I Am Ozzy

7. Des Moines

All of a sudden I was unemployed.

And unemployable.

I remember thinking, Well, I’ve still got a few dollars in my pocket, so I’ll have one last big fling in LA—then I’ll go back to England. I honestly thought I’d have to sell Bulrush Cottage and go and work on a building site or something. I just resigned myself to the fact that it was over. None of it had ever seemed real, anyway. The first thing I did was check myself into a place called Le Parc Hotel in West Hollywood, paid for by Don Arden’s company, Jet Records. I was amazed Don had forked out for it, to be honest with you. The second he realises I ain’t going back to Black Sabbath, I said to myself, they’re gonna kick me out of this place—so I might as well enjoy it while I still can. You didn’t get a room at Le Parc—you got a little apartment-type thing with its own kitchen where you could make your own food. I never left. I just sat on the bed and watched old war films with the curtains closed. I didn’t see daylight for months. My dealer would come over and give me some blow or some pot, I’d get booze delivered from Gil Turner’s up on Sunset Strip, and every once in a while I’d get some chicks over to fuck. Although I dunno why anyone was prepared to fuck me, not in those days. I was eating so much pizza and drinking so much beer, I had bigger tits than Jabba the Hutt’s fat older brother.

I hadn’t seen Thelma or the kids for ages. I’d call them up from the phone in my room, but it felt like they were slipping away from me, which made me feel even more depressed. I’d spent more time with Black Sabbath than I ever had with my family. We’d come back from months on the road, take a three-week break, then go straight off to some farm or castle where we’d fuck around until we came up with some new songs. We did that for a decade, until all our personal lives were ruined: Bill’s marriage failed, Tony’s marriage failed, Geezer’s marriage failed. But I didn’t want to accept it, because it would mean losing my home and my kids, and I’d already lost my dad and my band.

I just wanted to shut everything out, make everything go away.

So I hid in Le Parc and drank.

And drank.

And drank.

Then, one day, this bloke called Mark Nauseef knocked on my door. He was a drummer, also managed by Don Arden, and he’d played with everyone from the Velvet Underground to Thin Lizzy. He told me that Sharon from Jet Records was coming over to pick something up from him—he was staying in one of the other apartments—but that he had to leave town for a gig. Then he handed me an envelope.

‘Would you do me a favour and give this to her?’ he asked. ‘I told Sharon just to call for you at reception.’

‘No worries,’ I said.

As soon as I closed the door, I got a knife and opened it.

Inside was five hundred dollars in cash. Fuck knows what it was for and I didn’t care. I just called up my dealer and bought five hundred dollars’ worth of coke. A few hours later, Sharon came over and asked if I had something to give her. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said, all innocent.

‘Are you sure, Ozzy?’

‘Pretty sure.’

But it didn’t take Einstein to work out what had happened. There was a massive bag of coke on the table next to a ripped-up envelope with ‘Sharon’ written on it in felt-tip pen.

Sharon gave me a monumental bollocking when she saw it, shouting and cursing and telling me I was a fucking disaster.

I guess I won’t be shagging her any time soon, then, I thought.

But she came back the next day, to find me lying in a puddle of my own piss, smoking a joint.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘If you want to get your shit together, we want to manage you.’

‘Why would anyone want to manage me?’ I asked her.

I couldn’t believe it, I really couldn’t. But it was a good job that someone wanted me, ’cos I was down to my last few dollars. My royalties from Black Sabbath were non-existent, I didn’t have a savings account, and I had no new income coming in. At first, Don wanted me to start a band called Son of Sabbath, which I thought was a horrendous idea. Then he wanted me to team up with Gary Moore. I wasn’t too keen on that, either, even though me and Sharon had gone to San Francisco with Gary and his bird one time, and we’d had a lot of fun. (I really thought I was in with Sharon on that trip, to be honest with you, but nothing happened: she just went back to her hotel at the end of the night, and left me dribbling into my beer.) The worst idea that Don Arden had was for me and Sabbath to do gigs together, one after the other, like a double bill. I asked Sharon, ‘Is he having a laugh?’

But then Sharon started to take more control, and we decided that I should make a proper solo album.

I wanted to call it Blizzard of Ozz.

And little by little, things started to come together.

I’d never met anyone who could sort things out like Sharon could. Whatever she said she would do, she’d get it done. Or at least she’d come back to you and say, ‘Look, I tried my best, but I couldn’t make it happen.’ As a manager, you always knew exactly where you stood with her. Meanwhile, Sharon’s father would just shout and bully like some mob captain, so I tried to stay out of his way as much as I could. Of course, before I could make an album and go on tour, I needed a band. But I’d never held auditions before, and I didn’t have a clue how or where to start. So Sharon helped me out, taking me to see all these young, up-and-coming LA guitarists. But I wasn’t really in any state for it. I’d just find a sofa in the corner of the room and pass out. Then a friend of mine, Dana Strum—who’d auditioned to be my bass player—said to me, ‘Look, Ozzy, there’s one guy you really have to see. He plays with a band called Quiet Riot, and he’s red hot.’

So one night this tiny American bloke came over to Le Parc to introduce himself. The first thing that came into my mind was: he’s either a chick or gay. He had long, wet-looking hair, and this weirdly deep voice, and he was so thin he was almost not there. He reminded me a little of David Bowie’s guitarist, Mick Ronson.

‘How old are you?’ I asked, as soon as he walked through the door.

‘Twenty-two.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Randy Rhoads.’

‘Do you want a beer?’

‘I’ll take a Coke, if you have one.’

‘I’ll get you a beer. Are you a bloke, by the way?’

Randy just laughed.

‘Seriously,’ I said.

‘Er, yeah. Last time I checked.’

Randy must have thought I was a fucking lunatic.

Afterwards, we drove over to a studio somewhere so I could hear him play. I remember him plugging his Gibson Les Paul into a little practice amp and saying to me, ‘D’you mind if I warm up?’

‘Knock yourself out,’ I said.

Then he started doing these finger exercises. I had to say to him, ‘Stop. Randy, just stop right there.’

‘What’s wrong?’ he said, looking up at me with this worried expression on his face.

‘You’re hired.’

You should have heard him play, man.

I almost cried, he was so good.

Soon we were flying back to England for rehearsals. I quickly found out that although Randy looked like Mr Cool, he was an incredibly sweet, down-to-earth guy. A real gentleman, too—not at all what you’d expect of a flash American rock ’n’ roll guitar hero.

I couldn’t understand why he even wanted to get involved with a bloated alcoholic wreck like me.

At first, we stayed at Bulrush Cottage with Thelma and the kids. The first thing we wrote was ‘Goodbye to Romance’. Working with Randy was like night and day compared with Black Sabbath. I was just walking around the house one day, singing this melody that had been in my head for months, and Randy asked, ‘Is that your song, or a Beatles song?’ I said, ‘Oh no, it’s nothing, just this thing I’ve got stuck in my head.’ But he made me sit down with him until we’d worked it out.

He was incredibly patient—I wasn’t surprised at all when I found out that his mum was a music teacher. It was the first time I’d ever felt like I was an equal partner when it came to songwriting.

Another vivid memory of working with Randy was when we wrote ‘Suicide Solution’. We were at a party for a band called Wild Horses at John Henry’s, a rehearsal studio in London.

Everyone else was fucked up on one thing or another, but Randy was sitting in a corner experimenting with riffs on his Flying V, and all of a sudden he just went Dah, Dah, D’La-Dah, DAH, D’La-Dah. I shouted over, ‘Whoa, Randy! What was that?’ He just shrugged. I told him to play what he’d just played, then I started to sing this lyric I’d had in my head for a while:

‘Wine is fine, but whiskey’s quicker/ Suicide is slow with liquor’. And that was it, most of the song was written, right there. The night ended with everyone on stage, jamming.

Phil Lynott from Thin Lizzy was there. That might have been the last time I saw him before he died, actually. He was a tragic case, was Phil. I mean, I thought he missed his mark so badly. Great fucking performer, great voice, great style, but the old heroin got him in the end.

Thank God I never got into that shit.

Randy loved Britain.

Every weekend, he’d get in the van and drive somewhere, just to have a look around. He went to Wales, Scotland, the Lake District, you name it. He also collected toy trains, so wherever he went, he’d buy one. He was a quiet bloke, very dedicated, didn’t like showing off, but he could be a laugh, too. One time we were in this bar and there was a guy in the corner playing classical music on the piano, so Randy goes up to him and says, ‘D’you mind if I join you?’ The guy looks at Randy, looks around the bar, sees me, and goes, ‘Er, sure.’ So then Randy gets out his Gibson, hooks up his little practice amp, and starts playing along to this Beethoven piece or whatever it was. But as he goes along, he starts throwing in all these rock ’n’ roll moves, and by the end of it he’s on his knees, doing this wild solo with his tongue hanging out. It was fucking hilarious. The whole bar was in stitches.

The funny thing is, I don’t think Randy really ever liked Black Sabbath much. He was a proper musician. I mean, a lot of rock ’n’ roll guitarists are good, but they have just one trick, one gimmick, so even if you don’t know the song, you go, ‘Oh, that’s so-and-so.’ But Randy could play anything. His influences ranged from Leslie West to jazz greats like Charlie Christian and classical guys like John Williams. He didn’t understand why people were into ‘Iron Man’, ’cos he thought it was so simple a kid could play it.

We had arguments about that, actually. I’d say, ‘Look, if it works, who cares if it’s simple? I mean, you can’t get much easier than the riff to “You Really Got Me”—but it’s awesome.

When I first bought that single, I played it until the needle on my dad’s radiogram broke.’

Randy would just shrug and say, ‘I guess.’

One thing Sharon’s brother managed to get done when we were in England was find us a bass player—Bob Daisley, an Aussie bloke who’d been signed to Jet with a band called Widowmaker, which was how David knew him. I liked Bob immediately. He was a proper rock ’n’ roller—he wore denim jackets with cut-out sleeves and had his hair all blown out—and we’d go down the pub and do a bit of coke once in a while.

Another good thing about Bob was that he wasn’t just a bass player. He could chip in with songwriting, too.

And we had a laugh together—at first, anyway.

Getting a drummer wasn’t so easy.

We seemed to audition half of Britain before we finally came across Lee Kerslake, who’d played with Uriah Heep. He was all right, Lee—one of those big old pub blokes. Solid drummer, too. But the guy I’d really wanted—Tommy Aldridge, from the Pat Travers Band—wasn’t available.

Another early member of our line-up was a keyboard player from Ipswich called Lindsay Bridgewater. He was a very educated boy, was Lindsay, and he’d never met the likes of us before. I told him, ‘Lindsay, you look like a fucking school teacher. I want you to backcomb your hair, put on a white cape, get yourself some black lipstick and some black eyeliner. And while you’re playing, I want you to growl at the audience.’

The poor bloke didn’t last long.

I’d be talking out of my arse if I said I didn’t feel like I was in competition with Black Sabbath when we made Blizzard of Ozz. I wished them well, I suppose, but part of me was shitting myself that they were going to be more successful without me. And their first album with Dio was pretty good. I didn’t rush out and buy it, but I heard some tracks on the radio. It went to number nine in Britain and number twenty-eight in America. But by the time we’d got Blizzard in the can at Ridge Farm Studios in Surrey, I knew we had a cracking album of our own.

We had a couple of cracking albums, actually, because we had a lot of material left over when we were done.

And it was magic to be in control—like I’d finally pulled something off. Then again, even if you think something’s brilliant, you never know if the general public’s going to pick up on it.

But as soon as the radio stations got hold of ‘Crazy Train’, it was a done deal. The thing just exploded.

When the album came out in Britain in September 1980, it went to number seven in the album charts. When it came out in America six months later, it peaked at number twenty-one, but it eventually sold four million copies, making it one of Billboard’s Top 100 bestselling albums of the decade.

Reviews?

Didn’t read ’em.

A few nights before the tour started, I got Sharon in the sack for the first time. It had taken fucking long enough. We’d been at Shepperton Studios in Surrey, rehearsing for our first gig—which was going to be in Blackpool under the fake name of The Law—and we were all staying at the same hotel across the road. So I just followed Sharon back to her room. I think I might even have used my extra-special pick-up line: ‘Can I come back and watch your telly?’

The usual reply to this was, ‘Fuck off, I ain’t got one.’

But this time it worked.

I was shitfaced, obviously. So was Sharon—she must have been. All I remember is her deciding to take a bath, and me ripping off my clothes and jumping in with her. Then one thing led to another, as things tend to do when you jump in a bath with a chick.

I fell for Sharon so badly, man.

The thing is, before I met her, I’d never come across a girl who was like me. I mean, when me and Sharon went out, people used to think we were brother and sister, we were so similar.

Wherever we went, we were always the drunkest and the loudest.

We got up to some crazy shit in those early days.

One night in Germany, we went to a big dinner with the head of CBS Europe, who were releasing Blizzard of Ozz over there. He was a big, bearded, cigar-chomping bloke, and very straight. I was out of my fucking clock, of course. So we’re all sitting there at this huge table, and halfway through the meal I get the idea to climb on the table and start doing a striptease.

Everyone thinks it’s funny for a while. But I end up stark bollock naked, take a piss in the CBS guy’s carafe of wine, kneel down in front of him, and kiss him on the lips.

They didn’t think that was very funny.

We didn’t get a record played in Germany for years afterwards. I remember being on the plane, flying out of Berlin, with Sharon ripping up the contracts and saying, ‘Well, that’s another country gone.’

‘It was worth it for the striptease though, wasn’t it?’ I asked.

‘That wasn’t a striptease you were doing, Ozzy. It was a fucking Nazi goose-step. Up and down the table. That poor German bloke looked mortified. Then you put your balls in his fucking wine.’

‘I thought I pissed in his wine?’

‘That was before you pissed in his wine.’

Then we went to Paris, and I was still wasted from Berlin. I was crazy drunk, because people kept giving us all these free bottles of booze. By then, everyone had heard about what went on in Germany, so these very nervous record company people took us out for a drink at a nightclub. Everyone was talking about business, so to relieve the boredom I turned to the bloke next to me and said, ‘Hey, will you do me a favour?’

‘Sure,’ he said.

‘Punch me in the face.’

‘What?’

‘Punch me in the face.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘Look, I asked you to do me a favour, and you said you would. You promised. So punch me in the fucking face.’

‘No!’

‘Just punch me.’

‘Mr Osbourne, I’m sorry, but I can’t do that.’

‘Come on! YOU FUCKING PROMIS—’

BLAM!

The last thing I saw was Sharon’s fist approaching my face from across the table. Then I was flat out on the floor, my nose bleeding, feeling like half my teeth were gonna fall out.

I opened my eyes and saw Sharon looking down at me. ‘Are you happy now?’ she asked me.

I spat out some blood and snot. ‘Very happy, cheers.’

Later that night, I was lying in bed in the hotel room, having the worst comedown from cocaine you could ever imagine. I was shivering and sweating and having all these paranoid fantasies. So I rolled over and tried to give Sharon a cuddle, but she just moaned and pushed me away.

‘Sharon,’ I whimpered, ‘I think I’m dying.’

Silence.

So I tried again: ‘Sharon, I think I’m dying!’

Again, silence.

One more time: ‘Sharon, I think I’m—’

‘Die quietly then. I need to sleep. I’ve got a meeting in the morning.’

We’d wind each other up all the time, me and Sharon.

One night, we went for a drink together in a hotel. We took a seat in the corner, then I went up to the bar to get the beers in. But I got distracted by a guy in a wheelchair—a Hell’s Angel. We ended up having a bit of a laugh, me and this bloke, and I ended up completely forgetting I was supposed to be taking the drinks back to Sharon. Then I heard this voice from the corner of the room.

‘Ozzy! OZZY!’

Oh shit, I thought, I’m gonna get a right old bollocking now. So, on my way over, I came up with this ridiculous story. ‘Sorry, darling,’ I said, ‘but you’ll never guess what happened to that guy. He was telling me all about it, and I just couldn’t tear myself away.’

‘Let me guess: he fell off his motorbike.’

‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘It’s much worse than that. He’s suffering from blowback.’

‘He’s suffering from what?’

‘Blowback.’

‘What the fuck is blowback?’

‘Don’t you know?’

The word had just popped into my head, so now I was desperately trying to think of what it could be.

‘No, Ozzy, I don’t know what blowback is.’

‘That’s crazy.’

‘WELL, WHAT THE FUCK IS IT, THEN?’

‘It’s this thing you can get from a chick when they give you a handjob. What happens is, they’re wanking you off, and then just as you’re about to blow your wad, they put their thumb over the end of your knob, and sometimes—if you’re really unlucky, like that poor bloke over there—the sperm flies straight back down your tubes and, well, y’know…’

‘For the millionth time, Ozzy, no, I don’t know.’

‘Well, it, er… knocks out your spinal column.’

‘Oh my God!’ said Sharon, looking really shocked. ‘That’s awful. Go and buy that poor man another drink.’

I couldn’t believe that she’d bought it.

I never gave it another thought until a couple of weeks later, when I was sitting outside a Jet Records board meeting. All I could hear was Sharon saying the word ‘blowback’ over and over again, and all the blokes in the room going, ‘What? Blowback? What the fuck are you talking about?’

Then Sharon came storming out, bright red in the face, and screamed, ‘You fucking BASTARD, Ozzy!’

Smack.

Sharon was managing me virtually single-handed when we did the Blizzard of Ozz tour. It was the first time in my career that I’d ever seen anyone plan things so carefully. Before we even started, she said, ‘We can go two ways, Ozzy. We can open for a bigger act, like Van Halen, or we can headline smaller venues. I think we should headline smaller venues, because that way you’ll always have sold-out shows, and when people see sold-out signs, they want to go. Also, you’ll be seen as a top-billing act from day one.’

It turned out to be a brilliant move.

Everywhere we went, the venues were full, and there were more people queuing up outside.

Mind you, we worked our arses off for it.

This was my chance, and I knew I was only going to get one. Me and Sharon both knew it, actually, so we went out and did every radio station, every television station, every interview we could get. Nothing was too small. Every record or ticket we sold counted.

I learned that when Sharon’s on a mission, when she wants to get something done, she’ll fucking throw herself at it, lock, stock and barrel, and she’ll not stop fighting until well after the bell’s rung. When she’s got a bee up her arse, you can’t stop her. Whereas, with me, if it hadn’t been for her pushing all the time, I doubt I would have had the same success. In fact, I know I wouldn’t.

Sharon didn’t take anything for granted. It was in her blood and how she was raised. She used to tell me that her family either had the horn of plenty, the cornucopia, or nothing. One day they had the Rolls-Royce and a colour TV in every room; the next they were hiding the car and the tellies were being repossessed. It was a real boom-and-bust household.

I trusted Sharon, like I’d never trusted anyone before on the business side of things. And that’s essential for me, because I don’t understand contracts. I choose not to understand them, I suppose, because I can’t stand all the bullshit and backstabbing.

But Sharon wasn’t only good with money. She knew how to manage my image, too. She had me out of my grubby old Black Sabbath get-up in a second. ‘When Randy’s mum came over from LA, she thought you were a roadie,’ she told me. Then she got a hairdresser over to bleach my hair. It was the eighties—you had to be flamboyant like that. People laugh at it, but when you go to a gig nowadays, you don’t know who’s in the band and who’s in the audience, because they all look the fucking same. At least when somebody got on stage with a big glossy hairdo, they looked special.

Mind you, my stage rags got so outrageous at one point, people used to think I was a drag queen. I’d wear spandex trousers and these long coats studded with rhinestones. Looking back now, I’m not embarrassed by those clothes, but I am embarrassed by how bloated I was. I was a fat, boozy, pizza-eating fuck. You should have seen my face, it was fucking massive. It wasn’t surprising, either, given how much Guinness I was putting away on a daily basis. I’m telling you, man, one pint of Guinness is like eating three dinners.

Another person I learned to trust on that tour was Tony Dennis. He was this little Geordie bloke who kept turning up to the gigs every night, without fail. It was the middle of winter, but all he’d wear over his T-shirt was this little jeans jacket. He must have frozen his nuts off when he was queuing up to get in. He came to so many shows I ended up letting him in for free, even though I couldn’t understand a fucking word he said. It was all, ‘Why-eye, y’nah, Tuhni I-uhmi, haweh man, lyke.’ For all I knew, he could have been calling me a cunt.

Anyway, we were in Canterbury, and it was minus five or something, and I asked him,

‘How do you get around, Tony?’

‘I just hitch-hike, man.’

‘And where d’you sleep?’

‘Train stations. Telephone boxes. Ahl awa the place, y’nah?’

‘I tell you what,’ I said. ‘If you want to take care of the bags for us, we’ll get you a room.’

And he’s been with me ever since, has Tony. He’s like a family member. He’s a great guy, a really wonderful human being. I’m so reliant on him, and he’s so efficient, it’s amazing.

Nothing’s ever too much trouble for him, and I trust him completely. I could leave a big pile of dough on the table, come back two years later, and it would be exactly where I’d left it. He was there for my children, too, in the dark years. They still call him Uncle Tony. And all because of that one night in Canterbury when I asked him how he got around.

After our first night in the hotel opposite Shepperton Studios, me and Sharon were bonking all over the place. We couldn’t stop. And we didn’t carry on behind closed doors, either.

The people around us knew exactly what was happening. Some nights Sharon would go out of one door and Thelma would come in the other. I was knackered all the time, having two women on the go. I don’t know how those French blokes do it. When I was with Sharon, for example, I’d end up calling her ‘Tharon’, which earned me more than a few black eyes.

Looking back now, of course, I should have just left Thelma.

But I didn’t want to because of the kids. I knew that if we got a divorce, it would be terrible for them, because the kids always suffer the most in a break-up. And the thought of losing my family was unbearable to me. It was just too painful, I couldn’t take it.

On the other hand I’d never known what it was like to fall in love before I met Sharon—even though we didn’t exactly have a normal romance. I mean, Sharon was piggy in the middle when I was still married to Thelma, and in the beginning she was drinking nearly as much as I was. When we weren’t shagging, we were fighting. And when we weren’t fighting, we were drinking. But we were inseparable, couldn’t stay away from each other. On the road we’d always share a room together, and if Sharon ever had to go away on business, I’d spend hours and hours talking to her on the phone, telling her how much I loved her, how much I couldn’t wait to see her again. I’d never done that with anyone before. In fact, I can honestly say that I didn’t have a clue what love was about until I met Sharon. I’d been confusing it with infatuation. Then I realised that when you’re in love, it’s not just about the messing around in the sack, it’s about how empty you feel when they’re gone. And I couldn’t stand it when Sharon was gone.

But as badly as I’d fallen for Sharon, I knew things couldn’t go on the way they were. For a while, I’d thought I could have the best of both worlds—my family, and the woman I loved—but something had to give. So that Christmas, with the British leg of the tour over, I told Thelma everything, because for some stupid drunk reason I thought that would make things better. Not the most fucking brilliant idea I ever had.

Thelma went up like a bottle of pop, kicked me out, and told me she needed time to think.

Then Don Arden put in his size-ten boot. He called Thelma to a meeting down in London and told her he was putting his son David back in charge of me, to get me away from Sharon.

But the truth was, he was also shitting himself that Sharon was going to leave Jet Records and go it alone, which could end up costing him a fortune, especially if she took me with her—which is exactly what she did in the end. But Don should have known that if Sharon has her mind set on something, she’ll do it, no matter what. And if someone tries to stop her, she’ll just try twice as hard.

David didn’t last five minutes.

Before we took the Blizzard of Ozz tour to America in April 1981, we went back to Ridge Farm and recorded Diary of a Madman. To this day, I don’t know how we got that album done so quickly. It took us just under three weeks, I think.

We were all living in this crappy little flat while we were doing the sessions, and I’ll always remember the morning when I woke up and heard this amazing acoustic riff coming out of Randy’s room. I burst through his door, still in my underpants, and he was sitting there with a very uptight-looking classical instructor, having a lesson.

‘What was that you just played?’ I said, while the instructor stared at me like I was the Loch Ness Monster.

‘Ozzy, I’m busy!’

‘I know, but what was that you just played?’

‘Mozart.’

‘Right. We’re nicking it.’

‘We can’t nick Mozart.’

‘I’m sure he won’t mind.’

It ended up being the intro to ‘Diary of a Madman’—although by the time Randy had finished messing around with it, there was hardly any Mozart left.

The rest of the album was a blur. We were so rushed for time that we ended up mixing it on the road. My producer, Max Norman, would send tapes to my hotel room, and I’d call him on payphones and tell him to add a bit more bass here or a bit more midrange there.

It was around then that Bob and Lee started to bitch and moan about everything, which drove me fucking nuts. I’d look over and they’d be huddled in the corner, whispering like schoolgirls. From the very beginning, Bob had always wanted to call the band a name, instead of it just being Ozzy Osbourne. I didn’t understand that. Why would I want to leave one band just to join another, with everyone going, ‘Shall we do this gig or that gig? Hmm, let’s think about that’? I mean, if Bob and Lee had come into Jet’s offices and said, ‘We want to be in an equal-share band with Ozzy,’ I would have said, ‘Nah, thanks, I’ve had enough of that. I want to be my own boss. See ya.’ But Bob could be pushy, and if it wasn’t for Sharon he probably would have bullied me into doing exactly what he wanted. You see, I have this problem where I just tend to roll over and go along with things. Sometimes I think it’s because I don’t play an instrument, which makes me feel like I don’t deserve to be in the room, y’know?

Anyway, at some point I remember Sharon coming up to us, very excited, and saying,

‘Great news, guys. The tickets for the Palladium in New York just went on sale, and they sold out in an hour!’ We were all cheering and whooping and doing high fives. Then Sharon went off to take a phone call. When she came back she had an even bigger smile on her face and said, ‘You’ll never guess what: the Palladium want us to do two shows in one night.’

I couldn’t believe it: everything was really taking off. But Bob and Lee went very quiet then disappeared for one of their little chin-wags. When they came back, they said, ‘Well, if we’re doing two shows, we want double our travel expenses and double our pay.’ That was a bit much for me. None of us had seen any real dough at that point, and the Ardens had put up the cash for everything—the studio time, the hotels, the food, the equipment, the staff, you fucking name it. Where did they think the money was coming from—the sky? The fact was, every last penny had to be paid back to Don, but Bob and Lee didn’t have to worry about that because they were basically session players.

I wanted them gone after that. I said to Sharon, ‘If we carry on like this, every five minutes there’s going to be another row, and I’ve had enough of that bullshit.’

So that was the end of Bob and Lee, although I worked with Bob a few times over the years, until he started suing me every other day of the week.

It’s sad, y’know, what money does to people. Always money. But I honestly believe that if Bob and Lee had stayed on, I wouldn’t be where I am today. The bad vibes would have made it impossible to get anything done. Luckily, Sharon had been working on replacements for them for a while—they’d been getting on her tits for a long time—and she managed to sign up Tommy Aldridge, the drummer I’d wanted from the start, and a bass player called Rudy Sarzo, who’d worked with Randy in Quiet Riot. And that was that.

When the second album was finally done, we packed up our stuff, got on a plane, and went to LA for a week of rehearsals and record company meetings before the tour began in Maryland.

Don’t ask me who bought the doves.

All I know is that Sharon showed them to me when we were in the limo on the way over to the Century City headquarters of CBS Records, a few days after we’d flown into LA.

‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ she said. ‘Listen. They’re cooing. Aw.’

Our meeting with CBS was a big deal.

Although Blizzard of Ozz had been a hit in England, we badly needed success in America, ’cos we were broke. Everything depended on it. Since going out on the road, we’d been living hand-to-mouth, sleeping in flea-infested hotel rooms, one of us handcuffed to a briefcase full of all the cash we had left in the world. Which was fuck-all, pretty much. We hadn’t even been paid the advance for Diary of a Madman, ’cos Sharon couldn’t prise it out of her father’s sweaty hands. Meanwhile, Thelma was talking about a divorce, which meant I could lose everything all over again.

‘What d’you want doves for, anyway?’ I asked Sharon, swigging from the bottle of Cointreau I’d brought with me.

Sharon gave me one of her looks.

‘Don’t you remember, Ozzy? Our conversation? Last night? They’re for the meeting.

When we get in there, you’re going to throw the doves in the air so they fly around the room.’

‘What for?’

‘Because that’s what we agreed. And then you’re going to say “rock ’n’ roll” and give them the peace sign.’ I couldn’t remember any of it. It was only eleven o’clock in the morning, but I was already on Planet Booze. I hadn’t stopped since the night before. Or the night before that.

I’d even forgotten why we were going to see CBS. But then Sharon reminded me: ‘They need a kick up the arse because they bought Blizzard of Ozz from my father for a pathetically small sum of money, so they’re probably expecting it to bomb, which is exactly what Black Sabbath’s last two albums did in America. You’re nothing in this country as a solo artist, Ozzy.

Forget about the sold-out shows in Britain. You’re starting from scratch here. When you go into this meeting, you’ve got to make an impression, show them who you are.’

‘With doves?’ I said.

‘Exactly.’

I put down the bottle and took the birds from Sharon.

‘Why don’t I bite their heads off?’ I said, holding them up in front of my face. ‘That’ll make an impression.’

Sharon just laughed, shook her head, and looked out of the window at the blue sky and the palm trees.

‘I’m serious,’ I said.

‘Ozzy, you’re not going to bite their heads off.’

‘Yeah, I am.’

‘No, you’re not, silly.’

‘Yeah, I fucking am. I’ve been feeling a bit peckish all morning.’

Sharon laughed again. I loved that sound more than I loved anything else in the world.

The meeting was bullshit. A bunch of fake smiles and limp handshakes. Then someone told me how excited they were that Adam Ant was coming to America. Adam Ant? I almost chinned the cunt when he said that. It was obvious none of them gave a shit. Even the PR

chick kept looking at her watch. But the meeting went on and on while all these suits with gold watches spouted meaningless corporate marketing bollocks, until eventually I got pissed off waiting for Sharon to give me the cue to throw the doves in the air. In the end I just got up, walked aross the room, sat down on the arm of the PR chick’s chair, and pulled one of them out of my pocket.

‘Oh, cute,’ she said, giving me another fake smile. Then she looked at her watch again.

That’s it, I thought.

I opened my mouth wide.

Across the room, I saw Sharon flinch.

Then I went chomp, spit.

The dove’s head landed on the PR chick’s lap in a splatter of blood. To be honest with you, I was so pissed, it just tasted of Cointreau. Well, Cointreau and feathers. And a bit of beak. Then I threw the carcass on to the table and watched it twitch.

The bird had shit itself when I bit into its neck, and the stuff had gone everywhere. The PR

chick’s dress was flecked with this nasty brown-and-white goo, and my jacket, a horrible yellow eighties thing with a Rupert the Bear-style pattern on it, was pretty much ruined. To this day, I have no fucking idea what was going on in my head. I mean, the poor dove. But I’ll tell you one thing: it made an impression, all right.

For a split second, all you could hear was everyone taking a breath at the same time and the photographer in the corner going click-click-click.

Then pandemonium.

The PR chick started screaming, ‘Ew, ew, ew!’, while a bloke in a suit ran over to the bin in the corner and puked. Then alarms started going off, as someone yelled into the intercom for security.

‘GET THIS ANIMAL OUT OF HERE! NOW!’

At that moment I took the other dove out of my pocket.

