ‘Jason King with builder’s arms’—Jason King being a private-eye type character on TV at the time who had this stupid moustache and dodgy haircut. But when Tony confronted him, he just laughed, which was a really stupid thing to do. Tony just stood there and said, ‘Go on, son, finish laughing, ’cos in about thirty seconds you ain’t gonna be laughing any more.’ Then he started to laugh himself. The critic didn’t take him seriously, so he kept on laughing, and for about two seconds they were both just standing there, laughing their heads off. Then Tony swung his fist back and just about put this bloke in hospital. I never read his review of the show, but I’m told it wasn’t very flattering.

My old man wasn’t too impressed with our first album, either.

I’ll always remember the day I took it home and said, ‘Look, Dad! I got my voice on a record!’

I can picture him now, fiddling with his reading specs and holding the cover in front of his face. Then he opened the sleeve, went ‘Hmm’ and said, ‘Are you sure they didn’t make a mistake, son?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘This cross is upside down.’

‘It’s supposed to be like that.’

‘Oh. Well, don’t just stand there. Put it on. Let’s have a bit of a sing-along, eh?’

So I walked over to the radiogram, lifted the heavy wooden lid, put the record on the turntable—hoping the dodgy speaker that I’d put in there from the PA would work—and cranked up the volume.

With the first clap of thunder, my dad flinched.

I grinned nervously at him.

Then:

Bong!

Bong!

Bong!

My dad coughed.

Bong!

Bong!

Bong!

He coughed again.

Bong!

Bong!

Bong!

‘Son, when does—’

BLAM! Dow! Dowwwwwww!!! Dooooowwwwww!!!!!

My poor old man turned white. I think he’d been expecting something along the lines of

‘Knees up Mother Brown’. But I left the record on anyway. Finally, after six minutes and eighteen seconds of Tony and Geezer thrashing away on their guitars, Bill beating the shit out of his drums, and me howling on about a man in black coming to take me away to the lake of fire, my dad rubbed his eyes, shook his head and looked at the floor.

Silence.

‘What d’you think, Dad?’

‘John,’ he said, ‘are you absolutely sure you’ve only been drinking the occasional beer?’

I went bright red and said something like ‘Oh, er, yeah, Dad, whatever.’

Bless him, he just didn’t get it at all.

But it broke my heart, y’know? I’d always felt as though I’d let my father down. Not because of anything he’d ever said to me. But because I was a failure at school, because I couldn’t read or write properly, because I’d been sent to prison, and because I’d been fired from all of those factory jobs. But now, finally, with Black Sabbath, I was doing something I was good at, that I enjoyed, that I was prepared to work hard at. I suppose I just really wanted my old man to be proud of me. But it wasn’t his fault—it was the way he was. It was his generation.

And I think deep down he was proud of me, in his own way.

I can honestly say that we never took the black magic stuff seriously for one second. We just liked how theatrical it was. Even my old man eventually played along with it: he made me this awesome metal cross during one of his tea breaks at the factory. When I turned up to rehearsals with it, all the other guys wanted one, so I got Dad to make three more.

I couldn’t believe it when I learned that people actually ‘practised the occult’. These freaks with white make-up and black robes would come up to us after our gigs and invite us to black masses at Highgate Cemetery in London. I’d say to them, ‘Look, mate, the only evil spirits I’m interested in are called whisky, vodka and gin.’ At one point we were invited by a group of Satanists to play at Stonehenge. We told them to fuck off, so they said they’d put a curse on us. What a load of bollocks that was. Britain even had a ‘chief witch’ in those days, called Alex Sanders. Never met him. Never wanted to. Mind you, we did buy a Ouija board once and have a little seance. We scared the shit out of each other.

That night, at God knows what hour, Bill phoned me up and shouted, ‘Ozzy, I think my house is haunted!’

‘Sell tickets then,’ I told him, and put the phone down.

The good thing about all the satanic stuff was that it gave us endless free publicity. People couldn’t get enough of it. During its first day of release, Black Sabbath sold five thousand copies, and by the end of the year it was on its way to selling a million worldwide.

None of us could believe it.

Not even Jim Simpson could believe it—the poor bloke ended up getting completely over-whelmed. His office was in Birmingham, miles away from the action in London, and he had other bands to look after, no staff, and Henry’s Blues House to run. So it didn’t take long for us to start getting pissed off with him. For starters, we weren’t getting any dough. Jim wasn’t robbing us—he’s one of the most honest people I’ve ever met in the music business—but Philips were taking forever to cough up our royalties, and Jim wasn’t the kind of bloke who could go down there and bully them into paying. Then there was the issue of America: we wanted to go, immediately. But we had to get it right, which meant going easy on all the satanic stuff, ’cos we didn’t want to come across like fans of the Manson Family.

We’d get strung up by our balls if we did.

It didn’t take long for all the sharks down in London to realise there was blood in the water, as far as Jim was concerned. So, one by one, they started circling. They looked at us and they saw big fucking neon-lit pound signs. Our first album couldn’t have cost more than five hundred quid to make, so the profit margins were astronomical.

The first call we got was from Don Arden. We didn’t know much about him apart from his nickname—‘Mr Big’. Then we heard stories about him dangling people out of his fourth-floor Carnaby Street office window, stubbing cigars out on people’s foreheads, and demanding all his contracts be paid in cash and delivered by hand in brown paper bags. So we were shitting ourselves when we went down to London to meet him for the first time. When we got off the train at Euston Station, he had his blue Rolls-Royce waiting to pick us up. It was the first time I’d ever been in a Roller. I sat there in the back seat, like the King of England, thinking, Three years ago, you were a puke remover in a slaughterhouse, and before that you were doling out slop to child molesters in Winson Green. Now look where you are.

Don had a reputation as the kind of guy who could make you world famous but would rip you off while he was at it. It’s not like he was pulling any complex, high finance, Bernie Madoff-type scams. He just wouldn’t fucking pay. Simple as that. It would be like, ‘Don, you owe me a million quid, can I have the money please?’ And he’d go, ‘No, you can’t.’ End of conversation. And if you ever went to his office to ask for the dough in person, there was a good chance you’d leave in the back of an ambulance.

But the thing with us was, we didn’t really need anyone to make us world famous—we were already halfway there. Still, we sat in Don’s office and listened to his pitch. He was a short bloke, but with the build and presence of a pissed-off Rottweiler, and he had this incredible shouty voice. He’d pick up the phone to his receptionist and scream so loud the whole planet seemed to shake.

When the meeting was over we all stood up and said how great it was to meet him, blah-blah-blah, even though none of us wanted anything more to do with him. Then, as we filed out of his office, he introduced us to the chick he’d spent half the meeting bawling at over the phone.

‘This is Sharon, my daughter,’ he growled. ‘Sharon, take these lads down to the car, will you?’

I grinned at her, but she gave me a wary look. She probably thought I was a lunatic, standing there in my pyjama shirt, with no shoes and a hot-water tap on a piece of string around my neck.

But then, when Don huffed back to his office and closed the door behind him, I cracked a joke and made her smile. I just about fell on the floor. It was the most wicked, beautiful smile I’d ever seen in my life. And she had the laugh to go with it, too. It made me feel so good, hearing her laugh. I just wanted to make her do it again and again and again.

To this day, I feel bad about what happened with Jim Simpson. I think he got the wrong end of the stick with us. I suppose it’s easy to say what he should or shouldn’t have done with hind-sight, but if he’d admitted to himself that we were too big for him to handle, he could have sold us off to another management company, or contracted out our day-to-day management to a bigger firm. But he wasn’t strong enough to do that. And we were so desperate to go to America and get our big break that we didn’t have the patience to wait for him to sort himself out.

In the end it was a wide boy called Patrick Meehan who nabbed us. He was only a couple of years older than us, and he’d gone into the management racket with his father, who’d been a stuntman on the TV show Danger Man and then worked for Don Arden, first as a driver, then as a general lackey, looking after the likes of the Small Faces and the Animals. Patrick had another ex-Don Arden henchman working with him too: Wilf Pine. I liked Wilf a lot. He looked like a cartoon villain: short, built like a slab of concrete, and with this big, tasty, hard-boiled face. I think his hardman routine was all a bit of an act, to be honest with you, but there was never any doubt that he could do some serious damage if he was in the mood. He’d been Don’s personal bodyguard for a long time, and when I knew him he’d often go down to Brixton Prison to see the Kray twins, who’d only just been put away. He was all right, was Wilf. We’d have a laugh. ‘You’re crazy, d’you know that?’ he’d say to me.

Patrick was nothing like Don or Wilf, or his own father, for that matter. He was a slick, smooth-talking, good-looking guy, very cool, very sharp, didn’t have any problems with the ladies. He’d wear suits all the time, drove a Roller, kept his hair long but not too long. He was also the first guy I ever saw with diamond rings on his fingers. He’d obviously learned a lot from the way Don Arden operated. Patrick threw every trick in the book at us. The chauffeured limo. The champagne dinner. The non-stop compliments and the phoney shock that we weren’t all multi-millionaires already. He told us that if we signed with him, we could have anything we wanted—cars, houses, chicks, whatever. All we had to do was call him up and ask for it. What he told us were like fairy tales, basically, but we wanted to believe them. And there was at least some truth to what he said… The music business is like any other business, y’know? When sales are going well, everything’s hunky-fucking-dory. But the second something goes wrong, it’s all blood and law-suits.

I can’t remember exactly when or how we left Jim—we never actually fired him, although I suppose that makes no difference—but by September 1970 Big Bear Management was history and we were signed up with the Meehans’ company, Worldwide Artists.

It took about three and a half seconds for Jim to sue us. We were served with the writ when we were standing backstage at a venue on Lake Geneva, waiting to go on. It wouldn’t be the last time that happened. Jim sued Meehan, too, for ‘enticement’. It all took years to go through the courts. To a certain degree, I think Jim got a raw deal. I mean, he had brought Philips out to see us in the first place, which had got us the record deal. And even though he won some dough from the courts, he spent years paying his lawyers. So he didn’t really win in the end. It’s always the way with lawyers—we found that out for ourselves, later. The funny thing is, I still run into Jim every so often. We’re like long-lost friends now. He’s done a lot of great things for music in Birmingham, Jim Simpson has. And he’s still at it today. I wish him all the very best, I really do.

At the time, though, getting rid of Jim seemed like the greatest thing we’d ever done. It was like we’d just won the lottery: money was falling from the sky. Every day, I’d think of something new to ask for: ‘Er, hello, yes, is that Patrick Meehan’s office? It’s Ozzy Osbourne.

I’d like one of them Triumph Herald convertibles. Can you send me a green one? Cheers.’

Click. Then—ta-dah!—the fucking thing would be sitting outside my house the next morning with an envelope tucked behind the windscreen wiper full of paperwork for me to sign and return. Meehan seemed as good as his word: whatever we asked for, we got. And it wasn’t all about the big things: we were given allowances, so we could afford beer and fags and platform boots and leather jackets, and we could stay in hotels instead of sleeping in the back of Tony’s van.

Meanwhile, we just kept selling more records. One minute we were at the raggedy end of the line when it came to rock bands from Birmingham; the next we’d overtaken just about everybody. What we didn’t know was that Meehan was taking nearly everything. Even a lot of the stuff he ‘gave’ us wasn’t actually ours. Behind the scenes, he was bleeding us dry. But y’know what, I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, and I don’t think we can complain too much. We’d come out of Aston with nothing to lose and everything to gain, and by our early twenties we were living like kings. We didn’t have to carry our own gear, we didn’t have to make our own food, we barely had to tie our own shoelaces. And, on top of all that, we could just ask for stuff and it would appear on a silver plate.

I mean, you should have seen Tony’s collection of Lamborghinis. Even Bill got his own chauffeured Rolls-Royce. We were good like that: we split all the dough four ways. The way we saw it, Tony did the riffs, Geezer did the words, I did the melodies, and Bill did his wild drum thing, and each part was as important as the others, so everyone should get the same. I think that’s why we lasted as long as we did. For starters, it meant we never argued over who’d done what. Then, if one of us wanted to branch out—like if Bill wanted to sing, or if I wanted to write some lyrics—it was cool. No one was sitting there with a calculator, adding up the royalties they’d win or lose.

Mind you, another reason why we could do what we wanted was because we had total musical control. No record mogul had created Black Sabbath, so no record mogul could tell Black Sabbath what to do. A couple of them tried—and we told them where to stick it.

Not many bands can do that nowadays.

One thing I regret is not giving more dough to my folks. I mean, if it hadn’t been for my old man taking out a loan on that PA system, I never would have had a chance. In fact, I’d probably have gone back to burglary. Maybe I’d still be in prison today. But I didn’t think about them. I was young, I was loaded most of the time, and my ego was already starting to rule the world. Besides, I might have been rich, but I didn’t have much ready cash. All I did was call Patrick Meehan’s office and put in my requests, which was different to having your own dough to throw around. In fact, the only time I made any real money was when I realised I could just sell the stuff that the management company gave me, which I did one time with a Rolls-Royce. The others soon learned the same trick too. But how was I supposed to explain that to my folks, when they just saw me swaggering around the place like Jack the Lad? It’s not like I gave them nothing, but I know now that I never gave them enough. You could tell from the atmosphere every time I walked through the door at 14 Lodge Road. I’d ask my mum, ‘What’s wrong?’ and she’d say, ‘Oh, nothing.’

‘Well, it’s obviously something. Just tell me.’

She wouldn’t say, but you could smell it in the air: money, money, money. Nothing but money. Not: ‘I’m proud of you, son. Well done, you finally made it, you worked hard. Have a cup of tea. I love you.’ Just money. It got really ugly after a while. I didn’t want to be at home; it was so uncomfortable. I suppose they’d never had any money of their own, and they wanted mine. Which was fair enough. I should have given it to them.

But I didn’t.

I met a girl and moved out instead.

4. ‘You Guys Ain’t Black!’

I was never the Romeo type, me.

Even after our first album went gold, I never got any good-looking chicks. Black Sabbath was a blokes’ band. We’d get fag ends and beer bottles thrown at us, not frilly underwear. We used to joke that the only groupies that came to our gigs were ‘two-baggers’—you needed to put a couple of bags over their head before you could shag them; one wasn’t enough. And most of the time I was lucky even to get a two-bagger, to be honest with you. The chicks who wanted to shack up with me at the end of the night were usually three- or four-baggers. One night in Newcastle I think I had a five-bagger.

That was a rough night, that was. A lot of gin was involved, if I remember correctly.

But none of that stopped me trying to get my end away.

One of the places where I used to go cruising for a good old bonk was the Rum Runner nightclub on Broad Street in Birmingham, where an old school mate of Tony’s worked on the door. It was a famous place, the Rum Runner—years later, Duran Duran would become the resident band there—so it was magic to have someone on the inside who could get you in without any trouble.

One night, not long after we’d signed the record deal, I went to the Rum Runner with Tony. This was before we’d met Patrick Meehan, so we were still broke. We drove there in Tony’s second-hand car, which I think was a Ford Cortina. It was a piece of crap, anyway. Albert greets us at the door as usual, the bouncers unclip the rope to let us through, and the first thing I see is this dark-haired chick behind the counter in the cloakroom.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked Albert.

‘Thelma Riley,’ he told me. ‘Lovely gal. Brainy, too. But she’s divorced, and she’s got a kid, so watch yerself.’

I didn’t care.

She was beautiful, and I wanted to talk to her. So I did what I always did when I wanted to talk to a bird: I got fucking lollied. But something strange must have been going on that night, because the old get-as-dribblingly-drunk-as-possible strategy worked: I pulled her on the dance floor while Tony pulled her mate. Then we all drove back to Tony’s place in his Cortina, with me and Thelma having a snog and a fumble on the back seat.

Tony dumped Thelma’s friend the next day, but me and Thelma kept going. And when I finally couldn’t take any more of the bad atmosphere at 14 Lodge Road, we rented a flat together above a launderette in Edgbaston, a posh part of Birmingham.

A year or so later, in 1971, we got married in a registry office.

I thought it was what you did: get some dough, find a chick, get married, settle down, go to the pub.

It was a terrible mistake.

A few months before the wedding, Black Sabbath finally made it to America. Before we went, I remember Patrick Meehan’s dad calling us into a meeting at his London office, and telling us that we were going to be ‘ambassadors for British music’, so we should fucking behave ourselves.

We just nodded and ignored him.

Having said that, I made sure to go easy on the booze until we reached the airport. But what I didn’t know is that airports had bars—and I couldn’t resist a couple of cheeky ones to calm my nerves. So by the time I got to my seat, I was as pissed as a fart. Then we found out that Traffic were on the same plane. I couldn’t get over the fact that I was on the same flight as Steve Winwood. For the first time in my life, I began to feel like a proper rock star.

Even with all the booze I put away on the plane, it seemed to take for ever to get to JFK. I kept looking out of the window, thinking, How the fuck does this thing stay up in the air? Then we flew over Manhattan, where the World Trade Center was being built—half of it was still just scaffolding and steel girders—and landed as the sun was setting. It was a warm night, I remember, and I’d never experienced that warm-night-in-New-York vibe before. It had a distinctive smell, y’know? I thought it was great. Mind you, I was beyond pissed by this point.

The flight attendant had to help me out of my seat, and then I fell down the steps.

By the time I got to immigration, the hangover had set it. My headache was so bad that I’d forgotten what I’d written as a joke on the visa-waiver form. Where it asked for your religion, I’d put ‘Satanist’. So the bloke takes the form off me and starts reading it. Then he pauses when he gets halfway down.

He looks up at me. ‘Satanist, huh?’ he says, in this thick Bronx accent, with a bored, tired look on his face.

Suddenly I’m thinking, Oh, shit.

But before I can start trying to explain myself, he just stamps the form and shouts, ‘NEXT!’