‘Hello, birdie,’ I said to it, giving it a kiss on the head. ‘My name’s Ozzy Osbourne. And I’m here to promote my new album, Blizzard of Ozz.’

Then I opened my mouth and everyone in the room went ‘NOOOOOO!’ People were covering their eyes with their arms and screaming at me to stop it and get the fuck out. But instead of biting its head off, I let it go, and it flapped happily around the room.

‘Peace,’ I said, as two massive security guards burst into the room, grabbed me by the arms, and dragged me out backwards.

The panic in that place was insane, man.

Meanwhile, Sharon was pissing herself laughing. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.

I think it was just her reaction to the shock of it, more than anything else. She’d also been pretty pissed off with CBS for not showing enough enthusiasm about the album, so in a way she was probably glad I’d just given them the fright of their lives, even if it was the most horrific thing she’d ever seen. ‘You are banned from the CBS building, you freakshow,’ said the chief security bloke, after he’d pushed me out of the front door of the building into the hundred-degree LA heat. ‘If I see you here again, I’ll have you arrested, d’you understand?’

Sharon followed me outside, then she grabbed me by the collar, and kissed me.

‘That poor fucking creature,’ she said. ‘We’ll be lucky if CBS doesn’t pull the plug on the whole record after that performance. They might even sue us. You bad, bad, bad boy.’

‘So why aren’t you giving me a bollocking, then?’ I asked her, confused.

‘Because the press are going to fucking love it.’

That night, we went back to Don Arden’s house, where we were staying with Rudy and Tommy, our new rhythm section. Don’s house was a big Spanish-style deal at the top of Benedict Canyon, above Beverly Hills, with red tiles on the roof and a huge iron gate to keep the little people away. Apparently Howard Hughes had built the place for one of his girlfriends.

Don had bought it after making a ton of dough from ELO, and now he lived up there like a king, with Cary Grant as his neighbour. When were in town, Don would put us up in the one of the ‘bungalows’ on the grounds. He used another one of the bungalows as the LA headquarters of Jet Records.

I was so shitfaced by the time our limo pulled up in the driveway, I barely knew what planet I was on. Then I went off with Rudy to one of the rooms at the back of the house where Don had a TV, a drinks cabinet and a ‘wet bar’. I’d moved on from Cointreau to beer by that point, which meant I needed to take a slash every five seconds. But I couldn’t be arsed to walk all the way to the bog, so I just pissed in the sink. Which wasn’t a problem until Don walked past the door in his dressing-gown, on his way to bed.

All I heard was this voice from behind me, loud enough to register on the Richter scale.

‘OZZY, ARE YOU PISSING IN MY FUCKING SINK?’

Oh, shit.

I squeezed my dick to stop the piss.

He’s gonna kill me, I thought. He’s gonna fucking kill me.

Then I had an idea: if I whip around really quick while zipping up my fly, everything will be fine. So that’s what I started to do. But I was so loaded, my hand slipped off my dick as I turned, and this jet of piss came spraying out—straight at Don.

He jumped backwards and it missed him by a fraction of an inch.

To this day, I’ve never seen a human being so angry. I swear, I thought he was gonna rip my head off and take a shit down my windpipe. The bloke was livid: red in the face, shaking, spit flying out of his mouth. The whole deal. It was terrifying. When he was done calling me every name under the sun—and a few more—he said, ‘GET OUT. GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, YOU FUCKING ANIMAL. GET OUT! GET OUT NOW!’

Then he stomped off to find Sharon. A couple of minutes later, from the other end of the house, I heard, ‘AND YOU’RE EVEN WORSE, BECAUSE YOU’RE FUCKING HIM!’

All in all, I have great memories of that first American tour.

And it wasn’t just because Blizzard of Ozz had sold a million copies by the time we’d finished. It was because I had such fabulous people around me. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve Randy Rhoads. He was the only musician who’d ever been in my band. He could read music. He could write music. He was so dedicated that he would find a classical guitar instructor in every town we went to and get a lesson. He’d give his own lessons, too. Whenever we were on the West Coast, he’d find time to go to his mother’s school and tutor the kids.

He worshipped his mum, Randy did. I remember when we were recording Blizzard of Ozz at Ridge Farm, he asked if he could write a song and name it ‘Dee’ in her honour. I told him to go for it.

And I was having the greatest nights of my life with Sharon. We’d do stuff together that I’d never done before, like clubbing in New York. It couldn’t have been more different to when I went to New York with Black Sabbath—in those days, I wouldn’t even leave my room, ’cos I was always scared shitless. Coming from England, I thought the place was full of gangsters and villains. But Sharon took me out. We used to go to this bar called PJ’s, do coke, meet all these random people and have crazy adventures. We even hung out with Andy Warhol a few times—he was friends with a chick called Susan Blonde, who worked for CBS. He never said a word. He’d just sit there and take pictures of you with this freaky look on his face. Strange, strange bloke, that Andy Warhol.

I hung out a lot with Lemmy from Motörhead on that tour, too. He’s a very close friend of the family now. I love that guy. Wherever there’s a beer tent in the world, there’s Lemmy. But I’ve never seen that man fall down drunk, y’know? Even after twenty or thirty pints. I don’t know how he does it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he outlived me and Keith Richards.

Motörhead opened a few shows for us on that tour. They had this old hippy bus—it was the cheapest thing they could find—and all Lemmy would carry around with him was this suitcase full of books. That’s all he had in the world, apart from the clothes on his back. He loves reading, Lemmy. He’ll spend days at a time doing it. He came up to stay with us at the Howard Hughes house one time, and he wouldn’t leave the library.

Don Arden found him in there and threw a fit. He stormed to the lounge and shouted,

‘Sharon! Who the fuck is that caveman in my library? Get him out! Get him out of my house!’

‘Relax, Dad. It’s just Lemmy.’

‘I don’t care who he is. Get him out of here!’

‘He’s in a band, Dad. They’re supporting Ozzy.’

‘Well, for Christ’s sake at least get him a deckchair and put him out by the pool. He looks like the undead.’

Then Lemmy came strolling into the room. Don was right: he looked horrendous. We’d been out on the piss the night before, and his eyes were so red, they looked like puddles of blood.

But as soon as he saw me, he stopped dead in his tracks.

‘Fuck me, Ozzy,’ he said. ‘If I look half as bad as you do, I’m going back to bed, right now.’

When I finally got back to Bulrush Cottage at the end of 1981, I made a big effort to sort things out with Thelma. We even booked a holiday to Barbados with the kids.

Trouble is, if you’re a chronic alcoholic, Barbados isn’t the place to go. As soon as we got to the resort, I realised you could drink at the beach twenty-four hours a day. Which I saw as a challenge. We got there at five o’clock and I was legless by six. Thelma was used to seeing me pissed, but I was on another level altogether in Barbados.

All I remember is that at some point we bought tickets for a day trip around the bay on this olde worlde pirate ship. They had music and dancing and a walk-the-plank competition and all that kids’ stuff. Meanwhile, the big attraction for the adults was a barrel of rum punch they had at the ship’s bar. I just about jumped into that thing.

Every two minutes, it was glug-glug-glug.

After a few hours of that, I stripped down to my underpants, danced around the deck, then dived off the ship into these shark-infested waters. Unfortunately, I was too pissed to swim, so this big fucking Barbadian guy had to jump in after me and save my life. The last thing I remember is being hauled back on board and then falling asleep in the middle of the dance floor, still dripping wet. When the ship got back to the harbour, I was still there, dribbling and snoring. Apparently the captain came over and asked the kids, ‘Is that your dad?’ They went,

‘Yeah,’ then burst into tears.

Not exactly Father of the Year.

When we got on the plane to go home, Thelma turned to me and said, ‘This is the end, John. I want a divorce.’

I thought, Ah, she’s just pissed off because of the pirate ship incident. She’ll come to her senses.

But she never did.

When the plane landed at Heathrow, someone from Jet Records had organised a helicopter to pick me up and take me to a meeting about the Diary of a Madman tour. I said goodbye to the kids, kissed them on the heads, then Thelma looked at me for a long time.

‘It’s over, John,’ she said. ‘This time, it’s really over.’

I still didn’t believe her. I’d behaved so badly over the years, I thought she’d put up with anything. So I climbed into the helicopter and off I went to this country hotel, where Sharon was waiting with all these set designers and lighting technicians.

They led me into a conference room with a scale model of the Diary of a Madman stage in the middle of it.

It looked incredible.

‘The beauty of this stage,’ one of the technical guys told me, ‘is that it’s easy to carry, and easy to put together.’

‘It’s brilliant,’ I said. ‘Really brilliant. Now all we need is a midget.’

The idea had come to me in Barbados. Every night on the tour, halfway through ‘Goodbye to Romance’, we’d stage the execution of a midget. I’d shout, ‘Hang the bastard!’ or something like that, and this little guy would be hoisted up with a fake noose around his neck.

It would be magic.

So, before we went out on the road, we held midget auditions.

Now, most people don’t realise that little people who are in the entertainment business are all in competition for the same jobs, so they’re forever backstabbing each other. When you hold auditions, they’ll come walking in and say, ‘Oh, you don’t want to work with that last guy.

I did Snow White and the Seven with him a couple of years ago, and he’s a pain in the arse.’

It always cracked me up when a midget talked about being in Snow White and the Seven.

They’d say it with a completely straight face, too, like they thought it was some hip and cool underground thing to do.

After a few days of searching, we finally found just the right bloke for the job. His name was John Allen, and, funnily enough, he was an alcoholic. He’d get shitfaced after the gigs and start chasing groupies. He was paranoid, too. He carried this little penknife in a holster.

One day I asked him what it was for and he said, ‘Just in case the noose slips.’ I said, ‘You’re three feet tall and you’ll be dangling twenty feet off the ground, so what are you gonna do, cut the rope? You’ll end up like a fucking pancake!’

He was a funny guy, that John Allen. He had a completely normal-sized head, so he’d be sitting opposite you on a bar stool, and you’d forget that his feet couldn’t touch the ground.

But when he got loaded he’d lose his balance, so one moment he’d be there, and the next you’d hear this thump and he’d be on the floor. We used to play jokes on him all the fucking time. When we were on the tour bus, we’d wait until he passed out, then we’d put him on the highest bunk bed, so when he woke up he’d roll over and go, ‘Aarrgh!’ Splat.

He was as bad as me when it came to drinking. One time, he was so out of his shitter at Los Angeles airport that he missed his flight, so we had to send one of the roadies to pick him up. The roadie just grabbed him by the back of his trousers and threw him into the luggage compartment under the tour bus.

Then this woman came running over and shouted, ‘Hey, I saw what you did to that poor little man! You can’t treat him like that!’

The roadie just looked at her and said, ‘Fuck off. He’s our midget.’

Then this little head poked out from between the suitcases and went, ‘Yeah, fuck off, I’m his midget.’

When the tour started at the end of 1981, I was a wreck. I was in love with Sharon, but at the same time I was cut to pieces by losing my family. Then the fights between me and Sharon started to get even crazier than before. I’d get drunk and try to hit her, and she’d throw things at me. Wine bottles, gold discs, TVs—you name it, it would all come flying across the room. I ain’t proud to admit that a few of my punches reached their target. I gave her a black eye once and I thought her dad was gonna rip me into pieces. But he just said, ‘Watch yourself.’ It’s shameful, what I did when I was loaded. The fact that I ever raised my hand against a woman disgusts me. It was a fucking atrocious, unforgivable way to behave, and there’s no excuse for it, ever. And like I said before, it’s something I’ll take to the grave with me. I don’t know why Sharon stuck around, to be honest with you.

Sometimes she’d wake up in the morning and I’d be gone, ’cos I’d hitchhiked back to Bulrush Cottage. But every time I got home, Thelma would tell me to fuck off. That went on for weeks. It was fucking me up, fucking up the kids, fucking up Thelma.

And I can only imagine what it was doing to Sharon.

It took me a long, long time to get over the break-up with Thelma. It tore me apart. I’ve said to my kids, ‘I don’t want you to think I jumped away from you and clicked my heels and said, “bon voyage”. It wasn’t like that at all. It just about destroyed me.’

But eventually my little trips to Bulrush Cottage ended. The last time I went there it was pissing it down with rain and already getting dark. As soon as I walked through the gate, this heavy-set bloke popped out of nowhere and said, ‘Oi, where d’you think you’re going, eh?’

‘This is my house,’ I told him.

The bloke shook his head. ‘No it ain’t. This is your ex-wife’s house. And you’re not allowed within fifty yards of it. Court order. If you take one step further, you’re spending the night in jail.’

He must have been a bailiff or something.

From the garden, I could hear Thelma laughing inside the house. She was with her divorce lawyer, I think.

‘Can I at least get some clothes?’ I asked.

‘Wait here.’

Five minutes later, some of my old stage clothes came flying out of the door and landed on the grass. By the time I’d picked them up and stuffed them into a carrier bag they were soaked through. Then the door opened again, and out came my seven-foot-tall stuffed grizzly bear, his head in shreds after the time I opened fire on him with the Benelli. That bear was pretty much the only thing I got out of that divorce, along with the knackered old Merc that the cats had scratched up. Thelma got the house, every last penny I had in the bank, and a weekly allowance. I also wanted to pay for the kids to go to private schools. It was the least I could do.

I felt terribly sorry for myself that night.

Trying to carry a seven-foot bear back to London didn’t exactly make things easier. It wouldn’t fit in the cab with me, so I had to order a second cab, just for the bear. Then I had to leave it propped up against a bus stop on the street outside Sharon’s house on Wimbledon Common while I carried my bags into the hallway. But instead of going back out to get the bear, me and Sharon decided that it would be funnier to put one of her frilly kitchen aprons on it, and then get her friends to come outside and see it. But while we were trying to organise all that, someone nicked the fucking thing. I was heartbroken. I loved that bear.

As for the kids, once the damage is done with a divorce, you can’t ever make it right, although we’ve since become close again. And divorce was a much bigger deal back then.

In LA today, if your marriage breaks up, your wife will marry me, and I’ll marry your ex-wife, and we’ll all have fucking dinner and holidays in Mexico together. That ain’t cool with me. I don’t understand how people can do that. I haven’t seen Thelma for decades.

And, to be honest with you, I think it’s for the best.

By the time we took the Diary of a Madman tour to America, we were experts at midget-hanging. But there were some other problems with the show—like the medieval chain-mail suit I used to wear during a few of the numbers. As soon as I worked up a sweat, it was like being wrapped in razor blades. By the end of the night, I was carved up like a slice of roast beef. We also had a lot of trouble with our stage props. For example, we had these kabuki curtains that dropped down from above the stage in two parts, instead of parting in the middle like normal theatrical curtains do. The curtains would go down halfway through the show, and then when they were pulled up again, this mechanical arm with a giant God-like hand on the end of it would come out from under the drum riser and soar above the audience, with me crouching down in the palm. When the arm was fully extended, flames would shoot out of one of the fingers, and I’d stomp on this pedal by my foot, which would activate a catapult behind me, and about fifty pounds of raw meat would be flung into the audience.

Then I’d stand up and shout, ‘ROCK ’N’ ROLL!’

It was fucking awesome.

But, of course, what can go wrong will go wrong—and pretty much everything went wrong on the second night of the US tour. It was New Year’s Eve, and we were at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and Sports Arena, playing to a crowd of tens of thousands. First the smoke machine went on the blink. It was coughing out so much dry ice that no one could see what the fuck they were doing. Then, for some reason, one of the kabuki curtains wouldn’t come down, so we couldn’t get the giant God-like hand ready for its entrance. I remember standing there in my chain-mail suit, watching as Sharon literally swung from this curtain, trying to get it to fall. ‘Drop, you bastard, drop!’ she was screaming.

Eventually, after a couple of roadies joined in, they got the thing unstuck. But then the mechanical arm for the hand got caught up in the carpet on the floor of the stage and started to pull it from under the giant speaker cabinets behind the band, making them wobble like crazy. ‘TIMBER!’ one of the roadies shouted. For what might have been the longest thirty seconds of all our lives, Sharon, my assistant Tony and a bunch of roadies were wrestling with this carpet, trying to untangle it from the mechanical arm, to stop the whole fucking set collapsing.

Finally the carpet was pulled free, someone gave me a shove from behind, the kabuki curtains went up again, and before I knew it I was crouching down in the hand as it rose into the air, with this ocean of screaming kids below me. By that time I was convinced that something else was going to go wrong. So when the arm was fully extended, I covered my eyes and prepared to get my nuts blown off by the pyro, but the flames shot out of the finger without a problem. I was so relieved I almost wept. Then it was time for the final gimmick, so I stomped on the pedal beside my foot to activate the catapult. But what I didn’t know was that some dip-shit from the stage crew had set the catapult the previous night rather than just before the show, so the elastic had gone all limp. When I pressed the button, it just went phut, and instead of this massive payload of pigs’ bollocks and cows’ entrails flying into the audience, it smacked me at 20 mph in the back of the head. The last thing I remember is screaming

‘Aaaarrgh!’ and feeling all this blood and innards dribbling down the back of my neck.

The crowd thought it was all part of the show and went fucking wild.

It became one of our trademarks, throwing butchers’ off-cuts into the audience. As well as the catapult, we used to get the midget to come on stage with buckets of innards and throw them into the audience before he was hung. It was our version of the custard-pie fights I used to love seeing on telly when I was a kid. But then the audience got involved, and the fans started to bring their own meat, and throw it at us. When we finished a gig, it looked like the Trail of fucking Tears. You’d never get that kind of shit past health and safety today.

And it was amazing how quickly it got out of control.

One time this cop came up to me after a show and said, ‘Have you any idea what you’re doing to the youth of America?’

Then he showed me this Polaroid photograph of a kid in the queue outside the gig with an ox’s head on his shoulders.

‘Holy crap,’ I said. ‘Where did he get that from?’

‘He killed it on his way to the gig.’

‘Well, I hope he was hungry.’

It was insane what the kids would bring. It started with just cuts of meat, but then it moved on to entire animals. We had dead cats, birds, lizards, all kinds of stuff. One time, someone threw this huge bullfrog on to the stage, and it landed on its back. The fucking thing was so big, I thought it was someone’s baby. I got a terrible fright. I started screaming, ‘WHAT’S THAT? WHAT’S THAT? WHAT’S THAT?’ Then it rolled over and hopped away.

With every gig, it just got crazier and crazier. Eventually people started to throw things on stage with nails and razor blades embedded in them—joke shop stuff, mainly, like rubber snakes and plastic spiders. Some of the crew started to get freaked out about it, especially after a real snake ended up on stage one night. It was well and truly pissed off about being on stage with Ozzy Osbourne, that snake was. One of the roadies caught it with one of those big nets on a stick you use to clean swimming pools.

Tony—who had a small walk-on part in the show—was the jumpiest when it came to the creepy-crawlies. Basically, all he had to do was put on this suit of armour and bring me a drink on stage during a break while the scenery was changed. But it took the poor bloke about half an hour to get the suit on and off, and he spent the whole time shitting himself about something being thrown at him. So one night, just to wind him up, I threw a rubber snake in his direction, and when he jumped backwards, one of the roadies dropped a piece of string down his back. Tony went mental. He had that suit of armour off in about three seconds, until he was standing there with nothing on but these grey tights. He was so freaked out I swear his voice went up by three octaves.

It brought the house down.

I’m telling you: something crazy happened on every night of that tour.

And then on January 20, 1982 we played the Veterans Auditorium in Des Moines, Iowa. I’ll never forget the name of that place, that’s for sure. Or how to pronounce it: ‘DEE-Moyn’.

The gig was going great. The God-like hand was working without any hitches. We’d already hung the midget.

Then, from out of the audience came this bat.

Obviously a toy, I thought.

So I held it up to the lights and bared my teeth while Randy played one of his solos. The crowd went mental.

Then I did what I always did when we got a rubber toy on stage.

CHOMP.

Immediately though, something felt wrong. Very wrong.

For a start, my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid, with the worst aftertaste you could ever imagine. I could feel it staining my teeth and running down my chin.

Then the head in my mouth twitched.

Oh, fuck me I thought. I didn’t just go and eat a fucking bat, did I?

So I spat out the head, looked over into the wings, and saw Sharon with her eyes bulging, waving her hands, screaming, ‘NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IT’S REAL, OZZY, IT’S REAL!’

Next thing I knew I was in a wheelchair, being rushed into an emergency room. Meanwhile, a doctor was saying to Sharon, ‘Yes, Miss Arden, the bat was alive. It was probably stunned from being at a rock concert, but it was definitely alive. There’s a good chance Mr Osbourne now has rabies. Symptoms? Oh, y’know, malaise, headache, fever, violent twitches, uncontrollable excitement, depression, a pathological fear of liquids…’

‘Not much chance of that,’ muttered Sharon.

‘Mania is usually one of the final symptoms. Then the patient gets very lethargic, falls into a coma, and stops breathing.’

‘Oh my God.’

‘That’s why eating a bat is generally a bad idea, from a medical standpoint.’

‘Isn’t there a vaccine?’

‘It’s usually best administered beforehand, but, yes, we can give him a shot. A few shots, actually.’

Then the doctor went to get a syringe the size of a grenade launcher.

‘OK, Mr Osbourne,’ he said. ‘You’ll need to take off your pants and bend over.’

I did as he said.

‘This might sting a bit.’

That was the last thing I heard.

Every night for the rest of the tour I had to find a doctor and get more rabies shots: one in each arse cheek, one in each thigh, one in each arm. Every one hurt like a bastard. I had more holes in me than a lump of fucking Swiss cheese. But it was better than getting rabies, I suppose. Not that anyone would have noticed the difference if I’d gone insane. Meanwhile, the press were going nuts. The next morning, I was the ‘And finally…’ item on just about every news show on the planet. Everyone thought I’d bitten the head of a bat on purpose, instead of it being a simple misunderstanding. For a while, I was worried we might be closed down, and a couple of venues did go ahead and ban us. The fans didn’t help, either. After they heard about the bat, they started bringing even crazier stuff to the gigs. Going on stage was like being at a butchers’ convention.

And, of course, the animal rights people were going nuts. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals sent people to ‘monitor’ our gigs. The crew would fuck with them all the time. They’d say, ‘Oh, Ozzy’s going to throw eighteen puppies into the audience tonight, and he won’t sing a note until they’ve all been slaughtered.’

The ASPCA believed every word of it.

They even pulled over our tour bus in Boston. I remember all these do-gooders jumping on and seeing Sharon’s Yorkshire terrier—Mr Pook—and having a fit. One of the guys shouted, ‘OK, this bus isn’t going any further. I want that dog taken into protective custody.

Now!’

What did they think was going to happen? That we were going to start mowing down Yorkshire terriers with a machine-gun halfway through ‘You Lookin’ at Me Lookin’ at You’?

A few nights later, we were playing Madison Square Garden in New York. The whole place stank of shit. It turned out that they’d had a circus in there the week before, and the animals were still locked in their cages underneath the bleachers at the back. One of the venue managers came over and invited the crew to see them. But as soon as he saw me, he went, ‘I didn’t mean you.’

‘Why not?’ I said.

‘You can’t be trusted around animals.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

‘What the fuck do you think I’m going to do?’ I asked him. ‘Bite the head off an elephant?’

If you’d asked anyone on the Diary of a Madman crew which member of the band might not make it through the tour—me, Randy, Rudy or Tommy—they’d have put all their money on me.

Like the song said, the way I was boozing was a kind of suicide. It was only gonna be a matter of time.

Sharon was convinced something bad would happen. So whenever I’d been drinking in the hotel, she’d steal all my clothes, so there was no way I could leave and get into any trouble—unless I was prepared to walk down to the lobby stark bollock naked.

It worked, most of the time.

But then we got to San Antonio, Texas. As usual, I got shit-faced in the hotel. And, as usual, Sharon nicked my clothes. But she made the mistake of leaving one of her evening gowns in the room. It was this dark green frilly thing, and with a bit of ripping and tearing at the seams I got it on. Then I found some running shoes, and I was off.

So there I was in Sharon’s evening dress, on the loose, slinging this bottle of Courvoisier around the streets of San Antonio, looking for trouble. I think we might have had a photo shoot going on that day, but I can’t remember for sure. I do know that I was blasted. Then I got this sudden urge to take a piss, as you do when you’re blasted. Actually, it was more than an urge: my bladder felt like a hot cannon ball. I had to go, right there, right then. But I was in the middle of this strange town in Texas, and I didn’t have a clue where the public bogs were.

So I looked around, found a quiet corner, and started taking a slash against this crumbly old wall.

Ahhhh. That’s better.

Then I heard this voice behind me.

‘You disgust me.’

‘What?’ I turned around to see this old timer in a cowboy hat, staring at me like I’d just molested his gran.

‘You’re a disgrace, d’ya know that?’

‘My girlfriend nicked my clothes,’ I explained. ‘What else was I supposed to fucking wear?’

‘It ain’t the dress, you limey faggot piece o’ dirt. That wall you’re relieving yourself on is the Alamo!’

‘The Aalawot?’

Before he could answer, two fat Texan coppers came puffing around the corner, radios crackling.

‘That’s the one,’ said the old bloke. ‘Him… in the dress.’

BAM!

I was face down in the dirt, being handcuffed.

It took a moment for it all to click. I’d definitely heard of the Alamo—I’d seen the John Wayne movie a few times. So I knew it was this big-deal place where lots of Americans had been killed while they were fighting the Mexicans. But I hadn’t made the connection between the old wall I was pissing on and the ruins of a sacred national monument.

‘You’re a Brit, ain’tcha?’ one of the cops said to me.

‘So?’

‘Well, how would you feel if I urinated on Buckingham Palace, huh?’

I gave it some thought. Then I said to him, ‘I’ve no idea. I don’t fucking live there, do I?’

That went down a treat, that did.

Ten minutes later, I was sharing a jail cell with a 280 lb Mexican bloke who’d just murdered his wife with a brick, or some crazy shit. He must have thought he was hallucinating when he saw me show up in a green frock. I was thinking, Christ, he’s going to think I’m the ghost of his missus, and then he’s going to try to give her one last dick up the arse.

But all he did was grunt and stare.

I was in the cage for about three hours. Some of the cops and their friends came over to look at me. Maybe some of them had bought Blizzard of Ozz, I don’t know. But they gave me a pretty easy ride. They did me for public intoxication, instead of the more heavy-duty desecration of a venerated object, which would have meant a year in the slammer. And they let me out in time for the gig. Although the chief came down personally to tell me that, as soon as the show was over, I had to leave town and never show my ugly mug again.

That one piss cost me a fortune in lost San Antonio gigs over the years. And rightly so; I suppose: pissing on the Alamo wasn’t the cleverest thing I’d ever done. It wasn’t so much like pissing on Buckingham Palace as pissing on one of the monuments at a Normandy beach.

Unforgivable. A few years later, I apologised in person to the Mayor, promised never to do it again, and donated ten grand to the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. He let me play in the town again after that, although it took more than a decade for it to happen.

When I finally went back, I remember this scrawny Mexican kid coming up to me after the show.

‘Ozzy, is it true you got busted for pissing on the Alamo?’ he asked me.

‘Yeah,’ I told him. ‘It’s true.’

‘Shit, man,’ he said. ‘We piss on it every night on our way home.’

8. While I Was Sleeping

We were in the tour bus, on our way from Tennessee to

Florida, when Randy broke the news.

‘I don’t think I want to be a rock ’n’ roller any more,’ he said.

I waited for him to crack a smile. But he didn’t.

We were sitting at a little picnic table in the kitchen area of the bus, which was like a five-star hotel on wheels. It had TVs hanging from the ceiling, shag-pile carpets, air-conditioning, limo-style windows, a flash gold and white paint job, and—of course—a fully stocked bar.

I’d been drinking gin all night. After that bad scene at the Alamo, I’d gone easy on the Courvoisier for a while.

Randy was smoking fags and sipping from a can of Coke. He hardly touched the booze.

He only liked that horrible aniseed shit. What’s it called? Anisette. Like a thick, milky liqueur thing. Didn’t do drugs, either. Mind you, he made up for it with the fags. He could have won a gold medal in the Lung Cancer Olympics, could Randy Rhoads.

‘Are you joking with me?’ I said, trying not to choke on my drink.

‘No, Ozzy, I’m serious.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

It was long after midnight—maybe three or four in the morning—and me and Randy were the only ones still awake. Sharon was in the bedroom at the back. Rudy and Tommy were sprawled out on the bunks, along with some of the crew members who travelled with us, like Rachel Youngblood, an older black lady who did all our wardrobe, hair and make-up.

I was amazed they could sleep, ’cos the bus was rattling and shaking and groaning like it was gonna fall to pieces. It was a seven-hundred-mile journey from Knoxville to Orlando, and the driver was going like the clappers. I remember looking out of the window at all the headlamps of the cars and trucks flying past in the other direction and thinking, Any minute now, the wheels are gonna come off this thing. I had no idea that the driver had a nose full of coke.

I only found that out later from the coroner’s report.

Mind you, I had no idea about anything, me. I was out of my skull with all the booze and the coke and the fuck-knows-what-else I was shoving down my throat, twenty-four hours a day.

But I knew I didn’t want Randy to leave.

‘How could you quit now?’ I said to him. ‘We’ve only just broken through, man. Sharon says Diary of a Madman might sell even more copies than Blizzard. It’s going fucking gangbusters all over the world. Tomorrow night we’re playing with Foreigner!’

Randy just shrugged and said, ‘I want to go to university. Get a degree.’

‘Are you mad?’ I said. ‘Keep this up for a couple of years and you can buy your own fucking university.’

At least that made him smile.

‘Look,’ I went on. ‘You’re just knackered. Why don’t you get some rest, give yourself a bit of a break, y’know?’

‘I could say the same thing to you, Ozzy.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘That’s your fourth bottle of gin in twenty-four hours.’

‘Keeps me happy.’

‘Ozzy, why do you drink so much? What’s the point?’

The right answer to that question was: because I’m an alcoholic; because I have an addictive personality; because whatever I do, I do it addictively. But I didn’t know any of that back then.

All I ever knew was that I wanted another drink.

So I just gave Randy a blank look.

‘You’ll kill yourself, y’know?’ said Randy. ‘One of these days.’

‘Goodnight Randy,’ I said, draining my glass. ‘I’m off to bed.’

When I opened my eyes a few hours later, it was getting light. Sharon was lying next to me in her dressing-gown. My head felt like a pile of toxic shit.

I couldn’t understand why I’d woken up so early. The gin should have knocked me out until at least mid-afternoon.

Then I heard the noise.

It sounded like an engine at full revs. I thought we must have been overtaking a truck.

BBBBBBRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRMMMM…

Whatever it was that was making the din seemed to move away from the bus, but then all of a sudden it came back, even louder than before

B B B B B B R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M M B B B B B B R R R R R R R R R R R R R R R M M M M M M M M M…

‘Sharon?’ I said. ‘What the fuck is that noi—’

Then my head smashed into the bed frame as all the windows of the bus exploded.

I could smell fuel.

For a second, there was nothing but blackness.

Next thing I know I’m looking out of the porthole-shaped window next to my left arm. I can see black smoke and people with their heads in their hands, screaming. So I jump out of bed—stark bollock naked apart from a pair of greasy old underpants—and force open the bedroom door. There are tiny fragments of glass everywhere, and a fucking massive hole in the roof. Then I notice that the entire bus has been bent into a V-shape.

The first thing that comes into my head is that the driver must have lost control on the freeway. We must have crashed.

Then I’m coughing from the stench of the fuel and the smoke from the fire outside.

And I think: Fire and fuel. Oh, fuck.

‘EVERYONE GET OFF THE FUCKING BUS!’ I start to shout. ‘IT’S GONNA BLOW! IT’S GONNA BLOW!’

Panic.

Numb legs.

Sharon screaming.

I was still sozzled from the gin. My head was throbbing. My eyes were all crusty and raw. I looked for an emergency exit, but there wasn’t one. So I ran to the open door at the front of the bus instead, pulling Sharon along behind me. Then I looked around for the others, but all the bunks were empty. Where the fuck had everyone else gone? Where the hell was Randy?

I jumped out of the bus and landed on grass.

Grass?

At that point I thought I must have been dreaming.

Where was the road? Where were the cars? I’d expected to see twisted metal, blood, spinning hub-caps. But we were parked in the middle of a field, surrounded by a bunch of over-the-top, coke-dealer-style mansions. I saw a sign that said, ‘Flying Baron Estates’. Then, next to one of the houses, a gigantic fireball—like something from the set of a James Bond film. That’s where all the smoke was coming from. There was wreckage strewn around it. And what looked like…

Oh, Jesus Christ. I almost threw up when I saw that shit.

I had to turn away.

Aside from the smoke, it was a clear day—but it was early, so there was still a kind of muggy haze in the air.

‘Where are we? What’s happening?’ I kept saying, over and over. I’d never felt so totally fucking out-of-it in my life. It was worse than the worst acid trip I’d ever had. Then I noticed what looked like an air strip and a hangar. Next to the hangar, a woman in riding gear was walking next to a horse, like nothing had happened—like this was an everyday fucking occurrence. I was thinking, This is a nightmare, I’m dreaming, this can’t be real.

I stood there, in a trance, while our keyboard player, Don Airey, ran back to the bus, grabbed a miniature fire extinguisher from somewhere, jumped off the bus, then pointed it in the direction of the flames.

It spluttered and dribbled uselessly.

Meanwhile, Sharon was trying to do a head count, but people were scattered all over the field. They were just pointing at the flames and wailing and sobbing.

Now I could make out the remains of a garage around the flames. It looked as though there were two cars inside.

Something must have crashed into it.

And whatever it was must also have ripped the hole in our tour bus and taken out half the trees behind it.

Then Sharon went over to Don—‘El-Doom-O’, we used to call him, ’cos he was always expecting the worst—and screamed, ‘What happened? Tell me, what the fuck happened?’

But Don was crouched down in a ball and couldn’t talk. So Sharon turned to Jake Duncan, our Scottish tour manager. But he couldn’t say anything, either. Next thing I knew, Sharon took off her shoe and just started beating Jake around the head with it.

‘Where are Randy and Rachel? Where are Randy and Rachel?’

All Jake could do was point towards the flames.

‘I don’t understand,’ Sharon said. ‘I don’t understand.’

I didn’t understand, either. Nobody had said, ‘Oh, by the way, Ozzy, on the way to Orlando, we’re gonna stop off at a bus depot in Leesburg to fix the air conditioning.’ Nobody had said, ‘Oh, and by the way, Ozzy, the bus depot is part of this dodgy housing estate with an air strip.’ Nobody had said, ‘Oh, yeah, and your driver—who’s been up all night, out of his mind on cocaine—also happens to be pilot with an expired medical certificate who’s going to borrow some bloke’s plane without his permission and then, while you’re fast asleep, take your lead guitarist and your make-up artist on a sight-seeing trip above the tour bus, before dive-bombing into it.’

Nobody had said anything like that at all.

Then the house next to the garage catches fire, and without even thinking I’m running towards it—still half-pissed, still in my underpants—to make sure no one’s inside. When I get to the front door, I knock, wait for about two seconds, then barge in.

In the kitchen an old bloke is making coffee. He almost falls off his chair when he sees me.

‘Who the hell are you?’ he says. ‘Get out of my house!’

‘There’s a fire!’ I shout at him. ‘Get out! Get out!’

The guy was clearly insane, ’cos he just picked up a broom from the corner and tried to push me away with it. ‘Get out of my house, you little bastard! Go on, fuggarf!’

‘YOUR FUCKING HOUSE IS ON FUCKING FIRE!’

‘GEDDOUT! GEDDOUT, GODAMMIT!’

‘YOUR HOUSE IS—’

Then I realised he was stone deaf. He wouldn’t have heard if the entire fucking planet had exploded. He certainly couldn’t hear a word this long-haired, raving English loony in his underpants was telling him. I couldn’t think what to do, so I just ran to the other side of the kitchen, where there was a door which led to the garage. I opened it, and the fucking thing practically blew off its hinges from the force of the fire.

The old bloke didn’t tell me to get out of his house again after that.

We only learned the full story much later. The bus driver was called Andrew C. Aycock.

Six years earlier, he’d been involved in a fatal helicopter crash in the United Arab Emirates.

Then he’d got a job working for the Calhoun Twins, a Country & Western act who owned the company that was doing the transportation for our tour. When we stopped at the bus depot to fix the air conditioning, Aycock decided to try his luck at flying again. So, without asking, he took a plane belonging to a mate of his.

Don and Jake were the first to go up with him. Everything was fine: the take-off and landing went smoothly. Then it was Randy and Rachel’s turn. There’s a photograph of the two of them standing beside the plane, just before they got on. They’re both smiling. I saw it once, but I could never look at it again. I’m told that Rachel agreed to go up only after Aycock promised not to pull any stunts while they were in the air. If he promised her that, he was a fucking liar as well as a coked-up lunatic: everyone on the ground said he buzzed the tour bus two or three times before the wing clipped the roof a few inches from where me and Sharon were sleeping. But the most insane thing—and the one fact I still can’t get my head around, nearly thirty years later—is that the bloke was going through a heavy-duty divorce at the time, and his soon-to-be-ex missus was standing right next to the bus when he crashed the plane into it.

He’d picked her up at one of the tour venues, apparently, and was giving her a ride home.

A ride home? The woman he was divorcing?

At the time, there was a lot of talk that he might have been trying to kill her, but who the fuck knows? Whatever he was trying to do, he came down so low that even if he’d managed to miss the tour bus, he would have hit the trees behind it.

Don watched the whole thing happen.

I feel bad for him, ’cos it must have been a terrible thing to see. When the wing hit the bus, Randy and Rachel were thrown through the windscreen, or so I was told. Then the plane—minus its wing—smashed into the trees behind, fell into the garage, and exploded. The fire was so intense, the cops had to use dental records to identify the bodies.

Even now I don’t like talking or thinking about it.

If I’d been awake, I would have been on that fucking plane, no question. Knowing me, I’d have been on the wing, pissed, doing handstands and backflips. But it makes no sense to me that Randy went up.

He hated flying.

A few weeks earlier, I’d been drinking with him in a bar in Chicago. We were about to take a ten-day break from the tour, and Randy was asking how long it would take him to drive from New York to Georgia, where we were starting up again. I asked why the fuck he would want to drive all the way from New York to Georgia when there was an invention called the aeroplane. He told me he’d been freaked out by the Air Florida plane that had crashed into a bridge in Washington a few days earlier. Seventy-eight people had died. So Randy wasn’t exactly the type of person to go clowning around in a bullshit four-seat piece of shit. He didn’t even want to get on a jet run by a big commercial airline.

Some weird fucking unexplained shit went on that morning, because Rachel didn’t like planes, either. She had a weak heart, so she would hardly have wanted to do a loop-the-fucking-loop. A lot of people say, ‘Oh, they were pissing around, typical fucking rock stars.’ I want to set the record straight: Rachel was in her late fifties and had a heart condition; Randy was a very level-headed guy and he was afraid of flying. None of it makes any sense.

By the time the fire engines arrived, the flames had already burned themselves out. Randy was gone. Rachel was gone. I finally put on some clothes and took a beer from what was left of the fridge in the bus. I couldn’t handle the situation. Sharon was running around trying to find a telephone. She wanted to call her father. Then the cops arrived. Good ol’ boy types.

They weren’t too sympathetic.

‘Ozzy Ozz-Burn, huh?’ they said. ‘The bat-eating madman.’

We checked into some shithole called the Hilco Inn in Leesburg and tried to hide from the press while the police did their thing. We had to call Randy’s mum and Rachel’s best friend Grace, which was horrendous.

All of us wanted to get the fuck out of Leesburg, but we had to stay put until all the paperwork was done.

None of us could get our heads around the situation. Everything had been magic one minute, and the next it had taken such an ugly, tragic turn.

‘Y’know what? I think this is a sign that I ain’t supposed to do this any more,’ I said to Sharon.

By then I was having a total physical and mental breakdown. A doctor had to come over and shoot me up with sedatives. Sharon wasn’t doing much better. She was in a terrible state, poor Sharon. The one thing that gave us some comfort was a message from AC/DC saying,

‘If there’s anything we can do, let us know.’ That meant a lot to me, and I’ll always be grateful to them for it. You learn who your friends are when the shit hits the fan. In fact, AC/DC must have known exactly what we’d been going through, ’cos it had only been a couple of years since their singer Bon Scott had died from alcohol poisoning, also at a tragically young age.

The morning after the crash I called my sister Jean, who told me that my mother had been on a bus when she’d seen a newspaper stand with the headline, ‘OZZY OSBOURNE—AIR-CRASH DEATH’. My poor old mum had gone crazy. Then later that day, I went back to the dodgy housing estate with Randy’s brother-in-law. The bus was still there, twisted into the shape of a boomerang, next to the ruins of the garage. And there, in the corner, untouched in all the ash and rubble, was a perfect little cut-out section of the Gibson T-shirt that Randy had been wearing when he died. Just the logo, nothing else. I couldn’t believe it—it was so spooky.

Meanwhile, outside the hotel, all these kids had started to hang around. I noticed that some of them were wearing the Diary of a Madman tracksuits we’d had made for the tour, so I said to Sharon, ‘We’re not selling those things, are we?’ When she said ‘no’, I walked up to this kid and asked, ‘Where did you get the tracksuit from?’

He said, ‘Oh, I went in and got it off the bus.’

I went fucking crazy. Almost ripped his head off.

Eventually all the paperwork was done—the only drug they found in Randy’s body was nicotine—and the cops let us leave. They were glad to see us go, I imagine.

Then we had to do two funerals in one week, and it was fucking heavy-duty on all of us, especially Sharon, who suffered terribly. She couldn’t even listen to the Diary of a Madman album again for years.

Randy’s funeral was held at the First Lutheran Church in Burbank. I was one of the pallbearers. They had big pictures of Randy all around the altar. I remember thinking: It’s only been a few days since I was sitting on the bus with him, calling him mad for wanting to go to university. I felt so bad. Randy was one of the greatest guys who’d ever been in my life. And I suppose I felt guilty, too, because if he hadn’t been in my band, he wouldn’t have died. I don’t know how Randy’s mother survived the funeral—she must be some kind of woman. Her little baby had died. She was divorced, Delores was, so her kids meant everything to her. And Randy really loved her—he absolutely adored her. For years after, every time me and Sharon used to see Dee, we felt terrible. I mean, what can you say? It’s gotta be any parent’s worst nightmare when they lose their child like that.

After the service there was a motorcade from Burbank to San Bernardino, about an hour away. Randy was laid to rest at a place called Mountain View Cemetery, where his grandparents were buried. I made a vow there and then to honour his death every year by sending flowers. Unlike most of my vows, I kept it. But I’ve never been back to his graveside. I’d like to go there again one day, before I finally join him on the other side.

Rachel’s funeral couldn’t have been more different. It was at a black gospel church somewhere in South LA. She was very big on her church, Rachel was. And during the service they’re all singing gospel and diving on the floor and shouting, ‘Jesus Loves You, Rachel!’ I’m thinking, What the fuck’s all this about? It’s a joyous experience, an African-American funeral.

There’s no moping around.

The following week I did the David Letterman show. It was surreal, man. As soon as I’d sat down and the band stopped playing, Dave said to me, ‘Let’s just get right to it, Ozzy. From what I hear, you bit the head off a…’

I couldn’t believe he was going there.

‘Oh, don’t,’ I said. But it was too late.

Dave was very cool with me overall—he was very nice, very sympathetic—but I was in no mood for the bat story. Shock is a very weird thing, and the funerals had been bad.

At the end of the interview, Dave said to me, ‘I know that recently there’s been a personal and professional tragedy in your life. Quite honestly, I’m surprised that you went ahead with your commitment to be here, and I appreciate that, and I know you want to take a minute to explain.’

‘All I can say is that I lost two of the greatest people in my life,’ I said, trying not to choke up. ‘But it ain’t gonna stop me because I’m about rock ’n’ roll, and rock ’n’ roll is for the people, and I love people, and that’s what I’m about. I’m going to continue because Randy would have liked me to, and so would Rachel, and I’m not going to stop, ’cos you can’t kill rock ’n’ roll.’

If it sounds a bit over-the-top, it’s ’cos I was as pissed as a fart. It was the only way I could function.

In private, I wasn’t so sure that you couldn’t kill rock ’n’ roll. ‘It’s not meant to be,’ I kept telling Sharon. ‘Let’s call it a day.’

But she wasn’t having any of it. ‘No, we are not calling it a day. This is what you’re meant to do, Ozzy. Nothing’s gonna stop us.’ If Sharon hadn’t given me that speech a few times, I’d never have gone on a stage again.

I don’t know who started making the calls to find a new guitarist. Sharon was a mess, totally distraught, so maybe her father’s office organised it from LA. But eventually the search became a welcome distraction, a way to take our minds off things. I remember at one point I phoned Michael Schenker, the German guy who had played with UFO. He was like, I’ll do you this favour, but I want a private jet, and I want this, and I want that. I said to him, ‘Why are you stipulating your demands at this point? Just get me though the next show and we’ll talk about it.’ But he just kept saying, Oh, I’ll need this and I’ll need that. So in the end I said, ‘Y’know what? Go fuck yourself.’

He’s nuts anyway, Schenker, so I don’t hold it against him.

Our first stand-in was Bernie Tormé, a tall, blond Irish guy who had played with Ian Gillan’s band. Bernie was in an impossible situation, trying to take Randy’s place, but he couldn’t have been more helpful. Having been thrown in at the deep end, he did an incredible job for a few nights, before leaving to record with his own band. Next we hired Brad Gillis, from Night Ranger, and he got us through to the end of the tour.

I honestly don’t know how we did any of those gigs after Randy died. We were all in a state of shock. But I suppose being on the road was better than sitting around at home, thinking about the two incredible people we’d lost, and how we’d never get them back.

A few weeks after Randy died, I asked Sharon to marry me. ‘If there’s one good thing that could come out of all the shit we’ve been through on this tour,’ I told her, ‘it would be making you my wife.’

She said yes. So I put a ring on her finger, and we set a date.

Then the booze wore off and I changed my mind.

After everything that had gone down with Thelma, I was terrified of going through it all again. But then I got over the fear. I was in love with Sharon, and I knew I didn’t want anyone else. So, a few weeks later, I proposed again.

‘Will you marry me?’ I asked her.

‘Fuck off.’

‘Please?’

‘No.’

‘Please?’

‘All right then, yes.’

It went on like that for months. We had more engagements than most people have wedding guests. After the first one, it was usually Sharon who called them off. One time, when we were driving to a meeting in LA, she threw her ring out of the car window ’cos I hadn’t come home the night before. So I went out and bought her another one. Then I got pissed and lost it, but I didn’t realise until after I’d got down on one knee.

So that one was a non-starter.

But a couple of days later, I bought her another ring and we got engaged yet again. But then I was walking home after a twenty-four-hour bender, and I passed a graveyard. There was one freshly dug grave with a bunch of flowers on top. Beautiful flowers, actually. So I nicked them and gave them to Sharon when I got home. She almost burst into tears, she found it so touching.

Then she made this little sobbing noise and went, ‘Oh, Ozzy, and you even wrote me a note, how sweet!’

Suddenly I was thinking: What note? I can’t remember writing any note.

But it was too late. Sharon was already opening up the envelope and pulling out the card.

‘In loving memory of our dearest Harry,’ it said.

That was another ring out of the fucking window.

And I got a black eye, for good measure.

I proposed to her seventeen times in the end. You could track me home by the trail of rings. They weren’t fucking cheap, either. But they got a lot cheaper as time went on, that’s for sure.

Then, as soon as I’d signed the decree-whatever-the-fuck-it’s-called to make my divorce with Thelma official, Sharon chose July 4 as our wedding day—so I’d never forget the anniversary.

‘At least it’s not the first of May,’ I said to her.

‘Why?’

‘That’s the date Thelma chose so I’d never forget the anniversary.’

With things getting serious with Sharon, she started to get heavy with me about all the cocaine I was doing. She was fine with the booze, but the coke—no way. The fact that our psycho bus driver had been high on coke when he killed Randy and Rachel made it even worse.

Every time I took the stuff, I’d get a bollocking—to the point where I had to start hiding it from her.

But that caused even more problems.

One time, we were staying in one of the bungalows at the Howard Hughes house, and I’d just bought this eight-ball—an eighth of an ounce of coke—from my dealer.

‘This stuff’s gonna knock your head off,’ the bloke had told me.

As soon as I got back to the bungalow I went over to the bookshelves and hid the plastic bag inside this hardback novel. ‘Third shelf up, six books to the left,’ I kept repeating, so I’d remember. I was planning to save it for a special occasion, but that night I was having a bit of a bad comedown, so I decided to have a little toot. I made sure that Sharon was asleep, tiptoed out of the bedroom, went over to the bookshelves, counted three up and six across, then opened up the novel. No coke. Fuck.

Maybe it was six shelves up and three books from the left?

Still no coke.

So I sneaked out of the bungalow and knocked on the window of the room where Tommy was staying. ‘Pssst!’ I whispered. ‘Hey, Tommy! Are you awake, man? I can’t find the fucking coke.’

The second I said that, there was this clattering noise behind me.

Sharon had flung open the window of our bungalow.

‘IS THIS WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR, YOU FUCKING DRUG ADDICT?’ she shouted, emptying the bag of coke on to a sheet of paper.

‘Sharon,’ I said. ‘Be cool. Don’t do anything cra—’

But then she goes puff, and blows all the coke into the garden.

Before I even have time to react, Sharon’s Great Dane comes lolloping out from his kennel, and starts licking up the coke from the grass like it’s the best thing he’s ever tasted in his life. I’m thinking, This ain’t gonna be good news. Then the dog’s tail goes straight out—BOING!—and he takes this enormous shit. I’ve never seen such a big shit in my life, and it goes all over the water fountain in the courtyard. Then the dog takes off. He’s a fucking huge dog, this Great Dane, so when he runs he does some damage, knocking over plant pots, denting cars, trampling over flower beds, but he keeps it up for three days and three nights straight, his tongue hanging out, his tail still standing on end.

By the time the coke wore off, I swear the dog had lost four pounds. He’d developed a bit of a taste for the old waffle dust, too.

He was always trying to sniff it out after that.

We got married in Hawaii on the way to a gig in Japan. It was a small ceremony on the island of Maui. Don Arden showed up, but only because he wanted Sharon to sign some paper-work. My mum and my sister Jean came, too. Tommy was my best man. The funny thing about getting married in America was that we needed to get a blood test before they’d give us a licence. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the bloke from the lab had called back and said,

‘Mr Osbourne, we appear to have found some blood in your alcohol.’

There was a lot of drinking at that wedding, not to mention seven bottles of Hennessy in the wedding cake. If you’d been breathalysed after eating a slice of that stuff, you’d have gone to jail. And I was smoking some killer weed, too.

‘Maui-wowy’, the local dealer called it.

The stag night was a joke. I got so fucked up in the hotel, I missed it. There’s a photograph of me crashed out in the room as everyone’s getting ready to leave. Fucking classic.

The wedding night was even worse. I didn’t even make it back to the room to spend the night with my new wife. At five in the morning, the hotel manager had to call her room and say, ‘Will you please come and get your husband. He’s asleep in the corridor and blocking the maids.’

It wasn’t long after I almost pissed in my new father-in-law’s face that he stopped calling me Ozzy. He took to calling me ‘Vegetable’ instead. As in, ‘Fuck off, Vegetable,’ or, ‘Die, Vegetable,’ or, ‘Get out of my fucking house, right now, Vegetable.’ I could understand why the bloke was upset—no one likes to get piss splashed in their direction—but I thought that was a bit much.

Mind you, it was nothing compared with how he’d talk to Sharon. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have your own father say such fucking horrific things to you, but Sharon could take it. She was unbelievably tough like that. And I suppose she was just used to it.

Most of the time it was me who got upset. I’d sit there and ask myself, How can a human being even come up with that shit? Never mind say it to their own flesh and blood. It was just the vilest stuff, from the depths of the lowest places.

Then, the next thing you knew, they were friends again.

That’s how Sharon was raised—and why she’s so extreme. But I needed someone like her in my life, because she could stand up to me. In fact, standing up to me was nothing compared with standing up to her father.

In the end, what happened between Sharon and her old man was tragic. At the time, I was too out of it on booze and drugs to know exactly what went down, and it’s not my place to say much about it now. All I know is that Sharon found out that Don was having an affair with a girl younger than she was; that we left Jet Records, which made Don go apeshit; and that we had to pay him $1.5 million to buy out our contract and stop him bankrupting us with lawsuits.

There had always been bad blood between the two of them, but it got out of control. Eventually, they stopped talking to each other altogether, and the silence continued for almost twenty years.

If any good came out of that situation, it was that we borrowed as much dough as we could to buy out all of my contracts, so that we weren’t controlled by anyone. I remember Sharon going in for a meeting with Essex Music and saying, ‘OK, how much do you want to fuck off? This is going to get ugly, because we’re not playing along any more. Just give us the number, and we’ll pay it.’

A week later, I had my own publishing company.

Meanwhile, Don might have thought I was a vegetable, but from the moment Sharon bought out my contract, he never stopped trying to get it back—usually by attempting to fuck up our marriage. He could be a really devious guy when he wanted to be, could my father-in-law. One time, for example, I was staying with Sharon at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and we’d rented this very conspicuous white Rolls-Royce Corniche to ride around town in. But then I got shitfaced, we had this crazy fight about something, and Sharon fucked off, saying she was going back to England. Literally two minutes after she walked out of the door, the phone rang. It was Don. ‘I need to talk to you, Veg… er, Ozzy,’ he said. ‘It’s urgent.’

Looking back, he must have had someone outside the hotel, looking out for Sharon driving the Roller by herself. Otherwise, how would he have known that I was alone? The last thing I wanted to do was talk to him, but I couldn’t say no. The guy was terrifying. If you believed the rumours, he kept a loaded gun in his desk.

So Don came over and started telling me the most vile things you could ever imagine about my wife. It was the most disgusting stuff I’d ever heard. It was inhuman, what he said.

And he was talking about his own daughter.

Eventually, he paused for breath, then asked me, ‘Did you know all that, Ozzy? Did you know what your wife’s really like?’

Obviously, he wanted me to go crazy, leave Sharon, return to Jet Records, and start over.

But I wasn’t gonna give him the pleasure.

He had no right to come to my room and make up all this horrendous bullshit about my wife. I didn’t believe a single fucking word of it. Anyway, whatever Sharon had done, it couldn’t have been any worse than what I’d done. And it certainly wasn’t anywhere near as bad as what Don himself was doing. But I thought that the best way to piss him off would be just to act like it was no big deal.

‘Yeah, Don,’ I said. ‘I know all that about Sharon.’

‘You do?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And?’

‘And what, Don? I love her.’

‘If you want to get the marriage annulled, we can always arrange that for you, y’know?’

‘No thanks, Don.’

I could never believe what that guy was willing to do to his own family. Years later, for example, we found out that when he’d been managing me—and before then, even—he’d used Sharon as a shield. All of his companies, credit cards, bank accounts and loans were in her name. Basically Don didn’t exist on paper, so if he didn’t pay his bills, he couldn’t be sued.

And that included his tax bills, which he just fucking ignored—in England and America. Which left Sharon on the hook for everything without her ever knowing it. Then one day, out of the blue, she got a letter from the IRS saying she owed them, big time. By the time they’d added up all the unpaid taxes, interest and penalties, it came to seven figures. Don had taken her to the fucking cleaners.

‘I don’t know what your father’s made of,’ I said to her, ‘because I could never do that to my children.’

It drove Sharon halfway round the bend, that tax bill.

In the end, I said, ‘Look, whatever you’ve got to pay, just pay it, because I don’t want to live another day with this fucking thing hanging over us. You can’t avoid tax, so just get it done, and we’ll cut back on our expenses and work around it.’ That kind of thing happens a lot in the music business. When Sammy Davis Jr died, I heard that he left his wife with a seven-million-dollar tax bill, which took her a fucking eternity to pay off.

And there ain’t nothing you can do about it. You’ve just got to put on a brave face and dig deep.

But it was worth going through all that bullshit with Don to get my freedom. All of a sudden I could do whatever I wanted, no matter what he said. Like when I was in New York one time and I met up with my lawyer, Fred Asis, a great guy, ex-military. He told me that he had a meeting later with another one of his clients, a band called Was (Not Was), who were going crazy because their lead singer hadn’t shown up at the studio for a session.

‘I’ll stand in for him, if you want,’ I said, half joking.

But Fred took it seriously. ‘OK, I’ll ask them,’ he said.

Next thing I know I’m in this studio in New York, doing a rap on this song called ‘Shake Your Head’. I had a right old laugh—especially when I heard the final version, which had all these hot young backing-singer chicks on it. I still love that song today. It’s funny, y’know, because I’d always admired the Beatles for starting out as a bubblegum pop group and then getting heavier and heavier as their albums went on, and here was me going in the opposite direction.

But it wasn’t until years later that I heard the full story. I was at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood, and Don Was was there. By that time he’d become one of the biggest producers in the music business, and Was (Not Was) were huge. I remember him rushing over to me and gasping, ‘Ozzy, I’ve gotta tell you something about that song we did, “Shake Your Head”. This is gonna blow your mind.’

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘Well, remember how we had all those backing singers on there?’

‘Yeah.’

‘One of them ended up going off on her own and making a few albums. You might have heard of her.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Madonna.’

I couldn’t believe it: I’d made a record with Madonna. I told Don to re-release it, but for whatever reason he couldn’t get clearance. So we ended up re-recording it, with Kim Basinger taking Madonna’s place.

I did quite a few duets back in the eighties. One with Lita Ford—‘Close My Eyes Forever’—ended up being a Top-Ten single in America. I even did a version of ‘Born to be Wild’ with Miss Piggy, but I was disappointed when I found out she wouldn’t be in the studio at the same time as me (maybe she’d found out about my job at the Digbeth slaughterhouse). I was just having some fun, y’know? It wasn’t about money. Although, after we bought out Don Arden and the publishers and had paid off our tax bills, the dough finally started to roll in. I remember opening an envelope from Colin Newman one morning, dreading another final demand.

Instead, there was a royalty cheque for $750,000.

It was the most money I’d ever had in my life.

After the divorce with Thelma went through, a part of me wanted to say to her, ‘Fuck you. Look at me—I’m fine.’

So I bought a house called Outlands Cottage in Stafford shire, not far from where she lived. It was a thatched house, and pretty much the first thing I did after moving in was to set the fucking roof on fire. Don’t ask me how I did it. All I remember is a fireman turning up in his truck, whistling through his teeth, and going to me, ‘Some house-warming party, eh?’ And then after he put the fire out, we got shitfaced together. Mind you, he might as well have let the place burn down, ’cos the smell of charred thatch is fucking horrendous, and it never went away after that.

Sharon hated Outlands Cottage from the get-go. She’d fuck off to London and wouldn’t want to come home. I suppose I’d half expected or wanted Thelma to call me up in tears and beg me to come back to her. She never did. Although she did call me once to say, ‘So, I see you got married again, YOU FUCKING ARSEHOLE,’ before slamming the phone down.

Eventually, I began to realise that as much as I loved being close to Jess and Louis, it was bad news, living around the corner from my ex-wife. At one point I even tried to buy back Bulrush Cottage. Then I made the mistake of taking Sharon with me when I went to see the kids.

It was fine until we dropped them off and went for a drink at a hotel. Then I got all pissed and sentimental. I told Sharon I never wanted to go back to America, that I missed my kids, that I missed living next to the Hand & Cleaver, that I wanted to retire. Then, when I refused to get in the car to go home—it was actually our accountant Colin Newman’s BMW, which we’d borrowed for the day—she went over the edge. She climbed into the driver’s seat, put it in gear, and floored the accelerator. It was fucking terrifying. I remember jumping out of the way and then legging it on to the lawn in front of the hotel. But Sharon just crashed the car through this flower bed and kept coming at me, with the wheels churning up all the grass and sending lumps of turf flying all over the place.

And it wasn’t just me she nearly killed.

I had this guy called Pete Mertens working for me at the time. He was an old schoolfriend—very skinny, very funny, used to wear these outrageous checked jackets all the time. Anyway, when Sharon drove through the flower bed, Pete had to throw himself into a rose bush to get out of the way. All I remember is him standing up, brushing off his jacket, and going,

‘Fuck this—this ain’t worth two hundred quid a week. I’m off.’ (Later, he changed his mind and came back. Working for us might have been dangerous, but at least it was interesting, I suppose.)

In the end, the hotel manager came out and someone called the police. By then, I was hiding in a hedge. So Sharon got out of the car, came over to the hedge, and threw all her rings and jewellery into it. Then she turned around, stomped away, and called for a taxi.

I was there the next day, smelly and hung over, sifting through the soil for a fifty-grand Tiffany’s rock.

There were some other wild times at Outlands Cottage, before I finally realised that Sharon was right, and that we should move. One night I met this very straitlaced bloke down the pub—an accountant, I think he was—but he came back to the cottage for a joint afterwards, and then passed out on the sofa. So while he was asleep I pulled off his clothes and threw them on the fire. The poor bloke woke up at six in the morning, stark bollock naked. Then I sent him home to his wife in one of my chain-mail suits. It still makes me laugh to this day, the thought of him clanking off towards his car, wondering how the fuck he’s gonna explain himself.

Another one of my favourite tricks at Outlands Cottage was to shave off people’s eyebrows while they were asleep. Believe me, there’s nothing funnier than a bloke with no eyebrows. People don’t realise that your eyebrows provide most of your facial expressions, so when they’re gone, it’s hard to show concern or surprise or any of those other basic human emotions. But it takes people a while to realise what’s wrong. At first, they just look in the mirror and think, Christ, I look like shit today. One guy I did it to ended up going to see his doctor, ’cos he couldn’t work out what the fuck was up.

I went through a period of giving the eyebrow treatment to everyone: agents, managers, roadies, assistants, friends, friends-of-friends. Whenever someone turned up to a management meeting with a face that didn’t look quite right, you knew they’d spent the weekend at my house.

Pete Mertens often ended up being an unwilling accomplice in my drunken practical jokes.