‘Welcome to New York’ said the sign above his head.

We got our luggage from the carousel and went to queue in the taxi rank outside the arrivals hall. Fuck knows what all the businessmen with their suits and ties and briefcases were thinking, standing next to this long-haired, unwashed, pissed-up Brummie, wearing a tap around his neck and a pair of smelly old jeans with ‘Peace & Love’ and a CND symbol on one leg, and ‘Black Panthers Rule’ and a black fist symbol on the other.

As we waited, this massive yellow car drove by. It must have had nineteen or twenty doors on it.

‘I knew the cars here were big,’ I slurred, ‘but not that big!’

‘It’s a limousine, you idiot,’ said Tony.

Before we left England, we’d already recorded our follow-up to Black Sabbath. We had it in the can only five months after the release of the first record—which is unbelievable when you consider the lazy-arsed way albums are made these days. It was originally going to be called Warpiggers, which was a term for a black magic wedding or something. Then we changed it to War Pigs, and Geezer came up with these heavy-duty lyrics about death and destruction. No wonder we never got any chicks at our gigs. Geezer just wasn’t interested in your average ‘I love you’ pop song. Even when he wrote a boy-meets-girl lyric, it had a twist to it—like ‘N.I.B.’ off the first album, where the boy turns out to be the Devil. Geezer also liked to put a lot of topical stuff, like Vietnam references, into our songs. He had his ear to the ground, Geezer did.

We went back to Regent Sound in Soho to make the second record, although we’d spent a few weeks beforehand rehearsing in an old barn at Rockfield Studios in South Wales. Studio time cost a fortune back then, so we didn’t want to fuck around when the meter was running. And once our work was done at Regent Sound we moved to Island Studios in Notting Hill to do the final mix. That was when Rodger Bain realised we needed a few extra minutes of material. I remember him coming down from the control room one lunch break and saying,

‘Look, lads, we need some filler. Can you jam something?’ We all wanted to get started on our sandwiches, but Tony launched into this guitar riff while Bill played around with some drum patterns, I hummed a melody, and Geezer sat in the corner, scribbling down some lyrics.

Twenty minutes later, we had a song called ‘The Paranoid’. By the end of the day, it had become just ‘Paranoid’.

It’s always the way with the best songs: they come out of nowhere, when you’re not even trying. The thing with ‘Paranoid’ is that it doesn’t fit into any category: it was like a punk song years before punk had been invented. Mind you, none of us thought it was anything special when we recorded it. To us, it just seemed a bit half-arsed compared with ‘Hand of Doom’ or

‘Iron Man’ or any of those heavier numbers. But fucking hell, it was catchy; I was humming it all the way home from the studio. ‘Thelma,’ I said, when I got back to Edgbaston. ‘I think we might have written a single.’

She just gave me a look that said, That’ll be the day.

It’s funny, y’know: if you’d told us at the time that people would still be listening to any of those songs forty years into the future—and that the album would sell more than four million copies in America alone—we would have just laughed in your face.

But the fact is Tony Iommi turned out to be one of the greatest heavy rock riff-makers of all time. Whenever we went into the studio we’d challenge him to beat his last riff—and he’d come up with something like ‘Iron Man’ and blow everyone away.

But ‘Paranoid’ was a different class again. About two seconds after the suits at Vertigo heard that song, the name of the whole album became Paranoid. It wasn’t that they thought War Pigs might upset Americans because of Vietnam—at least not as far as I know. No, they were just freaking out about our little three-minute pop song, because they thought it might get played on the radio, and bands like ours never got played on the radio. And it made sense to give the album the same title as the single, to make it easier to promote in the record shops.

The suits were right. ‘Paranoid’ went straight to number four in the British singles chart and got us on Top of the Pops—alongside Cliff Richard, of all people. The only problem was the album cover, which had been done before the name change and now didn’t make any sense at all. What did four pink blokes holding shields and waving swords have to do with paranoia? They were pink because that was supposed to be the colour of the war pigs. But without ‘War Pigs’ written on the front, they just looked like gay fencers.

‘They’re not gay fencers, Ozzy,’ Bill told me. ‘They’re paranoid gay fencers.’

Top of the Pops was probably the biggest thing I’d done in my entire life at that point.

Every week when I was growing up in Aston, the entire Osbourne family would get together around the telly to watch that show. Even my mum loved it. So when my folks heard I was going to be on, they were speechless. In those days, fifteen million people tuned in to Top of the Pops every week, and Pan’s People were still doing those hippy dances between the numbers.

It was fucking awesome, man.

I remember being really impressed by Cliff Richard, ’cos he did his song live, with a full orchestra.

We didn’t take the piss out of him or anything—after all, it hadn’t been that long since I’d been singing ‘Living Doll’ in front of my parents. I think the song he did was ‘I Ain’t Got Time Any More’. I haven’t seen the tape for years—maybe it was wiped so the reels could be re-used, which was the BBC’s policy back then. I’ll tell you one thing, though: I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if Cliff looked older on that 1970 Top of the Pops episode than he does now. He ages in reverse, that bloke. Every time I see him, he’s lost another couple of years.

When it was our turn to go on, my whole body went numb with fear. The other three didn’t have to play a note—they just had to look the part and tap their feet in time to the backing track. But I had to sing live. It was my first time on telly and I was shitting myself like I’d never shit myself before. Pure terror. The inside of my mouth was so dry, it felt like I had a ball of cotton wool in there. But I got through it.

My mum and dad watched us at home on the telly—or so my brothers told me a few days later.

If they were proud, they didn’t say so. But I like to think they were.

That song changed everything for us. And I loved playing it. For a week or two we even had screaming girls showing up at our gigs and throwing their knickers at us, which was a nice change, although we were obviously a bit worried about pissing off our regular fans.

Straight after Top of the Pops, we did a gig in Paris, and at the end of the show this beautiful French chick stayed behind. Then she took me back to her place and fucked the shit out of me. I didn’t understand a word she said the entire night.

Which is sometimes the best way with one-night stands.

I thought America was fabulous.

Take pizza, for example. For years, I’d been thinking, I wish someone would invent a new kind of food. In England, it was always egg and chips, sausage and chips, pie and chips…

anything and chips. After a while it just got boring, y’know? But you couldn’t exactly order a shaved Parmesan and rocket salad in Birmingham in the early seventies. If it didn’t come out of a deep-fat fryer, no one knew what the fuck it was. But then, in New York, I discovered pizza. It blew my mind wide fucking open. I would buy ten or twenty slices a day. And then, when I realised you could buy a great big pizza all for yourself, I started ordering them wherever we went. I couldn’t wait to get back home and tell all my mates: ‘There’s this incredible new thing. It’s American and it’s called pizza. It’s like bread, but it’s better than any bread you’ve tasted in your life.’ I even tried to recreate a New York pizza for Thelma one time. I made some dough, then I got all these cans of beans and pilchards and olives and shit and put them on top—it must have been about fifteen quid’s worth of gear—but after ten minutes it just came dribbling out of the oven. It was like somebody had been sick in there. Thelma just looked at it and went, ‘I don’t think I like pizza, John.’ She never called me Ozzy, my first wife. Not once in the entire time I knew her.

Another incredible thing I discovered in America was the Harvey Wallbanger—a cocktail made with vodka, Galliano and orange juice. They knocked your fucking head off, those things. I drank so many Wallbangers that I can’t even stand the smell of them now.

One whiff and I’ll vomit on cue.

And then there were the American chicks, who were nothing like English chicks. I mean, when you pulled a chick in England, you gave her the eye, one thing led to another, you took her out, you bought her this and that, and then about a month later you asked if she fancied a good old game of hide the sausage. In America, the chicks just came right up to you and said,

‘Hey, let’s fuck.’ You didn’t even have to make any effort.

We found that out on our first night, when we stayed at a place called Loew’s Midtown Motor Inn, which was on Eighth Avenue and 48th Street, a sleazy part of town. I couldn’t sleep, ’cos I had jet lag, which was another wild new experience. So I’m lying there, wide awake at three o’clock in the morning, and there’s a knock on the door. I get up to answer it, and there’s this scrawny-looking chick standing there in a trench coat, which she unbuttons in front of me. And she’s completely starkers underneath.

‘Can I come in?’ she whispers, in this throaty, sexy voice.

What was I supposed to say? ‘No thanks, darlin’, I’m a bit busy.’

So, of course, I go to town on this chick until the sun comes up. Then she picks up her coat off the floor, gives me a peck on the cheek, and fucks off.

Later, when we’re all at breakfast, trying to work out where you put the maple syrup—Geezer was pouring it over his hash browns—I go, ‘You’ll never guess what happened to me last night.’

‘Actually,’ said Bill, with a little cough, ‘I think I can.’

Turned out we’d all had a knock on our door that night: it was our tour manager’s

‘Welcome to America’ present. Although, judging by the way my chick looked in daylight—she couldn’t have been a day under forty—he’d got obviously a bulk deal.

During the two months of our American tour, we covered distances that we couldn’t have imagined back in England. We played the Fillmore East in Manhattan. We played the Fillmore West in San Francisco. We even went to Florida, where I swam in an outdoor swimming pool for the first time: it was mid-night, I was out of my mind on dope and booze, and it was beautiful. I also saw my first proper turquoise ocean in Florida.

Bill hated flying, so we drove between a lot of the gigs, which became a bit of a ritual for us. Me and Bill’s epic road trips ended up being the highlights of all our American tours. We spent so much time together in the back of rented GMC mobile homes, we became as thick as thieves. Bill got his brother-in-law Dave to do the driving eventually, so we could drink more and take more drugs. It’s funny, you learn a lot about people when you’re on the road like that. Every morning, for example, Bill would have a cup of coffee, a glass of orange juice, a glass of milk, and a beer. Always in the same order.

I asked him why he did it once.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘the coffee’s to wake me up, the orange juice is to give me some vitamins to stop me getting sick, the milk’s to coat my stomach for the rest of the day, and the beer’s to put me back to sleep again.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Makes sense.’

Funny bloke, Bill. I remember one time, we had the GMC loaded full of beer and fags, and Dave was driving. We were going from New York to somewhere a long way further down the East Coast, so we’d got up early, even though we’d had a big night. Dave kept complaining that he’d eaten a dodgy pizza before going to bed. It tasted like rat’s piss, he said. So I’m sitting in the passenger seat at seven or eight o’clock in the morning, bleary-eyed and hung over; Bill’s crashed out in the back; and Dave’s driving along with this funny look on his face. I wind down the window and light up a fag, then look over and see Dave turning green.

‘You all right, Dave?’ I said, blowing smoke into the cabin.

‘Yeah, I’m—’

Then he lost it.

Bleeeeeugh!

He threw up all over the dashboard, and these half-digested lumps of cheese and dough and tomato sauce started to dribble into the air vents and on to my box of cigarettes. Just the sight and the smell were enough to make me come out in sympathy.

‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘Dave, I think I’m gonna—’

Bleeeeeugh!

So now there were two stomachfuls of vomit all over the inside of this van. The smell was fucking abominable, but Bill didn’t notice a thing—he was still passed out in the back.

We pulled over at the next truck stop and I ran out and asked the chick in the shop if she had any air freshener. There was no way I was even going to try to clean up the puke, but we needed to do something about the smell. It seemed like even the drivers of the cars overtaking us on the freeway were holding their noses. But the chick in the shop didn’t understand a fucking word I was saying. Finally, she goes, ‘Oh, you mean this?’ And she gives me a can of spearmint air spray. Then she says to me, ‘Personally, I don’t recommend it.’

Fuck it, I thought, and I bought it anyway. Then I ran back to the GMC, slammed the door, and while Dave pulled out of the parking spot I started spraying the stuff all over the place.

Then, all of a sudden, there’s this grunt and a rustling noise from behind us. I look over my shoulder and see Bill sitting bolt upright, looking very unwell. He could take the smell of our puke, but the spearmint air spray had tipped him over the edge.

‘Christ!’ he goes. ‘What the fuck is that sm—’

Bleeeeeugh!

Our first gig in America was at a club in New York called Ungano’s, at 210 West 70th Street. Then after that we did a show at the Fillmore East with Rod Stewart and the Faces.

We were pissed off with the Faces, actually, because they didn’t give us any time for a sound check. And Rod kept well out of our way. Looking back now, I don’t suppose he was too happy about having Black Sabbath supporting him. We were the unwashed hooligans and he was the blue-eyed boy. He was all right though, Rod; always very polite. And I thought he was a phenomenal singer.

Two months felt like an eternity to be so far away from home, and we missed England like crazy—especially when we started talking about how much we couldn’t wait to go down the pub and tell everyone about America, which was like going to Mars in those days. Very few Brits ever made it over, because the air fares were so expensive.

Practical jokes ended up being the best way to take our minds off home. One of the things we found hilarious was the American accent. Every time a hotel receptionist called me ‘Mr Ozz-Burn’, we’d all crack up laughing. Then we came up with this prank to play in hotel restaurants. During the meal, one of us would sneak off to the front desk and get them to page a ‘Mr Harry Bollocks’. So the others would be sitting there eating their hamburgers and this bell-hop would rush into the room, ringing his little bell, and shout, ‘Is there a Mr Hairy Bollocks here? I’m looking for Hairy Bollocks.’

Bill would laugh so hard he’d make himself ill.

But the biggest culture shock was at a gig in Philadelphia. It was mostly black guys in the audience, and you could tell they hated our music. We did ‘War Pigs’ and you could have heard a fucking pin drop. One guy, a big tall fella with a massive Afro, spent the whole gig sitting up on a high window ledge, and every few minutes he’d shout out, ‘Hey, you—Black Sabbath!’

I thought, Why the fuck does he keep saying that? What does he want? I didn’t realise he thought my name was Black Sabbath.

Anyway, about halfway through the gig, at the end of one of the songs, this guy does it again: ‘Hey, you—Black Sabbath!’

By this point I’d had enough. So I walked to the edge of the stage, looked up at him, and said, ‘All right mate, you win. What the fuck do you want? Just tell me. What is it, eh?’

And he peered down at me with this puzzled look on his face.

‘You guys ain’t black,’ he said.

That was our only bad gig, mind you.

None of us could believe how well the Black Sabbath album had gone down in America. It was a monster. Warner Bros, our American record company, were so pleased with it they told us they were going to delay the release of Paranoid until January the following year.

We were getting such big crowds wherever we played, we even started to get a few groupies.

Our first really crazy groupie experience was in a Holiday Inn, out in California somewhere. Now, usually, Patrick Meehan booked us into the shittiest of places; it wasn’t unusual for all four of us to share a single room in some dodgy motel on the outskirts of town for five bucks a night. So the Holiday Inn was luxurious by our standards: my room had a bath and a shower and a phone and a telly. It even had a waterbed—which were all the rage in those days. I loved those things, actually; it was like falling asleep on a tire floating in the middle of the ocean.

Anyway, so we’re in this Holiday Inn, and I’ve just finished talking to Thelma on the phone when there’s a knock at the door. I open it and there’s this beautiful chick standing there in a little dress. ‘Ozzy?’ she goes. ‘The gig was awesome. Can we talk?’

In she comes, pulls off her dress, we get down to business, and then she fucks off before I can even ask her name.

Five minutes later, there’s another knock on the door. I’m thinking, She probably left something in the room. So I get up to answer it. But it’s a different chick.

‘Ozzy?’ she goes. ‘The gig was awesome. Can we talk?’

Off comes her dress, down go my trousers, and after five minutes of my hairy arse bobbing up and down on top of her while we’re floating around on this waterbed, it was ‘Nice meeting you’, ‘Cheerio’, and off she went.

These Holiday Inns are fucking magic, I thought. Then there was another knock on the door.

You can guess what happened next.

I banged three chicks that night. Three. Without even leaving my hotel room. To be honest with you, I was flagging a bit with the last one. I had to use the special reserve tank.

Eventually I decided to find out where the fuck all these groupies were coming from. So I went to the bar but it was completely empty. Then I asked the guy in the lobby, ‘Where is everyone?’ He went, ‘Your British friends? Try the pool.’ So I took the lift up to the pool on the roof, and when the doors opened I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was like Caligula up there: dozens of the most amazing-looking chicks you could ever imagine, all stark naked, and blowjobs and threesomes going on left, right and centre. I lit up a joint, sat down on a recliner between two lesbian chicks, and began to sing ‘God Bless America’.

But it wasn’t just groupies who followed us around America. We also got a lot of loonies—the kind of people who took the black magic thing seriously. Before we even left for America, someone had sent us a film of a black magic parade in San Francisco, held in our honour.

There was a bloke who looked like Ming the Merciless sitting in a convertible Rolls-Royce while all these half-naked chicks danced around him in the streets. The bloke’s name was Anton LaVey and he was the High Priest of the Church of Satan or some bollocks, and the author of a book called The Satanic Bible.

We just thought, What the fuck?

I have a theory, y’know, about people who dedicate their lives to that kind of bullshit: they’re just in it because of all the sexual debauchery they can get up to.

Which is fair enough, I suppose.

But we didn’t want anything to do with it. A lot of people were still freaked out by Sharon Tate’s murder, so we didn’t want to come off like members of Charles Manson’s ‘Family’. I mean, only a few months earlier we’d been playing at Henry’s Blues House in front of a few dozen people, and now we were playing the Forum in LA in front of twenty thousand fans. We loved being big in the US, and we didn’t want to do anything to fuck it up.