For example, one Christmas, I began to wonder what it would be like to get a dog pissed. So me and Pete got a piece of raw meat and put it at the bottom of a bowl of sherry, then we called over Sharon’s Yorkshire terrier—Bubbles, this one was called—and waited to see what would happen. Sure enough, Bubbles lapped up the bowl of sherry to get to the meat. Then about five minutes later he went cross-eyed and started to stumble around all over the place while howling along to the music we were playing. We’d done it: Bubbles was absolutely shitfaced. It was brilliant—until poor old Bubbles passed out in the middle of the living room. I was terrified that I’d killed him, so I pulled the fairy lights off the tree and wrapped them around his body, so I could tell Sharon he’d electrocuted himself by accident. But he was all right, thank God—although he had a nasty hangover the next morning, and he kept giving me these dirty looks, as if to say, ‘I know what you did, you bastard.’

Bubbles wasn’t the only animal who lived with us at Outlands Cottage. We also had a donkey called Sally—who used to sit in the living room with me and watch Match of the Day—and a Great Dane and a German shepherd. The thing I remember most about those dogs is the time I came home from the butchers’ with some pigs hooves. I put them in a jar on the kitchen table, thinking I could use them in a good old fry up, but when Sharon walked into the room, she gagged and went, ‘Ozzy, what the fuck is that smell? And what are those disgusting-looking things on the table?’ When I told her, she literally retched. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ozzy,’ she said, ‘I can’t eat that, feed them to the dogs.’ So I gave the hooves to the dogs, and they both started to look very unwell immediately. Then one puked while the other one hosed down the walls with shit.

Poor old Pete Mertons got to the point where he just couldn’t take it any more. He was living with us at the time, and the craziness was never-ending. The last straw for him was when I downed one too many sleeping pills after an all-night drinking session and had to be taken to hospital to get my stomach pumped. When the doc asked my name, I just went, ‘Pete Mertens,’ then never thought any more of it. But when Pete went for a check-up a couple of months later, his doctor took him into his office, closed the door, and said to him, ‘Now then Mr Mertens, we can’t be having that behaviour, can we?’ Pete didn’t know what the fuck the doc was on about, and the doc just thought Pete was trying to pretend like it never happened.

I think the doc might even have sent him off for some counselling. And then eventually Pete found his file, with ‘sleeping pill overdose’ written at the top, and he went fucking mental with me.

Good bloke, Pete Mertens. Good bloke.

We moved so many times after we left Outlands Cottage that I can’t even remember half of the places. It was around this time that I learned my wife loves nothing more than buying and doing up houses. And because it takes so long to do them up, we always end up renting somewhere else while we’re waiting for the work to be done. Then, about three seconds after we’ve moved in, Sharon gets bored, so we sell up and buy another house—and we have to rent again while we’re doing that one up. It’s gone on like that for decades. Sometimes it feels like all we do with our money is renovate the Western fucking hemisphere. I got Sharon to count up all the houses once, and it turned out that in the twenty-seven years we’d been married, we’d lived in twenty-eight different places.

As I said, Sharon didn’t mind my drinking at first. She thought I was funny when I was drunk—probably ’cos she was usually drunk, too. But before long she changed her mind, and started to see the booze as being almost as bad as the coke. She said I’d gone from being a funny drunk to being an angry drunk. But one of the many problems with being an alcoholic is that when people tell you how bad you are when you’re drunk, you’re usually drunk. So you just keep getting drunk.

The funny thing is, I don’t even like the taste of booze. Not unless it’s drowned in fruit juice or some other sugary bullshit. It was always the feeling I was after. I mean, every now and again I enjoyed a good pint. But I never went to the pub to drink, I went to get fucking blasted.

I tried for a long time to drink like normal people do. When I was still married to Thelma, for example, I went to this wine-tasting at the Birmingham NEC. It was a food market or something around Christmas time. I thought, Fuck me, a wine tasting, that sounds like something a civilised, grown-up person might do. The next morning, Thelma said to me,

‘What did you buy?’ I said, ‘Oh, nothing.’ And she said, ‘Really? You must have bought something.’ I said, ‘Oh well, yeah—I guess I bought a couple of cases.’

Turned out I’d bought 144 cases.

I was so shitfaced, I’d thought I was buying 144 bottles. Then a delivery truck the size of the Exxon Valdez pulled up outside Bulrush Cottage and started unloading enough crates of wine to fill every room to the ceiling. It took months for me and the roadies to polish it all off.

When we finally emptied the last bottle, we all went down the Hand & Cleaver to celebrate.

Mind you, it’s all bullshit with wine, isn’t it? It’s just fucking vinegar with a fizz, no matter what the tasters say. I should know, I owned a wine bar once: Osbourne’s, we called it. What a crock of shit that place was. I remember saying to one of the merchants, ‘Look, tell me, what’s a good wine?’ And she says to me, ‘Well, Mr Osbourne, if you like Blue Nun at two quid a bottle, then that’s a good wine. And if you like Chateau du Wankeur at ninety-nine quid a bottle, then that’s a good wine.’ I didn’t listen. In those days, it was my ego that ordered the wine. The most expensive bottle on the whole list, just to be big-headed. Then I’d wake up the next morning with a two-hundred-quid hangover. But eventually I came to realise something about two-hundred-quid hangovers: they’re exactly the fucking same as two-quid hangovers.

It wasn’t until Sharon found out that she was pregnant that she really started to try and change the way I was living.

We were on tour in Germany at the time. ‘I think something’s going on,’ she said. ‘I’ve been feeling so sick lately.’ So I staggered out to buy one of those pregnancy dip-stick things—and it turned the colour it goes when your missus is expecting. I couldn’t believe it, because only a few months before Sharon had gone through a miscarriage after being attacked by one of her mother’s dogs. I got a right old bollocking for that, because I was standing right behind her when it happened. I heard the low growl of that Dobermann and just froze on the spot, completely stiff, instead of running over and biting its head off, or whatever the fuck I was supposed to do. I’m a chickenshit when it comes to stuff like that. And I had no idea she was pregnant. It was only when we went to the hospital afterwards that the docs told us.

So it was a big deal when the test was positive in Germany.

‘Let’s do one more test, just to make sure,’ I said.

It went the same colour as the first one.

‘I tell you what,’ I said, holding the little strip of paper to the light. ‘Let’s do one more, just to make really sure.’

We must have done five tests in the end. When we were finally convinced it was true, I remember Sharon saying to me, ‘Right, Ozzy, I’m going to tell you this once, so you’d better listen. If you ever, ever bring any cocaine into this house, I’m going to call the police and have you sent to prison. Do you understand me?’

I had absolutely no doubt whatsoever that she meant it.

‘I understand,’ I said.

‘And what about the shotguns, Ozzy?’

‘I’ll get rid of them.’

They were sold the next day. I knew I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to Aimee. So that was it: goodbye to the Benelli semi-automatic that I’d used to kill the chickens at Bulrush Cottage, along with all my other guns.

I carried on boozing, though. Even more so, without any coke in the house. I couldn’t stop.

But Sharon had lost all patience with that too, by then. The second I walked through the door, she’d be on my case.

You wouldn’t believe the things I’d do—the time and effort I would dedicate to sneaking a drink behind her back. I’d ‘pop to the supermarket’ next door, then walk straight through to the back of the grocery section, through the door to the store-room, climb out of the window at the back, jump over a wall, crawl through a hedge, and go to the pub on the other side. And then, after necking six pints in a row, I’d do the same in reverse.

The most unbelievable thing about my behaviour is that I was convinced it was entirely fucking normal.

Then I started trying to sneak booze into the house. One time, I got this big four-gallon bottle of vodka—the kind of bottle they put on display at a bar—but I couldn’t work out where to hide it. I ran around the house for ages, looking for the perfect place. Then it came to me: the oven! Sharon had never cooked a meal in her life, I said to myself, so she’d never look in there. And I was right: I got away with it for weeks. I’d say to Sharon, ‘I’ve just had an idea for a song. I think I’ll pop downstairs to the studio and get it down on tape.’ Then I’d pour myself a mug of vodka in the kitchen, neck it as fast as I could, and pretend like nothing had happened.

Then, one day, she twigged.

‘Sharon,’ I said, ‘I’ve just had an idea for a song. I think I’ll just—’

‘I found your song idea in the oven this morning,’ she said. ‘Then I poured your song idea down the sink.’

It was only a week or so after the oven incident, on September 2, 1983, that Aimee was born at the Wellington Hospital in St John’s Wood, London. She was a guiding light for us, she really was. It had been just over a year since Randy and Rachel had died, and we were only just starting to get over it. With Aimee, we had a brand new reason to feel good about life. She was such an innocent little thing, when you looked at her, you just couldn’t help breaking into a huge smile.

But no sooner had Aimee been born that it was time to go on the road again, this time to promote the Bark at the Moon album, which I’d just finished making with my new guitarist, Jake E. Lee. Sharon could have stayed at home, but that wasn’t her style, so we put a little cot in the back of the tour bus for Aimee and carried on. It was great for her: Aimee saw more of the world before her first birthday than most people do in a lifetime. I just wish I’d been sober for more of it. I was there physically, but not mentally. So I missed things you can never do over again: the first crawl, the first step, the first word.

If I think about it for too long, it breaks my heart.

In many ways I wasn’t really a father to Aimee. I was more like another kid for Sharon to look after.

9. Betty, Where’s the Bar?

‘Someone’s gonna die before this is over,’ I said to Doc McGhee, on the second night of the Bark at the Moon tour. Doc was the American manager of Mötley Crüe, our support band, and a good mate of mine.

‘Someone?’ he said. ‘I don’t think someone’s gonna die, Ozzy. I think we’re all gonna die.’

The problem, basically, was Mötley Crüe—which back then still had the original line-up of Nikki Sixx on bass, Tommy Lee on drums, Mick Mars on guitar and Vince Neil on vocals.

They were fucking crazy. Which obviously I took as a challenge. Just as I had with John Bonham, I felt like I had to out-crazy them, otherwise I wasn’t doing my job properly. But they took that as a challenge. So it was just wall-to-wall action, every minute of every day. The gigs were the easy part. The problem was surviving the bits in between.

The funniest thing about Mötley Crüe was that they dressed like chicks but lived like animals. It was an education, even for me. Wherever they went, they carried around this massive flight case full of every type of booze imaginable. The moment a gig was over, the lid would be thrown open, and the hounds of hell would be set loose.

Every night, bottles would be thrown, knives would be pulled, chair legs would be smashed, noses would be broken, property would be destroyed. It was like bedlam and pandemonium rolled into one, then multiplied by chaos.

People tell me stories about that tour and I have no idea if they’re true or not. They ask,

‘Ozzy, did you really once snort a line of ants off a Popsicle stick?’ and I ain’t got a fucking clue. It’s certainly possible. Every night stuff went up my nose that had no business being there. I was out of it the whole time. Even Tony Dennis got carried away. We ended up calling him ‘Captain Krell’—Krell was our new name for cocaine—because he tried doing a line once, although I don’t think he ever did it again. Our wardrobe chick even made him a little suit with ‘CK’ written in Superman letters on the chest.

We all thought it was hilarious.

One of the craziest nights of all was in Memphis.

As usual, it started as soon as we finished the gig. I remember walking down the corridor backstage to the dressing-room area and hearing Tommy Lee say, ‘Hey dude, Ozzy. Check this out!’

I stopped and looked around to see where his voice was coming from.

‘In here, man,’ said Tommy. ‘In here.’

I pushed open a door and saw him on the other side. He was sitting on a chair with his back to me. Nikki, Mick, Vince and a bunch of roadies were all standing around, smoking fags, laughing, talking about the show, drinking beer. And there, in front of Tommy, on her knees, was this naked chick. She was giving him the mother of all blowjobs.

Tommy waved at me to come closer. ‘Hey, dude, Ozzy. Check it out!’

So I peered over his shoulder. And there it was: his dick. Like a baby’s arm in a boxing glove. The fucking thing was so big, the chick could only get about a third of it in her mouth, and even then I was surprised there wasn’t a lump sticking out of the back of her neck. I’d never seen anything like it in my life.

‘Hey, Tommy,’ I said. ‘Can you get me one of those?’

‘Dude, sit down,’ he said. ‘Take your pants off, man. She’ll do you after she’s done me.’

I started to back away. ‘I ain’t gonna get mine out with that thing filling up the room!’ I said.

‘It would be like parking a tugboat next to the Titanic. Have you got a licence for that, Tommy?

It looks dangerous.’

‘Oh, dude, you don’t know what you’re miss—Oh, oh, oh, ah, urgh, urgh, ahhhhhh…’

I had to look away.

Then Tommy jumped up, zipped up his fly, and said, ‘Let’s get some eats, dude, I’m starving.’

We ended up in this place called Benihana—one of those Japanese steakhouse joints where they make the food on this big hot plate in front of you. While we waited for the food we drank beer and chasers. Then we got a jumbo-sized bottle of sake for the table. The last thing I remember is getting a massive bowl of wonton soup, finishing it, then filling the bowl to the brim with sake and downing it in one messy gulp.

‘Ahh!’ I said. ‘That’s better.’

Everyone just looked at me.

Then Tommy stood up and said, ‘Fuuuuuck, let’s get outta here, man. Any second now, Ozzy’s gonna blow.’

Then black.

Complete black.

Like someone yanking the cord from the back of a TV.

From what the others told me later, I got up from the table, said I was going to the bog, and never came back. To this day, I have no memory whatsoever of what I did for the next five hours.

But I’ll never forget waking up.

The first thing I heard was the noise:

N E E E E E E E E O O O O W W W W O O O M , N E E E E E E E E O O O O W W W W O O O M , Z Z Z Z M M M M M M M M M M M…

Then I opened my eyes. It was still dark, very dark, but there were thousands of little pin-pricks of light everywhere. I thought to myself, What the fuck’s going on? Am I dead or what?

And still this noise:

N E E E E E E E E O O O O W W W W O O O M , N E E E E E E E E O O O O W W W W O O O M , Z Z Z Z M M M M M M M M M M M …

Then I could smell rubber and petrol.

Then I heard an air horn, right next to my ear.

BLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHMM!!!!!!!!!

I rolled over, screaming.

Then blinding lights—maybe twenty or thirty of them, as tall as an office block—coming towards me. Before I could pick myself up and run, I heard this terrible roaring noise, and a gust of wind blew sand and grit in my face.

I’d woken up on the central reservation of a twelve-lane free-way.

How or why I was there, I had no idea. All I knew was that I had to get off the freeway before I died—and that I had to take a piss, because my bladder was about to explode. So I waited for a gap in the headlamps, then legged it across all these lanes, still too pissed to go in a straight line. Finally I made it to the other side, having just missed a motorbike in the slow lane. I jumped the fence, ran across another road, and began to search for somewhere to take a slash.And that’s when I saw it: a white car parked in a lay-by.

Perfect, I thought, this’ll give me a bit of cover.

So I whip out my dick, but no sooner have I started to give the tire of this car a good old watering than all these coloured bulbs in the back window light up, and I hear this horribly familiar noise.

BLOOP-BLOOP-WHOOOO. BAARRRP!

I couldn’t fucking believe it. Of all the places in Memphis where I could’ve taken a piss, I’d managed to choose the wheel of an unmarked cop car, parked in a lay-by, waiting to bust people for speeding.

Next thing I knew this woman police officer was winding down her window. She leaned out and said, ‘When you’ve finished shaking that thing, I’m taking your ass to jail!’

Ten minutes later, I was in the nick.

Luckily, they only kept me in there for a couple of hours. Then I called Doc McGhee and got him to pick me up in the tour bus.

The first thing I heard when I climbed back on board was ‘Hey, dude, Ozzy. Check this out, man!’ And we were off again, into oblivion.

Someone went to jail for one thing or another every night of that tour. And because Mick and Nikki looked so alike—they both had this long, dark, girly hair—they’d sometimes get locked up for something the other one had done.

One night they’re sharing a room and Nikki gets up, stark naked, to go and buy a Coke from the vending machine in the corridor, next to the lift. Just as he’s pressing the button for the Coke, the lift doors open and he hears this gasping noise. Then he glances over and sees three middle-aged women standing there with these looks of horror of their faces. ‘Hi,’ he says, before turning around and walking casually back to his room. A few minutes later there’s a knock at the door. So Nikki says to Mick, ‘That’s probably one of the groupies. Why don’t you go and answer it.’ So Mick goes off to answer the door and he’s greeted by the hotel manager, a cop and one of the chicks from the lift. The chick shouts, ‘That’s him!’ and they drag Mick off to jail, even though he had no idea what he was supposed to have done.

The thing is, though, we were all so out of our minds all the time, it was quite normal not to know what we’d done.

Apart from waking up in the middle of a freeway, the worst moment for me was after we played Madison Square Garden in New York. For the after-show party, we went to this club in an old church. We were all hanging out in this private room, having a few drinks and a bit of coke, when some bloke came up to me and said, ‘Hey, Ozzy, would you like to have your photograph taken with Brian Wilson?’

‘Who the fuck’s Brian Wilson?’

‘Y’know, Brian Wilson. From the Beach Boys.’

‘Oh, him. Sure. Yeah. Whatever.’

Everyone had been talking about Brian Wilson a lot, because the week before, his brother Dennis—the one who’d been mates with Charles Manson in the 1960s—had drowned in LA.

Dennis was only thirty-nine, so it was terribly sad. Anyway, I was told to go and meet Brian Wilson on the stairwell, so out I went, loaded up on booze and coke, and waited for him. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty minutes. Then thirty minutes. Finally, after another five minutes, Brian appeared. By then, I was thoroughly pissed off, thinking, What a dick. But at the same time I knew about Dennis, so I decided to give him a break. The first thing I said was: ‘Sorry to hear about your brother, Brian.’

He didn’t say anything. He just gave me this funny look, then walked off. That was it for me.

‘First you show up late,’ I said, raising my voice, ‘and now you’re just gonna fuck off without saying a single fucking word? I tell you what, Brian, why don’t we forget about the photograph so you can shove your head back up your arse, where it fucking belongs, eh?’

Next morning, I’m lying in the hotel room, my head pounding. The phone starts ringing and Sharon answers it. ‘Yes, no, yes, OK. Oh, he did, did he? Hmm. Right. Don’t worry, I’ll deal with it.’ Click. She hands me the phone and says,

‘You’re calling Brian Wilson.’

‘Who the fuck’s Brian Wilson?’

I get smacked on the head with the receiver.

Smack.

‘Ow! That fucking hurt!’

‘Brian Wilson is the Living Musical Legend you insulted last night,’ says Sharon. ‘And now you’re going to call him and apologise.’

The memories start to come back.

‘Hang on a minute,’ I say. ‘Brian Wilson was the one who insulted me!’

‘Oh yeah?’ says Sharon.

‘Yeah!’

‘Ozzy, when Brian Wilson reached over to shake your hand, the first thing you said was:

“Hello, Brian, you fucking arsehole, I’m glad to hear your brother’s dead.”’

I sit bolt upright.

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘No, the fucking cocaine you keep shoving up your nose said that.’

‘But I would remember.’

‘Everyone else seems to remember perfectly well. They also remember you told him to shove his head up his arse, because that’s where it belongs. Here, this is Brian’s number. Apologise.’

So I called him and apologised. Twice.

Since then, I’ve bumped into him a few times over the years. We’re cool now, me and Brian. Although we never did get around to taking that photograph.

If any of us had a near-death experience on the Bark at the Moon tour, it was me. Amazingly, though, it didn’t have anything to do with booze or drugs—not directly, anyway. It happened when we took a forty-eight-hour break after a gig in New Orleans to shoot the video for ‘So Tired’ in London. It was an insane distance to travel in that amount of time, but in those days MTV was just starting to become a big part of the music business, and if you could get them to play one of your videos on heavy rotation, it just about guaranteed that your album would go platinum. So we always put a lot of money and effort into them.

The plan was to fly from New Orleans to New York, take Concorde to London, shoot the video, take Concorde back to New York, then connect to the next venue. It was a gruelling schedule, not helped by the fact that I was chronically pissed. The only thing that kept me from passing out was all the cocaine I was snorting.

When we finally got to the studio in London, the first thing the director said to me was,

‘OK, Ozzy, just sit in front of this mirror. When I give the word, it’s gonna explode from behind.’

‘All right,’ I said, wondering what kind of high-tech special effects they were going to use.

But there were no special effects. There was just an old mirror and a bloke standing behind it with a hammer in his hand. I don’t know who the fuck they were using as a props guy, but obviously no one had told him about theatrical mirrors, which are designed to break without killing anyone. So, halfway through the song, the bloke swings his hammer, the mirror explodes, and I get a faceful of glass. It was a good job I was so loaded: I didn’t feel a thing. I just spat out all the blood and glass and went, ‘Yeah, cheers.’

Then I got up and had another can of Guinness.

I didn’t think any more of it until I was halfway across the Atlantic on Concorde. I remember pressing the button for another drink and the stewardess coming over and almost dropping her tray with fright. ‘Oh my God!’ she squealed. ‘Are you OK?’ It turned out the pressure from being up at nearly sixty thousand feet had caused all the tiny bits of glass lodged in my skin to rise to the surface, until my face had literally exploded. It had just popped, like a squashed tomato.

When Sharon turned around to look, she almost passed out.

An ambulance was waiting for me at JFK when we landed. It wasn’t the first time I’d been wheeled off Concorde. I used to get so pissed on those flights, Sharon would have to carry me through immigration on a luggage trolley with my passport Scotch taped to my forehead.

And then when they asked her if she had anything to declare, she’d just point at me and go,

‘Him’.

In the hospital in New York they put me under and tried to pull out as much of the broken glass as they could with tweezers. Then they gave me some drugs to reduce the swelling. I remember coming to in this white room, with white walls, and people all around me covered in white sheets and thinking, Fuck, I’m in the morgue. Then I heard a hissing noise next to my bed.

Pssst, pssst.

I looked down and there was this kid holding up a pen and a copy of Bark at the Moon.

‘Will you sign this for me?’ he asked.

‘Fuck off,’ I told him. ‘I’m dead.’

By the time the tour ended, we were all still alive, but my prediction that someone would die still came true. It happened when Vince Neil went back to his house at Redondo Beach in LA and got fucked up with the drummer from Hanoi Rocks. At some point they ran out of booze and decided to drive to the local bottle shop in Vince’s car, which was one of those low-slung, ridiculously fast, bright red De Tomaso Panteras. Vince was so loaded he drove head-on into a car coming in the opposite direction. The bloke from Hanoi Rocks was dead by the time they got him to hospital.

I didn’t see much of Mötley Crüe after the tour, although I kept in touch with Tommy, on and off. I remember going to his house years later with my son Jack, who must have been about thirteen.

‘Wow, dude, come in,’ said Tommy, when I rang the door-bell. ‘I can’t believe it. Ozzy Osbourne’s in my house.’

There were some other guests there, too, and after we’d all been given the tour of his place, Tommy said, ‘Hey, dudes, check this out.’ He tapped a code into a keypad in the wall, a hidden door slid open, and on the other side there was this padded sex chamber with some kind of heavy-duty harness thing swinging from the ceiling. The idea was that you’d take a chick in there, strap her to this contraption, then fuck the living shit out of her.

‘What’s wrong with a bed?’ I asked Tommy. Then I turned around and realised that Jack had walked into the room with the rest of us. He was standing there, his eyes bulging. I felt so embarrassed, I didn’t know where to fucking look.

I didn’t take him to Tommy’s again after that.

By the time the Bark at the Moon tour ended, me and Sharon’s fights had reached another level of craziness. Part of it was just the pressure of being famous. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I ain’t complaining: my first three solo albums eventually sold more than ten million copies in America alone, which was beyond anything I could have hoped for. But when you’re selling that many records, you can’t do anything normal any more, ’cos you get too much hassle from the public. I remember one night when me and Sharon were staying in a Holiday Inn. It was maybe three or four in the morning, and we were both in bed. There was a knock on the door, so I got up to answer it, and these guys in overalls just brushed past me and walked into the room.

When Sharon saw them she said, ‘Who the fuck are you? What are you doing in our room?’

They went, ‘Oh, we’re just interested in seeing how you live.’

Sharon threw something at them and they brushed past me again on their way out.

All they wanted to do was come in and stare. That was it.

We stopped staying in cheap hotels after that.

I mean, I’m usually happy to meet fans, but not when I’m asleep with my wife at four in the morning.

Or when I’m eating. It drives me nuts when people come up to me when I’m in a restaurant with Sharon. It’s a big taboo with me, that is. The worst is when they say, ‘Hey, you look like you’re somebody famous! Can I have your autograph?’

‘I tell you what,’ I want to say to them, ‘why don’t you go away and find out who you think I am, come back again, and then I’ll give you my autograph.’

But fame wasn’t the biggest problem for me and Sharon. That was my drinking, which was so bad I couldn’t be trusted with anything. When we were in Germany doing a gig, for example, I went on a tour of the Dachau concentration camp and was asked to leave because I was being drunk and disorderly. I must be the only person in history who’s ever been thrown out of that fucking place.

Another thing I did when I was drunk was get more tattoos, which drove Sharon mental.

Eventually she said, ‘Ozzy, if you get one more tattoo, I’m gonna string you up by your bollocks.’

That night, I went out and got ‘thanks’ tattooed on my right palm. It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. I mean, how many times do you say ‘thanks’ to people during your lifetime?

Tens of thousands, probably. Now all I had to do was raise my right hand. But Sharon didn’t appreciate the innovation. When she noticed it the next morning—I’d been trying to keep my hand under the kitchen table, but then she asked me to pass the salt—she drove me straight to a plastic surgeon to get the tattoo removed. But he told me he’d have to cut off half of my hand to get rid of the thing, so it stayed.

When we left the hospital, Sharon thanked the doctor for his time.

I just raised my right palm.

Another time we were in Albuquerque in the middle of winter, freezing cold, ice and snow everywhere. I was pissed and coked out of my fucking mind and decided to take a ride on this aerial tramway thing, which goes ten thousand feet up the Sandia Mountains to a restaurant and observation deck at the top. But there was something wrong with the cable car, and it swung to a halt halfway up the mountain.

‘What do you do if you get stuck up here?’ I asked the bloke at the controls, after we’d been dangling there for ages.

‘Oh, there’s an escape hatch in the roof,’ he said, pointing to this hatch above our heads.

‘But how do you climb up there?’ I asked.

‘There’s a ladder right behind you. All you have to do is pull it out. It’s very simple.’

‘Is the hatch locked?’

‘No.’

Big mistake, telling me that. As soon as I knew there was a ladder and an unlocked hatch I had to try it out. So I pulled out the ladder and started to climb up to the ceiling.

The guy went mental.

‘What the hell are you doing? You can’t do that! Stop! Stop!’

That just egged me on even more. I opened the hatch, felt this blast of icy wind, and pulled myself up on to the roof, by which time the guy and everyone else in the cable car was screaming and begging me to come back down. Then, just as I was getting my balance, the car started to move again. I almost slipped and went splat onto the rocks thousands of feet below, but I kept my balance by putting out my arms like I was surfing. Then I started to sing

‘Good Vibrations’. I stayed up there until we were almost at the top.

The funny thing is I hate heights. I get vertigo going up a doorstep. So when I saw the cable car from the ground the next day—stone-cold sober, for once—I almost threw up. It makes me shiver even now, just thinking about it.

Doing crazy stuff like that always led to another argument with Sharon. On one occasion I lost it so badly with her, I picked up a vodka bottle and threw it in her direction. But the second it left my hand, I realised what I’d done: it was going straight for her head. Oh, fuck, I thought, I’ve just killed my wife. But it missed by an inch, thank God. The neck went straight through the plaster in the wall above her head and just stuck there, like a piece of modern art.

Sharon would always find ways to retaliate, mind you. Like when she’d take a hammer to my gold records. And then I’d retaliate to her retaliation by saying I didn’t want to go on stage that night. One time, I shaved my head to try to get out of doing a show. I was hung over, knackered and pissed off, so I just thought, Fuck it, fuck them all.

But that shit didn’t work with Sharon.

She just took one look at me and said, ‘Right, we’re getting you a wig.’ Then she dragged me and a couple of the roadies to this joke shop which had a Lady Godiva wig in the window that had been there for five hundred years, with dead flies and dust and dandruff and God knows what else embedded in it. I put it on and everyone pissed themselves laughing.

But it turned out to be quite cool in the end, that wig, because I rigged it with blood capsules. Halfway through the show I’d pretend to pull out my hair and all this blood would come running down my face. It looked brilliant. But after the bat-biting incident, everyone thought it was real. At one gig, this chick in the front row almost fainted. She was screaming and pointing and crying and shouting, ‘It’s true what they say! He is crazy!’

‘Darling,’ said Sharon, a few months after the Bark at the Moon tour, when she found out that she was pregnant with Kelly. ‘I’ve heard about this great place in Palm Springs where you can take a break before the next tour. It’s a hotel, and they have classes every day where they teach you how to drink like a gentleman.’

‘Really?’ I said.

In my head, I was going, That’s it! I’ve been doing it wrong. That must be why I’ve been getting these terrible hangovers. I need to learn how to drink like James Bond!

‘What’s the name of this place?’ I said.

‘The Betty Ford Center. Have you heard of it?’

‘Nope.’

‘Well, it just opened, and it’s run by the wife of a former president. I think you’ll have a good time there.’

‘Sounds magic,’ I said. ‘Sign me up.’

‘Actually, I’ve already booked you in for the week after the baby’s due,’ Sharon replied.

In the end, Kelly arrived on October 28, 1984. It was an eventful birth, to say the least. For some insane reason, Sharon had decided that she didn’t want an epidural. But then as soon as the contractions started, she went, ‘I’ve changed my mind! Get me the anaesthetist!’ Now, for Sharon to say that meant that she was in fucking agony—’cos my wife can take a bit of pain, certainly a lot more than I can. But the nurse wasn’t having any of it. She goes, ‘Mrs Osbourne, you do realise that there are people in third world countries who give birth without an epidural all the time, don’t you?’ Big mistake, that was. Sharon sat up in bed and screamed,

‘LISTEN, YOU FUCKHEAD, THIS ISN’T A FUCKING THIRD WORLD COUNTRY, SO GET ME A FUCKING ANAESTHETIST!’

An hour later, Kelly came out into the world, screaming—and she hasn’t stopped since, bless her. She’s a real chip off the old block, is Kelly. I think that’s why I’ve always felt so protective of her. It certainly wasn’t easy, leaving my beautiful little girl with Sharon and the nurses only a few hours after she was born, but at the same time I knew I had to get my drinking under control. With any luck, I thought, I’ll come home from Palm Springs a new man. So the next morning I got on the plane, drank three bottles of champagne in first class, landed at LAX twelve hours later, threw up, had a few toots of cocaine, then passed out in the back of a limo as it drove me to the Betty Ford Center. I hope this place is relaxing, I thought, ’cos I’m knackered.

I’d never even heard the word ‘rehab’ before. And I certainly didn’t know that Betty Ford—the wife of President Gerald Ford—had been an alcoholic herself. While I was on tour I never spent much time watching telly or looking at newspapers, so I had no idea what a big deal the clinic was, or that the press had been calling it ‘Camp Betty’. In my head, I imagined this beautiful oasis of a hotel out in the middle of the Californian desert, with a shimmering swimming pool outside, a golf course, lots of hot chicks in bikinis everywhere, and all these Hugh Hefner types in velvet smoking jackets and bow ties, leaning against an outdoor bar, while a middle-aged woman with a voice like Barbara Woodhouse said, ‘OK, gentlemen, after me: take the olive, stir it around the martini, pick up the glass with your fingers arranged like so.