Mind you, we did bump into some members of the Manson Family at the Whiskey A Go Go on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles one night. They were very weird people—somewhere-else people, if you know what I mean. Not on the same wavelength as the rest of the world. They gave me the willies, big time. The funny thing is, though, before he turned psycho, Manson had been a big part of the LA music scene. If he hadn’t gone to jail, we probably would have ended up hanging out with him. It blew my mind when I learned that he’d been pals with Dennis Wilson from the Beach Boys. The Beach Boys had even covered one of Manson’s songs, ‘Never Learn Not to Love’. But from what I heard, Dennis ended up getting so spooked by Manson and his friends that he fled his own house. He just woke up and fucked off one day. Then Manson had a bullet delivered to Wilson’s new place. The bloke must have been shitting bricks.

There was a lot of mad stuff like that going on in those days.

LA was a crazy place in 1970. The flower power thing was still a huge deal. When you drove around, you’d see all these people with long hair and bare feet, just sitting around on street corners, smoking weed and strumming guitars. The locals probably thought we were crazy, too, I suppose. I remember walking into an liquor store on Sunset Boulevard one time and asking for twenty fags. The woman behind the counter said, ‘What do you want twenty fags for? Get out of here, you fucking pervert!’

She must have thought I was a sex fiend. Of course, at the time I didn’t have a clue that ‘fag’ doesn’t mean cigarette in America.

As much as we tried to avoid them, the Satanists never stopped being a pain in the arse.

About a year after the first tour, we were playing a gig in Memphis and this bloke wearing a black cloak ran on stage. Under normal circumstances, if a fan climbed on stage, I’d put my arm around him and we’d have a good old head bang for a bit. But this bloke looked like one of the satanic loonies, so I told him to fuck off out of it and pushed him away, towards Tony.

Before I knew it, one of our roadies was running on stage with a metal bar raised above his head, and he twatted the guy in the face. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. ‘What the fuck are you doing, man?’ I shouted. ‘You can’t do that!’

The roadie turned around and said, ‘Yes I fucking can. Look.’

The satanic bloke was lying on the stage with his cloak wide open. In his right hand was a dagger.

I almost fell backwards into one of the speaker cabinets, I was so freaked out. If it hadn’t been for our roadie, Tony might have been a goner.

By the time we headed back to our motel that night, everyone was shaken up. But the fuckers had found out where we were staying, and in the car park of the motel were more guys in black robes, their hoods up, chanting. We were too knackered to deal with it, so we just ignored them and made our way to our rooms, which faced on to the street. A few seconds later, one of the roadies started jabbering and screaming—it turned out that someone had drawn an inverted cross in blood on his door.

I can’t say we were scared. But after the incident with the guy on the stage, we weren’t in the mood to take any more bullshit. So we called the police. Of course, they found the whole thing extremely funny.

They just wouldn’t fuck off, those Satanists. I’d walk out of my hotel room in the morning, and they’d be right outside my door, sitting in a circle on the carpet, all dressed in black hooded capes, surrounded by candles. Eventually I couldn’t take it any more. So, one morning, instead of brushing past them as I usually did, I went up to them, sat down, took a deep breath, blew out their candles, and sang ‘Happy Birthday’.

They weren’t too fucking happy about that, believe me.

We were on the road non-stop for two years after our first American tour. Between 1970 and 1972, we must have crossed the Atlantic six times. We spent so much time in the air, we ended up being on first-name terms with the PanAm flight attendants. And even though we were exhausted and ill half the time from the jet lag, the booze and the drugs, it was a fucking blast. We did everything, saw everything, met everyone.

We even went to an Elvis gig.

It was at the Forum in LA. We were so far up in the nose-bleeds, it seemed to take longer to get to our seats than it did for the King to do his set. He looked like an ant from where we were sitting, and I couldn’t get over the fact that his band played for ages before he came on.

Then he did only a few numbers before he buggered off again. We were sitting there thinking, Is that it? Then this voice came booming out over the Tannoy: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building.’

‘Lazy fat bastard,’ I said, before remembering where I was.

It was an education, that gig. It was the first time I’d seen merchandising sold so professionally at a venue. You could buy Elvis drinks coasters, Elvis bog-seat warmers, Elvis mug and spoon sets, Elvis dolls, Elvis watches, Elvis jumpsuits. Anything you could think of, they’d put the name ‘Elvis’ on it and wanted to sell it to you with an Elvis Coke and an Elvis hot dog.

And the fans seemed only too happy to buy it.

He must have been the richest bloke on the planet.

It didn’t take us long to start getting into drugs big time. You couldn’t really get cocaine in Birmingham back then, so I didn’t try it until a gig in Denver with a band called Mountain in early 1971. Mountain’s guitarist and lead singer was a guy called Leslie West, and it was him who introduced me to the old waffle dust—we called it that ’cos it made you stay up all night, talking bollocks—although he insists to this day that I’d been taking it long before then. He’s got a bit of a bee up his arse about it, in fact. But I just say to him, ‘Listen, Leslie, when you come from Aston and you fall in love with cocaine, you remember when you started. It’s like having your first fuck!’

We were at a hotel after the show, and Leslie was cutting up a line. ‘D’you want a bit?’ he asked me.

At first I said, ‘Whoa, fucking hell, man, no way.’

But he kept saying, ‘Go on, just a bit, it’s all right.’

He didn’t exactly have to try very hard to persuade me.

Then it was, sniff-sniff-ahh.

I was in love, immediately. It’s the same with just about every drug I’ve ever taken: the first time I try it, that’s how I want to feel for the rest of my life. But it never works out that way. You can chase it all you want, but, believe me, you’ll never get that first-time high again.

The world went a bit fuzzy after that.

Every day I’d be smoking dope, boozing, having a few toots of coke, fucking around with speed or barbiturates or cough syrup, doing acid, you name it. I didn’t know what day it was most of the time. But at some point we made it back to Island Studios in Notting Hill to record our third album, Master of Reality, again with Rodger Bain.

I can’t remember much about it, apart from the fact that Tony detuned his guitar to make it easier to play, Geezer wrote ‘Sweet Leaf’ about all the dope we’d been smoking, and

‘Children of the Grave’ was the most kick-ass song we’d ever recorded. As usual, the critics hated it, although one of ’em described us as ‘Titanic’s house band on the eve of Armageddon’, which sounded about right to me. And the music press obviously didn’t put anyone off buying it, because Master of Reality was another monster hit, reaching number five in Britain and number eight in America.

But we never had a chance to enjoy our success. And I certainly didn’t have much time to enjoy married life. In fact, I was starting to realise that getting married so young might not have been such a clever idea. I would get this crazy restless feeling whenever I was at home, like I was going out of my mind. The only way I could handle it was to get loaded.

Life at home was made more complicated because Thelma’s son was living with us. His name was Elliot, and he must have been four or five at the time. I adopted him, actually. He was a good kid, but for some reason we never got on. Y’know, some people just don’t hit it off with their children. That was me and Elliot. I spent the whole time when I was home screaming at him or whacking him around the ear ’ole. And it’s not like he ever did anything bad to deserve it. I wish I could have been better with him, because he’d had a rough time before I came along: his dad had fucked off before Elliot had ever known him. When he got older, he told me he saw his old man in the pub one time, but he couldn’t bring himself to talk to him.

Which is terribly sad, really.

But I wasn’t much of a substitute. It probably didn’t help that my boozing was so over the top, which made me volatile. And, of course, my ego was out of control. To tell you the truth, I must have been a horrendous stepdad.

And if I loved Thelma, I certainly didn’t treat her like I did. If I’ve got any regrets about my life, that’s one of them. For years, I acted like a married bachelor, sneaking around, banging chicks, getting so wasted down the pub that I’d fall asleep in the car on the street outside. I put that woman through hell. I should never have married her. She didn’t deserve it: she wasn’t a bad person, and she wasn’t a bad wife. But I was a fucking nightmare.

Nine months to the day after me and Thelma got married, she got pregnant. At that point, we still hadn’t seen much dough from all the record sales and the touring, but we knew how well the band was doing, so we assumed that Patrick Meehan would soon be sending us a royalty cheque big enough to buy Buckingham Palace. In the meantime, the usual agreement stood: anything I wanted, I just picked up the phone. So Thelma suggested that we should go house hunting. We couldn’t live in a little flat with a screaming baby, she said, so why not move to a proper place? We could afford it, after all.

I was all for it.

‘Let’s live in the country,’ I said, imagining myself in a tweed suit with green welly-boots, a Range Rover and a shotgun.

For the next few months, every time I came off the road for a few days, we climbed into our brand-new green Triumph Herald convertible—I’d got it for Thelma, because I couldn’t drive—and go looking for houses in the countryside. Eventually we found one we both liked: Bulrush Cottage in Ranton, Staffordshire. They were asking just over twenty grand for the place, which seemed reasonable enough. It had four bedrooms, a sauna, there was room for a little studio and, best of all, it had plenty of land. But we kept on looking, just to make sure.

Then, one day, in a tea shop in Evesham, Worcestershire, we decided that we’d seen enough: we’d make an offer on Bulrush. It felt like I’d finally grown up. But just as we were starting to get excited about our new life in the country, Thelma suddenly went ‘Shhh!’ and said, ‘Can you hear that?’

‘What?’ I said.

‘That clicking noise.’

‘What clickin…?’ Then I heard it, too.

It was more of a tick than a click.

Tick, tick, tick, tick.

I looked down and saw a big puddle under Thelma’s chair. Something was dripping from under her dress. Then one of the tea ladies started wailing about the mess on the floor.

‘Oh my God,’ said Thelma. ‘My waters have broken!’

‘What d’you mean?’ I said. ‘You’ve pissed yerself?’

‘No, John—my waters have broken.’

‘Eh?’

‘I’m having the baby.’

I jumped up so quickly my chair fell over. Then my whole body went numb with panic. I couldn’t think. My heart was like a drum roll. The first thing that came into my head was: I’m not drunk enough. The bottle of cognac I’d gone through in the car had already worn off. I’d always thought that Thelma would go off to hospital to have the baby. I didn’t think it could just happen—in the middle of a fucking tea shop!

‘Is anyone in here a doctor?’ I shouted, looking desperately around the room. ‘We need a doctor. Help! We need a doctor!’

‘John,’ hissed Thelma. ‘You just need to drive me to hospital. We don’t need a doctor.’

‘We need a doctor!’

‘No, we don’t.’

‘Yeah, we do,’ I moaned. ‘I don’t feel well.’

‘John,’ said Thelma, ‘you need to drive me to hospital. Now.’

‘I don’t have a driving licence.’

‘Since when has the law stopped you from doing anything?’

‘I’m drunk.’

‘You’ve been drunk since 1967! C’mon, John. Hurry.’

So I got up, paid the bill, and led Thelma outside to the Herald. I had no idea how to work the thing. My parents had never owned a car, and I’d always assumed that I’d never be able to afford one, so I hadn’t taken the slightest bit of interest in learning how to drive. All I knew was the basics, like how to tune the radio and wind down the windows.

But gears? Choke? Clutch?

Nah.

The car jerked backwards and forwards on its springs like a pissed kangaroo for about twenty minutes before I got it moving. In the wrong direction. Then I finally found first gear.

‘John, you’re going to have to put your foot down,’ said Thelma, between groans.

‘My foot’s shaking,’ I told her. ‘I can hardly keep it on the pedal.’

My hands were shaking, too. I was terrified that our baby was going to end up plopping out of Thelma and on to the dashboard, where it might blow away, because the hood was still down. I could imagine the headline: ‘ROCKER’S TOT IN FREAK M-WAY TRAGEDY’.

‘Seriously, John. Arrrgh! Drive faster. Arrrgh! I’m having contractions!’

‘The car won’t go any faster!’

‘You’re only going ten miles an hour.’

After what seemed like a thousand years, we made it to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Edgbaston. Then all I had to do was stop the car. But every time I put my foot on the middle pedal it just started bouncing up and down again and making this horrible noise. It’s a miracle I didn’t crash into the back of an ambulance, to be honest with you. But somehow I managed to get the wheels to stop moving, and then get Thelma out of her seat—not easy when she was screaming and puffing—and into the maternity ward.

A few hours later, at 11.20 p.m., little Jessica Osbourne was born—so I became a father for the first time. The date was January 20, 1972. It was one of those cold, clear winter nights.

Through the hospital window, you could see all these gleaming constellations in every direction.

‘What should we give her as a middle name?’ said Thelma, holding Jessica up to her chest.

‘Starshine,’ I said.

5. Killing the Vicar (in Atrocity Cottage)

By the summer of 1972—six months after Jess was born—we were back in America, this time to record a new album, which we’d decided to call Snowblind in honour of our new-found love of cocaine. By now, I was putting so much of the stuff up my nose that I had to smoke a bag of dope every day just to stop my heart from exploding. We were staying at 773 Stradella Road in Bel Air, a rented 1930s mansion complete with its own staff of maids and gardeners.

The place was owned by the Du Pont family and it had six bedrooms, seven bathrooms, a private cinema (which we used for writing and rehearsing) and a swimming pool in the back, which was on stilts and looked out over all these woods and mountains. We never left the house. Booze, drugs, food, groupies—everything was delivered. On a good day there’d be bowls of white powder and crates of booze in every room, and all these random rock ’n’ rollers and chicks in bikinis hanging around the place—in the bedrooms, on the sofas, outside on the recliners—all of them as high as we were.

It would be almost impossible to exaggerate how much coke we did in that house. We’d discovered that when you take coke, every thought you have, every word you say, every suggestion you make seems like the most fabulous thing you’ve ever heard in your life. At one point we were getting through so much of the stuff, we had to have it delivered twice a day.

Don’t ask me who was organising it all—the only thing I can remember is this shady-looking bloke on the telephone the whole time. But he wasn’t shady in the normal sense of the word: he was clean cut and had one of those Ivy League accents, and he’d wear white shirts and smart trousers, like he was on his way to work in an office.

I once asked him, ‘What the fuck do you do, man?’

He just laughed and fiddled nervously with his aviator shades. At that stage I didn’t care, as long as the coke kept coming.

My favourite thing to do when I was high was to stay up all night watching American telly.

In those days there was only one thing on after the normal programming ended at midnight—a sales pitch by a bloke called Cal Worthington, who sold second-hand cars down in Long Beach or somewhere. His big joke was that he always appeared on air with his dog, Spot—but the dog was never actually a dog. It would be an alligator on a lead, or some crazy shit like that. He also had this catchphrase, ‘If I can’t make you a better deal, I’ll eat a bug!’, and did these stunts, like being strapped to the wing of an aeroplane as it did a loop-the-loop.

After a few hours of snorting coke and watching that shit, you thought you were going insane.

The funny thing is, he’s still at it today, old Cal. He must be about a thousand years old.

We fucked around so much at 773 Stradella Road, it’s a wonder we got any songs written at all. And it wasn’t just the coke. We got through a shitload of beer, too. I’d brought over these ‘party cans’ of best bitter from my local boozer. Each can held five pints, and you could fit six of them in one suitcase. It was like taking coal to Newcastle, but we didn’t care, ’cos we missed a good old English pint. We’d sit there by the pool, in ninety-degree sunshine, coked out of our minds, drinking stale Brummie piss, and looking out over Bel Air.

But then we had to tone things down because Thelma came to visit for few days—without the baby. The good behaviour didn’t last long, mind you. The second Thelma left for the airport to go back to England, we went straight back to being animals again. During our songwriting sessions, for example, no one could be arsed to walk upstairs for a slash, so we’d just go outside on to this little balcony and piss over the railing, which was only a couple of feet high. Then, one day, Tony gets this can of blue spray paint and sneaks round to the other side of the railing, and when Bill starts pissing, he sprays his dick with it. You should have heard the scream, man. It was priceless. But then, two seconds later, Bill blacks out, falls headfirst over the railing, and starts to roll down the hillside.

I said to Tony, ‘Gimme a look at that can, will yer?’

He passed it up to me, and there on the side, in big capital letters, it said: ‘WARNING. KEEP AWAY FROM SKIN. MAY CAUSE RASH, BLISTERING, CONVULSIONS, VOMITING, AND/OR FAINTING. IF ANY OF THESE SYMPTOMS OCCUR, SEEK MEDICAL CARE.’

‘Ah, he’ll be all right,’ I said.

And he was, eventually.

Although he did have a blue dick for a while.

In spite of all the arsing around, musically those few weeks in Bel Air were the strongest we’d ever been. For me, Snowblind was one of Black Sabbath’s best-ever albums—although the record company wouldn’t let us keep the title, ’cos in those days cocaine was a big deal, and they didn’t want the hassle of a controversy.

We didn’t argue.

So, after we’d recorded the new songs at the Record Plant in Hollywood, the name Snowblind was dropped, and our fourth album became known as just Vol. 4. We still managed to get a cheeky reference to cocaine in the liner notes, though. If you look closely enough, you’ll see a dedication to ‘the great COKE-Cola company of Los Angeles’.

And it was true—that album owed a lot to cocaine.

When I listen to songs like ‘Supernaut’, I can just about taste the stuff. The whole album’s like having someone pour a couple of lines into your ears. Frank Zappa once told me that

‘Supernaut’ was one of his favourite rock ’n’ roll tracks of all time, because you can hear the adrenaline. We were flying, y’know? In 1972, it had been only two years since the biggest compliment you could give us was that we were big in Carlisle. Now we had more money than the Queen—or so we thought—with three hit records in the charts, fans all over the world, and as much booze and drugs and chicks as we could ever want.

We weren’t on Cloud Nine. We were on Cloud Ten-and-a-Half.

And we still really cared about the music. We wanted to impress ourselves before we impressed anyone else. If other people happened to like what we were doing, that was just a bonus. That’s how we ended up doing songs like ‘Changes’, which didn’t sound like anything we’d ever done before. When a lot of people hear the name Black Sabbath, all they think of is the heavy stuff. But there was a lot more to us than that—especially when we started making an effort to get away from all that black magic shit. With ‘Changes’, Tony just sat down at the piano and came up with this beautiful riff, I hummed a melody over the top, and Geezer wrote these heartbreaking lyrics about the break-up Bill was going through with his wife at the time.

I thought that song was brilliant from the moment we first recorded it.

I had to keep listening to it, over and over again. I’m still like that today: if I put it on my iPod, I’ll drive everyone nuts by singing along to it for the rest of the day.

Eventually we started to wonder where the fuck all the coke was coming from. All we knew was that it arrived in the back of unmarked vans, packed inside cardboard boxes. In each box there were about thirty vials—ten across, three deep—and each one had a screw-on top, sealed with wax.

I’m telling you: that coke was the whitest, purest, strongest stuff you could ever imagine.

One sniff, and you were the king of the universe.

But as much as we loved being human vacuum cleaners, we knew it would have been a big deal, getting caught with one of our dodgy shipments. Especially in America. And I didn’t much fancy the idea of spending the rest of my life bent over in an LA prison with the cock of some 280 lb gang member up my arse. The trouble was, of course, being constantly strung-out just made me even more paranoid, and after a while I’d convinced myself that our Ivy League dealer was FBI, or LAPD, or the fucking CIA.

Then, one night, me and the lads went down to Hollywood to see The French Connection at the cinema. Big mistake, that was. The plot was based on a true story about two undercover New York cops busting an international heroin-smuggling ring. By the time the credits rolled, I was hyperventilating.

‘Where the fuck would someone be getting vials of coke with wax seals on them?’ I said to Bill.

He just shrugged.

Then we went to the bog to do another couple of lines.

A few days later, I was lying by the pool, smoking a joint and drinking a beer, trying to get my heart to slow down, when the shady-looking bloke came over and sat down next to me. It was morning, and he had a cup of coffee in one hand and a copy of the Wall Street Journal in the other.

I hadn’t been to bed.

Now’s my chance to feel this bloke out, see how dodgy he is, I thought. So I leaned over and said, ‘Did you ever see that movie, The French Connection?’

He smiled and shook his head.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You should, y’know. It’s very interesting.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ the bloke chuckled. ‘But why go and see a movie when I had a part in the real thing?’

As soon as I heard that, I broke out into this horrible prickly sweat. This guy was bad news. I just knew it.

‘Listen, man,’ I said. ‘Who do you work for?’

He put down his newspaper and took a sip of his coffee. ‘The United States government,’

he said.

I almost jumped off my recliner and made a dive for the hedge. But my head was spinning, and I hadn’t felt my legs since the night before. That’s it, I thought: we’re all fucked now.

‘Jesus Christ, man, relax,’ he said, seeing the look on my face. ‘I’m not the FBI. You’re not about to get busted. We’re all friends here. I work for the Food and Drug Administration.’

‘The what?’

‘The FDA.’

‘You mean, all that coke… it’s coming from—’

‘Think of it as a gift from Santa Claus, Ozzy. Because you know what they say about Santa Claus, don’t you?

‘No?’

‘There’s a lot of snow where he comes from.’

Before I could work out if the bloke was being serious, he looked at his watch and said he had a meeting to attend. So he finished his coffee, got up, patted me on the back, and fucked off. I thought no more of it. Then I went back inside the house for a bit more coke and a few hits on the bong.

So there I am on the sofa, with all these sealed vials of coke lined up in front of me—along with a big bowl of pot—and I’m cutting up my first line of the day. But then I start to sweat again—that same horrible, prickly sweat as before. Fuck me, I’m thinking, the paranoia’s really bad today. At that moment Bill strolls into the room with a beer in his hand and goes, ‘It’s like a furnace in here, Ozzy. Why don’t you switch on the AC?’ Then he pokes his head out of the patio door to get his first sunlight in days.

I thought, What’s ‘the AC’ when it’s at home? Then it clicked: air conditioning. I always used to forget that the mod cons in America were so much more advanced than they were in Britain. I’d only recently got used to the novelty of an indoor shitter, never mind automated climate control. So I got up and started looking for the thermostat. Must be on the wall somewhere around here, I said to myself. After a few minutes—bingo!—I found it in a little nook by the front door. So I turned down the temperature and went back to my coke and pot.

Magic.

But as soon as I’d got the first line up my nose, I heard something.

Was it…?

Nah.

Shit, it sounded like…

Suddenly Bill threw himself through the open patio door, with this wild-eyed look on his face. At the same time, I heard doors slamming at the other end of the house and what sounded like three big blokes falling down the stairs. Then Tony, Geezer and one of the roadies—an American bloke called Frank—came puffing into the room. Everyone was half-dressed apart from Frank, who was still in his underwear.

We all looked at each other.

Then in unison, we shouted: ‘Sirens!’

It sounded like the entire fucking LAPD was coming up the driveway. We were being busted! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

‘GET THE COKE! GET THE COKE!’ I started to scream.

So Frank dived towards the coffee table, grabbed the vials of coke, but then just ran around in circles, his hair standing on end, a fag still in his mouth, his briefs riding up into his arse crack.

Then I remembered something else.

‘GET THE POT! GET THE POT!’

Frank dived back towards the coffee table and grabbed the big bowl of pot, but when he did that he dropped the coke. So he ended up scrabbling around on the floor, trying to balance everything in his arms. Meanwhile, I couldn’t even move. Even before the sirens, my heart had been going at triple speed. Now it was beating so fast I thought it was gonna crack open my rib cage.

B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-bum!

B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-bum!

B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-bum!

By the time I pulled myself together, Bill, Geezer and Tony had all bolted. So it was just me and Frank, and enough coke to march the Bolivian army to the moon and back.

‘Frank! Frank!’ I shouted. ‘Over ’ere. The bog. Quick!’

Somehow Frank managed to haul himself and all the drugs over to the bog, which was just off the hallway near the front door, and we dived inside and locked the door behind us.

The sirens were fucking deafening now.

Then I heard the brakes of the police cars squealing as they pulled up outside. Then a radio crackling. Then a knock at the door.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

‘Open up!’ shouted one of the cops. ‘C’mon, open up!’ By now, me and Frank were kneeling on the floor. In our panic, we’d tried to get rid of the pot before the coke—first by washing it down the sink, then by flushing it down the bog. Big mistake. The sink and the bog couldn’t take it, and they’d started to overflow with all this brown, lumpy water. So we tried forcing some of the pot down the U-trap, using the end of the bog brush. But it wouldn’t go. The pipes were backed up.

And we still had to get rid of all the coke.

‘There’s nothing else for it,’ I said to Frank. ‘We’re gonna have to snort all the coke.’

‘Are you fucking out of your mind?’ he said. ‘You’ll die!’

‘Have you ever been to prison, Frank?’ I said. ‘Well, I have, and I’m telling you right now, I ain’t going back.’

So I started to break open the vials and tip the coke on to the floor. Then I got down on all fours, pressed my nose against the tiles, and started to vacuum up as much of the stuff as I could.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

‘Open the door! We know you’re in there!’

Frank was looking at me like I was insane.

‘Any second now,’ I told him, my face bright red, my legs tingling, my eyeballs throbbing,

‘they’re gonna break down that door, and we’ll be fucked.’

‘Oh, man,’ said Frank, joining me on all fours. ‘I can’t believe I’m about to do this.’

We must have snorted about six or seven grams each before I heard the tapping noise outside the door.

‘SHHH! Listen,’ I said.

There it was again: tap, tap, tap, tap…

It sounded like footsteps…

Then I heard the front door open and a woman’s voice. She was speaking in Spanish. The maid! The maid was letting in the cops. Fuck! I broke open another vial and put my nose to the floor again.

A male voice: ‘Good morning, ma’am,’ he said. ‘I believe someone at this residence pressed the emergency call button?’

I stopped, mid-sniff.

Emergency call button?

The maid said something in Spanish again, the man replied, then I heard two sets of footsteps in the hallway and the man’s voice getting louder. The cop was inside the house!

‘It’s usually located right next to the AC thermostat,’ he said. ‘Yep, here it is—right on the wall. If you press this button, ma’am, it sounds an alarm down at the Bel Air station and we dispatch some officers to make sure everything is OK. Looks as though someone might have pressed it by accident when they were adjusting the thermostat. Happens more often than you’d think. Let me just reset the system—there we go—and we’ll be on our way. Any problems, just give us a call. Here’s our number. Or hit the button again. We have someone on call twenty-four hours a day.’

‘Gracias,’ said the maid.

I heard the front door close and the maid walk back towards the kitchen. All of the air came out of my lungs. Holy shit: that had been a close one. Then I looked over at Frank: his face was a mask of white powder and snot, and his left nostril was bleeding.

‘You mean…?’ he said.

‘Yeah.’ I nodded. ‘Someone needs to teach Bill how to use that fucking thing.’

The constant fear of getting busted wasn’t the only downside to coke. It got to the point where practically every word out of my mouth was coked-up bollocks. For fifteen hours straight, I’d tell the lads how much I loved them more than anything else in the world. Even me and Tony—who never had conversations—would have nights when we’d be up for hours, hugging each other and saying, ‘No, really, I love you, man—I really love you.’

Then I’d go to bed, wait for my heart to stop beating at eight times its usual speed, then fall into this fucking horrific withdrawal. The comedowns were so bad that I used to pray. I’d say, ‘God, please let me sleep, and I promise I’ll never do cocaine again, as long as I live.’

Then I’d wake up with my jaw aching from spouting so much bullshit the previous night.

And I’d do another line.

It was amazing how quickly it took over our lives. It got to the point where we couldn’t do anything without it. Then it got to the point where we couldn’t do anything with it, either.

When I finally realised the pot wasn’t enough to calm me down from all the coke, I started getting into Valium. Then eventually I moved on to heroin, but thank God I didn’t like that stuff.

Geezer tried it, too. He thought it was fucking brilliant, but he was sensible. He didn’t want to get involved. Frank, the roadie, wasn’t so lucky—heroin ruined him in the end. I haven’t heard from Frank in years now, and I’d be amazed if he survived, to be honest with you. I hope he did, I really do, but when heroin gets hold of you, it’s usually The End.

During the making of Vol. 4, we all had moments when we were so fucked up that we just couldn’t function. With Bill, it was when he was recording ‘Under the Sun’. By the time he got the drums right on that song, we’d renamed it ‘Everywhere Under the Fucking Sun’. Then the poor bloke came down with hepatitis and almost died. Meanwhile, Geezer ended up in hospital with kidney problems. Even Tony burned out. Just after we’d finished the album, we did a gig at the Hollywood Bowl. Tony had been doing coke literally for days—we all had, but Tony had gone over the edge. I mean, that stuff just twists your whole idea of reality. You start seeing things that aren’t there. And Tony was gone. Near the end of the gig he walked off stage and collapsed.

‘Severe exhaustion,’ the doctor said.

That was one way of putting it.

At the same time, the coke was fucking up my voice, good and proper. When you’re taking heavy-duty amounts of cocaine, this white gunk starts to trickle down the back of your throat, and you find yourself doing that phlegm-clearing thing all the time—like a sniff, but deeper and gunkier. And that puts a lot of stress on that little titty thing that hangs down at the back of your throat—the epiglottis, or the ‘clack’, as I’ve always called it. Anyway, I was taking so much coke that I was clearing away the phlegm every couple of minutes, until eventually I tore my clack in half. I was lying in bed at the time in the Sunset Marquis hotel, and I just felt it flop down inside the back of my throat. It was horrific. Then the fucking thing swelled up to the size of a golf ball. I thought: Right, this is it—I’m gonna die now.

So I went to see a doctor on Sunset Boulevard.

He asked, ‘What’s the problem, Mr Osbourne?’

‘I’ve sucked my clack,’ I croaked.

‘You’ve what?’

‘My clack.’

I pointed at my throat.

‘Let’s have a look,’ he said, getting out his lollipop stick and his little flashlight. ‘Open wide.

‘Say “ahh” for me now.’

So I opened my mouth and closed my eyes.

‘Holy mother of Christ!’ he said. ‘How in God’s name did you do that?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Mr Osbourne, your epiglottis is the size of a small light bulb, and it’s glowing almost as brightly. I don’t even need to use my flashlight.’

‘Can you fix it?’

‘I think so,’ he said, writing out a prescription. ‘But whatever it is you’ve been doing, stop doing it.’

That wasn’t the end of our medical problems, though. When it was time to go back to England, we were all terrified of taking home an STD from one of the groupies and giving it to our other half. Catching some exotic disease was always a big worry when we were in America. I remember one time during a particularly wild night at a hotel somewhere, Tony came running out of his room, going, ‘Aargh! My knob! My knob!’ I asked him what was wrong, and he told me that he’d been messing around with this groupie when he looked down and saw all this yellow pus coming out of her. He thought he was about to die.

‘Did the pus smell funny?’ I asked him.

‘Yeah,’ he said, white in the face. ‘I almost puked.’

‘Ah.’

‘What d’you mean, “ah”?’

‘Was it the blonde chick?’ I asked. ‘The one with the tattoo?’

‘Yeah. And?’

‘Well, that probably explains it then.’

‘Ozzy,’ said Tony, getting visibly angry. ‘Stop fucking around, this is serious. What are you talking about?’

‘Look, I ain’t a doctor,’ I said. ‘But I don’t think the yellow stuff was pus.’

‘Well what was it then?’

‘Probably the banana I stuck up there earlier.’

I don’t think Tony knew whether to be relieved or even more worried after that.

Of course, one failsafe way to make sure you never gave anything dodgy to your missus was to get a shot of penicillin. I’d learned that after getting the clap one time. But in those days we didn’t know any dodgy doctors, which meant the only way to get a ‘safety shot’ was to check yourself into the emergency room of the nearest hospital.

So that’s what we did after making Vol. 4.

By then we’d left Bel Air and were on the road in small-town America somewhere, doing a few shows before our flight back home. I’ll never forget the scene: me, Tony, Geezer, and pretty much the entire road crew—I don’t know what Bill was up to that day—checking ourselves into this hospital one night. And of course no one had the bottle to tell the good-looking chick on the front desk why we were there, so they were all going, ‘Go on, Ozzy, you tell her, you don’t care, you’re fucking crazy, you are.’ But even I couldn’t bring myself to say,

‘Oh, hello there, my name’s Ozzy Osbourne, and I’ve been bonking groupies for a couple of months, and I think my knob might be about to fall off, would you mind terribly giving me a shot of penicillin to make sure my missus doesn’t get whatever I’ve got?’

But it was too late to turn around and walk away.

So when the girl asked me what the problem was, I just turned bright red and blurted, ‘I think I broke my ribs.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Here’s a ticket. See this number? They’ll call it out when the doctor’s ready to see you.’

Then it was Geezer’s turn to go up.

‘I’ve got whatever he’s got,’ he said, pointing at me.

Eventually the doctors twigged. I don’t know who came clean with them, ’cos I certainly didn’t. I just remember this bloke in a white suit coming up to me and going, ‘Are you with the others?’ and me nodding. Then he showed me into this room with Tony, Geezer and about half a dozen other hairy English blokes all bent over with their trousers down, their lily-white arses ready for their penicillin jabs.

‘Join the line,’ he said.

It was September when we got back to England.

By that time the deal to buy Bulrush Cottage had gone through, and Thelma, Elliot and the baby were already settled in. It always made me smile, going home to Bulrush Cottage—mainly because it was on a little country road called Butt Lane. ‘Welcome to Butt Lane,’ I used to say to visitors, ‘the arsehole of Britain.’

It wasn’t just me and Thelma and the baby who got a new place to live around that time. I also sorted out a bigger house for my mum and dad. As always, Patrick Meehan’s office took care of the dough side of things, although when the land behind Bulrush Cottage was put up for sale we bought it with our own money—or rather, money we made by selling the Rolls-Royce that Patrick Meehan had given Tony, which Tony had then given to us. I think that was the first time we’d bought anything with our own money. To this day, I don’t know why we did it. Maybe it’s ’cos Thelma dealt with all the paperwork. I made her do it because the farmer who sold us the land was a cross-dresser, and I didn’t want to go anywhere near him. Fucking hell, man, the first time I saw that bloke, I thought I was hallucinating. He had this big bushy beard and he’d drive his tractor down Butt Lane while wearing a frock and curlers in his hair.

Other times you’d see him by the side of the road, his frock hitched up, taking a slash. And the funny thing is, no one would bat an eyelid.

Tony and Geezer also bought houses when they got back. Tony got a place in Acton Trussell, on the other side of the M6; and Geezer bought somewhere down in Worcestershire.

It took Bill a bit longer to find his rock ’n’ roll retreat, so in the meantime he rented a place called Fields Farm, out near Evesham. In less than three years, we’d gone from piss-poor backstreet kids to millionaire country gents. It was unbelievable.

And I loved living in the country.

For starters, I suddenly had enough room to get even more toys sent over from Patrick Meehan’s office. Like a seven-foot-tall stuffed grizzly bear. And a gypsy caravan with a little fireplace inside. And a myna bird called Fred, who lived in the laundry room. He could do a wicked impression of a washing machine, could Fred. Or at least he could until I put a shotgun in his face and told him to shut the fuck up.

I have to say I really pigged out on the calls to Patrick Meehan’s office after we moved into Bulrush Cottage. Everything I’d ever wanted as a kid, I had them deliver. I ended up with a whole shed full of Scalextric cars, jukeboxes, table football games, trampolines, pool tables, shotguns, crossbows, catapults, swords, arcade games, toy soldiers, fruit machines… Every single thing you could ever think to ask for, I asked for it. The guns were most fun. The most powerful one I had was this Benelli five-shot semi-automatic. I tried it out on the stuffed bear one time. Its head just exploded—you should have fucking seen it, man. Another thing I’d do is get these mannequins and tie them to this tree trunk in the garden and execute them at dawn. I’m telling you, it’s really terrifying what booze and drugs will do to your mind if you take them for long enough. I was out of control.