That’s right, good, good. Now, take a sip, count to three, and do it again. Slowly, slowly.’

This is going to be my dream holiday of a lifetime, I said to myself.

But when I got there, the place looked more like a hospital than a hotel. Mind you, the grounds were stunning: freshly sprinkled lawns, tall palm trees and man-made lakes everywhere, and these huge, brown, alien-looking mountains looming in the background.

I walk in the door and Betty herself is waiting for me. She’s a tiny little thing. Polo-neck sweater, big hairdo. Not much of a sense of humour, by the look of it.

‘Hello, Mr Osbourne,’ she goes. ‘I’m Mrs Ford. I spoke with your wife Sharon a few days ago.’

‘Look, Betty, d’you mind if I check in a bit later?’ I say. ‘I’m gasping. Terrible flight. Where’s the bar?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The bar. It must be around here somewhere.’

‘You do know where you are, don’t you, Mr Osbourne?’

‘Er, yeah?’

‘So you’ll know that we don’t… have a bar.’

‘How do you teach people to drink properly, then?’

‘Mr Osbourne, I think your wife might have misled you slightly. We don’t teach you how to drink here.’

‘You don’t?’

‘We teach you not to drink.’

‘Oh. Maybe I should stay somewhere else, then.’

‘I’m afraid that’s not an option, Mr Osbourne. Your wife was… How can I put this? She was very insistent.’

I can’t even begin to describe the disappointment. It was almost as bad as the boredom.

After one hour in that place, I felt like I’d been there a thousand years. The thing I hated most about the weeks that followed was talking about my drinking in front of all these strangers during the group sessions. Although I learned some pretty cool things. One bloke was a dentist from LA. His wife found out about his drinking and she was on his case twenty-four hours a day. So he emptied the tank of wind-screen-washer fluid in his BMW, refilled it with gin and tonic, disconnected the plastic tube from the nozzles on the bonnet, and re-routed it so it came out of one of the air vents under the dashboard. Whenever he wanted a drink, all he had to do was get in his car, put the tube in his mouth, pull on the indicator stalk, and he’d get a squirt of G&T down his throat. It worked brilliantly, apparently, until one day there was a really bad traffic jam and he turned up at work so out of his shitter that he accidentally drilled a hole in the head of one of his patients.

I’m telling you, the ingenuity of alcoholics is something else. If only it could be put to some kind of good use. I mean, if you said to an alcoholic, ‘Look, the only way for you to get another drink is to cure cancer,’ the disease would be history in five seconds.

As well as the group sessions, I had to see a therapist on my own. It was hard, being sober and having to discuss all the things I’d just found out were wrong with me. Like being dyslexic and having attention deficit disorder. (They didn’t add the word ‘hyperactivity’ to it until a few years later.) It explained a lot, I suppose. The shrink said that my dyslexia had given me a terrible insecurity complex, so I couldn’t take rejection or failure or pressure of any sort, which was why I was self-medicating with booze. She also said that because I was poorly educated, and knew I was poorly educated, I always thought people were taking me for a ride, so I didn’t trust anyone. She was right, but it didn’t help that I usually was being taken for a ride—until Sharon came along. Mind you, I had moments of coked-up paranoia when I didn’t trust my wife, either.

The shrink also told me that I have an addictive personality, which means that I do everything addictively. And, on top of that, I have an obsessive-compulsive disorder, which makes it all ten times worse. I’m like a walking dictionary of psychiatric disorders, I am. It blew my mind. And it took me a long time to accept any of it.

My stay in Camp Betty was the longest I’d been without drink or drugs in my adult life, and the comedown was horrendous. Everyone else was going through the same thing, but I can’t say that made me feel any better. At first, they put me in a room with a guy who owned a bowling alley, but he snored like an asthmatic horse, so I moved and ended up with a depressive mortician. I said to him, ‘Look, if you suffer from depression, why the fuck do you work in a mortuary?’

‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘It’s just what I do.’

The mortician snored even louder than the bowling alley guy—he was like a moose with a tracheotomy. The whole room shook. So I ended up spending every night on the sofa in the lobby, shivering and sweating.

Eventually, Sharon came to get me. I’d been in there six weeks. I looked better—I’d lost a bit of weight—but I’d got the whole rehab thing wrong. I thought it was supposed to cure me.

But there ain’t no cure for what I’ve got. All rehab can do is tell you what’s wrong with you and then suggest ways for you to get better. Later, when I realised it wasn’t a solution by itself, I used to go there just to take the heat off myself a bit when things got out of hand. Rehab can work, but you’ve got to want it. If you really want to quit, you can’t say, ‘Well, I want to quit today, but I might have a drink next week at my friend’s wedding.’ You’ve got to commit, then live each day as it comes. Every morning, you’ve got to wake up and say, ‘OK, today’s gonna be one more day without a drink,’ or a cigarette, or a pill, or a joint, or whatever it is that’s been killing you.

That’s as much as you can hope for when you’re an addict.

The first gig I did after Betty Ford was in Rio de Janeiro.

I was legless before I even got on the plane.

By the time we reached Rio, I’d got through a whole bottle of Courvoisier, and was passed out in the aisle. Sharon tried her best to move me—but I was like a dead fucking body. In the end she got so pissed off with me that she grabbed the stainless steel fork from her meal tray and began stabbing me with it. I soon fucking moved after that. But at least I now knew what I was—a full-blown, practising alcoholic. I couldn’t pretend any more that I was just having fun, or that boozing was something everyone did when they got a bit of dough. I had a disease, and it was killing me. I used to think, Even an animal won’t go near something again if it makes it sick, so why do I keep going back to this?

The gig was Rock in Rio, a ten-day festival featuring Queen, Rod Stewart, AC/DC and Yes. One and a half million people bought tickets. But I was disappointed by the place. I’d expected to see the Girl from Ipanema on every corner, but I never saw a single one. There were just all these dirt-poor kids running around like rats. People were either outrageously rich or living on the streets—there didn’t seem to be anything in between.

I’ll always remember meeting Ronnie Biggs, the Great Train Robber, on that trip. In those days he was living in exile in Brazil, and he seemed to be making the best of it—he claimed he shagged two and a half thousand chicks while he was there. But it was still a kind of prison for him, because he was so homesick. He came over to the hotel wearing a T-shirt that said,

‘Rio—a Wonderful Place to Escape to’, but he just kept asking, ‘So, what’s it like in England, Ozzy? Do they still have this shop, or that shop, or this beer, or that beer?’

I felt sorry for the guy. No one in their right mind would give him a job, so he’d get all these English tourists over to his house, charge them fifty quid each, get them to buy him some beers and a bag of dope, then tell them the Great Train Robbery story. He called it ‘The Ronnie Biggs Experience’. I suppose it was better than being in prison. He was all right, Ronnie, y’know. He wasn’t a bad guy, and everyone knew that he wasn’t even on the train when the driver was assaulted, yet he was sent down for thirty years. You can rape a kid and kill a granny and get less than thirty years nowadays. People say, ‘He got away with it in the end, didn’t he?’ But I don’t think he did. I mean, the bloke was so unhappy. I wasn’t surprised when he finally came back to Britain, even though it meant getting arrested at Heathrow and thrown straight in the slammer.

Home’s home, in the end, even if it’s behind bars. At least he got his freedom at the finish, although it was only ’cos the guy was on his deathbed. Ronnie always said his last wish was ‘to walk into a Margate pub as an Englishman and buy a pint’. But from what I’ve heard, he’s going to have to wait until the next life for that pleasure.

The summer after Rock in Rio, I agreed to do Live Aid with Black Sabbath. Sharon was already pregnant again, and we didn’t want to fly to Philadelphia, so we decided to take the QE2 to New York instead, then drive the rest of the way.

After the first hour at sea, we regretted it. In those days we were used to getting to New York in three hours on Concorde. The QE2 took five fucking days, which felt more like five billion years. I mean, what the fuck are you supposed to do on a ship, apart from puke your guts out ’cos you’re feeling sea sick? By the end of day one, I was hoping we might hit an iceberg, just to liven things up a bit. And the boredom only got worse from there. In the end I went to see the ship’s doctor and begged him for sedatives to put me out for the rest of the way. I woke up forty-eight hours later, just as we were pulling into port. Sharon was so pissed off—she’d had to entertain herself while I was out cold—it’s a miracle she didn’t throw me over-board. ‘Remember me? You arsehole,’ was the first thing she said when I opened my eyes.

To be honest with you, I was stressed out about doing Live Aid. I hadn’t talked to Tony for years, so it wasn’t exactly the most comfortable of situations. Then the organisers put us between Billy Ocean and the Four fucking Tops… at ten o’clock in the morning. I don’t know what they were thinking. People kept telling us that they needed more black acts in the show, so maybe they thought we were black—like when we played Philadelphia on our first American tour.

It didn’t get off to a good start.

When I was in the lobby of the hotel, checking in before the gig, this bloke comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, Ozzy, can I have a photograph?’ and I go, ‘Sure, yeah.’ Then the bloke goes, ‘Sorry, I have to do this,’ and hands me a lawsuit. It was from my father-in-law. He’d served me—before a fucking charity gig.

When everyone backstage heard about the writ—don’t ask me what it was about, or what happened to it, ’cos I left it all to Sharon—one of the roadies came up to me and said, ‘He’s quite a character, your father-in-law, isn’t he?’

‘What d’you mean?’ I asked him.

‘He said the cover of Born Again reminded him of his grand-children.’

If you haven’t seen that cover—Born Again was Black Sabbath’s third album after I left—it’s of an aborted demon baby with fangs and claws. What an unbelievable thing to say!

On the one hand, doing Live Aid was brilliant: it was for a great cause, and no one can play those old Black Sabbath songs like me, Tony, Geezer and Bill. But on the other hand, it was all a bit embarrassing. For a start, I was still grossly overweight—on the video, I’m the size of a planet. Also, in the six years since I’d left the band, I’d become a celebrity in America, whereas Black Sabbath had been going in the other direction. So I got preferential treatment, even though I hadn’t asked for it. It was just stupid little things, like I got a Live Aid jacket and they didn’t. But it still felt awkward. And I didn’t handle it with much grace, because my coked-up rock star ego was out of control. Deep down, a part of me wanted to say to them,

‘You fired me and now I don’t need you, so fuck you.’ Looking back now, all I can think is, Why was I like that? Why did I have to be such a dickhead?

But the gig went smoothly enough. We just checked in to the hotel, met up at the sound check, ran through the set list, got up there, did the songs and fucked off home.

As for Don Arden’s lawsuit, it probably shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise. Jet Records had taken a big hit when we left. And a lot of other things were going wrong for him too.

For example, it was around that time Sharon’s brother David ended up in court in England for allegedly kidnapping, black-mailing and beating up an accountant called Harshad Patel. It was a very bad scene. David was sentenced to two years in Wandsworth for whatever part he had in it, but he only served a few months. By the end of it, he’d been moved to Ford Open Prison.

Then they went after Don, who was still living in the Howard Hughes house at the top of Benedict Canyon. In the end, Don realised he was going to be extradited, so he went back of his own accord to stand trial. Then he hired the best lawyers in London and got off, scot-free.

A few months after Live Aid, on November 8, 1985, Jack was born. I was too pissed to remember much of it—I spent most of the time in the pub opposite the hospital—but I remember Sharon wanting to have him circumcised. I didn’t put up a fight. I mean, the funny thing is, even though my mother was a Catholic, she had me circumcised. None of my brothers had it done—just me. I remember asking my mum what the fuck she was thinking, and she just went, ‘Oh, it was fashionable.’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘It was fashionable to cut my dick off!’ I remember shouting at her.

But I have to admit, it is cleaner that way. And because Jack was part-Jewish—because of Don Arden, whose real name was Harry Levy—it seemed like the right thing to do.

The most amazing thing about Jack being born is that he was our third kid in three years.

We hadn’t planned it that way. It just happened. Every time I came off the road, me and Sharon would get in the sack together—as you do—one thing would lead to another, then nine months later Sharon would be giving birth to another little Osbourne.

It was crazy, really, because I ended up touring the world as the Prince of Darkness with three little kids in tow, which wasn’t exactly good for the image. For a few years I spent most of my time between gigs in a panic trying to find Jack’s comfort blanket, which was this little yellow teddy bear thing called Baby. Jack would go fucking insane if he didn’t have Baby to cuddle and chew on. But we were travelling so much, Baby would always end up getting left behind. I became obsessed with that fucking bear. I’d come off stage after singing ‘Diary of a Madman’, and the first thing I’d say was, ‘Where’s Baby? Has anyone seen Baby? Make sure we don’t lose Baby.’

On more than one occasion we had to send our private jet halfway across America just to get Baby back from the hotel were we’d stayed the previous night. We’d drop twenty grand on jet fuel, just to rescue Baby. And don’t think we didn’t fucking try to just buy Jack a replacement. He was too smart for that—he wouldn’t have any of it. You’d find a comfort blanket that was absolutely identical in every way to Baby, but Jack would take one look at it, throw it back at you, and bawl his eyes out until he got his real Baby back. And of course as time went on, Baby ended up having major surgery after being eaten by Sharon’s dog a few times, so in the end there was no mistaking him.

As much as I was drunk and absent a lot of the time, I loved being a dad. It’s just so much fun watching these little people you’ve brought into the world as they develop and grow up.

Sharon loved being a mum, too. But enough was enough after a while. After Jack was born, I remember her saying to me, ‘Ozzy, I can’t have you anywhere near me next time you finish a tour. I feel like I’ve been pregnant for ever, I can’t do it any more.’

So I went and got the snip. What a strange experience that was.

‘You know this can’t be reversed, don’t you, Mr Osbourne?’ said the doc.

‘Yeah.’

‘So you’re sure about this?’

‘Oh, yeah.’

‘Absolutely sure?’

‘Doc, believe me, I’m sure.’

‘OK then, sign this form.’

After the operation, my balls swelled up to the size of watermelons. They ached terribly, too. ‘Hey, Doc,’ I said. ‘Can you give me something that will leave the swelling but take away the pain?’

All in all, I don’t recommend it, as far as elective surgery goes. When you pop your load after you’ve had the snip, nothing but dust comes out. It’s like a dry sneeze. Really weird, man.

Then, nine months later, Sharon got broody again. So I had to go back to the doc and ask him to unsnip me.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ he said. ‘I told you that couldn’t be done. But we can always try, I suppose.’

It didn’t work. As the doc said, it’s very hard to reverse a snip. Maybe if I’d gone back to get my pipes cleaned out, it would have been OK. Who knows? But we gave up on having any more kids after that. Still, five kids in one lifetime ain’t bad—and I love them all so much.

They’re the best things that ever happened to me, no question about it.

Another problem with getting the snip was that it made me think I suddenly had the freedom to do whatever I wanted to—or at least whatever I thought I wanted to, when I was pissed out of my skull. But my wife was brought up in a rock ’n’ roll environment, and she can sniff out a lie from six thousand miles away. And I’m the world’s worst liar, anyway.

So she knew exactly what I was up to. Of course, she hated it, but she put up with it. At first.

It wasn’t like I was having affairs. I just wanted to think I was Robert Redford for an hour.

But I was never any good at that game. Most of the time, when I was with a chick, she’d be calling an ambulance or carrying me back to my hotel room in a cab while I puked my guts out. I’d start the night like James Bond, and end it like a pile of shit on the floor. And the guilt that followed was always fucking lethal. I hated it. I felt like such an arsehole. And I’m a terrible hypochondriac, so I’d always be shitting myself that I’d caught some rare and deadly virus. I can catch a disease off the telly, me. I’ll be taking some pill to help me get to sleep, then I’ll see an ad for it on TV, and the voiceover will say, ‘Side-effects may include vomiting, bleeding and, on rare occasions, death’ and I’ll convince myself I’m halfway to the morgue. It got to the point where I had doctors coming over to look at my dick twice a week, just to be on the safe side.

Then AIDS came along.

I wasn’t worried at first. Like most people, I thought it was a gay thing. And no matter how drunk or high I got, I never felt the urge to jump in the sack with some hairy-arsed bloke.

But it didn’t take long for everyone to realise that you don’t have to be gay to get AIDS.

Then, one night, I bonked this chick in the Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood. As soon as I was done, I just knew something wasn’t right. So, at two in the morning, I called the front desk and asked if they had a doctor on duty. They did—those fancy hotels always have their own in-house quacks—so he came up to my room, checked out my tackle and told me I should go and have a test.

‘What d’you mean, a test?’ I asked him.

‘An HIV test,’ he said.

That was it, as far as I was concerned. I was a goner.

For a few days I drove myself halfway insane with worry. I was impossible to be around.

Then I blurted everything out to Sharon. You can imagine how that went down. Think of that 100-megaton bomb the Russians once set off in the Arctic.

That was Sharon when I told her that I had to get an HIV test ’cos I’d bonked some dodgy chick from a hotel bar. Angry doesn’t even begin to describe it. It was such a bad scene, I began to think that being dead might actually be better than being alive for another bollocking.

Anyway, I got the test. And then a week later, I went with Sharon to get the results.

I’ll never forget the doctor walking into that little room, sitting down, getting out his file, and going, ‘Well, Mr Osbourne, the good news is that you don’t have herpes, the clap or syphilis.’

The second he said that, I knew something was up.

‘What’s the bad news?’ I asked him.

‘Well, I’m afraid there’s no easy way to tell you this,’ he said, as my whole body went numb with fear. ‘But you’re HIV positive.’

I literally fell to my knees, put my hands over my head, and screamed, ‘WHAT THE FUCK

DO YOU MEAN I’M HIV POSITIVE? THAT’S A FUCKING DEATH SENTENCE, YOU ARSEHOLE!’

You’ve got to remember, in those days HIV wasn’t treatable like it is now. If you got HIV, it meant you’d get AIDS—and then you’d die. The End. And if I was HIV positive, then it probably meant that Sharon was HIV positive, too. Which meant I’d killed the mother of my kids.

I couldn’t even look at Sharon, I felt so fucking terrible. She must have hated me at that moment. But she didn’t say anything. I suppose the shock of it must have been as bad for her as it was for me.

Then the phone on the doctor’s desk rang. I was still on my knees and screaming at this point, but I soon shut up when I realised it was the lab, calling about my results. I listened as the doctor ummed and ahhed for a while. Then he put down the receiver and went, ‘Actually, Mr Osbourne, let me clarify: your test was borderline, not positive. That means we need to run it again. Sorry for the confusion.’

Confusion? If I hadn’t been such a mess, I would have got up and chinned the bastard.

But I was in no state for anything.

‘How long will that take?’ I croaked, trying not to throw up.

‘Another week.’

‘I won’t last a week,’ I said. ‘Seriously, doc, I’ll have topped myself by then. Is there any way of getting it faster?’

‘It’ll be expensive.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘OK then. I’ll get it for you overnight. In the meantime, Mrs Osbourne, I suggest you get a test, too.’

Sharon nodded, her face white.

The next day we went back for my results. I’d been a fucking wreck all night, but Sharon wasn’t exactly in the mood to give me any sympathy. The only thing she was in the mood for was divorce. I honestly thought my marriage was over.

‘So, Mr Osbourne,’ began the doc. ‘We ran another test on you, and I’m delighted to say that you don’t seem to have HIV—although we should do the test one more time, to be sure.’

I put my head in my hands, released all the air from my lungs, and thanked God like I’d never thanked Him before. Meanwhile, I heard Sharon let out a sob of relief and blow her nose.

‘The confusion seems to have arisen from the state of your immune system,’ the doc went on. ‘Basically, Mr Osbourne, your immune system currently isn’t functioning. At all. At first, the lab couldn’t understand it. So they did some more blood-work, and then they came across some—well, er, some lifestyle factors that probably explain the anomaly.’

‘Lifestyle factors?’

‘Your blood contains near-fatal quantities of alcohol and cocaine, Mr Osbourne, not to mention a number of other controlled substances. The lab’s never seen anything like it.’

‘So I really don’t have HIV?’

‘No. But your body thinks it does.’

‘Well, that’s a relief.’

‘Mr Osbourne, you might not be HIV positive, but your life is still in grave danger if you don’t take it easier.’

I nodded, but by then I wasn’t even listening. I was too busy planning the drink I needed to celebrate. Mind you, I did change my lifestyle in one way—I never cheated on Sharon again.

With the AIDS crisis over, I flew back to England to prepare for the next tour. I’d only been back a week or two when I got a frantic call from Sharon, who was still in California.

‘Ozzy, get on the next plane out here.’

She sounded terrible.

‘What? Why?’ I said.

‘Just go to the airport, buy a ticket, then call the Beverly Hills Hotel and let me know which flight you’re on.’

‘Is everything OK?’

‘No. One more thing, Ozzy.’

‘Yeah?’

‘DO. NOT. GET. DRUNK.’

Click.

Fifteen hours later, I was walking through immigration at LAX when about ten thousand flashbulbs went off. I thought there must have been a royal visit going on or something. Then a reporter shoved a TV camera in my face and said, ‘What do you think, Ozzy?’

‘Oh, er, well, the chicken was a bit soggy,’ I said. ‘But other than that, it was a pretty decent flight.’

‘I mean about the kid. The dead kid. Any comment?’

‘What?’

‘The suicide. Your thoughts?’

‘I have no idea what you’re talki—’

Before I could say any more, about ten security guards pushed the cameraman out of the way and formed a circle around me. Then they escorted me outside and bundled me into a black limo.

Waiting on the back seat was Howard Weitzman, my lawyer.

‘The kid’s name is—or rather was—John McCollum,’ he explained, handing me a copy of the Los Angeles Times. ‘Nineteen years old. Big fans of yours. According to his parents, he was drinking and listening to Speak of the Devil when he shot himself with his father’s .22. He was still wearing headphones when they found him. And they’re blaming it all on you.’

‘Me?’

‘The father says his son was just doing what the lyrics of “Suicide Solution” told him to do.’

‘But Speak of the Devil is a live album of Black Sabbath songs. “Suicide Solution” isn’t even on there.’

‘Right.’

‘And has he actually read the lyrics?’

‘Look, you and I both know the song’s about the perils of too much liquor, but he doesn’t see it that way.’

‘He thinks I want my fans to kill themselves? How the fuck does he think I plan to sell any more records?’

‘That’s not all, Ozzy. They’re saying that your songs have subliminal messages embedded in them, instructing the young and impressionable to “get a gun”, “end it now”, “shoot-shoot-shoot”, that kind of thing. It’s all in the lawsuit. I’ll have a copy sent over to your hotel.’

‘How much are they suing me for?’

‘Everything. Plus damages.’

‘You’re kidding me.’

‘Unfortunately not. We’re on our way to a press conference right now. Let me do the talking.’

The press conference was at a tennis club. I was jet-lagged, pissed (I couldn’t help myself) and in shock. It got even worse when I was led on to this little podium to face the cameras. I was used to being interviewed by music magazines or whatever, but not by this hardcore national media gang. It was like being back in the classroom with Mr Jones. The reporters were throwing questions at me so hard and so fast, I almost wanted to duck for cover.

One guy said, ‘Listen, Mr Osbourne, isn’t it true that you sing on one of your songs,

“Paranoid”, “I tell you to end your life”?’

I had to take a moment to run through Geezer’s lyrics in my head. Then I said to him, ‘No, I sing “ enjoy life”.’

But the other reporters were already shouting their follow-up questions, so no one could hear.

‘It’s ENJOY life,’ I kept repeating. ‘ENJOY life.’

No one listened.

‘Ozzy,’ said another reporter. ‘Mr McCollum’s attorney says he went to one of your concerts, and that it was like being at Nuremberg, with the crowd chanting your name. Any comment?’

‘Nuremberg?’ I should have said, ‘I don’t think Hitler spent much of his time at Nuremberg making the peace sign and shouting “rock ’n’ roll”.’ But I didn’t. I couldn’t get my words out. I just froze.

Then they started asking about ‘Suicide Solution’. All I can remember is Howard Weisman shouting above the crowd, ‘The song is autobiographical. It’s about Mr Osbourne’s well-publicised battle with alcoholism, which he believes is a form of suicide, as evidenced by the tragic death of Mr Osbourne’s good friend Bon Scott, lead singer of the Australian band AC/DC.’

‘But Ozzy,’ shouted the reporters, ‘isn’t it true that…’

Finally, it was over and I went back to the hotel, shaking. I flopped down on the bed, flicked on the TV, and there was Don Arden, discussing the case. ‘To be perfectly honest, I would be doubtful as to whether Mr Osbourne knew the meaning of the lyrics—if there was any meaning—because his command of the English language is minimal,’ he said.

I suppose it was his way of showing support.

The press conference was very frightening, and it gave me a taste of what was to come. I became public enemy number one in America. I opened a newspaper one morning in New York and there was a picture of me with a gun pointed at my head. They must have cut and pasted it together ’cos I’d never posed for it, but it freaked me out. Then I started to get death threats wherever I went. The cops would use them to try to get me to cancel gigs. One time in Texas, the local police chief called up our tour manager and said, ‘There’s been some dynamite stolen from the local quarry, and we’ve had a letter from an anonymous source saying it’s going to be used to blow up Ozzy.’

I was scared for the kids, more than anything. I told the nannies never to stop for anyone on the street. It was 1986, just over five years since John Lennon had signed a copy of Double Fantasy for a fan and then been shot by the same bloke. And I was well aware that it was often the fans who could be the most psycho. One guy started to follow me around with this five-million-year-old mammoth tusk. Another bloke sent me a video of his house: he’d painted my name over every single thing, both outside and in. Then he sent me another video of this little girl wearing a pair of welly-boots and dancing to ‘Fairies Wear Boots’.

He was insane, that guy. He built a tomb so that me and him could spend the rest of eternity together. I could think of better fucking things to do with eternity, to be honest with you. It got to the point where the cops had to take him into custody every time I played a gig anywhere near where he lived. And if I did a signing at a record shop in the area, they’d make me wear a bullet-proof jacket, just to be safe.

I got well and truly pissed off with the crazy stuff after a while. I remember one time, me and my assistant Tony were on a flight from Tokyo to LA. There’d been a six-hour delay at the gate, and they’d handed out free drinks coupons, so everyone was pissed. But this one American chick wouldn’t leave me alone. She was sitting behind me, and every two seconds she’d tap me on the back of my head and go, ‘I know you.’

Tony kept saying to her, ‘Now, missus, please just go away. We don’t want to be bothered,’ but she wouldn’t listen.

In the end, she got out of her seat, came round, and wanted a photograph. So I let her take one. Then she went, ‘I got it! You’re Ozzy Bourne!’

I’d had enough. ‘FUCK OFF!’ I shouted.

A stewardess came over and told me not to be rude to the other passengers.

‘Well, keep that woman away from me then!’ I told her.

But she kept coming back. And back. And back.

Finally, I thought, Right, I’m gonna do something about this.

In those days, I used to carry around these things called Doom Dots. They’re basically chloral hydrate, and they come in little gel caps. All you do is stick a pin in the end and squirt the stuff into someone’s drink. When you hear about people being ‘slipped a Mickey’, that’s what they’re being given—a Doom Dot. Anyway, I waited for this chick to get up and go for a piss, then reached behind me, and squirted a Doom Dot into her glass of wine.

When she came back, I told Tony, ‘Keep looking behind me, and tell me what’s happening.’

He said, ‘Whey, she’s ahl-reet right now, but she’s leaning forward a bit. She’s lookin’ a bit dazed. Oh, hang on now—she’s goin’, she’s goin’, she’s—’

I felt a jolt in the back of my seat.

‘What happened?’ I asked Tony.

‘Face down on the tray. Fast asleep.’

‘Magic,’ I said.

‘Aye. It’s just a shame she didn’t get her soup oot the way first, lyke. Poor lass. She’s gonna be covered.’

But the Jesus freaks were the worst. While the ‘Suicide Solution’ case was going through the courts they followed me around everywhere. They would picket my shows with signs that read, ‘The Anti-Christ Is Here’. And they’d always be chanting: ‘Put Satan behind you! Put Jesus in front of you!’

One time, I made my own sign—a smiley face with the words ‘Have a Nice Day’—and went out and joined them. They didn’t even notice. Then, just as the gig was about to start, I put down the sign, said, ‘See ya, guys,’ and went back to my dressing room.

The most memorable Jesus-freak moment was in Tyler, Texas. By then, the death threats were coming in pretty much every day, so I had this security guy, a Vietnam vet called Chuck, who was with me at all times. Chuck was so hardcore he couldn’t even go into a Chinese restaurant. ‘If I see anyone who looks like a Gook, I’m gonna take ’em out,’ he’d say. He had to turn down a tour with me in Japan ’cos he couldn’t handle it. Whenever we stayed in a hotel, he’d spend the night crawling around on his belly through the undergrowth in the garden or doing push-ups in the corridor. Really intense guy.

Anyway, in Tyler, we did the gig, went out on the town, and got back to the hotel at about seven in the morning. I’d agreed to meet a doctor in the lobby at noon that day—my throat had been bothering me—so I went to bed, got a few hours’ sleep, then Chuck knocked on my door and off we went to see the quack. But the doctor was nowhere to be found, so I said to the chick on the front desk, ‘If a bloke in a white coat turns up, just tell him I’m in the coffee shop.’

But I didn’t have a clue that the local evangelist guy had been doing this TV campaign about me in the run-up to the gig, telling everyone that I was the Devil, that I was corrupting the youth of America, and that I was going to take everyone with me to hell. So half the town was out to get me, but I had no idea. There I was, sitting in this coffee shop, with Chuck twitching and muttering beside me. Thirty minutes went by. No doctor. Then another thirty minutes. Still no doctor. Then, finally, this guy comes in and says, ‘Are you Ozzy Osbourne?’

‘Yeah.’

‘PUT SATAN BEHIND YOU! PUT JESUS IN FRONT OF YOU! PUT SATAN BEHIND YOU! PUT JESUS IN FRONT OF YOU! PUT SATAN BEHIND YOU! PUT JESUS IN FRONT OF YOU!’

It was the preacher from the telly. And it turned out that the coffee shop was full of his disciples, so as soon as he started to do his nutty Jesus bullshit, all these other people joined in, until I was surrounded by forty or fifty Jesus freaks, all red in the face and spitting out the same words.

Then Chuck went fucking mental. The whole thing must have triggered some sort of ’Nam flashback, ’cos he just flipped. Stage-five psycho. The guy must have taken down about fifteen of the Jesus freaks in the first ten seconds. There were teeth and Bibles and glasses flying everything.

I didn’t stick around to see what happened next. I just elbowed the preacher in the nuts and legged it.

The funny thing is, I’m actually quite interested in the Bible, and I’ve tried to read it several times. But I’ve only ever got as far as the bit about Moses being 720 years old, and I’m like,

‘What were these people smoking back then?’ The bottom line is I don’t believe in a bloke called God in a white suit who sits on a fluffy cloud any more than I believe in a bloke called the Devil with a three-pronged fork and a couple of horns. But I believe that there’s day, there’s night, there’s good, there’s bad, there’s black, there’s white. If there is a God, it’s nature. If there’s a Devil, it’s nature. I feel the same way when people ask me if songs like

‘Hand of Doom’ and ‘War Pigs’ are anti-war. I think war is just part of human nature. And I’m fascinated by human nature—especially the dark side. I always have been. It doesn’t make me a Devil worshipper, no more than being interested in Hitler makes me a Nazi. I mean, if I’m a Nazi, how come I married a woman who’s half Jewish?