Obviously, the most important thing I needed to sort out after moving to the country was a ready supply of drugs. So I called up one of my American dealers and got him to start sending me cocaine via air mail, on the understanding that I’d pay him the next time I was over there on tour. It worked a treat, although I ended up waiting for the postman all day like a dog.

Thelma must have thought I was buying dirty magazines or something.

Then I found a local dope dealer who said he could get me some really strong hash from Afghanistan. He wasn’t wrong, either. The first time I smoked that stuff it almost knocked my fucking head off. It came in massive slabs of black resin, which would last even me for weeks.

There was nothing I loved more than when someone came over to Bulrush Cottage and said,

‘Dope? Nah, I don’t smoke that stuff. Never has any effect on me.’

If you said that, you were mine.

The first person who claimed to be immune to dope was our local fruit ’n’ veg man, Charlie Clapham. He was a right old character, Charlie was, and he became a good friend. One night, after we’d been to the pub, I got out the tin of Afghan hash and said, ‘Try this.’

‘Nah, never works on me, that stuff.’

‘Go on, Charlie, try it, just once. For me.’

So he grabbed the brick out of my hands and before I could say anything he bit off a huge chunk of it. He must have eaten at least half an ounce. Then he burped in my face and said,

‘Urgh, that tasted ’orrible.’

Five minutes later, he said, ‘See? Nothing,’ and went home.

It must have been about one o’clock in the morning when he left, and the poor fucker was meant to be at his market stall by four. But I knew there was no way he’d be doing a normal day’s work.

Sure enough, when I saw him a few days later, he grabbed me by the collar and said,

‘What the fuck was that shit you gave me the other night? By the time I got to the market I was hallucinating. I couldn’t get out of the van. I was just lying in the back with the carrots, a coat over my head, screaming. I thought the Martians had landed!’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, Charlie,’ I told him.

‘Can I come over tomorrow night and have some more?’ he said.

I rarely slept in my own bed at Bulrush Cottage. I was so loaded every night, I could never make it up the stairs. So I’d sleep in the car, in my caravan, under the piano in the living room, in the studio or outside in a bale of hay. When I slept outside in winter, it wasn’t unusual for me to wake up blue in the face with icicles on my nose. In those days, there was no such thing as hypothermia.

Crazy shit would happen all the time at that house. The fact that I was usually pissed up and fucking around with my shot-guns didn’t help. That’s a great combination, that is—booze and shotguns. Very fucking safe. One time I tried to jump over a fence in the back garden while holding one of my guns. I’d forgotten to put the safety on and my finger was resting on the trigger, so as soon as I hit the ground, it went BAM! BAM! BAM! and almost blew my leg off.

It’s a miracle I ain’t an amputee.

I’d shoot anything that moved in those days. I remember when we got rid of Thelma’s Triumph Herald and replaced it with a brand-new Mercedes—after yet another call to Patrick Meehan’s office. The car was always covered in scratches, and we couldn’t work out why. I’d get it resprayed, park it in the garage overnight, but the next morning the paintwork would be covered in all these nicks and gouges again. It was costing me an arm and a leg. Then I realised what was happening: we had a family of stray cats living in the garage, and when it was cold they’d climb up on the Merc’s bonnet, because it was nice and warm. So, one day, I came back from a long session at the Hand & Cleaver, got my shotgun, and just fucking obliterated the place. I got two or three of them that first time. Then I kept going back every day, picking them off, one by one.

But y’know, that’s one of my regrets—the cruelty to animals. I could have found another way to get rid of those cats, but like I said, I was out of control. It got so bad, people started to call my house Atrocity Cottage, not Bulrush Cottage. It was me who came up with the name—I just blurted it out one night when I was pissed—but from then on it stuck.

People would come to stay with us and they’d never be the same again. Take my old mate Jimmy Phillips, the bloke who’d played bottleneck guitar in Polka Tulk. He got so fucked up on booze and Afghan hash over at Bulrush Cottage one night that he ended up taking a shit in the kitchen sink. Then there was the time when one of my old schoolfriends from Birmingham brought his new wife over for a visit. The day after they arrived, I woke up in the morning with a terrible headache and a big hairy arm around my shoulder. I thought my mate must have been having a go at Thelma while I was asleep, so I jumped out of bed, ready to chin the bastard. But then I realised what had happened: I’d got up in the middle of the night to take a piss and had gone back to the wrong room. Talk about an awkward fucking situation. I was stark naked, too—so I just grabbed my trousers from the floor and dived back into the bed, put them on under the sheets, and then staggered back to my own room, with no one saying a word.

I’ve never seen them again to this day.

And, as time went on, things got even crazier. At one point—don’t ask me why—I started to wear medical uniforms all the time. My assistant, David Tangye, bought them for me. You’d see us staggering up and down these country lanes between the pubs, out of our minds on booze, dope, acid—you name it—wearing these green American-style scrubs, with stethoscopes around our necks.

Every once in a while, the lads from Led Zeppelin would also come over to Bulrush Cottage. Robert Plant didn’t live too far away, actually, and I’d go over to his place, too. I remember one night at Plant’s house—not long after we’d got back from Bel Air—I taught him how to play seven-card stud. That was a big fucking mistake. As I explained the rules, he said he wanted to place bets—‘just to see how it works, y’know?’—and then he kept raising the stakes. I was just beginning to think what a fucking idiot he must be when he pulled out a royal flush, and I had to give him fifty quid.

He fleeced me, the cheeky bastard.

After a few nights out with Zeppelin, I worked out that their drummer, John Bonham, was as fucking nuts as I was, so we’d spend most of the time trying to outcrazy each other. That was always the way with me, y’know? I’d try to win people over with my craziness, like I had in the playground at Birchfield Road. But, of course, behind the mask there was a sad old clown most of the time. Bonham was the same, I think.

He would just drink himself to fucking bits. One time, we got his assistant, a guy called Matthew, to drive us to a club in Birmingham in my car. But when it was time to go home, Bonham was so pissed, he thought it was his car, so he locked all the doors from inside and wouldn’t let me in. I ended up standing in the car park shouting, ‘John, this is my car. Open the door!’

‘Fuck off,’ he said, through the window, as Matthew revved the engine.

‘John, for crying out—’

‘I said fuck off.’

‘BUT THIS IS MY CAR!’

Then something finally clicked inside his head. ‘Well, you should fucking get in then, shouldn’t you?’ he said.

Even though I was pissed all the time in the seventies, the one thing I really wanted to do more than just about anything was get my driving licence. And fucking hell, man, I tried. I took my test more times than I can remember while I lived at Bulrush Cottage—and I failed every time. I’d just get intimidated, y’know? After my first couple of attempts, I started to go down to the Hand & Cleaver beforehand to sort out my nerves, but more often than not I’d end up being shitfaced by the time I got in the car with the examiner, and then I’d drive like a cunt. Then I thought the problem might be the car, so I called Patrick Meehan’s office and asked for a Range Rover to replace the Merc. When that didn’t work, I asked for a Jag. But it was a V12, so every time I put my foot down, I woke up in a hedge.

Eventually I took the test in a Roller.

That didn’t work, either.

Finally I went to the doctor and asked for some pills to calm me down, so he wrote me a prescription for a sedative. On the box, it said, ‘DO NOT MIX WITH ALCOHOL’, which was like showing a red rag to a bull as far as I was concerned. Still, I managed to limit myself to only three or four pints that day. Unfortunately, that just meant I smoked twice as much Afghan hash. The good news was that when I got into the car with the examiner, I didn’t feel intimated at all. The bad news was that when I stopped for the first traffic light, I nodded off.

I gave up on the tests after that, but I kept driving anyway. Whenever I gave anyone a ride, they’d ask, ‘Do you have a licence yet?’ and I’d answer, ‘Oh yeah, of course.’

Which was sort of true.

I had a TV licence.

But I didn’t want to push my luck too far, so I started trying to come up with other ways of getting around.

Which is why I ended up getting a horse.

Now, I’m generally not cool with horses—they don’t have brakes and they’ve got their own brains. But I was bored of going down to the Hand & Cleaver on my lawnmower, so I went to see a dealer and said, ‘Look, can you get me a horse that’s a bit on the lazy side?’

A few days later, this chick turned up at the cottage with this pure white gelding—a male with its nuts chopped off—called Turpin. ‘He’s very laid back,’ she told me. ‘He won’t give you any trouble at all. The only things he doesn’t like are very loud hissing noises—like the air brakes on a truck. But you won’t get anything like that around here.’

‘Oh no,’ I said, laughing. ‘It’s very quiet out here in Ranton.’

So I called Patrick Meehan’s office to get him to send the breeder some dough, and that was that: I was the proud owner of one lazy horse. I kept him at the farm up the road, because they had a little paddock and someone who could feed him and clean out his stable.

Of course, the second I got Turpin I thought I was John Wayne. I started riding him up and down Butt Lane, wearing a cowboy hat and this leather shirt that I’d bought in LA, singing the theme to Rawhide. After a few days of that I started to feel pretty comfortable in the saddle, so one lunchtime I decided to take him past the Hand & Cleaver to show the locals, and maybe stop off for a cheeky one at the same time. Off we went down Butt Lane, clippety-clop, clippety-clop. Now, that summer, the Hand & Cleaver had put these picnic tables outside, so I knew I’d have an audience. And I couldn’t wait to see everyone’s jaws drop when I turned up.

On I went, clippety-clop, clippety-clop.

Two minutes later, I’d arrived.

Sure enough, all these people were sitting outside with their pints and their bags of pork scratchings, and they started oohing and ahhing when they saw this beautiful white horse.

Then I pulled on the reins to get Turpin to stop, and started to dismount. But just as I was about to swing my leg over the saddle, a milk delivery truck came around the bend. At first, I ignored it—that truck used to drive up Butt Lane every week—but then a thought popped into my head: I hope that thing doesn’t have air bra—

TTSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHH went the truck.

The second those air brakes went off, Turpin’s ears went back and he took off like a fucking Grand National winner. First he bolted in the direction of the truck, with me hanging on to the saddle for dear life, one foot out of the stirrups, my cowboy hat dangling from my neck by the strap. Then he realised he was going in the wrong direction, so he turned around and started galloping back towards the farm. He charged past the Hand & Cleaver at such a fucking speed, the faces of the people outside were just a blur. Meanwhile, I was screaming at the top of my lungs, ‘Staaarghp! You fucker! Staaarghp!’ Which is exactly what he did, as soon as he got back to his paddock—he stopped dead, sending me flying over his head and a fence.

I landed in a cowpat.

Turpin got a new owner after that.

Then, a few days later, I killed the vicar. Or at least I thought I did.

It was an accident.

You see, in those days, out in the countryside, vicars would make house calls. They didn’t need a reason to come and see you. You’d just hear a knock on your door and there would be a bloke in his frock and his dog collar, wanting to talk about the weather.

So one day, while I was down the pub, the vicar came round to Bulrush Cottage for one of his visits, and Thelma invited him in for a cup of tea. The trouble was, Bulrush Cottage wasn’t set up for entertaining vicars—there were beer cans and shotguns and bongs all over the place—and Thelma didn’t have a clue what to feed him, either. So she rummaged around in the kitchen until she found this nasty-looking cake in an old tin. With no better option, she gave him a slice, even though it looked and tasted like shit.

What Thelma had forgotten was that the week before, my local dope dealer had given me some dodgy hash. It was stale or something, so it was crap to smoke, but it was still as potent as ever. And rather than letting it go to waste, I’d grated it into a bowl with some cake mix and baked it. The trouble was, the lump of dope was enormous, and I only had half a tin of cake mix in the cupboard, so the cake ended up being about 80 per cent dope and 20 per cent mix.

I almost barfed when I tasted it.

‘See this tin?’ I remember saying to Thelma. ‘Don’t let anyone touch it.’

She mustn’t have been listening.

All she knew was that there was a tin with a skull and cross-bones marked on it, with some cake inside, and that she had a vicar to feed. So she gave him a slice.

He’d just swallowed his last mouthful when I got back from the pub. The second I saw him sitting there on the sofa with the little plate in front of him and crumbs everywhere, I knew it was bad news.

‘That really was a delicious slice of cake. Thank you very much, Mrs Osbourne,’ the vicar was saying. ‘Would you mind if I had another?’

‘Oh, not at all!’ said Thelma.

‘Thelma,’ I said, ‘I don’t think we have any more cake.’

‘Yes, we do, John, it’s in the kitch—’

‘WE. DON’T. HAVE. MORE. CAKE.’

‘Oh, I don’t want to be any trouble,’ said the vicar, standing up. Then he started to dab his brow with a handkerchief. Then he turned a funny colour.

I knew exactly what was coming next. You see, eating dope is very different to smoking it—it affects your whole body, not just your head. And it takes only the tiniest bit to send you over the edge.

‘Oh my,’ he said. ‘I think I’m feeling a little—’

BOOM!

‘Fuck! Vicar down!’ I shouted, rushing over to see if he was still breathing. Then I turned to look at Thelma. ‘What the fuck were you thinking?’ I said. ‘He’s gonna die! I told you not to touch that cake. He’s just eaten enough Afghan hash to knock out a bleedin’ elephant!’

‘How was I supposed to know the cake was dodgy?’

‘Because I told you!’

‘No, you didn’t.’

‘It’s in a tin with a skull and crossbones on the top!’

‘So what are we going to do?’ said Thelma, turning white.

‘We’re going to have to move the body, that’s what we’re going to have to do,’ I said.

‘Here, take his legs.’

‘Where are we taking him?’

‘Back to wherever he lives.’

So we carried the vicar to his car, put him on the back seat, found his address in the glove compartment, and I drove him home. He was out cold. Part of me honestly thought he was a goner, although I’d been drinking most of the day, so I can’t say I was thinking completely straight. All I knew is that for a man of the cloth—or anyone else—that much of my hash in one go could be lethal. But I kept telling myself that he’d just wake up with a really bad hangover, and we’d be OK.

When I got to his house I dragged him out of his car and propped him up on the steps to the front door. If I’d have been cleverer, I would have wiped my fingerprints off the car, but I just felt so terrible about what had happened, and I so badly wanted to believe that he’d be fine, I can honestly say it never even entered my head.

Still, I spent the entire night lying awake, waiting for the sirens. Clearly, I’d be the first person to get a knock on the door in the middle of the night if they did any tests on the vicar’s body. Who else in his parish would have given him a lethal slice of hash cake? But there were no sirens that night. And none the next day, either.

Then more days passed. Still nothing.

I was out of my fucking mind with guilt. So was Thelma.

But I didn’t want to go anywhere near the vicarage—it might look a bit suspicious—so every time I went to the Hand & Cleaver I’d make subtle enquiries. ‘Anyone bumped into the vicar lately?’ I’d say, all casual. ‘He’s a nice bloke, that vicar, isn’t he? I wonder what his sermon will be about on Sunday.’ Eventually someone mentioned that he must be off sick, ’cos he’d missed church and no one had seen him for a while.

That’s it, I thought. I killed him. I wondered if I should turn myself in. ‘It was an accident, Your Honour,’ I imagined myself saying to the judge. ‘A terrible, terrible accident.’ This went on for at least a week.

Then, one day, I walked into the pub and there he was, at the bar, in his frock, sipping a cranberry juice.

I almost hugged the bloke and gave him a kiss.

‘Oh, er, hello there, Vicar,’ I said, going light in the head with relief.

‘Ah, Mr Osbourne,’ he said, shaking my hand. ‘You know the funniest thing? I can’t remember how I got home from your house the other day. And the next morning I had this terrible, terrible flu.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear that, Vicar.’

‘Yes, yes, a very nasty business, that flu.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘I’ve never had flu like it.’

‘Well, I’m glad you’re feeling bett—’

‘I was having hallucinations for three days, you know? The most curious experience. I convinced myself that Martians had landed on the Vicarage lawn and were trying to organise a tombola.’

‘That’s terrible, Vicar. I hope you’re feeling better now.’

‘Oh, much better, thank you. Although I must have put on 40 pounds this week, I’ve been so incredibly hungry.’

‘Listen, Vicar,’ I said. ‘If there’s anything I can do for the church, anything at all, just let me know, OK?’

‘Oh, how kind of you. Do you play the organ, by any chance?’

‘Er, no.’

‘But you are in some kind of pop group, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Tell me, what do you call yourselves?’

‘Black Sabbath.’

‘Oh.’ The vicar frowned for a while. Then he looked at me and said, ‘That’s a rather peculiar name, isn’t it?’

6. The End Is Nigh

We recorded the next Black Sabbath album in a haunted house, out in the middle of absolutely fucking nowhere. I don’t know whose brilliant idea that was, but it wasn’t mine, that’s for sure. The name of the place was Clearwell Castle. It was in the Forest of Dean, on the Welsh border, and it scared the crap out of us from day one. It had a moat, a portcullis, four-poster beds in the rooms, big fireplaces everywhere, animal heads on the walls, and a big old dark musty dungeon, which we used as our rehearsal room. It had been built in 1728 on the site of an old Tudor manor house, and the locals told us that a headless figure would roam the corridors at night, moaning and wailing. We just laughed it off, but as soon as we’d unpacked our bags, we all started to get the willies, big time. At least that took the pressure off us, as far as the next album was concerned. We were more worried about sleeping alone in these spooky old rooms with swords and armour on the walls than coming up with another million-selling LP. We weren’t so much the Lords of Darkness as the Lords of Chickenshit when it came to that kind of thing. I remember when we went to see The Exorcist that Christmas in Philadelphia: we were so freaked out, we had to go and watch The Sting afterwards to take our minds off it. Even then, we all ended up sleeping in the same hotel room, because we were scared out of our minds. It’s funny, because years later Linda Blair—who played the satanic kid in that movie—ended up dating my mate Glenn Hughes from Deep Purple. She definitely liked musicians, it turned out. She even went out with Ted Nugent once. But she wouldn’t go near me.