All those Jesus freaks ever had to do was listen to my records, and it would have been obvious. But they just wanted to use me for publicity. And I suppose I didn’t care that much, ’cos every time they attacked me, I got my ugly mug on the telly and sold another hundred thousand records. I should probably have sent them a Christmas card.

But in the end, even the American legal system came down on my side.

The ‘Suicide Solution’ lawsuit was filed in January 1986, and was thrown out in August of that year. At the court hearing, Howard Weitzman told the judge that if they were gonna ban

‘Suicide Solution’ and hold me responsible for some poor kid shooting himself, then they’d have to ban Shakespeare, ’cos Romeo and Juliet’s about suicide, too. He also said that the song lyrics were protected by the right of free speech in America. The judge agreed, but his summing up wasn’t exactly friendly. He said that although I was ‘totally objectionable and repulsive, trash can be given First Amendment protection, too’.

I had to read that sentence about five times before I realised that the bloke had actually ruled in our favour.

The one thing the McCollums were right about was that there was a subliminal message in ‘Suicide Solution’. But it wasn’t ‘Get the gun, get the gun, shoot-shoot-shoot’. What I actually say is ‘Get the flaps out, get the flaps out, bodge-bodge-bodge’. It was a stupid dirty joke we had at the time. If a chick took her kit off, we said she was getting her flaps out—her piss flaps. And ‘bodge’ was just a word we had for fuck. So I was basically saying, ‘Get a chick naked and give her one,’ which was a whole fucking lot different to saying, ‘Blow your brains out.’

But the media was obsessed with that stuff for a long time. Which was great PR as far as we were concerned. It got to the point where if you put a ‘parental advisory’ sticker on your album saying it contained explicit lyrics, you sold twice as many copies. Then you had to have one of those stickers, otherwise the album wouldn’t chart.

After a while, I started to put subliminal messages in as many of my songs as I could. For example, on No Rest for the Wicked, if you play ‘Bloodbath in Paradise’ backwards, you can clearly hear me saying, ‘Your mother sells whelks in Hull.’

The saddest thing about that period wasn’t that the Jesus freaks kept giving us a hard time. It was that my old bandmates Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake decided to have a go, too.

It started to feel like someone had put a bull’s-eye on my forehead, just ’cos I’d made a bit of dough.

They claimed we owed them money for Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman, so they sued us. And we fought, because we didn’t owe them anything. Bob and Lee were what’s known as paid-to-play musicians. They got a weekly rate for recording, a different rate for touring and another rate to stay at home. I even paid for the fucking petrol they used to drive to and from the studio. Yes, they helped write some of the songs on the first two albums, but they got publishing royalties for that—and they still get them to this day. So what more did they want? I’m obviously no great legal brain, but from what I understand they said I wasn’t a solo artist and that we were all part of a band. But if I was just the singer and we were all at the same level, how come I auditioned them? And how come I was talking about Blizzard of Ozz for years before I met them? And where the fuck are all their hit records, before and after the two albums with me?

People ask me why we didn’t just settle. But that’s what Michael Jackson did, and look what happened to him. If you’ve got a bit of hard-earned dough in the bank and you say to someone who’s suing you, ‘OK, how much will it cost to make this go away?’ that opens the door for every loony and arsehole in the world to try to get the next load off you. You have to stand up for yourself, ’cos it can be a nasty game, this business—especially when people think you go to bed at night on a big mountain of cash.

In the end Bob and Lee’s lawsuit got thrown out of every court in America. What really pisses me off is that Bob and Lee never said to me, ‘Ozzy, we’ve gotta sit down. We wanna have a talk to you.’ They just kept blasting off in all fucking directions. The first I knew about it was when I got served. They’d been creeping around behind my back, calling up other people who’d played on my albums and trying to get them involved. I’d done fuck-all wrong, but they made me feel like the criminal of the century, and it really got up my arse after a while.

Sharon protected me from a lot of the details, ’cos she knows how much I worry. In the end she just snapped and re-recorded Bob and Lee’s parts on those two albums. When they were re-released, a sticker was put on the covers telling people all about it. I didn’t have anything to do with that decision, and I can’t say I feel good about it. I told Sharon that I was uncomfortable with it, but I get it, y’know? I understand why she felt she had to do it. Every time we got past one hurdle, another one would come up. It never stopped. The case went on for twenty-five years after Blizzard of Ozz was recorded. All I wanted to do was get on with being a rock ’n’ roller, and instead I ended up being Perry fucking Mason, giving depositions here, there and everywhere.

What really kills me is that I worked with Bob for years, and I was very fond of him and his family. He’s a very talented bloke. We were good friends. I certainly didn’t turn around and sue him when they put my balls to the fire for ‘Suicide Solution’, even though he wrote some of the lyrics. But sometimes in life you’ve gotta move on. Eventually, I had to stop talking to him or seeing him, ’cos I was frightened I might say the wrong thing—and then it would be lawsuit time again. Also, I just hate fucking confrontations. It’s one of my biggest failings.

I never want to go through any of that bullshit again. Before I work with anyone now, I tell them to get themselves a lawyer, have their lawyer write up a contract with my lawyer, then read it, think about it, make sure they’re happy with it, make double and triple sure they’re happy with it, and then never say that anyone ripped them off.

Because I don’t do that—no matter what Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake might say.

My last good memory of the eighties, before everything went dark, was being sent to Wormwood Scrubs. Not because I’d broken the law again—amazingly—but because I was asked to play a gig there.

What a crazy experience that was. I might have been in a few police station lock-ups over the years, but I hadn’t set foot in a proper slammer since I’d walked out of Winson Green in 1966. The iron bars, the balconies, even the guards all looked the same as they had twenty years before, but it was the smell that really brought it all back to me: like a public shitter, times ten. Bad enough to make your eyes water. I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would want to work in one of those places. I suppose they’re all ex-army, so they’re used to it.

Maybe that’s what I would have done in the end if the army hadn’t told me to fuck off.

I was invited to do the gig because the prison had its own band, called the Scrubs, which had both guards and inmates in it. They’d written a song and donated the royalties to charity.

Then they wrote to me and asked if I fancied doing a gig with them. The deal was that they’d play a set, then I’d play my set, then we’d do a jam of ‘Jailhouse Rock’.

So we get to the prison and they let me through all the fences and gates and doors, then they show me into this back room where there’s a big fat guy making a pot of tea. He’s a nice jolly chap, very friendly, and offers me a cup of tea.

I ask him, ‘How long are you in here for, then?’

‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I’ll never get out of here.’

We keep chatting for a while and I’m drinking this cup of tea, but then curiosity gets the better of me and I say, ‘So, how come you’re in here for such a long stretch?’

‘I murdered eight people.’

That’s a bit heavy duty, I think, but we carry on talking. Then curiosity gets the better of me again. ‘So, how did you do it?’ I ask, taking another sip of my tea. ‘I mean, how did you kill all those people?’

‘Oh, I poisoned them,’ he says.

I just about threw the mug of tea at the wall. And whatever had been in my mouth came out of my nose. It’s funny, when you think of a murderer, you always picture some tall, dark, evil-looking monster. But it can be just a nice, normal, jolly fat bloke, with a loose wire somewhere.

The gig itself was surreal.

The smell of dope in the hall where we played almost knocked me off my feet. It was like a Jamaican wedding in there. Another thing that amazed me was that they had a bar right outside, where all the guards went. As for the members of the Scrubs, the bass player was a Vietnamese guy who’d burned thirty-seven people to death a few years earlier by pouring petrol through the letterbox of an underground club in Soho and putting a match to it (the biggest mass killing in British history at the time); the guitarist was a kid who’d murdered a drug dealer by beating him to death with an iron bar; and then there were a couple of guards who sang and played the drums.

I’ll never forget the moment when it was our turn to go on stage. Jake E. Lee had just left the band and Zakk Wylde had taken over as lead guitarist. He was young, with ripped muscles and long blond hair, and the second he walked out from the wings, the entire place started to wolf-whistle and scream, ‘Bend over, little boy, bend over, little boy!’ Then they all started to jump around, stoned out of their minds, while the riot-guards stood guard. It was insane. I’d said to Sharon before we went on, ‘At least if we’re crap, no one will walk out.’ Now I was thinking, No, they’ll just kill me.

At one point, I looked down and there in the front row was Jeremy Bamber, the bloke who murdered his entire family with a rifle at a farmhouse in Essex and then tried to make it look like his mentally ill sister had done it. His face had been on the front page of every tabloid in Britain for months. He gave me a big smile, did the old Bambinator.

At the end, when we were playing ‘Jailhouse Rock’, there was a full-on stage invasion, led by one of the kids who had tried to cut the head off that police officer, Keith Blakelock, during the Broadwater Farm riot. I knew it was him ’cos one of the guards on stage told me. The last thing I saw was this kid taking off a shoe and hitting himself on the head with it.

Fuck this for a game of soldiers, I thought. Nice seeing ya, I’m off now.

And I didn’t look back.

One morning, not long after that gig, Sharon asked me, ‘Did you have a good night last night, Ozzy?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘At Kelly’s birthday party. Did you have a good time?’

‘Yeah, I suppose.’

All I could remember was playing with the kids in the garden, making Jack laugh by tickling his tummy, telling a few funny jokes, and eating one too many slices of Kelly’s birthday cake. We’d even hired a clown for the occasion—a bloke called Ally Doolally—who’d put on a little puppet show. The rest was a bit of a blur, ’cos I’d also had one or two drinks.

‘You should have seen yourself,’ said Sharon.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I mean you should have seen yourself.’

‘I don’t understand, Sharon. I was a bit tipsy, yes, but it was a birthday party. Everyone was a bit tipsy.’

‘No, honestly, Ozzy, you should have seen yourself. Actually, would you like to see yourself? I have a video.’

Oh crap, I thought.

Sharon had filmed the whole thing. She put the tape in the machine, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. In my mind, I’d been the fun dad that everyone wants to have around. Then I saw the reality. Jack was terrified and in tears. Kelly and Aimee were hiding in the shed, also in tears. All the other parents were leaving and muttering under their breath. The clown had a bloody nose. And there was me, in the middle of it all, fat, pissed, cake all over my face, dripping wet from something or other, raving, screaming drunk.

I was a beast. Absolutely terrifying.

After I’d come out of the Betty Ford Center, I’d started to say to myself, ‘Well, I might be an alcoholic, but I have the perfect job for an alcoholic, so maybe it’s kind of all right that I’m an alcoholic.’

In a way, it was true. I mean, what other occupation rewards you for being out of your brains all the time? The more loaded I was when I got on stage, the more the audience knew it was gonna be a good night. The trouble was the booze was making me so ill that I couldn’t function without taking pills or cocaine on top of it. Then I couldn’t sleep—or I had panic attacks, or I went into these paranoid delusions—so I turned to sedatives, which I’d get from doctors on the road. Whenever I overdosed, which I did all the time, I’d just blame it on my dyslexia: ‘Sorry, Doc, I thought it said six every one hour, not one every six hours.’

I had a different doctor in every town—‘gig doctors’ I called them—and played them off against each other. When you’re a drug addict, half the thrill is the chase, not the fix. When I discovered Vicodin, for example, I used to keep an old bottle and put a couple of pills in it, then I’d say, ‘Oh, Doc, I’ve got these Vicodins, but I’m running low.’ He’d look at the date and the two pills left in the jar, then whack me up another fifty. So I’d get fifty pills before every gig.

I was doing twenty-five a day at one point.

Mind you, in America, if you’re a celebrity, you don’t have to try very hard to get doctors to give you whatever you want. One gig doctor would drive out to see me in his pick-up. In the back he had one of those tool cabinets full of little drawers, and in each drawer he had a different kind of drug. All the heavy shit you could ever want. Eventually Sharon found out what was going on and put her foot down. She grabbed the doc by the scruff of the neck and said,

‘Do not give my husband any drugs under any circumstances or you’re going to jail.’

Deep down, I knew that all the booze and drugs had turned sour on me; that I’d stopped being funny and zany and had started to become sad. I’d run miles to get a drink. I’d do anything for a drink. I used to keep a fridge full of beer in the kitchen, and I’d get up, first thing in the morning, knock off a Corona, and by twelve o’clock I was fucking blasted. And when I was doing Vicodin and all that other shit, I was always playing with my fucking nose. You can see how bad I was on Penelope Spheeris’s documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II. Everyone thought it was hysterical, me trying to fry an egg at seven o’clock in the morning after I’d been out on the piss all night, drinking bottle after bottle of vino.

Booze does terrible things to you when you drink as much as I did. For example, I started to shit myself on a regular basis. At first I made a joke out of it, but then it just stopped being funny. One time, I was in a hotel somewhere in England, and I was walking down the corridor to my room, but suddenly I felt this turd rumbling down the pipe. I had to go. Right then. It was either do it on the carpet or do it in my pants, and I’d had enough of doing it in my pants. So I squatted down, dropped my trousers, and took a dump right there in the corridor.

At that exact moment, a bellboy came out of the elevator, looked at me, and shouted,

‘What the hell are you doing?’

I couldn’t even begin to think how to explain. So I just held up my room key and said, ‘It’s all right, I’m staying here.’

‘No you’re fucking not,’ he said.

A lot of alcoholics shit themselves. I mean, think about it: a gallon of Guinness makes enough tarmac to pave ten miles of the M6. And when you come round the following day, your body wants to get rid of everything: it just wants to expel all the toxic crap you forced into it the night before. I tried to stop it by switching from Guinness to Hennessy. But I was fruiting it up with orange juice or Coca-Cola the whole time, which made it just as bad. And I was drinking four bottles of Hennessy a day, plus the cocaine and the pills and the beer. At first, I would barely get hangovers, but as time went on they started to get worse and worse, until I couldn’t handle them any more.

So I went back to rehab. I was just so sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. If you drink a liquid that makes you feel better, then that’s one thing. But if you drink a liquid that makes you feel worse than you did originally, then what’s the point? And I felt like I was dying.

I couldn’t face Betty Ford again, so I went to the Hazelden Clinic in Center City, Minnesota. It was winter, freezing cold. I spent the whole time shivering, throwing up and feeling sorry for myself.

On the first day, the therapist got a bunch of us together and said, ‘When you go back to your rooms tonight, I want you to write down how much you think drink and drugs have cost you since you started doing them. Just add it all up and come back to me.’

So that night I got out a calculator and started to do some sums. I kind of wanted to get a big number, so I grossly exaggerated a lot of things, like how many pints I had each day—I put twenty-five—and how much each of them cost. In the end I came up with this obscene number. Just a huge, ridiculous number. Something like a million quid. Then I tried to get some sleep, but I couldn’t.

The next day, I showed my calculations to the bloke, and he said, ‘Oh, very interesting.’

I was surprised, ’cos I thought he was gonna say, ‘Oh, come off it, Ozzy, give me some real numbers.’

Then he said, ‘So is this just from drinking?’

‘And drugs,’ I said.

‘Hmm. And you’re sure this is everything?’ he asked me.

‘It’s a million quid!’ I said. ‘How much more could it be?’

‘Well, have you ever been fined because of drinking?’

‘A few times, yeah.’

‘Have you ever missed any gigs or been banned from any venues because of drinking?’

‘A few times, yeah.’

‘Had to pay lawyers to get you out of trouble because of your drinking?’

‘A few times, yeah.’

‘Medical fees?’

‘Big time.’

‘And d’you think you might have lost record sales because your work was affected by drinking?’

‘Probably.’

‘Probably?’

‘OK, definitely.’

‘Final question: have you ever lost property or other assets in a divorce caused by your drinking?’

‘Yeah, I lost everything.’

‘Well, Ozzy, I did some research and some calculations of my own last night, and d’you want to know what I think your addictions have cost you?’

‘Go on then.’

He told me. I almost threw up.

10. Blackout

I woke up groaning.

Fuck me, I thought, as my eyes began to focus: must have been another good one last night. I was lying on a bare concrete floor in a square room. It had bars on the window, a bucket in the corner, and human shit up the walls. For a second I thought I was in a public toilet. But no: the bars on the window were the giveaway.

One of these days, I thought, I really need to stop waking up in jail cells.

I touched my face. Argh! Shit, that hurt.

For some reason, all I was wearing one of my smelly old T-shirts—the kind I used to sleep in—and a pair of shiny black tuxedo trousers. At least it’s better than waking up in one of Sharon’s frocks again, I thought.

I wondered what time it was. Seven in the morning? Nine? Ten? My watch was gone. So was my wallet. The coppers must have bagged my stuff when they booked me. The only thing left in my pockets was a scrunched-up receipt from my local Chinese restaurant, the Dynasty.

I pictured the inside of the place—red, like hell—and saw myself sitting in one of the leather booths, arguing with Sharon, and crushing powder and pills in one of those… what d’you call them? A pestle and mortar. What the fuck had I been doing last night? Coke? Sleeping pills?

Amphetamines? All that and more, knowing me.

I felt disgusting. My whole body ached—especially my face, and my teeth, and my nose.

I needed a bag of ice.

I needed a shower.

I needed a doctor.

‘HELLO?’ I shouted through the bars. ‘ANYBODY THERE?’

No reply.

I tried to think what my drunk, coked-up evil-twin brother could have done to put me behind bars. But my brain was empty. Blank. Just that image of me in the Dynasty, then static.

I’d probably been caught pissing in the street again, I thought. But if that was the case, why was I wearing my pyjama T-shirt? Had I been arrested at my house? Whatever I’d got up to, it had given me the mother of all headaches. I hoped I hadn’t already used up my telephone call, ’cos I needed to tell Sharon that I was in jail, so she could come and get me. Or maybe she’d gone to America. She was always fucking off to America to get out of my way, especially after a big argument. In which case I’d need to call Tony Dennis.

Good old Tony.

He’d sort me out.

It was September 3, 1989.

By then, we’d moved back to England full time. We’d bought a place called Beel House, in Little Chalfont, Bucking hamshire. The house dated back to the seventeenth century, or so Sharon told me. Dirk Bogarde once lived there. It was a real house, not the fake, movie-set bullshit you get out in California. But my favourite thing about it was our next-door neighbour, George, who lived in what used to be the gatehouse. George was a chemist, and he made his own wine. Every day I’d knock on his door and say, ‘Gimme a bottle of your super stuff, George.’ It was like rocket fuel, that wine of his. People would come over from America, take one swig, their eyes would widen, and they’d go, ‘What the fuck is this stuff?’ A few glasses of Chateau d’George was enough to put you under for good. The funny thing was George didn’t even drink. He was a teetotaller. He’d say, ‘Oh, Mr Osbourne, I saw that you set fire to the kitchen last night. That must have been a good one. Remind me, was it the elderberry or the tea leaf?’

But Sharon was on my back, big time, so I couldn’t drink George’s brews in front of her.

And I couldn’t hide the bottles in the oven any more, either. So I started to bury the stuff in the garden. Trouble was, I would always hide the booze when I was pissed, so the next night I could never remember where the fuck I’d put it. I’d be out there with a shovel until two o’clock in the morning, digging holes all over the place. Then Sharon would come down for breakfast and look out of the window, and there’d be all these trenches everywhere. ‘Fuck me, Sharon,’

I’d say to her, ‘them moles have been busy, haven’t they?’

In the end, I had floodlights installed to help me find the booze. Cost me an arm and a leg.

Then Sharon twigged, and that was the end of that.

‘I should have known better than to think you would develop a sudden interest in horticulture,’ she said.

It was probably good that I got caught, ’cos my body could hardly take the hard stuff any more. I was forty, and my system had started to give up. I knew something was badly wrong when I went to the pub one time and woke up five days later. People would come up to me and say, ‘Hello, Ozzy,’ and I’d ask, ‘Do I know you?’ And they’d go, ‘I spent three months living at your house over the summer. Don’t you remember?’

I’d been warned about blackouts when I went to the Betty Ford Center that time after Kelly was born. The doc told me that my tolerance would eventually hit zero, and then my body and brain would shut down. But I thought it was just bullshit to frighten me. ‘You know what my real drinking problem is?’ I said to him. ‘I can’t find a fucking bar in this place.’

But then the blackouts started, just like he said they would. They didn’t stop me drinking, though. They just made me worry, which made me drink even more. After what had happened with Vince Neil and the car crash, my biggest fear was waking up in a courtroom one day with someone pointing at me and saying, ‘That’s him! He’s the one who ran my husband down!’ Or, ‘That’s him! The one who killed my baby!’

‘But I had a blackout, Your Honour’ would be my last words before they locked me up and threw away the key.

‘HELLO?’ I shouted again. ‘ANYBODY THERE?’

I was getting nervous now—which meant all the booze and the coke from the night before must have been wearing off. As soon as I get out of this shithole, I told myself, I’m gonna have a nice drink to calm myself down.

Silence.

I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Where the fuck was everybody?

I was sweating and shivering now. And I really needed to take a shit.

Finally this copper showed up: big bloke, my age—maybe older—with a right old pissed-off look on his face.

‘Excuse me,’ I said to him. ‘Will someone please tell me what I’m doing in this place?’

He just stood there, looking at me like I was a cockroach in his dinner. ‘You really want to know?’ he said.

‘Yeah.’

He came up to the bars, took an even better look at me, and said, ‘Normally I don’t believe people when they have a convenient loss of memory while they’re breaking the law. But in your case, after seeing the state of you last night, I might make an exception.’

‘Eh?’

‘You should have seen yourself.’

‘Look, are you gonna tell me why I’m in here or not?’

‘I’ll tell you what,’ said the copper. ‘Why don’t I just go and get your file? Then I can read you the charges.’

Read me the charges?

I almost crapped my pants when he said that.

What the fuck had I done? Killed someone? I began to think about the documentary I’d watched a few weeks before on American telly, about a murderer in New York. He was on trial, this bloke, and he knew he was going to get for ever in jail, so he got some peanut butter and smeared it up his arse crack, then, just before the jury went out to consider its verdict, he put his hand down his trousers, scraped it up, and started to eat it out of his hand.

And he got off for being insane.

Trouble was, I didn’t have any peanut butter. So if I wanted to look like I was eating my own shit, I’d have to eat my own shit.

Y’know, even after Sharon played me the video of Kelly’s birthday party—the one where I made all the kids cry—I never really thought of myself as a frightening drunk. I couldn’t see why I was doing any harm. I thought I was just going out, having a few beers, going home, shitting myself, then wetting the bed. Everyone did that, didn’t they? It was just a bit of a laugh, par for the course, what you did. But in rehab they said, ‘Look, what you’ve got to do is reverse the role. How would you feel if you went home and it was Sharon who was lying on the floor in a puddle of her own shit and piss, and she was out of her mind, and the kitchen was on fire, and she couldn’t look after the kids? How long would you stay with her? How would you feel about your marriage?’

When they put it like that, I could see their point.

But it’s taken me until now to realise how scary and wrong it all was. I was just an excessive fucking pig. I would drink a bottle of cognac, pass out, wake up, then drink another. I’m not exaggerating when I say I was drinking four bottles of Hennessy a day.

Even now, I have a lot of trouble understanding why Sharon stayed—or why she married me in the first place, come to think of it.

I mean, she was actually afraid of me half the time.

And the truth was I was afraid of me, too. Afraid of what I’d do to myself or, even worse, to someone else.

A lot of the time, Sharon would just leave the country when I went on a bender. ‘See ya, I’m off to America,’ she’d say. It was around then that she’d started to manage other acts, because I was so fucking volatile, she didn’t want to be totally dependent on me. But that made me worry that she was gonna run off with some young fucking hot shot. I mean, I wouldn’t have blamed her—I wasn’t exactly much fun to be around. Being with me was like falling into an abyss.

One night, when Sharon was away, I paid George the chemist fifty quid for this extra-super-strong bottle of wine, and got well and truly shitfaced with my old keyboard player, John Sinclair. It so happened that I’d been to see a doctor that day, so I had this scoopful of pills: sleeping pills, pain meds, temazepam, you name it. Doctors would give me jars and jars of that shit, all the time. So while I was getting pissed, I was also popping these things, one after the other, until eventually I blacked out.

When I woke up the next morning, I was in bed with Johnny, and we were all tangled up with each other. But when I reached down to check my dick, to make sure nothing had happened, I realised I couldn’t feel anything. I was numb. Totally numb.

So I was lying there, and I started to scream, ‘Fuck! Fuck! I can’t feel my legs!’

Then I hear this grunt next to me.

‘That’s because they’re my legs,’ said Johnny.

I had to take three showers after that. It makes me shudder just to think about it. In fact, I felt like such a fucking mess, I said, ‘Right, that’s it. No more booze, no more pills, no more nothing. This is ridiculous. Sharon’s gonna leave me at this rate.’

I went cold turkey.

Which, as any drug addict will tell you, is the stupidest thing you can ever do. When Sharon came home, Jack ran up to her and shouted, ‘Mum! Mum! Dad’s stopped drinking! He’s stopped drinking!’ Then I crawled off to bed, feeling horrendous, but couldn’t sleep from the comedown. So I scoffed my face full of Excedrin PM, because I thought Excedrin PM didn’t count as a drug.

Then I really did go numb.

I couldn’t feel a thing.

By the time I opened my eyes again, all I could see was Sharon leaning over me and going, ‘What’s my name? What’s my name?’ I couldn’t answer because I felt like I was underwater. Then she was going, ‘How many fingers am I holding up? How many fingers, Ozzy?’

But I couldn’t count. All I wanted to do was sleep. For the first time in years, all my pain had gone. Suddenly I knew what the phrase ‘out-of-body experience’ meant. It was the richest, warmest, most comforting feeling I’d ever had.

I didn’t want it to end.

It was beautiful, so beautiful.

Then Sharon and Tony were dragging me on to the back seat of the car, and we were driving round and round, trying to find a doctor. Finally, I was on a bed with all these drips coming out of me, and in a muffled voice I could hear the doc saying to Sharon, ‘Your husband has gone into an alcoholic seizure. It’s very, very serious. We’ve put him on anti-seizure medication, but we’re going to have to keep monitoring him overnight. He might not come out of it.’

Then, little by little, the feeling returned.

Toes first. Then legs. Then chest. I felt like I was being lifted up from deep, deep under the sea. Then, all of a sudden, my ears popped and I could hear an EKG machine behind me.

Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep.

‘How many fingers?’ Sharon was saying. ‘How many fingers, Ozzy?’

Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep.

‘Ozzy, what’s my name? What’s my name?’

Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep.

‘Your name’s Sharon. I’m so sorry, Sharon. I’m so fucking sorry for everything. I love you.’

Clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp.

The copper walks up to the bars of my cell holding a sheet of paper in his hand. I’m looking at him, sweating, breathing fast and shallow, fists balled, wanting to fucking die.

He’s looking back at me.Then he clears his throat and starts to read: John Michael Osbourne, you are hereby charged with the attempted murder by strangulation of your wife,Sharon Osbourne, during a domestic disturbance that took place in the early hours of Sunday, September 3, 1989, at Beel House, Little Chalfont, in the county of Buckinghamshire.

It was like someone had hit me over the head with a shovel. I staggered backwards, fell against the shit-smeared wall, then slumped on to the floor, head in my hands. I wanted to throw up, pass out and scream, all at the same time. Attempted murder? Sharon? This was my worst nightmare. I’m gonna wake up in a minute, I thought. This can’t be happening. ‘I love my wife!’ I wanted to tell the copper. ‘I love my wife, she’s my best friend in the world, she saved my life. Why the fuck would I want to kill my wife?’

But I didn’t say anything.

I couldn’t speak.

I couldn’t do anything.

‘I hope you’re proud of yourself,’ said the copper.

‘Is she all right?’ I asked him, when I finally got my voice back.

‘Her husband just tried to kill her. How d’you think she is?’

‘But why would I do that? I don’t understand.’

‘Well, it says here that after returning home from a Chinese restaurant—you’d gone there after celebrating your daughter Aimee’s sixth birthday, during which time you became heavily intoxicated on Russian vodka—you walked into the bedroom naked and said, I quote, “We’ve had a little talk and it’s clear that you have to die.”’

‘I said what?’

‘Apparently, you’d spent the entire night complaining about being overworked, because you’d just come back from the Moscow Festival of Peace—fitting that, ain’t it?—and then you had to go to California. Sounds more like a holiday than work to me.’

‘It can’t be true,’ I said. ‘I’d never try to kill her.’

But of course it could be true. Sharon had been saying for years that she never knew which version of me was going to walk through the front door: Bad Ozzy or Good Ozzy. Usually it was Bad Ozzy. Especially when I’d just come off the road, and I had that horrendous restless feeling. Only this time I’d decided to kill more than my chickens.

‘Another thing,’ said the copper. ‘Your wife told us that if she’d had access to a gun at the time of the assault, she would have used it. Although I see she had a pretty good go at scratching your eyes out. She’s quite a fighter, your missus, isn’t she?’

I didn’t know what to say. So I just tried to make light of it, and said, ‘Well, at least it’ll give the press something to write about.’

The copper didn’t like that.

‘Given the severity of the charges,’ he said, ‘I don’t think this is very fucking funny, do you? You’re up for attempted murder, you piss-head. Your wife could very well be dead if others in the house hadn’t heard her screaming. They’re gonna put you away for a long time, mark my words.’

‘Sharon knows I love her,’ I said, trying not to think of Winson Green and Bradley the child molester.

‘We’ll see about that, won’t we?’

It would be fair to say that the coppers in Amersham jail didn’t take much of a shine to me.

My little dance, my little ego, it didn’t do me any favours in there. I wasn’t the bat-biting, Alamo-pissing, ‘Crazy Train’-singing rock ’n’ roll hero. All that celebrity shit counts for nothing with the Thames Valley Police.

Especially when they’ve locked you up for attempted murder.

They kept me in the cell for about thirty-six hours in the end. The only thing I had for company was the shit up the walls. Apparently Don Arden tried to call me when I was in there. So did Tony Iommi. But they didn’t get through—and I wouldn’t have spoken to them, anyway. A few reporters called, too. The coppers told me they wanted to know if it was true that Sharon was having an affair, or if it was true that I was going back to Jet Records to reform Black Sabbath. Fuck knows where they’d heard all that bullshit from.

All I wanted was to keep my family.

Then I had to go to Beaconsfield Magistrates’ Court. They let me out of the cell to clean myself up a bit first, but whoever had pebble-dashed the walls of the cell had done the same thing to the shower, so I didn’t want to get in. Then Tony Dennis came over with a tuxedo jacket, a black shirt and a pair of earrings. I put it all on and tried to feel smart and respectable, but I was going into severe withdrawal. I looked terrible. I felt terrible. I smelled terrible.

When the time came to leave, the cops walked me through the jail and out of the back door—away from all the press—and bundled me into the back of a cop car. Tony followed close behind in the Range Rover.

The courtroom was a zoo. It was the ‘Suicide Solution’ press conference all over again.

Only this time it was really serious. I was shitting blue cobblers, as my old man used to say.

Don Arden had sent one of his heavies to sit at the back and listen. My accountant Colin Newman was there. The funny thing is I can’t remember if Sharon was there—which probably meant she wasn’t. Thankfully, all the lawyer-talk and gavel-bashing didn’t go on for very long.

‘John Michael Osbourne,’ said the judge, at the end, ‘I’m granting you bail on three conditions: that you immediately enter a certified rehabilitation programme of your choosing; that you do not attempt to make contact with your wife; and that you do not attempt to go back to Beel House. Understand?’

‘Yes, Your Honour. Thank you, Your Honour.’

‘Ozzy!’ went the press. ‘Is it true that Sharon wants a divorce? Is it true about the affair?

Ozzy! Ozzy!’

Tony had already booked me into a rehab place: Huntercombe Manor, about twenty minutes away. On the way we passed a newsagent’s. ‘DEATH THREAT OZZY SENT TO BOOZE CLINIC,’ said the sandwich board outside. It feels strange, y’know, when you see the most private moments of your life put on display like that. Very strange.

Huntercombe Manor was all right. I mean, it wasn’t exactly Palm Springs, but it wasn’t a dump, either. The rate was steep enough: about five hundred quid a night in today’s dough.

After I checked in, I just sat there alone in my room, smoking fags, drinking Coke, feeling very sorry for myself. I wanted to hit the bottle so badly, man—so badly, it physically hurt.

I must have been in that joint for a couple of months in the end.

The other people in there were the usual chronic boozers and junkies. There was a gay bloke who’d been involved in the Profumo Affair; there was an aristocrat, Lord Henry; and there was a young Asian woman whose name I can’t remember. Rehab wasn’t as advanced in England in those days as it is now. There was still a lot of shame attached to it.

Eventually, Sharon came to visit. I told her how sorry I was, how much I loved her, how much I loved the kids, how much I wanted to keep our family together. But I knew it was useless.

‘Ozzy,’ she said, in this low, quiet voice, ‘I’ve got some important news that I think you’ll want to hear.’

That’s it, I thought. It’s over. She’s found someone else. She wants a divorce. ‘Sharon,’ I said, ‘it’s OK. I underst—’

‘I’m going to drop the charges.’

I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard.

‘What? Why?’

‘I don’t believe you’re capable of attempted murder, Ozzy. It’s not in you. You’re a sweet, gentle man. But when you get drunk, Ozzy Osbourne disappears and someone else takes over. I want that other person to go away, Ozzy. I don’t want to see him again. Ever.’

‘I’m gonna stop,’ I said. ‘I promise, I’m gonna stop.’

Meanwhile, the press was going nuts. They had photographers hiding in the bushes, hanging from the treetops. The story wasn’t over, as far as they were concerned. And even though Sharon dropped the charges, the Crown Prosecution Service said it was determined to put me away on the lesser charge of assault. I still wasn’t allowed to go back to Beel House, either. But then—on Hallowe’en—they dropped the case.

It was finally over.

The press didn’t fucking care, though. One of the newspapers sent a reporter to my mum’s house in Walsall, and then printed some exaggerated bullshit about what a terrible parent she was, and what a shitty upbringing she’d given me. It was horrendous. Then my mum got into a slagging match with them, which just kept the story going. It got to the point where my kids had to stop going to school, because they were being hounded at the gate. So I called up my mum and said, ‘Look, I know it ain’t true what they said, but you can’t win a slagging match with the tabloids. And if you keep making a fuss, they’re going to keep making my kids’ lives hell. Why don’t I go on the BBC this week and put the record straight. Then we can put it all behind us, eh?’

My mum agreed, so I went on the Tommy Vance show on Radio 1 and said my bit—that my parents had been great, that the press were telling lies, the whole lot.

Settled. Over. Done. No more.

The next thing I know, my mum’s demanding a retraction from one of the papers, and the whole thing blows up again. So it drags on for another three months, the kids have to keep staying away from school.

Finally, she called me and said, ‘You’ll be glad to know I got that retraction.’

‘Are you happy now?’ I said, still pissed off with her.

‘Yes, very happy. They’re just working on the settlement.’

‘Settlement?’

‘I asked them for fifty thousand, and they’ve just come back with forty-five thousand.’

‘So it was all about money? I would have given you the fucking money, Mum. I was trying to protect my kids!’

Looking back now, I can’t blame my mum for acting the way she did. She’d grown up poor, so fifty grand was a massive amount of dough. But I still found it very depressing. Was it just all about money? Was that the meaning of life? I mean, friends said to me at the time, ‘It’s all right for you, ’cos you’ve got money,’ and there’s some truth in that. But what killed me was the fact that if one of my kids ever said, ‘Look, Dad, please stop doing this because it’s hurting my family,’ I’d stop doing it immediately. And it’s not like my mum was broke—I gave her an allowance every week. But for some reason she couldn’t understand that the more she bugged the press and complained, the more the press wanted to be on my back. It really hurt my relationship with her, in the end. We were always falling out about one thing or another, and we always made up, but I didn’t go and see her much after she got the retraction. It just seemed that we always ended up talking about money, and I’ve never liked that topic of conversation.

I went on a big mission to clean myself up after rehab. I lost a lot of weight. Then I went to a plastic surgeon to get forty-four of my forty-five chins removed. All he did was cut a hole, stick a vacuum cleaner in there, and suck out all the blubber. It was magic. Mind you, part of the reason I did it was just to get shot up with Demerol, which I thought was the best drug ever.

While I was in there, I had some fat taken off my hips, too. I’ve got no problem with cosmetic surgery, me. If something bothers you, and you can get it fixed, then fix it, that’s what I say. Sharon’s had a shitload of it done—she’ll draw you a map if you ask her. And she looks great. Mind you, it’s like anything in life: you get what you pay for.

I felt a lot better after dropping forty pounds. And I managed to stay off the booze for quite a while, even though I hardly ever went to the AA meetings. I’ve just never felt comfortable in those places. It’s my worst zone. I’ll get up and sing my heart out in front of two hundred thousand people at a rock festival, but when I’ve got to talk about the way I feel to people I’ve never met before, I can’t do it. There’s nothing to hide behind.

Mind you, in LA, those meetings are like rock star conventions. One time, at this clinic in LA, I was sitting in a room with a bunch of other sorry-looking alcoholics, and I looked over and saw Eric Clapton. It was terrible moment, actually, ’cos at the time I was convinced that Clapton hated me. We’d met at an awards show about ten years earlier, and someone had wanted a photograph of me and him and Grace Jones, so we posed for this picture, but I was off my nut on booze and coke, and ended up making all these crazy faces. I got the impression Clapton was either scared of me or just didn’t like me, and for some reason I became convinced he’d personally called up the photographer and had the picture destroyed.

So when I saw him at that meeting, I fucked off as fast as I could out of a back door. Then I saw him there again a few days later, and again I tried to avoid him, but this time Clapton went after me.

‘Ozzy!’ he shouted, as I was about to cross the street to my car.

‘Oh, er, hello, Eric,’ I went.

‘You living over here now?’ he asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘How are you finding it?’

And it went on from there. We had a really nice chat, actually. And then a fortnight later I was browsing through a magazine and there was the picture of me and Eric Clapton and Grace Jones, with me pulling a stupid face and Eric smiling. I’d been imagining the whole thing.

I still hated those AA meetings, though. Eventually I stopped going completely. Whenever I fell off the wagon, I’d just get someone to come over and do one of those home detox things to get me back on the right track again. I was really into all that stuff for a while. Potions, massages, organic herbal fruit baths—any bollocks you can imagine, I did it. Then, one day, this bloke came over and gave me a bottle of colon-cleansing solution.

‘Flush yourself out with this stuff every morning,’ he said, ‘and you’ll feel absolutely amazing, I promise.’

I didn’t get around to using it for a long time—I didn’t fancy the thought of it, to be honest with you—but then finally, one morning, I said to myself, ‘Fuck it, I bought the stuff, I might as well give it a go.’ The solution was made from seed husks, and the instructions said you just had to pour yourself a glass of it and down in it one, before it had a chance to expand in your throat. So that’s what I did. It tasted fucking horrendous—like wet sawdust, but worse. Then I went out with Sharon to look at houses, which was actually a rarity for me, because as far as I’m concerned there’s nothing fucking worse than house-hunting. But on this occasion Sharon really wanted me to see a place that was owned by Roger Whittaker, the easy-listening guy, because it had a recording studio in the basement. I had nothing else going on, so I couldn’t say no.

When we get to the house, the estate agent is waiting for us outside. She’s a posh chick in her late thirties, green Barbour jacket, pearls, the whole deal. Then she gets out this big chain of keys and lets us in through the front door. But as soon as I step foot inside the hallway, I begin to feel this apocalyptic rumbling in my arse. I’m thinking, Aye-aye, here we go, the colon cleanser’s kicking in. So I ask the chick where the nearest bog is, shuffle over there as fast as I can without looking conspicuous, slam the door behind me, sit down, and set free this massive torrent of liquid shit. It goes on for so long, it feels like I’m giving birth to the Mississippi River. When it’s finally over, I start looking around for some shit roll. But there isn’t any. I stand up and think, Fuck it, I’ll just have to go unwiped until we get home. Then I realise the shit’s gone all over the back of my legs, so I don’t have any choice—I’ve got to wipe myself down with something. But there isn’t even a flannel.

So I end up just standing there, trousers down, paralysed, trying to work out what to do.

Then Sharon knocks on the door.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

‘Ozzy? Are you OK?’

‘I’m, er, fine, thank you, darling,’ I say.

‘You’re taking an awfully long time.’

‘Won’t be long, darling.’

‘Hurry up.’

Finally, it comes to me: the curtains. I’ll wipe my arse with the curtains! So I rip ’em down and do what needs to be done. But then I’ve got another problem on my hands: what the fuck am I supposed to do with a pair of Roger Whittaker’s shitty curtains? I can hardly bring them out of the bog with me and ask the estate agent for directions to the nearest toxic dump. Then I think, Well, maybe I should leave a note. But what would it say? ‘Dear Roger, sorry for shitting on your curtains. Love the whistling! Cheers, Ozzy.’

In the end, I just rolled them up and hid them in the bath, behind the shower curtain.

If you’re reading this, Roger, I’m terribly, terribly sorry. But how about buying some shit roll in future, eh?

A lot of people think you have to be fucked up to write good material, but I reckon the album I did after coming out of Huntercombe Manor, No More Tears, was my best in years.

Maybe part of that was because I said to the band before we even started, ‘Look, we have to treat every song like it could be a hit single, but without being too hokey or try-hard.’

And it worked, pretty much.

Everything about that album seemed to go right. My new guitarist, Zakk Wylde, was a genius. My producers were amazing. And Sharon got the artwork spot on. She’s very artistic, my wife, which a lot of people don’t realise. The cover is a sepia portrait of me with an angel’s wing on my shoulder. The idea was to give the album more of a mature vibe. I mean, I couldn’t keep doing the blood-out-of-the-mouth thing—it was starting to get hammy. I remember the shoot for the cover in New York very well, actually: normally, it takes about five hundred rolls to get a photograph like that in the can, but for No More Tears it was just click-click-click, ‘OK, we’ve got it, see ya.’

The only thing I didn’t like about No More Tears was the video for ‘Mama I’m Coming Home’. It was one of those high-tech, million-dollar jobs, but all I wanted was something simple, like the video for Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. So in the end I did a second video for $50,000 using the Nirvana camera guy, and it was perfect. It had a huge impact on me, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’—and I was very proud when I found out that Kurt Cobain was a fan of mine. I thought he was awesome. I thought that whole Nevermind album was awesome. It was such a tragedy the way it ended.

Mind you, it’s amazing I didn’t end up the same way as Kurt Cobain. I might have been sober after No More Tears—most of the time, anyway—but whatever I’d cut out in booze I was making up for with pills. I was already an expert at scamming doctors, and I’d go to a different one every day of the week, picking up a new prescription for something each time. For a while, it was enough just to fake symptoms, but when Sharon cottoned on and started calling the doctors in advance to warn them about me, I had to give myself real symptoms. So I’d whack myself over the head with a piece of wood and say, ‘I fell off my bike, can I have some Vicodin, please?’

The doc would go, ‘Are you sure you fell off your bike, Mr Osbourne?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘It’s just that you have a nail sticking out of your head with a splinter attached to it, Mr Osbourne.’

‘Oh, I must have fallen on a piece of wood, then.’

‘Right. OK. Take five of these.’

‘Cheers.’

But I didn’t just go to doctors. I had dealers, too. I remember one time, in Germany I think it was, I visited this guy to buy some sleeping pills—I was more addicted to sleeping pills than just about anything else. He was out of sleeping pills, but he asked if I wanted to try some Rohypnol instead. Now, as it happened, I’d heard all about Rohypnol. The press were going crazy about it at the time, calling it the ‘date-rape drug’, but, to be honest with you, I thought it was all bullshit. A drug that could completely paralyse you while you remained fully awake? I mean, c’mon, it seemed too good to be true. But I bought a couple of doses of the stuff and decided to try it out, as a kind of science experiment.

I gulped down the pills with a bit of cognac as soon as I got back to my hotel room. Then I waited. ‘Well, this is a load of bollocks,’ I said to myself. Two minutes later, while I was lying on the edge of the bed, trying to order a movie on the telly with the remote control, it suddenly kicked in. Fuck me, this stuff is real! I couldn’t move. Totally paralysed. But I was also wide awake. It was the weirdest feeling. The only trouble was that I’d been dangling on the edge of the bed when my muscles had seized up, so I ended up sliding to the floor and banging my head on the coffee table on the way down. It hurt like a motherfucker. Then I was trapped between the bed and the wall, unable to move or talk, for about five hours.

So I can’t say I’d recommend it.

My health took a real dive around that time.

I started to notice a tremor in my hand. My speech was slurred. I was always exhausted. I tried to escape from it all by getting loaded, but I’d developed such a tolerance to all the drugs I was taking, I had to overdose to get high. It reached the point where I was getting my stomach pumped every other week. I had a few very close calls. One time, I scammed a bottle of codeine off a doctor in New York and downed the whole fucking lot. I nearly went into respiratory arrest. All I remember is lying in this hotel bed, sweating and feeling like I was suffocating, and the doc telling me over the phone that if you take too much codeine, your brain stops telling your lungs to work. I was very lucky to survive. Although, the way I was feeling, I would have been happy never to wake up again.

The worse I got, the more I worried that Sharon would leave me. And the more I worried, the worse I got. In fact, I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t already left me. I’ve heard people say, ‘Oh, your wife only wants to spend your money.’ But it’s only because of her that I’m alive to make any money. And people forget that when we met, she was the one with the money, not me. I was halfway to the bankruptcy court.

The bottom line is: Sharon saved my life, Sharon is my life, and I love her. And I was terrified that I was going to lose her. But as much as I wanted everything to be normal and right, I was terribly sick, physically and mentally. I couldn’t even face being on stage any more.

So I tried to kill myself a few times to get out of gigs. I mean, I wasn’t really trying to kill myself. If you’re determined to commit suicide, you’ll blow your brains out or you’ll jump off a tall building. You’ll do something that you can’t take back, in other words. When you ‘try to kill yourself’ by taking too many pills—like I did—you know you’re probably gonna get found by someone. So all you’re doing is sending a message. But it’s a deadly fucking game to play.

Look what happened to my old mate Steve Clark from Def Leppard. All it took was a bit of brandy, a bit of vodka, some painkillers and some antidepressants, and that was the end of it. Lights out.

For ever.

Then, one day, Sharon said to me, ‘Right, Ozzy, we’re going to Boston. There’s a doctor I want you to see.’

‘What’s wrong with going to a doctor in England?’

‘This one’s a specialist.’

‘A specialist in what?’

‘In what’s wrong with you. We’re leaving tomorrow.’

I presumed she just meant a doctor who knew a lot about drug addiction, so I said, ‘OK,’

and off we went to Boston.

But this doc was a hardcore guy. The best of the best. He worked out of a teaching hospital—St Elizabeth’s Medical Center—and he had more qualifications hanging on his office wall than I had gold records.

‘OK, Mr Osbourne,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to stand in the middle of the room, then walk towards me, slowly.’

‘Why?’

‘Just do it,’ hissed Sharon.

‘All right then.’

So I walked towards this bloke, and I mustn’t have been drinking that day, ’cos I managed to go in a straight line.

More or less.

Then he got me to follow his finger as he moved it up and down, and from side to side.

What the fuck does this have to do with being a drug addict? I kept thinking to myself. But that wasn’t the end of it. Next thing I knew I was hopping across the room on one leg, doing lifting exercises, and jogging around in circles with my eyes closed.

It felt like a fucking PE class.

‘Hmm, OK,’ he said. ‘Well, I can tell you this much, Mr Osbourne. You don’t have multiple sclerosis.’

What the—?

‘But I never thought I did have multiple sclerosis,’ I spluttered.

‘And you don’t have Parkinson’s.’

‘But I never thought I did have Parkinson’s.’

‘Nevertheless,’ he went on, ‘you clearly have some symptoms that could be caused by both of those conditions, and diagnosis can be difficult. All I can say is that, for now, you’re one hundred per cent clear.’

‘What?’

I looked at Sharon.

She looked at the floor. ‘Ozzy, I didn’t want to tell you,’ she said, sounding like she was trying hard not to cry. ‘But after your last couple of physicals, the doctors told me they were worried. That’s why we’re here.’

All this had been going on for six months, apparently. My doctors in LA were pretty much convinced that I either had MS or Parkinson’s, which is why we’d had to come all the way to Boston to see this specialist. But even though the doc had given me the all-clear, just the sound of the words ‘MS’ and ‘Parkinson’s’ set me off into a panic. The worst thing was, if I’d had either of those diseases, it would have made a lot of sense—my tremor was out of fucking control. That’s why both me and Sharon wanted to get another opinion. So the doc recommended that we go and see a colleague of his who ran a research centre at Oxford University, and off we went. He did the exact same tests on me as before, and told me the exact same thing: I was clear. ‘Aside from your drug addiction and your alcoholism, you’re a very healthy man, Mr Osbourne,’ he said. ‘My considered medical opinion is that you should leave my office and go and live your life.’

So I decided to retire. In 1992 I went on tour to promote No More Tears. We called it the No More Tours tour. That was it. I was done. The end. I’d been on the road for twenty-five years, pretty much. I was like a mouse on a wheel: album, tour, album, tour, album, tour, album, tour. I mean, I’d buy all these houses, and I’d never fucking live in them. That’s the thing about being working class: you feel like you can never turn down work. But after seeing the doc in Boston I thought, Why am I doing this? I don’t need to work. I don’t need the dough.

Then, when we got back to England, Sharon said, ‘Don’t go crazy, but I’ve bought us a new house.’

‘Where?’

‘It’s called Welders House. In a village called Jordans in Buckinghamshire.’

‘Is there a pub near by?’

‘It’s a Quaker village, Ozzy.’

She wasn’t fucking kidding, either. Welders is probably further away from a pub than any other house in England. I was seriously pissed off with Sharon for buying that place—I didn’t talk to her for about six months because it was in such a dreadful state. ‘Dilapidated’ doesn’t even begin to describe it, and we had to rent a place in Gerrards Cross for a year while it was being done up. Even now, I don’t think it’s anywhere near as attractive as Beel House. But on the inside it’s magnificent. Apparently, it was built by the Victorian Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli as a wedding present for his daughter. Then it became a convalescent home for army officers during World War Two. By the time Sharon came along, it was owned by one of the special-effects guys who’d worked on Star Wars.

I forgave Sharon eventually, because when we finally moved in it was magic. The weather was perfect that summer, and suddenly I had all this land—two hundred and fifty acres—and I could just fuck around all day on my quad bikes, without having to worry about anything. My health improved dramatically. I even stopped worrying about MS and Parkinson’s disease. I just thought, Well, if I get it, I get it.

But as soon as I felt better, I got bored. Crazy bored. I started to think about my dad—about how he’d taken early retirement and then ended up in hospital as soon as he’d finished the garden. I started to think about the bills for the renovation, and the cost of the staff at the management company, and how all the money to keep the whole machine up and running was now coming out of my savings. Then I thought, How can I retire at the age of forty-six? I mean, it’s not like I worked for anyone other than myself.

And what I do for a living isn’t a job, anyway. Or if it is, it’s the best fucking job in the world, hands down.

So one morning I got up, made myself a cup of tea, and said to Sharon, all casual, ‘Can’t you get me a gig at one of those American festivals this year?’

‘What d’you mean, Ozzy?’

‘I’d like to do a gig. Get back in the game.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m bored out of my fucking brains, Sharon.’

‘OK, then. If you’re serious, I’ll make some calls.’

So she called the organisers of Lollapalooza.

And they told her to fuck off.

‘Ozzy Osbourne? He’s a fucking dinosaur,’ they said, in not so many words.

That wound Sharon up no end, as you can imagine. So a few days later, she said, ‘Screw it, we’ll do our own bloody festival.’

‘Hang on a minute, Sharon,’ I said. ‘What d’you mean, “We’ll do our own festival”?’

‘We’ll book some venues and we’ll do it ourselves. Screw Lollapafuckinglooza.’

‘Won’t that be expensive?’

‘I’m not going to lie to you, Ozzy, it could be very expensive. But life’s all about taking risks, isn’t it?’

‘OK, but before you start going around booking stadiums left, right and centre, let’s test the ground first, eh? Start off small, like we did with Blizzard of Ozz. Then, if it takes off, we’ll get bigger.’

‘Well, listen to you, Mr Businessman all of a sudden.’

‘What are you planning to call this festival?’

‘Ozzfest.’

As soon as she said the word, I could think of only one thing: ‘Beerfest’. It was fucking perfect.

That’s how it started. Our strategy was to take all the undesirables, all the bands that couldn’t find an outlet anywhere else, and put them together, give them an audience. It worked better than we ever could have expected, ’cos nothing existed for those bands at the time. It had got to the point in the music business where if you wanted to play a gig, the venues made you buy all the tickets in advance, so you had to give them away for free or sell them on your own, which is bullshit. Black Sabbath never had to deal with that kind of bollocks in the early days. We’d never have left Aston, if that had been the case. Where would we have found the dough?

A year later, in 1996, we were ready.

And we did exactly what we said we’d do. We started out small in just two cities—Phoenix and Los Angeles—as part of my tour to promote the Ozzmosis album (the Retirement Sucks tour, as it was known). It couldn’t have gone better. It was a monster, from day one.

As soon as it was over, Sharon turned to me and said, ‘D’you know who would be the perfect band to headline Ozzfest ’97?’

‘Who?’

‘Black Sabbath.’

‘What? Are you kidding? I think Tony’s the only one left. And their last album didn’t even chart, did it?’

‘No, the real Black Sabbath: you, Tony, Geezer and Bill. Back together after eighteen years.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘It’s time, Ozzy. Hatchets buried. Once and for all.’

I’d spoken to Tony only once or twice since Live Aid. Although we had done a gig together, of sorts, in Orange County at the end of the No More Tours tour in 1992. I can’t remember if it was me who called him first, or the other way around, but once the word got out about a reunion, we had a few ‘big talks’ on the phone. During one of them I finally asked him why Black Sabbath had fired me. He told me what I already knew—that I’d been slagging off the band in the press, and that my drinking had become unmanageable—but for the first time I actually got it. I ain’t saying it was right, but I got it, y’know? And I could hardly complain, because if Tony hadn’t kicked me out, where would I be now?

That summer, we went out on the road.

At first, it wasn’t the full original line-up: it was just me, Tony and Geezer, with Mike Bordin from Faith No More standing in on drums for Bill. I honestly don’t know why we couldn’t get Bill to play those first few shows. But I was told he’d had a lot of health issues, including a bad case of agoraphobia, so maybe the rest of us were trying to protect him from the stress. By the end of the year, though, he was back with us to do two gigs at the Birmingham NEC, which were fucking phenomenal. Even though I’ve always played Sabbath songs on stage, it’s never as good as when the four of us do them. Today, when I listen to the recordings of those shows—we put them out the following year on an album called Reunion—I still get chills. We didn’t do overdubs or anything. When you put that album on, it sounds exactly as it did on those two nights.

Everything went so well that we decided to have a go at making a new album together, which would have been our first since Never Say Die in 1978. So off we went to Rockfield Studios in South Wales—where I’d quit the band twenty years before.

At first, it all went smoothly enough. We did a couple of bonus songs for the Reunion album—‘Psycho Man’ and ‘Selling My Soul’. But then the practical jokes started again.

Or so I thought, anyway.

‘Ozzy,’ said Bill, after we’d finished the first rehearsal, ‘can you give me a massage? My hand’s hurting.’

Here we go, I thought.

‘Seriously, Ozzy. Argh, my hand.’

I just rolled my eyes and walked out of the room.

The next thing I knew, this ambulance was coming up the driveway with all its lights flashing. It skidded to a halt in front of the studio, then four paramedics jumped out and ran into the studio. About a minute later they came out again with Bill on a stretcher. I still thought it was a joke. We’d relentlessly been giving Bill shit for his dodgy health, so we thought he was just getting his own back with a wind-up. Part of me was quite impressed: he was putting so much effort into it. Tony thought he was fucking around, too. He was on his way out for a walk when the ambulance arrived, and he just looked at it and said, ‘That’ll be for Bill.’

Bill had always been the boy who cries wolf, y’know? I remember one time, back in the day, I was at his house and he said, ‘Oh, ’ello Ozzy. You’ll never guess what? I’ve just come out of a coma.’

‘What d’you mean, a coma? That’s one stage removed from being dead. You know that, don’t you, Bill?’

‘All I know is I went to bed on Friday, and now it’s Tuesday, and I only just woke up. That’s a coma, isn’t it?’

‘No, that’s taking too many drugs and drinking too much cider and sleeping for three days in a row, you dick.’

But this time it turned out that Bill wasn’t fucking around. His sore hand was the first sign of a major heart attack. Both his parents had died of heart disease, so it ran in the family. He was kept in hospital for ages, and even when he was let out he couldn’t work for a year. So we had to tour without him again, which was a terrible shame. When he finally felt up to it, we gave it another shot in the studio, but by then it just wasn’t happening.

The press blamed my ego for our failure to record a new album. But in all honesty I don’t think that was the problem. I’d just changed. We all had. I wasn’t the crazy singer who spent most of his time getting blasted down the pub but could be called back to do a quick vocal whenever Tony had come up with a riff. That wasn’t how I worked any more. And by then I’d been solo for a lot longer than I’d ever been with Black Sabbath. If I’m honest, being sober probably didn’t help the creativity, either—although I was still a chronic drug addict. I latched on to a doctor in Monmouth in no time, and got him to prescribe me some Valium. I was also taking about twenty-five Vicodins a day, thanks to a stash I brought over from America. I needed something to calm me down. I mean, the expectations for the album were just so high. And if it wasn’t as good as before, what was the point of doing it? There wasn’t a point, as far as I was concerned.

So it never happened.

I was back in LA, staying at a rented place in Malibu, when the phone rang. It was Norman, my brother-in-law.

Oh shit, I thought. This ain’t gonna be good news.

It wasn’t.

‘John?’ said Norman. ‘It’s your mother. She’s not doing very well. You should come home and see her.’

‘Now?’

‘Yeah. I’m sorry, John. But the docs say it’s bad.’

It had been eleven years since the argument about the newspaper retraction, and I hadn’t seen much of my mum since—although we had made up over the phone. Of course, I now wish I’d spent more time with her. But my mum didn’t exactly make it easy for me, talking about money all the time. I should just have given her more of it, I suppose. But I always thought that whatever I had was temporary.

As soon as I got the call from Norman, I flew back to England with my assistant Tony.

Then we drove up to Manor Hospital in Walsall, where she was being treated.

My mum was eighty-seven, and she’d been ill for a while. She was diabetic, had kidney trouble, and her ticker was on the blink. She knew her time was up. I’d never known her go to church before, but all of a sudden she’d become very religious. She spent half the time I was there reciting prayers. She’d been raised a Catholic, so I suppose she thought she’d better catch up on her homework before going over the great divide. But she didn’t seem frightened, and she wasn’t suffering—or, if she was, she didn’t let me know. The first thing I said to her was: ‘Mum, are you in pain? You’re not just putting on a brave face, are you?’

‘No dear, I’m all right,’ she said. ‘You’ve always been such a worrier. Ever since you were a little baby.’

I stayed for a few days. Mum sat up in bed for hours talking to me with her arm hooked up to this whirring and bleeping dialysis machine. She seemed so well, I began to wonder what all the fuss was about. Then, on my last day there, she asked me to pull my chair closer to the bed, because she had something very important to ask me.

I leaned in really close, not knowing what to expect.

‘John,’ she said, ‘is it true?’

‘Is what true, Mum?’

‘Are you really a millionaire?’

‘Oh, for fu—’ I had to stop myself. After all, my mum was dying. So I just said, ‘I don’t really want to talk about it.’

‘Oh, go on, John, tell me. Pleeeease.’

‘OK, then. Yeah, I am.’

She smiled and her eyes twinkled like a schoolgirl’s. I thought, Well, at least I finally made her happy.

Then she said, ‘But tell me, John, are you a multi-multi-multi-multi-millionaire?’

‘C’mon, Mum,’ I said. ‘Let’s not talk about this.’

‘But I want to!’

I sighed and said, ‘OK, then. Yeah, I am.’

Her face broke into that huge grin again. Part of me was thinking, Is this really that important to her? But at the same time, I knew this moment was the closest we’d been in years.

So I just laughed. Then she laughed, too.

‘What’s it like?’ she asked, with a giggle.

‘Could be worse, Mum,’ I said. ‘Could be worse.’

After that we said our goodbyes and I flew back to California with Tony. As soon as I landed, I had to go and do a gig with Black Sabbath at the Universal Amphitheatre. I can’t remember much of it, ’cos I couldn’t concentrate. I just kept thinking about my mum, asking me if I was a millionaire. After the gig, I went back to the house in Malibu. When I opened the door, the phone was ringing.

It was Norman.

‘John,’ he said. ‘She’s gone.’

I sobbed, man.

I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

It was April 8, 2001—just forty-eight hours since we’d been talking in the hospital.

I don’t know why, but I took it very hard. One thing I’ve learned about myself over the years is that I’m no good at dealing with people dying. It’s not that I’m afraid of it—I know that everyone’s gotta go eventually—but I can’t help thinking that there are only one or two ways of being brought into this world, but there are so many fucked-up ways of leaving it. Not that my mum went out in a bad way: Norman told me that she just went to sleep that night and never woke up.

I couldn’t face the funeral—not after what had gone down at my father’s. Besides, I didn’t want it to be a press event, which it would have been, with people asking me for a photograph outside the church. I just wanted my mum to go out in peace, without it being about me. I’d given her enough grief over the years, and I didn’t want to add to it. So I didn’t go.

I still think it was the right decision—if only because my final memory of my mum is such a fond one. I can see her so clearly, lying in the hospital bed, smiling up at me, asking what it’s like to be a ‘multi-multi-multi-multi-millionaire’, and me answering, ‘It could be worse, Mum. It could be worse.’

11. Dead Again

The first time we allowed TV cameras into our house was in 1997, the year Black Sabbath got back together. We were renting Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith’s old place in Beverly Hills. I was off the booze—most of the time, anyway—but I was still scamming as many pills as I could from any doctor who’d write me a prescription. I was smoking my head off, too. Cigars, mainly. I thought it was quite acceptable to fire up a foot-long Cuban while lying in bed at nine o’clock at night. I’d say to Sharon, ‘D’you mind?’ and she’d look up from her magazine and go, ‘Oh no, please, don’t mind me.’