Not a fucking chance.

Clearwell Castle certainly wasn’t our first choice of venue for making the new album. The plan had initially been to go back to the Bel Air mansion to write the next record, but then we found out we wouldn’t be able to do any recording in LA, because Stevie Wonder had installed a giant synthesizer in our favourite room at the Record Plant. So that idea was shelved. Probably a good job, too: we’d almost killed ourselves with cocaine the last time we’d made a record in LA. At Clearwell Castle, meanwhile, the only danger was scaring ourselves to death.

And of course we tried very, very hard to do just that.

We hadn’t been there a day before the practical jokes started. I was the first culprit: I realised that if you put a cartridge in our eight-track machine and turned down the volume all the way, when it reached the end of a song it would make this loud CHA-CHUNK-CHICK noise, which would echo off the stone walls. So I hid the machine under Tony’s bed. Just before he turned in for the night—after we’d spent the evening putting the willies up each other with a seance in the dungeon—I sneaked into his room, pressed ‘play’, and set the volume to zero.

Then I ran out and hid in the room next door.

Eventually I heard Tony get into bed.

I waited.

Then, one by one, the lights in the castle went out, until it was pitch black. Apart from the occasional creak from the rafters, and the wind rattling the windows, there was just this eerie silence.

I waited.

And waited.

Then, out of the darkness: CHA-CHUNK-CHICK.

All I heard from Tony’s room was ‘AAAAGGGGGGHHHHHH!’ and then a thump as he fell out of bed. Then the door burst open and Tony came charging out in his underpants, screaming, ‘There’s something in my fucking room! There’s something in my fucking room!’

I didn’t stop laughing for days.

But as much as the castle might have taken our minds off things, it didn’t help with the songwriting. The problem was that Vol. 4 had been a classic—by Black Sabbath’s standards, anyway. Which meant we wanted the follow-up to be another classic. But you can’t control that. To a certain extent, you’ve just got to be in the right place at the right time. I mean, I don’t think Michael Jackson sat down one day and said to himself, ‘Y’know what? Next year I’m gonna write an album called Thriller, and every song will be a corker, and then I’ll sell a million copies of it every week.’ You can’t plan that kind of thing.

Then again, we were terrified of becoming one of those bands who started off with a few albums that people thought were amazing, only to follow them up with one turd after another.

None of us could really believe how our lives had changed since coming back from the Star Club in 1969. I think we all expected to wake up one day and find that it was all over, that our little scam had been exposed.

Personally, one of my biggest worries was about us moving too far away from what our fans wanted. I mean, I knew we couldn’t keep on doing ‘Iron Man’ for ever—we had to challenge ourselves—but we couldn’t put brass bands on every track or start doing abstract jazz bollocks, either. The name of the band was Black Sabbath—and as long as we were called Black Sabbath, it was gonna be hard to be accepted as anything else.

It’s like the guy who plays Batman in the movies. He might be a great actor, but if he goes off and plays a gay waiter in his next role, people will spend the entire movie wondering when he’s gonna rip off his tuxedo, put on a rubber suit, and jump out of the window.

So we had to be very careful.

To be honest with you, for a few days at Clearwell Castle, it felt like we didn’t know how to move on. For the first time ever, Tony seemed to be having a hard time coming up with new material. Which meant no riffs. And without riffs, we had no songs. It was that Dutch band, Golden Earring, that saved us in the end. We were listening to their latest album, Moontan, and something just clicked in Tony’s head. A couple of days later, he came down to the dungeon and started playing the riff to ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ . Like I said: every time we thought Tony couldn’t do it again, he did it again—and better. From that moment on, there was no more writer’s block.

Which was a huge relief.

But we still couldn’t concentrate in that bloody castle. We wound each other up so much none of us got any sleep. You’d just lie there with your eyes wide open, expecting an empty suit of armour to walk into your bedroom at any second and shove a dagger up your arse.

And the fucking seances we kept holding didn’t help. I dunno what we were thinking, ’cos they’re really dodgy, those things. You’ve got no idea who’s pushing the glass, and then you end up convincing yourself that your great aunt Sally is standing behind you with a sheet over her head. And when you’re doing it in a dungeon, it’s even worse.

Tony was the one who pulled the most pranks. One day he found an old dressmaker’s dummy in a cupboard, put a frock and a wig on it, then threw it out of a third-floor window just as Bill and Geezer were coming back from the pub. They almost shit their pants. Bill legged it so fast back up the drive-way, he must have broken the land speed record. Another time—I wasn’t around to witness this, but someone told me about it—Tony tied a piece of white thread to an old model sailing ship that was in one of the roadies’ bedrooms, and he fed the thread under the door and into another room. Then he waited until the roadie was in there alone and he gave it a little tug. The roadie looked up, and there on this dusty mantelpiece—which was supported by two gargoyles—the ship was ‘sailing’ all by itself. He ran out of that room and refused ever to go back in.

Bill got the worst of it, though. One night he’d been on the cider and had passed out on the sofa. We got this full-length mirror and lifted it over him, so it was only a few inches from his face. Then we poked him until he woke up. The second he opened his eyes, all he could see was himself staring back. To this day, I’ve never heard a grown man scream so loud. He must have thought he’d woken up in hell.

Bill started going to bed with a dagger after that.

The jokes got out of hand eventually. People started driving home at night instead of sleeping in their rooms. The funny thing is, the only genuinely dangerous thing that happened during our time at Clearwell Castle was when I got loaded and feel asleep with my boot in the fire. All I can remember is waking up at three o’clock in the morning with a funny feeling at the end of my leg, then jumping up, screaming, and hopping around the room with this flaming boot, looking for something wet to put it in. Everyone else thought it was hilarious.

Geezer just looked at me and said, ‘Got a light, Ozzy?’

But the smile was soon wiped off his face when an ember flew off my boot and set the carpet on fire. All I can say is: thank God for the vat of cider that Bill kept behind his drum kit, which we used to douse the flames. I’m amazed it put the fire out, to be honest with you. I’d tasted Bill’s cider, so I half expected it to go up like a Molotov cocktail.

By the time we left Clearwell Castle, we at least had most of the new album written. So we moved on to Morgan Studios, just off Willesden High Road in north London, to finish it off.

Morgan Studios was a very popular place at the time, so whenever you did any work there, you’d run into other bands, and usually you’d end up going over to the little caff they had in there—it had a dartboard and served booze—and having a bit of a laugh. This time, though, when I went over to say hello to the band working next door to us, my heart sank. It was Yes. While we were working on our album in Studio 4, they were making Tales from Topographic Oceans in Studio 3. They were hippies, so they’d brought in all of these cut-out cows to make their recording space look ‘earthy’. I later found out that the cows even had electrically powered udders. No fucking kidding. They also had bales of hay all over the place, a white picket fence, and a little barn in the corner—like a kid’s plaything. I just said to myself,

‘And I thought Geezer was weird.’

During the whole time we were at Morgan Studios, the only member of Yes I ever saw in the caff was Rick Wakeman, their superstar keyboard player. He was famous for doing warp-speed Moog solos while dressed in a wizard’s cape, and it turned out he was the only regular bloke in Yes. In fact, he was always in the caff—usually drinking heavily—and he wasn’t into any of that cut-out-cow, hippy bullshit. He’d rather get out of his box and play darts with me.

We used to have a right few laughs, me and Rick—and we’ve remained friends to this day.

The bloke’s a born storyteller. Hanging out with him is like An Evening with… He once told me that he’d legally changed his name to Michael Schumacher in case the cops ever pulled him over for speeding and asked for his name. Then, when PC Plod told him to fuck off and demanded to see his driving licence, there it would be, in black and white. You’ve got to admire that kind of dedication to winding up the boys in blue.

He had a collection of about thirty Rollers and Bentleys back then—although I don’t know when he ever drove ’em, because whenever I saw him he was shitfaced. He was almost as bad as me. Then, a few years later, he had a bunch of heart attacks in a row and had to give it up.

You could tell that Rick was bored out of his mind with Tales from Topographic Oceans.

One of the funniest stories I ever heard about him was from the time when Yes went on tour with that album. He got so fed up that halfway through one of the eight-hour twiddly bits, he got his roadie to order a curry and bring it to him on stage. Then he sat there at his keyboards, eating a chicken vindaloo under his cape while smoking a fag.

He didn’t last much longer in Yes after that.

Anyway, one day at Morgan Studios, when Rick seemed even more bored than usual, I asked him if he’d like to come over to Studio 4 and hear some of our new tracks. I remember playing the melody of ‘Sabbra Cadabra’ to him on my ARP 2600 synthesizer. There I was, murdering this riff with one grubby finger, going duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh-duh, with Rick watching me. And when I finally stopped, Rick just went, ‘Hmm, maybe it would sound better like this…’ leaned over the keyboard, and went diddly-diddly-diddly-diddly-dud-diddly-duh. His fingers moved so fast, I swear you couldn’t see the fucking things.

I asked him right then if he’d play on the album, and he said he’d love to, as long as we paid him his usual fee.

‘How much?’ I asked.

‘Two pints of Director’s best bitter.’

Apart from Rick, though, Yes lived like monks. They didn’t eat meat. They looked like they had yoga classes every day. And you’d never see them getting boozed up. The only rock ’n’ roll thing they did was smoke dope—and, as it happened, I’d just got another shipment of hash in from Afghanistan, and it was phenomenal. Really heavy-duty shit. Now I considered myself a bit of dope connoisseur in those days, and I was interested to see what Yes thought of this stuff. So one morning I took my brick of hash to the studio, went over to see Yes, and gave them a big lump of it. For some reason, the only one of them who was missing that day was Rick.

‘Here, lads,’ I said. ‘Stick a bit of this in your rollies.’

They said they’d try it immediately.

I went back to Studio 4, had a couple of joints myself, did some double-tracking for the vocals, nipped over to the caff for a cheeky five or six at lunchtime, came back, had another joint, then decided to check how Yes were doing.

But when I went into Studio 3, it was empty.

I found the chick from the reception desk and said, ‘Have you seen Yes anywhere?’

‘Oh, they all started to feel very unwell around lunchtime. They had to go home.’

By now, our album had a title—Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, after the track that had broken Tony’s writer’s block—and it was another stonker. Our last truly great album, I think. Even the artwork was spot on: it showed a bloke lying on his bed being attacked by demons in his sleep, with a skull and the number 666 above his head. I fucking loved that cover. And with the music we’d managed to strike just the right balance between our old heaviness and our new, ‘experimental’ side. On the one hand, you had tracks like ‘Spiral Architect’, which featured a full orchestra, and ‘Fluff’, which sounded almost like the Shadows (it was named in honour of Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman, the DJ who always played our records on Radio 1). On the other, there was ‘A National Acrobat’, which was so heavy it was like being hit over the head with a lump of concrete. I even got one of my own songs on the album: ‘Who Are You?’ I’d written it one night at Bulrush Cottage while I was loaded and fiddling around with a Revox tape machine and my ARP 2600.

We were all happy with Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, I think. Even Patrick Meehan and the record company were happy. Which meant only one thing, of course: things could only go down-hill from there.

I should have known that bad things were about to happen to Black Sabbath when we flew to America in 1974 and the bloke sitting next to me croaked it halfway across the Atlantic.

One minute I was hearing this choking noise—‘uh, ugh, urrrgh’. The next I was sitting next to a corpse. I didn’t know what the fuck to do, so I pressed the button to call for a flight attendant.

‘Yes, sir, can I help you?’ said the chick, all prim and proper.

‘This bloke’s a goner, I reckon,’ I said, pointing at the lump beside me.

‘Sorry, sir?’

‘He’s kicked the bucket,’ I said, holding up the bloke’s floppy left arm. ‘Look at ’im. Dead as a fucking dodo.’

The stewardess started to panic. ‘What happened?’ she hissed, trying to cover him with a blanket. ‘Did he seem unwell?’

‘Well, he was making a bit of a choking noise,’ I said. ‘I just thought his peanuts had gone down the wrong way. Then he turned white, his eyes rolled back in his head, and the next thing I knew he’d kicked the bucket.’

‘Look,’ said the stewardess quietly. ‘We’re going to prop him up here against the window with this pillow. Please don’t mention this to the other passengers. We don’t want anyone panicking. To compensate for your inconvenience, we can reseat you in first class, if you’d like.’

‘What’s the difference between business and first?’ I asked.

‘Champagne.’

‘Magic.’

That was the beginning of The End.

What I remember most about the tour to promote Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is everyone starting to get pissed off. By now Patrick Meehan had stopped being the magician on the end of the phone line who could get you a Rolls-Royce or a horse or a Scalextric set, and had started to become the annoying flash bastard who never gave you a straight answer when you asked him how much dough you were making.

Meanwhile, Tony was grumbling about doing all the work in the studio, which meant he had no personal life. He had a point. But then again, Tony loved being in the studio—he’d even started to produce the albums himself. Personally, I could never stand all the sitting around, smoking cigarettes, and listening to the same three seconds of guitar solo over and over again. I still can’t handle it to this day. It drives me fucking nuts. Once I’ve done my thing, I have to get out into the fresh air. But as technology improved during the seventies, the temptation was always to add one more track, then another, then another… Tony couldn’t get enough of all that stuff. He had the patience for it. And no one ever argued with him, because he was the band’s unofficial leader.

Geezer was also getting fed up, because he was tired of me asking him for lyrics all the time. I can see how that must have got on his tits after a while, but the guy was a genius.

When we were at Morgan Studios, I remember calling him when he was taking a day off at his country house. I said, ‘C’mon, Geezer, I need some words for “Spiral Architect”.’ He grumbled a bit, told me to call him back in an hour, and put the phone down. When I spoke to him again, he said, ‘Have you got a pen? Good. Write this down: “Sorcerers of madness/Selling me their time/Child of God sitting in the sun…”’

I said, ‘Geezer, are you just reading this out of a book or something?’

I couldn’t believe it. The bloke had written a masterpiece in the time it took me to read one sentence.

I told him, ‘Keep that up and we’ll have the whole bloody album done by five o’clock.’

One reason why we weren’t getting on so well is that we’d all started to develop these coked-up, rock-star egos.

It was happening to a lot of bands in those days. When we did the CalJam Festival at the Ontario Motor Speedway in 1974, for example, there was all kinds of bollocks going on backstage with the other bands. Things like, ‘Well, if he’s got a pinball machine, then I want a pinball machine,’ or ‘If he’s got a quadraphonic sound system, then I want a quadraphonic sound system.’ People were starting to think they were gods. I mean, the scale of that CalJam thing was unbelievable: about 250,000 fans, with the performances ‘simulcast’ on FM radio and the ABC TV network. Rock ’n’ roll had never been done on that scale before. You should have seen the rig Emerson, Lake and Palmer had. Halfway through their set, Keith Emerson did a solo on a grand piano while it was lifted off the stage and spun around, end-over-end.

CalJam was a good gig for us, actually.

We hadn’t played live for a while, so we rehearsed in our hotel room without any amps.

The next day we flew in by helicopter, ’cos all the roads were blocked. Then we just ripped through our set, with me wearing these silver moon boots and yellow leggings.

Deep Purple didn’t have such a good time, though. Ritchie Blackmore hated TV cameras—he said they got between him and the audience—so after a couple of songs he smashed the neck of his guitar through the lens of one of them, and then set his amp on fire. It was a heavy scene, and the whole band had to fuck off quick in a helicopter, because the fire marshals were after them. ABC must have been well pissed off, too. Those cameras cost an arm and a leg. I remember being on the flight back to England with Ritchie, actually. It was fucking crazy. I had four grams of coke hidden down my sock, and I had to get rid of it before we landed, so I started handing it out to the air hostesses. They were completely whacked out on the stuff after a while. My in-flight meal took a flight of its own at one point. Can you even imagine doing that kind of thing nowadays? When I think about it, I shudder.

Another crazy thing that happened around that time was getting to know Frank Zappa in Chicago. We were doing a gig there, and it turned out that he was staying at our hotel. All of us looked up to Zappa—especially Geezer—because he seemed like he was from another planet. At the time he’d just released this quadraphonic album called Apostrophe (’), which had a track on it called ‘Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow’. Fucking classic.

Anyway, so there we were at this hotel, and we ended up hanging out with his band in the bar. Then the next day we got word that Frank wanted us to come to his Independence Day party, which was going to be held that night at a restaurant around the corner.

We could hardly wait.

So come eight o’clock, off we went to meet Frank. When we arrived at the restaurant, there he was, sitting at this massive table, surrounded by his band. We introduced ourselves, then we all started to get pissed. But it was really weird, because the guys in his band kept coming up to me and saying, ‘You got any blow? Don’t tell Frank I asked you. He’s straight.

Hates that stuff. But have you got any? Just a toot, to keep me going.’

I didn’t want to get involved, so I just went, ‘Nah,’ even though I had a big bag of the stuff in my pocket.

Later, after we’d finished eating, I was sitting next to Frank when two waiters burst out of the kitchen, wheeling a massive cake in front of them. The whole restaurant went quiet. You should have seen that cake, man. It was made into the shape of a naked chick with two big, icing-covered tits—and her legs were spread wide apart. But the craziest thing about it was that they’d rigged up a little pump, so champagne was squirting out of her vagina. You could have heard a pin drop in that place until the band finally started to sing ‘America the Beautiful’. Then everyone had to have a ceremonial drink of the champagne, starting with Frank.

When it was my turn, I took a long gulp, screwed up my face, and said, ‘Ugh, tastes like piss.’

Everyone thought that was hilarious.

Then Frank leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘Got any blow? It’s not for me—it’s for my bodyguard.’

‘Are you serious?’ I asked him.

‘Sure. But don’t tell the band. They’re straight.’

I saw Frank again a few years later, after he’d done a gig at the Birmingham Odeon.

When the show was over, he asked me, ‘Is there anywhere we can get something to eat in this town? I’m staying at the Holiday Inn, and the food’s terrible.’

I told him, ‘At this time of night, there’s only the curry house on Bristol Street, but I don’t recommend it.’

Frank just shrugged and said, ‘Oh, that’ll do, I’ll have a go.’

So we all went to this dodgy Indian joint—me, Frank, Thelma and some Japanese chick that Frank was hanging out with at the time. I told Frank that the only thing on the menu he shouldn’t order, under any circumstances, was the steak. He nodded, looked at the menu for a while, then ordered the steak. When it arrived, I just sat there and watched him try to eat it.

‘Like old boots, is it?’ I said.

‘No, actually,’ replied Frank, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. ‘More like new ones.’

By the mid-seventies, everything had changed with Black Sabbath. In the early days, we used to hang out with each other all the time, and whenever we arrived in a new place for a gig, we’d walk around the town like a little gang, trying out the pubs and clubs, hitting on chicks, getting pissed. But as time went on, we saw less and less of each other. When me and Bill did our road trips, for example, we hardly spent any time with Tony or Geezer. Then even me and Bill started to drift apart. I was the noisy fucker who would always be throwing parties and having chicks in my room and getting up to all sorts of debauchery, and Bill would just want to stay in his bed and sleep.

After all that time on the road, we’d just had enough of each other’s company. But when we didn’t spend any time together, all our problems grew in our heads, and we stopped communicating.

Then, all of a sudden, everything just blew up. For a start, the publishing rights to a lot of our early work had already been sold to a company called Essex Music ‘in perpetuity’, which was a posh way of saying for ever.

And there’d been other signs of trouble, like when London & County Bank went bust. I don’t know exactly what the deal was—I’m hardly the financial brain of Britain—but I know I had to sell the deeds to the land I’d bought from the cross-dressing farmer in order to save Bulrush Cottage. If me and Thelma hadn’t paid for the land with our own money, we’d have been fucked.

The biggest problem was our management. At some point we realised that we’d been stitched up. Although in theory Meehan would send us an allowance for whatever we wanted, whenever we asked for it, we didn’t actually have any control. We were supposed to have our own individual bank accounts, but it turned out they didn’t exist. So I’d have to go to his office and ask for a thousand quid or whatever. He’d say, ‘OK,’ and the cheque would turn up in the post. But after a while the cheques started to bounce.

So we fired him. Then all this legal crap started, with lawsuits flying around all over the place. While we were working on the follow-up to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath—which we ended up calling Sabotage, in reference to Meehan’s bullshit—writs were being delivered to us at the mixing desk. That was when we came to the conclusion that lawyers rip you off just as much as managers do. You get charged for every penny they spend while they’re working for you, down to the last paperclip. And they’re happy to fuck around in court for the rest of their lives, as long as someone’s paying the bills. If it takes fifty years to win, that’s fine, as far as those guys are concerned.

We had this one lawyer working for us, and I ended up hating him. I just couldn’t stand the bloke because he was taking the piss. When we were recording Sabotage in Morgan Studios, he came over to see us one day and said, ‘Gentlemen, I’m going to buy you all a drink.’ I thought, Wow, I can’t believe this, the guy’s actually getting his wallet out for something.

Then, at the end of the meeting, he took out this little notepad and started adding up what we’d all had, so he could bill us later. ‘Right. Ozzy, you had two beers, so that’s sixty pence,’

he went, ‘and Tony, you had one beer and—’

I said, ‘You’re fucking joking, right?’

But of course he wasn’t. That’s what lawyers do. They grease you down and stick their fist up your arse.

You can hear the frustration on Sabotage. There’s some heavy-duty shit on that album.

One incredible track is ‘Supertzar’. I remember the day it was recorded: I walked into Morgan Studios and there was an entire forty-member choir in there along with an eighty-six-year-old harpist. They were making a noise like God conducting the soundtrack to the end of the world. I didn’t even attempt to put a vocal over the top of it.

One song I’m very proud of on that album is ‘The Writ’. I wrote most of lyrics myself, which felt a bit like seeing a shrink. All the anger I felt towards Meehan came pouring out. But y’know what? All that bullshit he pulled on us didn’t get him anywhere in the end. You should see him now: he looks like a fat, boozy old fuck. But I don’t hate him. Hating people isn’t a productive way of living. When all’s said and done, I don’t wish the bloke any harm. I’m still here, y’know? I still have a career. So what’s the point in hating anyone? There’s enough hate in the world as it is, without me adding to it. And I got a song out of it, at least.

Aside from ‘The Writ’, I can’t say I’m very proud of much else that happened in that period.

Like pulling a gun on Bill while I was having a bad acid trip at Bulrush Cottage. The gun wasn’t loaded. But he didn’t know that, and I didn’t tell him. He was very cool about it at the time, but we’ve never talked about it since, which means it was probably quite a big deal.

I had a few bad acid trips around that time, actually. Another night we were at Fields Farm, Bill’s old rented house, which a couple of roadies had taken over, and we were getting badly fucked up for some reason. There was a terrible vibe that night, because a kid had just drowned in the lake on the property while pissing around in a canoe, and the cops had torn the place apart, dredging the lake for the body, and searching for drugs. Not exactly the best time to be doing acid, in other words. But that didn’t stop us. All I can remember is wandering off into a field and meeting these two horses. Then one of them said to the other, ‘Fuck me, that bloke can talk,’ and I freaked out, big time.

I hit Thelma, too, which is probably the worst thing I ever did in my life. I started to get overpowering with her, and the poor woman must have been frightened to death. What made it even worse was that we’d just had our second kid—little Louis. Thelma really suffered with me, y’know, and I really regret that. If there’s one thing I wish for in my life, it’s that I could take it all back. But of course you never can never take violence back—of any kind—and I’ll take it to the grave with me. My own parents used to fight a lot, so maybe I thought that’s just what you do. But there’s no excuse. One night, when I was out of my tree on booze and pills, I hit Thelma so hard I gave her a black eye. We were meeting her father the next day, and I thought, Fucking hell, he’s gonna beat the crap out of me now. But all he said was, ‘So which one of you won, eh?’

The saddest thing is, it wasn’t until I became sober that I truly realised how disgusting my behaviour was. But I do now, trust me.

While all that fucked-up stuff was going on, we decided to make another album—this time hauling all our gear and crew to America and booking into Criteria Studios in Miami. The title we’d decided on was Technical Ecstasy, although I can’t say I was 100 per cent enthusiastic.

By now, our albums were getting ridiculously expensive to make. We’d recorded Black Sabbath in one day. Sabotage took about four thousand years. Technical Ecstasy didn’t take quite as long, but the cost of doing it in Florida was astronomical.

At the same time as our sales were falling, the record company wasn’t as interested as it used to be, we’d just got a million-dollar tax bill from the IRS in America, we couldn’t afford to pay our legal bills, and we didn’t have a manager. At one point, Bill was the one manning the phones. Worse than all that, though, we’d lost our direction. It wasn’t the experimentation with the music. It was more that we didn’t seem to know who we were any more. One minute you had an album cover like Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, with the bloke being attacked by demons on it, and the next you had two robots having sex while they’re going up a fucking escalator, which was the artwork for Technical Ecstasy.

I’m not saying the album was all bad—it wasn’t. For example, Bill wrote a song called ‘It’s Alright’, which I loved. He sang it, too. He’s got a great voice, Bill, and I was more than happy for him to do the honours. But I’d started to lose interest, and I kept thinking about what it would be like to have a solo career. I’d even had a T-shirt made with ‘Blizzard of Ozz’ written on the front. Meanwhile, in the studio, Tony was always saying, ‘We’ve gotta sound like Foreigner,’ or, ‘We’ve gotta sound like Queen.’ But I thought it was strange that the bands that we’d once influenced were now influencing us. Then again, I’d lost the plot with the booze and the drugs, and I was saying a lot of bad things, making trouble, being a dick-head.

In fact, my boozing was so bad during the Technical Ecstasy sessions in Florida, I checked myself into a loony bin called St George’s when I got back home. It’s real name was the Stafford County Asylum, but they changed it to make people feel better about being insane. It was a big old Victorian place. Dark and dingy, like the set of a science-fiction movie.

The first thing the doctor said to me when I went in there was, ‘Do you masturbate, Mr Osbourne?’ I told him, ‘I’m in here for my head, not my dick.’

I didn’t last long in that place. I’m telling you, the docs in those funny farms are more bonkers than the patients.

Then Thelma bought me some chickens.

She probably thought it would help bring me down to earth. And it did, for about five minutes. But then the novelty wore off—especially when I realised that Thelma expected me to feed the fucking things and clean out their shit. So I started trying to find a reason to get rid of them.

‘Thelma,’ I said to her, one morning, after I’d finally had enough. ‘Where did you get those chickens from? They’re broken.’

‘What do you mean, they’re broken?’

‘They’re not laying any eggs.’

‘Well, it would help if you fed them, John. Besides, they’re probably stressed out, poor things.’

‘Why d’you say that?’

‘Come on, John. You put up a sign beside their coop that says, “Oflag 14”. I know they can’t read, but still.’

‘It’s just a joke.’

‘Firing warning shots over their heads every morning probably isn’t helping much, either.’

‘Everyone needs a bit of encouragement.’

‘You’re scaring the living daylights out of them. You’ll give one of them a heart attack if you keep it up.’

Here’s hoping, I thought.

As the weeks and months went by, I kept forgetting to feed the chickens, and they kept forgetting to lay any eggs. All I would hear from Thelma was: ‘John, feed the chickens.’ Or:

‘John, remember to feed the chickens.’ Or: ‘John, did you feed the chickens?’

It was driving me fucking nuts.

I was trying to have a break—making Technical Ecstasy had been knackering, mainly thanks to all the boozing involved—but I couldn’t get any peace. If it wasn’t Thelma, it was the lawyers. If it wasn’t the lawyers, it was the accountants. If it wasn’t the accountants, it was the record company. And if it wasn’t the record company, it was Tony or Bill or Geezer, worrying about the ‘new direction’ or complaining about our tax bills.

The only way I could handle it was to get loaded all the time.

Then one day I finally lost it.

I’d been up all night—a lock-in at the Hand & Cleaver, followed by more boozing at home, then a few toots of coke, then some dope, then some more coke, then a blackout around breakfast time to refresh myself, then some coke to wake me up again. By then it was time for lunch. So I had a bottle of cough syrup, three glasses of wine, some more coke, a joint, half a packet of cigarettes and a Scotch egg. But no matter how much I put away, I couldn’t get rid of this horrendous restless feeling. I’d often get that feeling after coming home from America: I’d find myself standing in the kitchen for hours, just opening and closing the fridge door; or sitting in the living room in front of the telly, flipping from one channel to the next, never watching anything.

But this time, something was different.

I was going insane.

There was nothing else for it: I was gonna have to go back down the Hand & Cleaver and sort myself out.

I was just about to leave the house when I heard Thelma coming down the stairs. She walked into the kitchen and said, ‘I’m going to my mum’s to get the kids.’ I watched as she picked up a pile of Good Housekeeping magazines from the table and started putting them in her bag. Then she stopped and turned to look at me standing there beside the fridge in my underpants and my dressing-gown, fag in mouth, giving my balls a good old scratch.

‘Did you feed the chickens?’ she said.

‘I told you, they’re broken.’

‘Just feed them, John, for God’s sake. Or, y’know what? Let them die—I don’t care any more.’

‘I’m going down the pub.’

‘Wearing the terrycloth bathrobe you got for Christmas?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Classy, John. Very classy.’

‘Have you seen my slippers?’

‘Try the dog bed. I’ll be back at eight.’

Next thing I knew I was staggering out of the house in a pair of welly-boots—I couldn’t find my slippers—heading in the direction of the pub. As I walked I kept trying to tighten the cord around my dressing-gown. I didn’t want to be flashing a loose bollock at any passing farmers; especially not the bearded cross-dressing loony from down the road.

When I got to the gate at the bottom of the driveway I suddenly had a change of heart.

‘You know what?’ I said to myself. ‘I’m going to feed those chickens. Fuck it. If it keeps her happy, I’ll do it.’ So I turned around and started wobbling back in the direction of the house.

But I was thirsty now, so I went over to where the Range Rover was parked, pulled open the door, and reached into the glove box for my emergency bottle of Scotch.

Swig. Ahhh. That’s better! Burp.

On I went into the garden… But then I had another change of heart. Fuck the chickens! I thought. Not one of those little fuckers has ever laid any eggs for me! Fuck them! Fuck them all!

Swig. Ahhh. Burp. I lit another fag.

Then I remembered that I still hadn’t finished the fag that was already in my mouth, so I flicked it into Thelma’s vegetable patch. I changed direction again, this time heading towards the shed.

I threw open the door and stood there, looking up at my Benelli semi-automatic on the gun rack. I picked it up, opened the chamber to see if it was loaded—it was—then I set about stuffing the pockets of my dressing-gown full of cartridges. Next I reached up to the top shelf for the jerry can of petrol that the gardener kept there for my lawnmower—the one I used to ride to the pub every so often for a laugh (Patrick Meehan’s office had got it for me, even though I’d asked them for a combine harvester).

So, with the jerry can in one hand, the shotgun in the other, and the Scotch under my arm—still puffing away on my fag—I lurched into the garden and towards the chicken coop. The sun was setting now, and the sky had gone all red and orange. In my head, the only thing I could hear was Thelma saying, ‘John, feed the chickens. John, have you fed the chickens?’

Then our accountant going, ‘Lads, this is serious. This is a million-dollar tax bill from the IRS.’

And Geezer saying, ‘We’re calling the album Technical Ecstasy. We need a new direction.

We can’t do that black magic shit for ever.’

It wouldn’t stop.

Over and over.

‘John, feed the chickens.’

‘Lads, this is serious.’

‘We’re calling the album Technical Ecstasy.’

‘John, did you feed the chickens?’

‘A million-dollar tax bill.’

‘John, feed the chickens!’

‘We need a new direction.’

‘This is serious.’

‘We can’t do that black magic shit for ever.’

AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!

When I reached the coop I put down the jerry can and the gun, knelt down by the ‘Oflag 14’ sign and took a look inside. The chickens clucked and nodded their little beaks.

‘Anyone laid any eggs?’ I asked—like I didn’t already know the answer to that fucking question. ‘Didn’t think so,’ I said, standing up. ‘Too bad.’

Then I picked up the gun.

Safety off.

Aim.

Cluck-cluck.

Bang-bang!

Aim.

Squawk!

Bang-bang!

Aim.

Squaaawwwwwwwwwkkkkkkkkkk!!!!!

BANG!

The sound of the gun was fucking deafening, and it echoed across the fields for what seemed like miles in all directions. And with every shot there was a white flash that lit up the coop and the garden around it, followed by a strong whiff of gun-powder. I was feeling much better now.

Much, much better.

Swig. Ahhh. Burp.

The chickens—the ones who hadn’t already gone off to meet their maker—were going nuts.

I waited a moment for the smoke to clear.

Aim.

Cluck-cluck.

Bang-bang!

Aim.

Squawk!

Bang-bang!

Aim.

Squaaawwwwwwwwwkkkkkkkkkk!!!!!

BANG!

By the time I was done there was blood and feathers and bits of beak all over the fucking place. It looked as though someone had thrown a bucket of chicken guts at me and then emptied a pillow over my head. My dressing-gown was ruined. But I felt fucking fabulous—like someone had just lifted a three-ton anvil off my back. I put down the shotgun, picked up the jerry can, and started emptying it over what was left of the chickens. I lit up another fag, took a long drag, stood well back, then flicked it into the coop.

Whoooooooooossssshhhhh!

Flames everywhere.

Then I took the leftover cartridges out of my pocket and started throwing them into the fire.

Bang!

Bang!

Bang-bang-bang!

‘Heh-heh-heh,’ I went.

Then something moved behind me.

I almost fell over the gun and shot myself in the nuts with fright. I turned around to see a chicken legging it away from me. That little fucker! I heard myself letting out this weird, psycho noise—‘Eeeeaaaargggghhhh!’—then, without even thinking, I set off after it. I didn’t know what the fuck was wrong with me, or why I was doing what I was doing. All I knew was that I was possessed with this insane, uncontrollable rage at all chickenkind. Kill the chicken! Kill the chicken! Kill the chicken!

But let me tell you something: it’s not fucking easy, catching a chicken, especially when it’s getting dark and you haven’t slept for twenty-four hours and you’re fucked up on a shitload of booze and coke and you’re wearing a dressing-gown and welly-boots.

So I clomped back over to the shed, found a sword, and came out with it raised above my head, Samurai-style. ‘Die, you chicken bastard, die!’ I shouted, as the chicken made a last-ditch run for the fence at the end of the garden, its little beak nodding so fast it looked like its head could fly off at any second. I’d almost caught up with it when the front door of my neighbour’s house burst open. Then this little old lady—Mrs Armstrong, I think her name was—came running out with a garden hoe in her hands. She was used to all kinds of crazy shit going on at Bulrush Cottage, but this time, I don’t even think she could believe it. With the coop burning and the rounds from my gun exploding every few minutes, it was like a scene from an old World War Two movie.

Bang!

Bang!

Bang-bang-bang!

At first I didn’t even notice her. I was too busy chasing the chicken, which ended up bolting under the fence and legging it up Mrs Armstrong’s driveway, out of her gate, and down Butt Lane in the direction of the pub. Then I looked up and our eyes met. I must have been quite a sight, standing there in my dressing gown with a crazed look on my face, splattered with blood, and holding up a sword, my garden on fire behind me.

‘Ah, good evening, Mr Osbourne,’ she said. ‘I see you’re back from America.’

There was a long silence. More cartridges exploded behind me. I didn’t know what to say, so I just nodded.

‘Unwinding, are we?’ she asked.

I wasn’t the only one going out of my mind with the stress of the band imploding.

I remember one time, Geezer phoned me up and said, ‘Look, Ozzy, I’m sick of touring just to pay the lawyers. Before we go on the road again, I wanna know what we’re gonna get.’

And I said to him, ‘Y’know what, Geezer, you’re right. Let’s call a meeting.’

So we had a meeting, and I was the first one to speak up.

‘Look, lads,’ I said, ‘I think it’s crazy that we’re doing gigs to pay the lawyers. What d’you think, Geezer?’

Geezer just shrugged and said, ‘Dunno.’

That was it.

I’d had enough. There didn’t seem to be any point any more. None of us was getting on.

We were spending more time in meetings with lawyers than we were writing songs; we were all exhausted from touring the world pretty much non-stop for six years; and we were out of our minds on booze and drugs. The final straw was a meeting with Colin Newman, our accountant, where he told us that if we didn’t settle our tax bills soon, we’d be going to prison. In those days, the tax rate for people like us was something like 80 per cent in the UK and 70

per cent in America, so you can imagine the amount of dough we owed. And after the taxes, we still had our expenses to pay. We were broke, basically. Wiped out. Geezer might not have had the bollocks to say anything in front of the others, but he was right: there was no point in being in a rock ’n’ roll band just to worry about money and writs all the time.

So one day I just walked out of a rehearsal and didn’t come back.

Then I got a call from Norman, my sister Jean’s husband.

Now, he’s a lovely guy, Norman—in many ways the older brother I never had. But whenever he called, it usually meant something heavy was going down with the family.

This time was no different.

‘It’s your dad,’ said Norman. ‘You should go and see him.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘He’s not well, John. He might not make it through the night.’

I immediately felt sick and numb. Losing a parent had always been my worst fear, ever since I was a little kid, when I would go up to my dad’s bed and shake him awake because I thought he wasn’t breathing. Now the fear was coming true. I knew my dad had been ill, but I hadn’t thought he was at death’s door.

When I pulled myself together, I got in the car and went to see him.

My whole family was already there by his bedside, including my mum, who was just absolutely devastated.

Dad was riddled with cancer, it turned out. It was out of control, because he’d refused to go and see a doctor until they had to carry him away in an ambulance. He’d stopped working only a few months before. He was sixty-four, and they’d offered him an early retirement deal.

‘I’m gonna have some time to do the garden now,’ he’d told me. So he did the garden. But as soon as he’d done the garden, that was it. Game over.

I was terrified of seeing him, to be honest with you, because I knew what to expect. My dad’s younger brother had died the year before from liver cancer. I’d visited him on the ward and it had shocked the crap out of me, so much so that I’d burst into tears. He bore no resemblance to the guy I’d known. He didn’t even look human.

When I got to the hospital this time, my dad had just come out of surgery, and he was up and running. He looked all right, and he managed a smile. They had him on the happy juice, I imagine. Although, as one of my aunties used to say, ‘God always gives you one good day before you die.’ We talked a little, but not much. The funny thing is, when I was growing up, my dad never used to say anything like, ‘You wanna watch those cigarettes,’ or, ‘Stop going to the pub all the time,’ but that day he told me, ‘Do something about your drinking, John. It’s too bloody much. And stop taking sleeping pills.’

‘I’ve left Black Sabbath,’ I told him.

‘They’re finished then,’ he said. Then he fell asleep.

The next day, he took a dive. One of the worst things about it was seeing my mum so distraught. In hospitals back then, the sicker you got, the further they moved you from the other patients. By the end of the day, my dad had been shoved into this broom cupboard in the corner, with mops and buckets and tubs of bleach all over the place. They’d put bandages around his hands like he was a boxer, and they’d tied him to the bars of this giant cot, because he’d kept pulling out his IV tube. It really fucked me up, seeing him like that, the man I adored, the man who’d taught me that even if you don’t have a good education, you can still have good manners. At least he was loaded on all kinds of drugs, so he wasn’t in too much pain. When he saw me, he smiled, stuck his thumbs up through his bandages and went,

‘Speeeeed!’—it was the only drug he knew the name of. Mind you, then he said, ‘Take these fucking pipes out of me, John, they hurt.’

He died at 11.20 p.m. on January 20, 1978: in the same hospital, on the same date, at the same time as Jess had been born six years earlier. That coincidence still floors me to this day. The cause of death was given as ‘carcinoma of the oesophagus’, although he also had cancer of the intestines and cancer of the bowel. He hadn’t eaten or gone to the bog by himself for thirteen weeks. Jean was with him when he passed away. The doctors told her they wanted to find out why their Frankenstein experiment on him the previous day in surgery hadn’t worked, but she wouldn’t let them do an autopsy.

I was in the car, on my way to Bill’s house, listening to ‘Baker Street’ by Gerry Rafferty, at the moment he passed away. As soon I pulled up in Bill’s driveway, he was standing there, with a grim look on his face. ‘Someone’s on the phone for you, Ozzy,’ he said.

It was Norman, giving me the news. To this day, whenever ‘Baker Street’ comes on the radio, I hear Norman’s voice and feel that intense sadness.

His funeral was a week later, and he was cremated. I really hate the way traditional English funerals are organised: you’re just starting to get over the shock of the death, then you have to go through it all over again. The Jews have a far better idea: when someone dies, you bury them as soon as possible. At least that way you get it all out of your system quickly.

The only way I could handle my father’s funeral was to get out of my skull. I got up that morning and poured myself a neat whisky; then I kept going all day. By the time they brought the coffin to the house where my mum and dad had been living, I was halfway to another planet. The coffin was sealed, but for some stupid fucking pissed reason I decided I wanted to see Dad again, one last time, so I got one of the pallbearers to unscrew the lid. A bad idea, that was. In the end, we all took it in turns to look at him. But he’d been dead a week, so as soon as I peered into the coffin, I regretted it. The undertaker had put all this greasepaint on him, so he looked like a fucking clown. That wasn’t the way I wanted to remember my father—but as I’m writing this now, that’s the picture I see in my head. I’d rather have remembered him being tied to that hospital cot, smiling and sticking his thumbs up, and going, ‘Speeeeed!’

Then we all got in the hearse with the coffin. My sisters and my mother started howling like wild animals, which freaked the fuck out of me. I’d never experienced anything like it before. They teach you how to handle life in England, but they don’t teach you a thing about death. There’s no book telling you what to do when your mum or dad dies.

It’s like, You’re on your own now, sunshine.

If there’s one thing that sums up my father, it’s the indoor bathroom he built at 14 Lodge Road, so we wouldn’t have to use a tin bathtub in front of the fire any more. He hired a professional contractor to do most of the work, but only a few weeks after it was finished all this damp started coming in through the wall. So my dad went off to the hardware shop, bought what he needed, and replastered the wall himself. But the damp came back. So my dad plastered it again. Then it came back again and again and again. By this time he was on a mission. And you couldn’t stop my dad when he was on a mission. He came up with all kinds of crazy concoctions to put on that wall and stop the damp. It went on for ever, his anti-damp crusade. Then, finally, after a few years, he got this heavy-duty industrial tar from the GEC factory, smeared it all over the wall, plastered over the tar, then went out and bought some yellow and white tiles, and laid them on top.

‘That should fucking do it,’ I remember him saying.

I’d forgotten all about it until years later, when I went back to the house to do a documentary with the BBC. By that time, there was a Pakistani family living there, and every wall in the house had been painted white. It was eerie, seeing the place like that. But then I walked into the bathroom—and on the wall were my dad’s tiles, still up there, like the day they were laid. I just thought, He fucking did it in the end, my old man.

You couldn’t wipe the smile off my face for the rest of the day.

I miss my dad a lot, even now. I just wish we could have sat down and had a good old man-to-man conversation about all the stuff I never knew to ask him when I was a kid, or was too pissed and busy being a rock star to ask him when I was in my twenties.

But I suppose that’s always the way, isn’t it?

The day I left Black Sabbath, we were at Rockfield Studios in South Wales, trying to record a new album. We’d just had another soul-destroying meeting about money and lawyers, and I couldn’t take it any more. So I just walked out of the studio and fucked off back to Bulrush Cottage in Thelma’s Mercedes. I was shitfaced, obviously. And then, like a pissed dickhead, I started to slag off the band in the press, which wasn’t fair. But y’know, when a band splits up, it’s like a marriage ending—for a while, all you want to do is hurt each other. The bloke they found to replace me after I walked out was another Brummie, called Dave Walker, a guy I’d admired for a long time, actually—he’d been with Savoy Brown and then Fleetwood Mac for a while.

But for whatever reason things didn’t work out with Dave, so when I came back a few weeks later, everything was back to normal—on the surface, at least. No one really talked about what happened. I just turned up in the studio one day—I think Bill had been trying to act as peacemaker on the phone—and that was the end of it. But it was obvious things had changed, especially between me and Tony. I don’t think anyone’s heart was in what we were doing any more. Still, as soon as I came back, we picked up where we’d left off with the album, which we decided to call Never Say Die.

By now, we were starting to get our finances sorted out, thanks to Colin Newman, who advised us to make the album as tax exiles in another country, to avoid having to give 80 per cent of all our dough to the Labour government. We chose Canada, even though it was January and would be so cold that we wouldn’t be able to walk outside without our eyeballs freezing over. So we booked ourselves into Sounds Interchange Studios and flew off to Toronto.

But even three thousand miles away from England the old problems soon came up again.

For example, I spent just about every night getting seriously fucked-up at a place called the Gas Works, opposite the apartment block where I was staying. One night I went over there, came back, passed out, and woke up an hour later with this incredible heartburn. I remember opening my eyes and thinking, What the fuck? It was pitch black, but I noticed this red glow in front of me. I had no idea what it was. Meanwhile, the heartburn was getting worse and worse. Then suddenly I realised what had happened: I’d fallen asleep with a cigarette in my hand. I was on fire! So I jumped out of bed, tore off my clothes, bundled them up with the smouldering sheets, ran to the bathroom, dumped the whole lot in the bath, turned on the cold water, and waited for the smoke to clear. By the time I was done, the room was a fucking bomb site, I was stark bollock naked, my sheets were ruined and I was freezing to death.

I was thinking, What the fuck do I do now? Then I had an idea: I ripped down the curtains and used them as sheets instead. It worked great, until the boot-faced maid came in the next morning.

She went mental.

‘WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY APARTMENT?’ she screamed at me. ‘GET OUT! GET OUT! YOU ANIMAL!’

Things weren’t going much better in the studio. When I mentioned in passing that I wanted to do a side project of my own, Tony snapped, ‘If you’ve got any songs, Ozzy, you should give them to us first.’ But then whenever I came up with an idea, nobody would give me the time of day. I’d say, ‘What do you think of this, then?’ and they’d go, ‘Nah. That’s crap.’

Then, one day, Thelma called the studio and said she’d just had a miscarriage, so we all packed up our stuff and went back to England. But going home didn’t improve things between us, to the point where me and Tony weren’t speaking to each other at all. We didn’t argue.

The opposite, really: just a complete lack of communication. And during the last sessions for the album in England, I’d given up. Tony, Bill and Geezer decided they wanted to do a song called ‘Breakout’, with a jazz band going da-dah-da-dah, DAH, and I just went, Fuck this, I’m off. That’s why Bill sang the vocals on ‘Swinging the Chain’. The bottom line was that

‘Breakout’ was stretching it too far for me. With tracks like that on the album, I thought, we might as well have been called Slack Haddock, not Black Sabbath. The only impressive thing about that jazz band as far as I was concerned was how much they could drink. It was incredible. If you didn’t get the takes done by midday, you were fucked, ’cos they were all too pissed.

Never Say Die bombed like none of our albums had ever done before in America, but it did OK in Britain, where it went to number twelve in the album charts, and got us a slot on Top of the Pops. Which was good fun, actually, ’cos we got to meet Bob Marley. I’ll always remember the moment he came out of his dressing room—it was next to ours—and you literally couldn’t see his head through the cloud of dope smoke. He was smoking the biggest, fattest joint I’d ever seen—and believe me, I’d seen a few. I kept thinking, He’s gonna have to lip-synch, he’s gonna have to lip-synch, no one can do a live show when they’re that high. But no—he did it live. Flawlessly, too.

There were other good things happening for Black Sabbath around that time, too. For example, after sorting out our finances, we’d decided to hire Don Arden as our manager, mainly because we’d been impressed by what he’d done for the Electric Light Orchestra. And for me, the best thing about being managed by Don Arden was getting to see his daughter Sharon on a regular basis. Almost immediately, I began falling in love with her from a distance. It was that wicked laugh that got me. And the fact that she was so beautiful and glamorous—she wore fur coats, and had diamonds dripping from everywhere. I’d never seen anything like it.

And she was as loud and crazy as I was. By then, Sharon was helping to run the business with Don, and whenever she came over to see the band, we’d end up having a laugh. She was great company, was Sharon—the best. But nothing happened between us for a long time.

But I knew it was all over with Black Sabbath, and it was clear they’d had enough of my insane behaviour. One of my last memories of being with the band was missing a gig at the Municipal Auditorium in Nashville during our last US tour. I’d been doing so much coke with Bill while driving between shows in his GMC mobile home that I hadn’t slept for three days straight. I looked like the walking dead. My eyeballs felt like someone had injected them with caffeine, my skin was all red and prickly, and I could hardly feel my legs. But at five o’clock in the morning on the day of the gig, after we pulled into town, I finally hit the sack at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. It was the best fucking sleep I’d ever had in my life. It was like being six feet under, it was so good. And when I woke up, I felt almost normal again.

But I didn’t know that the key I’d used to get into my room was from one of the other Hyatt hotels we’d stayed at earlier in the tour, in another city. So while my bags had been sent to the right room by the tour manager, I’d gone to the wrong room. Which wouldn’t normally have been a problem: the key I had in my pocket just wouldn’t have worked and I would have gone down to reception and realised the mistake. But when I got to the room, the maid was still in there, plumping the pillows and checking that the minibar was full. So the door was open and I walked straight in. I just showed her the key—which had the right number and the Hyatt logo on it—and she smiled and told me to enjoy my stay. Then she closed the door behind her while I got into the wrong bed in the wrong room and fell asleep.

For twenty-four hours.

In the meantime, the gig came and went. Of course, the hotel sent someone up to my room to look for me, but all they found was my luggage. They had no idea I was zonked out on a different floor, in another wing of the hotel. The lads panicked, my ugly mug was plastered all over the local TV stations, the cops set up a special missing persons unit, the fans began to plan a candlelit vigil, the insurance company was on the phone, venues across America were preparing for the tour to be cancelled, the record company went apeshit, and Thelma thought she’d become a widow.

Then I woke up.

The first thing I did was call down to the front desk and ask them what time it was. ‘Six o’clock,’ the woman told me. Perfect timing, I thought. The gig was at eight. So I got out of bed and started looking for my suitcase. Then I realised that everything seeemed very quiet.

So I called back down to the front desk.

‘Morning or evening?’ I asked.

‘Sorry?’

‘You said it was six o’clock. Morning or evening?’

‘Oh, morning.’

‘Ah.’

Then I called the tour manager’s room.

‘Yeah?’ he croaked.

‘It’s me, Ozzy,’ I said. ‘I think there might be a problem.’

First there was silence.

Then tears—of rage. To this day, I’ve never had a bollocking like it.

It was Bill who told me I was fired.

The date was April 27, 1979—a Friday afternoon.

We were doing some rehearsals in LA, and I was loaded, but then I was loaded all the time. It was obvious that Bill had been sent by the others, because he wasn’t exactly the firing type.

I can’t remember exactly what he said to me. We haven’t talked about it since. But the gist was that Tony thought I was a pissed, coked-up loser and a waste of time for everyone concerned. To be honest with you, it felt like he was finally getting his revenge for me walking out.

And it didn’t come as a complete surprise: I’d had the feeling in the studio for a while that Tony was trying to wind me up by getting me to sing takes over and over again, even though there was nothing wrong with the first one.

I didn’t let it affect my friendship with Bill. I felt bad for the guy, actually, ’cos his mum had just died. Then not long after I was kicked out of Black Sabbath, his father died too. When I’d heard the news, I thought, Fuck the war, I’m still his mate, we’re still the same people who lived in a GMC together for months on end in America. So I drove straight up to Birming ham to see him.

He’d taken it really badly and I felt terrible for him. Then his dad’s funeral turned into a joke. They were carrying the coffin out of the church when they realised that someone in the funeral party had nicked the vicar’s car. The vicar refused to continue with the service until he got it back, but whoever had nicked the fucking thing couldn’t get the steering lock off, and ended up crashing into a garden. Imagine that kind of bullshit going down when you’re trying to lay your old man to rest. Unbelievable.

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel betrayed by what happened with Black Sabbath. We weren’t some manufactured boy band whose members were expendable. We were four blokes from the same town who’d grown up together a few streets apart. We were like a family, like brothers. And firing me for being fucked up was hypocritical bullshit. We were all fucked up. If you’re stoned and I’m stoned, and you’re telling me that I’m fired because I’m stoned, how can that fucking be? Because I’m slightly more stoned than you are?

But I don’t give a fuck any more—and it worked out for the best in the end. It gave me the shove up the arse I needed, and it probably made it a lot more fun for them, making records with a new singer. I don’t have anything bad to say about the guy they hired to replace me, Ronnie James Dio, who’d previously been with Rainbow. He’s a great singer. Then again, he ain’t me, and I ain’t him. So I just wish they’d called the band Black Sabbath II.

That’s all.