I don’t think the TV guys could believe what they were seeing most of the time. On the first day, I remember this producer turning to me and saying, ‘Is it always like this?’

‘Like what?’

‘A sit-com.’

‘What d’you mean, “a sit-com”?’

‘It’s the timing,’ he said. ‘You walk in one door, the dog walks out of the other, then your daughter says, “Dad, why does the dog walk like that?” and you say, “Because it’s got four legs.” And then she goes into a huff and storms off, stage left. You couldn’t script this stuff.’

‘We’re not trying to be funny, you know.’

‘I know. That’s what makes it so funny.’

‘Things just happen to my family,’ I told him. ‘But things happen to every family, don’t they?’

‘Not like this,’ he said.

A company called September Films made the documentary—Ozzy Osbourne Uncut, they called it—and it was shown on Channel Five in Britain and the Travel Channel in America.

People went crazy over it. In the year after it came out, Five repeated it over and over. I don’t think anyone could get over the fact that we had to deal with the exact same boring, day-today bullshit as any other family. I mean, yes, I’m the crazy rock ’n’ roller who bit the head off a bat and pissed on the Alamo, but I also have a son who likes to mess around with the settings on my telly, so when I make myself a nice pot of tea, put my feet up, and try to watch a programme on the History Channel, I can’t get the fucking thing to work. That kind of stuff blew people’s minds. I think they had this idea in their heads that when I wasn’t being arrested for public intoxication, I went to a cave and hung upside down, drinking snakes’ blood. But I’m like Coco the Clown, me: at the end of the day, I come home, take off my greasepaint and my big red nose, and become Dad.

The documentary won a Rose d’Or award at the Montreux TV festival in Switzerland, and all of a sudden everyone wanted to make TV stars out of us. Now, I’ve never much liked being on telly. I just feel so hokey doing it. Plus, I can’t read scripts, and I when I see myself on screen, I get a fucking panic attack. But Sharon was all for it, so we did a deal with MTV to do a one-off appearance on Cribs, which was a bit like a cooler American version of Through the Keyhole. By then, we’d long since stopped renting Don Johnson’s old place and I’d forked out just over six million dollars for a house around the corner at 513 Doheny Road. We were living there full-time, going to Welders House only when we were in England for business or on family visits.

Again, people went crazy for it. That Cribs episode became a cult classic overnight. So one thing led to another, and MTV ended up offering us a show of our own.

Don’t ask me how all the business stuff went down, ’cos that’s Sharon’s department. As far as I was concerned, I just woke up one morning and we had this thing to do called The Osbournes. I was happy for Sharon, ’cos she loved all the chaos in the house. She loved doing TV, too. She’ll openly say, ‘I’m a TV hoo’er.’ She’d be the next fucking test card, if she had her way.

But if I’m honest, I was hoping that it would all be shelved before it ever made it on to the air.

A few days before we agreed to the filming, we had a family meeting, to make sure the kids were OK with it. You often hear people say, ‘How could they expose their kids to that kind of fame?’ but we had no idea how popular our little MTV show would become. And our kids had been born into show business, anyway: Aimee went on tour with us when she was less than a year old; Kelly was the kind of girl who’d stand up at the front of a jumbo jet and sing ‘Little Donkey’ to all the passengers; and Jack used to sit on my shoulders when I did encores on stage. It was the life they knew.

So we weren’t surprised when Jack and Kelly said they were all for The Osbournes.

Aimee felt differently, though. From the very beginning, she didn’t want anything to do with it.

We respected her for that. Aimee likes to be anonymous, and we’d never have forced her into doing anything she wasn’t comfortable with. In fact, I said to all my kids, ‘Look, if you decide you want to get involved with this, it’s gonna be like being on a fairground ride—you won’t be able to make it stop.’

Jack and Kelly both understood. Or at least they said they understood. To be honest with you, I don’t think any of us really understood.

Meanwhile, Aimee’s mind was made up. ‘Have fun, guys. See ya.’

She’s a smart one, Aimee. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying we were all idiots for signing on the dotted line, ’cos in many ways The Osbournes was a great experience—but I’d never have agreed to any of it if I’d known what I was letting myself in for. No fucking way, man. I agreed to do it mainly because I thought there was very little chance it would ever happen. Even if it does happen, I remember thinking, it won’t get any further than one or two shows. American telly is very brutal. The bitching and backstabbing that go on when the cameras aren’t rolling are ridiculous—it’s enough to make the rock ’n’ roll business look like a fucking joke. And it’s like that because very, very few shows ever make it. I was convinced The Osbournes would be one of the failures.

Our first big mistake was letting them do all the filming at our real house. Most of the time on telly, everything’s recorded in a studio, then they cut to stock footage of a street or a bar or whatever to make you think that’s where the scene’s being shot. But no one had done a show like The Osbournes before, so MTV just made it up as they went along.

First they set up an office in our garage—Fort Apache, I called it, ’cos it was like some military command post. They put all these video monitors in there, and little office cubicles, and this big workboard, where they kept track of everything we had planned for the days ahead.

No one slept in Fort Apache, as far as I know. They just staggered the shifts so they had all these technicians and camera operators and producers coming in and out all the time. It was very impressive, the way MTV organised the logistics; those guys could invade a country, they’re so good.

And I have to admit, it was a laugh for a week or two. It was fun having all these new people around. And they were good guys—they became like family after a while. But then it was like, How much longer is this going to go on? I mean, if you’d have taken me aside after those first few weeks of filming in 2001 and told me that I’d still be doing it three years later, I’d have shot myself in the balls, just to get out of it. But I didn’t have a fucking clue.

None of us did.

In the early days, the production team’s life was made a lot easier because I had a very specific routine. Every morning, come what may, I’d get up, have a coffee, blend some juice, and go and work out in the gym for an hour. So all they had to do was put static cameras in those places and leave them running. But after a while these cameras started to appear all over the house, until I felt like I couldn’t get away from the things.

‘Right, that’s it,’ I said one day. ‘I need a bunker—a safety zone—or I’m gonna go out of my mind.’

So they taped off this room where I could go to scratch my balls, or pick a zit, or knock one out, without it ending up on the telly. I mean, you want reality only up to a point.

But then one day I was sitting in the safe room, smoking a joint and having a good old rummage under my ballsack, when I started to get this creepy feeling. At first I thought, The stress of this show’s driving me insane, ’cos I’m starting to get an attack of the old paranoia.

But I searched the room anyway. And there in the corner, hidden under a pile of magazines, was a little spy-camera. I went apeshit about that. ‘What’s the point of having a safe room if there’s a fucking TV camera in it!’ I yelled at them.

‘Don’t worry, Ozzy, it’s not recording anything. It’s just so we know where you are.’

‘Bollocks,’ I said. ‘Get rid of it.’

‘But how will we know where you are?’

‘If the door’s closed, that’s where I am!’

The show was broadcast for the first time on March 5, 2002—a Tuesday night. By Wednesday morning, it was like I’d moved to another planet. One minute I was a dinosaur who’d been told to fuck off by Lollapalooza; the next I was strapped to a rocket and being blasted through the stratosphere at warp factor ten. I can honestly say that I never knew the power of telly until The Osbournes aired. When you’ve got a hit TV show in America, that’s as big as it gets, fame-wise. Bigger than being a movie star. Bigger than being a politician. And a lot bigger than being the ex-lead singer of Black Sabbath.

I can’t say that I ever sat down and watched any of the shows all the way through. But from the clips I saw, it was obvious that the production team had done a phenomenal job—especially when it came to editing down the thousands of hours of footage they must have had. Even the title sequence—Pat Boone doing a jazzy version of ‘Crazy Train’ in that silky voice of his—was genius. I love it when people mess around with musical styles like that—it’s so clever. And the funny thing was we’d lived next door to Pat Boone for a while at Beverly Drive. He’s a lovely bloke, actually: a born-again Christian, but he never gave us a hard time.

We knew immediately that The Osbournes was big. But it took a few days for us to realise just how big. That weekend, for example, me and Sharon went down to Beverly Hills for a little walk around this market they have in the park, just like we often did. But literally the second I got out of the car, this girl turned around, screamed, then ran up to me with her mobile phone and went, ‘Ozzy! Ozzy! Can I take my picture with you?’

‘Oh, sure,’ I said.

But then all these other people turned around, then they screamed, which made even more people turn around, then they screamed. Within about three seconds, it seemed like thousands of people were screaming and wanted a fucking picture.

Having the MTV crew trailing along behind didn’t exactly help matters, either.

It was terrifying, man. I mean, I ain’t complaining, ’cos The Osbournes had given me a completely new audience, but the whole thing felt like Beatlemania on LSD. I couldn’t believe it. And I certainly couldn’t understand it. I’d never been that famous before—not even close.

So I fucked off back to England to get away from it. But the same thing happened there. The moment I got off the plane at Heathrow, there was this wall of flash-bulbs and thousands of people shouting and screaming and going, ‘Oi, Ozzy! Over ’ere! Gis a picture!’

Obviously, I was no longer famous for being a singer. I was famous for being that swearing bloke on the telly—which felt very strange, and not always in a good way.

I got a lot of flak for it, too. Some people said that I’d sold out ’cos I was on the telly. But that’s a load of bollocks, that is. The thing is, no one like me had done a reality show before.

But I’ve always believed that you’ve got to move with the times. You’ve got to try and take things to the next level, or you’ll just get stuck in a rut. If you stay the same you might keep a few people happy—like the ones who think that any kind of change is a sell-out—but sooner or later, your career will be fucked. And a lot of people forget that in the beginning, The Osbournes was just an MTV experiment. No one expected it to blow up in the way it did. But it didn’t change me at all. When I was on the show, I never pretended to be anyone other than who I am. Even now when I’m doing ads on the telly, I’m not pretending to be anyone other than who I am. So how’s that selling out?

Mind you, there are things that happened on The Osbournes that I still can’t get my head around to this day. Like when Sharon got a call from Greta Van Susteren, one of the anchors at Fox News.

‘I was wondering if you and Ozzy wanted to have dinner next week with the President of the United States,’ she said.

‘Is he in trouble again?’ asked Sharon.

Greta laughed. ‘Not that I know of, no.’

‘Thank God for that.’

‘Will you come?’

‘Of course we will. It would be an honour.’

When Sharon told me, I couldn’t believe it. I always thought I’d be on a ‘Wanted’ poster on the Oval Office wall, not invited over for tea. ‘What does President Bush want to talk about, anyway?’ I said. ‘Black Sabbath?’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Sharon, ‘it won’t be just the four of us. It’s the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Fox News has a table, so there’ll be plenty of other people there.’

‘George Bush used to be the Governor of Texas, didn’t he?’ I said.

‘Yes?’

‘Well, I pissed on that Alamo thing once. He’s gonna be cool with that, is he?’

‘I’m sure he’s forgotten all about it, Ozzy. He used to like a drink or two himself, y’know.’

‘He did?’

‘Oooh yeah.’

So off we went to Washington. The dinner was at the Hilton, where Ronald Reagan had been shot. It wasn’t long after 9/11, so I was feeling really paranoid about the security situation. Then, when we got there, it was pandemonium. They had about five thousand TV cameras outside, and just one little metal detector with a couple of guys manning it. I had to cling on to Greta’s jacket just to get through the crowd.

Meanwhile, my assistant Tony—who’s only a little fella—skipped over the rope and walked behind the metal detector without anyone even noticing. It was a joke, man. I could have smuggled a ballistic fucking missile into that place, and no one would have said a word.

Then the dinner started, and I started to have this horrendous panic attack. There I was, this half-baked rock star, in a room with all these Great Brains and the Leader of the Free World. What the fuck was I doing there? What did all these people want from me? The Osbournes had only been on air for about two months, and my brain was already struggling to process it all.

In the end, I just snapped. I couldn’t survive one more second in that place without being pissed out of my mind. So I grabbed a bottle of vino from one of the waiters, filled my wine glass, downed it, refilled it, downed it, refilled it, and carried on until the bottle was empty.

Then I got another. Meanwhile, Sharon was glaring at me from the other end of the table. I ignored her. Not tonight, darling, I thought.

Then the First Lady walked into the room, with George W. Bush following her. And the first thing he said when he reached the podium was: ‘Laura and I are honoured to be here tonight.

Thanks for the invitation. What a fantastic audience we have tonight: Washington power-brokers, celebrities, Hollywood stars… and Ossie Ozz-Burn!’

By that time I was well and truly blasted, so as soon as I heard my name, I jumped up on the table like a drunken arsehole and screamed, ‘Yeeeeeeeehhaaaaaa!!’ It brought the fucking house down. But I was fucked, so I didn’t know when to stop. I just stayed up there, going,

‘Yeeeeeeeehhaaaaaa!!’ until the whole room of eighteen hundred people went silent.

Bush looked at me.

‘Yeeeeeeeehhaaaaaa!!’ I screamed again.

Silence.

‘Yeeeeee—’

‘OK, Ozzy,’ snapped Bush. On the tape, you can even hear him say, ‘This might have been a mistake.’

I finally climbed down from the table—actually, I think Greta might have pulled me down.

Then Bush started to tell this joke about me: ‘The thing about Ozzy is he’s made a lot of big hit recordings: “Party with the Animals”, “Face in Hell”, “Bloodbath in Paradise”…’

I was about to get back up on the table and tell him that none of those were big hits, but then he delivered the punchline.

‘Ozzy,’ he said, ‘Mom loves your stuff.’

The whole room went crazy.

I don’t remember much after that.

Y’know, ever since I went to that dinner, people ask me what I think of Bush. But I can’t say I have an opinion, because I don’t know enough about all that political stuff. I mean, somebody must have voted for him, right? In 2000 and 2004. And I think a lot of that crazy terrorist shit had been going on for a long time before he got into power. I don’t think they were sitting around in their cave and suddenly said, ‘Oh, look, Bush is in the White House.

Let’s fly some planes into the World Trade Center.’

The thing is, I’m living in America as a guest, so it’s not up to me to say anything, y’know?

I keep trying to explain that to Jack: ‘Don’t talk about politics here, because you’re not an American. They’ll just say to you, “Get the fuck out of our country, if you don’t like it”.’ We’ve made a good living from America. We should be grateful.

A month later, I met the Queen.

She came up to me and shook my hand after I’d done a song at the Party at the Palace concert, during the Golden Jubilee weekend. Magnificent woman, I’ve always thought. I have so much respect for her. Then I met her again, not long after, at the Royal Variety Performance. I was standing next to Cliff Richard. She took one look at the two of us, said, ‘Oh, so this is what they call variety, is it?’ then cracked up laughing.

I honestly thought that Sharon must have slipped some acid into my cornflakes that morning.

Seriously, though, I get on very well with the royals. I’m even an ambassador for the Prince’s Trust now, so I’ve met Charles a few times. Very nice guy. The press keep giving him stick, but if you get rid of the monarchy, what do you replace it with? President Gordon ‘Wet Fart’ Brown? Personally, I think the royal family do a hell of a lot of good. People think they live in that palace and spend their whole lives just holding up sceptres and watching the telly, but they work their arses off. They have to be on all the time. And the dough they make for Britain adds up to a ridiculous fortune every year.

I’m not so comfortable with politicians. Meeting them always just feels weird and a bit creepy, no matter who it is. For example, I met Tony Blair during The Osbournes period at this thing called the Pride of Britain Awards. He was all right, I suppose; very charming. But I couldn’t get over the fact that our young soldiers were dying out in the Middle East and he could still find the time to hang around with pop stars.

Then he came over to me and said, ‘I was in a rock ’n’ roll band once, y’know?’

I said, ‘So I believe, Prime Minister.’

‘But I could never work out the chords to “Iron Man”.’

I wanted to say, ‘Fuck me, Tony, that’s a staggering piece of information, that is. I mean, you’re at war with Afghanistan, people are getting blown up all over the place, so who honestly gives a fuck that you could never work out the chords to “Iron Man”?’

But they’re all the same, so there’s no point getting wound up about it.

For a while after The Osbournes went on air, it seemed like everyone in the world wanted to be around me. Then we had a party at our house, and Elizabeth Taylor showed up. For me, that was the most surreal moment of all, ’cos when I was a kid, my dad had said to me, ‘I want you to see the most beautiful woman in the world.’ Then he’d let me stay up late to watch Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. So that’s what Elizabeth Taylor has always been to me—the most beautiful woman in the world. But, of course, I can’t even remember what I said to her, ’cos I was fucking wasted again.

Of all the people I got to meet, though, the most special was probably Paul McCartney. I mean, I’d looked up to that man since I was fourteen. But what the fuck are you supposed to talk to him about, eh? It’s like trying to strike up a conversation with God. Where d’you start?

‘Oh, I see you made the Earth in seven days. What was that like?’ We were at Elton John’s birthday party: Paul on one side of me, Sting on the other, and Elton opposite. It was like I’d died and gone to rock star heaven. But I’m useless when it comes to making conversation with people I admire. I’m a big believer in just leaving them alone, generally. In that way, I’m very shy. There were some rumours going around in the press for a while that me and Paul were gonna do a duet, but I can honestly say I never heard a word about it from the man himself. And I’m glad I didn’t, ’cos I would have shit my pants, big time.

He played at the Brits when me and Sharon were hosting, though. I remember Sharon turning to me halfway through his set and whispering, ‘Did you ever think you’d be standing on stage with a Beatle?’

‘Never in a million years’ was the answer.

It didn’t even seem so long since I’d been looking up at his picture on the wall of 14 Lodge Road.

We e-mail each other from time to time now, me and Paul. (Which means I speak and Tony taps what I’ve said into the computer, ’cos I don’t have the patience for all that internet bollocks.) It started when I heard a song called ‘Fine Line’ on a Lexus commercial. I thought, Fucking hell, that’s not a bad tune, I think I’ll nick it. So I mentioned it—just in passing—to a guy who used to work with me called John Roden, who also happened to work with Paul.

John said, ‘Y’know who wrote that, don’t you?’

I told him I didn’t have a clue.

‘My other boss,’ he said.

Obviously I left the song well alone after that.

Then, out of the blue, came this letter saying, ‘Thanks for not nicking “Fine Line”, Ozzy.’

You couldn’t get the smile off my face for days. And it just went on from there. We don’t e-mail very often, but if he’s got an album coming out, or if he’s getting some flak in the press, I’ll drop him a line. The last one I sent was to congratulate him on that Fireman album he did. If you haven’t heard it, you should, ’cos it’s fucking phenomenal.

Not everyone loved The Osbournes.

Bill Cosby, for example.

He got a right old bee up his arse about it.

I suppose he got offended ’cos the press kept comparing our show to his: one of the newspapers even said I was ‘America’s New Favourite Dad’. So he wrote us a letter. It was along the lines of ‘I saw you on the telly, and your foul language sets a bad example.’

Fair enough, I thought.

But, y’know, swearing is just part of who we are—we’re forever effing and blinding. And the whole point of The Osbournes was to be real. But I have to say I always thought that bleeping out the swearing actually improved the show. In Canada, they didn’t have any bleeps, and I reckoned it wasn’t anywhere near as funny. It’s just human nature—isn’t it?—to be more attracted to something that’s taboo. If someone tells you not to smoke, you wanna smoke. If they say, ‘Don’t do drugs,’ you wanna do drugs. That’s why I’ve always thought that the best way to stop people taking drugs is to legalise the fucking things. It would take people about five seconds to realise that being an addict is a terribly unattractive and pathetic way to be, whereas at the moment it still has that kind of rebel cool vibe to it, y’know?

Anyway, Sharon replied to Bill Cosby.

‘Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, Mr Cosby,’ she wrote, ‘but people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and we all know about your little affair, which has been all over the newspapers, so how about you put your own house in order before having a go at ours?’

She also pointed out that when you switch on the telly in America, there’s always a guy being shot or chopped up or scraped off the tarmac, and no one bats an eyelid. But if you say ‘fuck’, everyone freaks out. It’s insane when you think about it.

Killing’s fine, but swearing isn’t.

To be fair to Bill, we got a very nice reply from him, saying, ‘Hands up, you got me, I’m sorry.’

So he was very cool about it in the end.

MTV shit themselves when The Osbournes got so big, so quickly, ’cos they hadn’t signed a long-term deal with us. So then all the games started—and you know me, I can’t stand all that bullshit.

But it didn’t stop them trying to drag me into it.

Not long after the ratings went crazy, I remember me and Sharon were in New York to do the Total Request Live show at the MTV building in Times Square. As soon as we went off air, this exec in a suit came up to us and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a surprise for you guys.’

‘What kind of surprise?’ I said.

‘Follow me, and I’ll show you.’

So this guy took us up to a boardroom on one of the highest floors in the building. There was a big conference table in the middle with telephones on it and chairs all around, and these huge windows looking out over the New York skyline.

‘Are you ready?’ he asked us.

I looked at Sharon, and she looked back at me. Neither of us knew what the fuck was going on. Then the bloke hit the speakerphone button, and this Charlie’s Angels voice came on the line.

‘Have you got the gift?’ it said.

‘Yep,’ said the bloke.

‘OK, give them the gift.’

The bloke reached into his jacket pocket, took out this gold-embossed envelope, and handed it to me.

I opened it and saw a cheque for $250,000.

‘What is this?’ I said.

‘A gift,’ the guy told me. ‘From MTV.’

Now, I might not be much of a businessman, but even I knew that cashing a cheque for $250,000 could be seen as some kind of contract. If that thing had landed in my bank account, the negotiations for the next few seasons would have been a whole different ball game.

I mean, maybe it was just a gift. Maybe they weren’t trying to pull any funny stuff. But it still creeped me out. Even Sharon was speechless, for once.

‘Thanks very much,’ I said. ‘Would you mind sending it to my lawyer’s office? He deals with all that.’

Talk about swimming with fucking sharks.

By the summer of 2002, it seemed like The Osbournes was the biggest thing on the planet. And the stress of it was killing me. After falling off the wagon at the Correspondents’ Dinner, I’d been getting pissed every day. And I was still necking as much prescription medication as I could get my hands on—which was a lot. At one point I was on forty-two different pills a day: sedatives, sleeping medication, anti-depressants, amphetamines, anti-seizure medication, anti-psychotics. You fucking name it, I was on it. I was taking an unbelievable quantity of drugs. Half the pills were just to cancel out the side-effects of the others.

And none of them seemed to be making me any better. My tremor was so bad that I was shaking like an epileptic. My speech was terrible. I’d even started to develop a stammer, which I’d never had before—although stammers run in my family. If someone asked me a question, I would panic, and by the time the words reached my mouth from my brain, they would be all jumbled. And that just made me even more stressed, ’cos I thought it was the beginning of the end for me. Any day now, I thought to myself, a doctor was gonna take me aside and say to me, ‘I’m very sorry, Mr Osbourne, but the tests have come back, and you have MS.’ Or Parkinson’s disease. Or something equally horrific.

I started to get very self-conscious about it. I remember watching some clips from The Osbournes—and even I didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. I mean, I’ve never had a problem playing the clown, but when it became a national joke that no one could understand a fucking word I said, it was a bit different. I began to feel like I had when I was at school and I couldn’t read out a page from a book, and everyone laughed and called me an idiot. So I just got more pissed and more stoned. But the drink and the drugs made my tremor worse—which was the exact opposite of what I’d expected, because alcoholics get the DTs when they come off the booze, not when they’re on it. And the pills my docs were giving me were supposed to make the shaking go away.

There seemed to be only one rational explanation for all of it.

I was dying.

So every other week I had a new test. It was like a new hobby. But none of the results ever came back positive. Then I began to wonder if I was getting tested for the wrong things. I mean, it was cancer that had killed my father, not Parkinson’s disease. So I went to see a cancer specialist.

‘Look,’ I said to him, ‘is there some kind of high-tech scan you can do that’ll tell me if I’m gonna get cancer?’

‘What kind of cancer?’

‘Any kind of cancer.’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Yes there is… sort of.’

‘What d’you mean, “sort of”?’

‘There is a machine. But it won’t be available for another five years, at the very least.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because they haven’t finished inventing it yet.’

‘Is there anything else you can do, then?’

‘You could always get a colonoscopy. Although, y’know, I really don’t see any warning—’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it.’

So he gave me this kit to get my arse ready for its close-up. It was basically four bottles of liquid, and you had to drink a couple of them in the afternoon, shit through the eye of a needle, rinse yourself out, drink the next two, shit through the needle again, then not eat anything for twenty-four hours. You could have seen daylight through my arse by the end of it, it was so clean. Then I went back to the doc’s for the test.

First he got me to lie on this table and put my knees up to my chest. ‘Right,’ he says, ‘I’m going to put you under with some Demerol. Then I’m going to insert this camera up your rectal passage. Don’t worry: you won’t feel a thing. And I’ll record everything on a DVD, so you can watch it yourself at your leisure.’

‘OK.’

So he jabs me with a needle, and while I’m waiting to pass out I notice this massive flat-screen TV to the side of me. Then, all of a sudden, I feel something the size of a small house go up my arse. I yelp and close my eyes, and when I open them again, the TV screen is showing a high-definition image of a big red cave.

‘Is that the inside of my arsehole?’ I ask.

‘Why the hell aren’t you asleep?’ says the doc.

‘Dunno.’

‘Don’t you feel groggy?’

‘Not really.’

‘Not even a little bit?’

‘Nope.’

‘I’m going to give you some more Demerol then.’

‘Whatever it takes, Doc.’

So he gives me another shot of the good stuff. Ahhh. Two minutes later, he says, ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Fine, thanks,’ I say, still glued to Journey to the Centre of my Arse on the TV screen.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he says. ‘You’re still awake? I’m going to give you some more.’

‘Go on then.’

Another couple of minutes go by.

‘How about now, Mr Osbourne? Blink if you can hear me?’

‘Blink? Why can’t I just tell you?’

‘That’s impossible! You’re not human!’

‘How can I fall asleep during this?’ I say. ‘Any minute now you’re going to find some long-lost cufflinks up there, or maybe an old watch, or a pair of Sharon’s tights.’

‘I can’t have you awake right now. I’m going to give you one last sh—’

Black.

When it was over, the doc told me he’d found a couple of abnormal growths up my arsehole—polyps, they’re called—and he needed to send them away for testing. Nothing much to worry about, he said. And he was right, ’cos when the results came back, everything was fine.

But then I convinced myself that Sharon also needed to get a colonoscopy—’cos she never went for regular check-ups. In the end I nagged her so much that she finally agreed to go before flying off to New York with the kids to do some filming. She was still there when the results came back. This time, they weren’t good: the lab had found ‘cancerous tumours’. But as devastating as that news was, the way we found out was fucking unbelievable. The woman from the doctor’s surgery just called Sharon’s work number in LA and left a voicemail. It should have been me who broke the news to her, in person. Instead she found out when some chick from the office called up with her list of end-of-day messages: ‘Oh, by the way, are you sitting down for this? You’ve got cancer.’

The first thing Sharon did was call me.

‘Ozzy, please don’t freak out,’ she said. ‘I’m coming home tonight and going into hospital tomorrow.’

Stunned silence.

‘Ozzy, it’s gonna be OK. Stop freaking out.’

‘I’m not freaking out.’

As soon as she hung up, I was literally on the floor, howling. When I was growing up, no one ever recovered from cancer. I mean, the doc would always tell you it was survivable, but everyone knew that was just bullshit to calm you down.

But I had to pull myself together before Sharon’s plane landed in LA. So I showered, put on the brand of aftershave that Sharon loved, and got dressed up in a black evening suit with a white silk scarf. I wanted to look as good as possible for my wife.

Then off I went to the airport. When Sharon finally stepped off the plane with the kids and the dogs, we all hugged and cried on the tarmac. As much as I was trying to put a brave face on things, I was a fucking wreck. I’d been bad enough before the cancer scare, but this had pushed me into an abyss. My doctors were working overtime, upping my dosage of this, that and the other. My head felt like it was floating three feet above my shoulders.

‘I’m going to deal with this,’ was the first thing Sharon said to me.

Then we went back home, and the crew from MTV were waiting. They said, ‘Look, it’s OK

if you want us all to go home now. Just let us know. It’s your decision.’

But Sharon wouldn’t have any of it.

‘This is reality TV,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t get any more fucking real than this. Keep your cameras rolling.’

I thought it was very courageous of her to say that. But that’s my wife for you. Tougher than tough.

Looking back now, I had a full-on nervous breakdown in July 2002, which was made ten times worse by all the shit I was putting down my neck, twenty-four hours a day. It’s not enough to say that I love Sharon. I owe my life to Sharon. The thought of losing her was unbearable. But I never gave up. When something heavy like that happens, you get this force field around you, and things that would normally rattle your cage just don’t mean anything any more. It’s hard to describe—I just went to this other place in my head.

Sharon’s operation was on July 3, 2002. When it was done, and the cancer had been removed, the doctor said that she’d make a full recovery. But while they were digging around up there, they took out a couple of lymph nodes for testing. Days later, the lab confirmed that the cancer had spread into her lymph nodes. Which meant the worst wasn’t over—not by a long shot. I didn’t know it at the time, but Sharon’s chances of survival were only about 33 per cent. All I knew was that she’d have to go through months of horrific chemotherapy.

They were the darkest, most miserable, terrible, fucked-up days of my life. And I can’t even begin to imagine how bad it must have been for Sharon. Almost immediately, her hair started to fall out, so she had to get hairpieces made. And every time she got zapped by the chemo, she’d come home so badly dehydrated—because of all the vomiting—that she’d have a seizure. What would happen is, the first day she got back from the hospital she’d be wired, the second day she’d be all spaced out, and the third day she’d go into a seizure. And the seizures got worse every time.

One evening I went out for dinner with the kids, and when we got back, Sharon was worse than I’d ever seen her before: instead of just having one seizure, she was having them one after the other. It was fucking terrifying. There was no way we could wait for an ambulance, so I ran into Fort Apache, and shouted at the MTV guys, ‘Get us one of your trucks. We need to drive Sharon to the emergency room, right now, because if we wait for an ambulance, it’s gonna be too late.’ Then I then ran back to the bedroom, picked up Sharon from the bed, and carried her down the stairs and out to the drive-way.

The guys had a truck waiting by the time we got outside. Two of the crew members sat up front while I climbed into the back with Sharon. We’d strapped her to this gurney, but she was bouncing off the fucking thing like you wouldn’t believe. It was wild, like something out of The Exorcist. The spasms were so intense it was like she was levitating. Then, when we got to the hospital—it took us three minutes—all these nurses were running around, screaming. It was a terrible scene, the worst vibe you can possibly imagine.

After that, I got a team of nurses to live with us at Doheny Road, ’cos I never wanted Sharon to go through that again. I also got my agent to call Robin Williams to ask him if he would come over and cheer up Sharon. I’ve always believed that if you can get someone to laugh when they’re sick, it’s the best way of helping them to get better—and I got the feeling that Robin felt the same way after seeing that movie he did, Patch Adams. So he came over one day when I’d gone off to the studio, and apparently Sharon was crying with laughter the whole afternoon. To this day I think that’s the greatest gift I’ve ever given my wife, and I’m for ever in Robin’s debt for it. I mean, ‘thanks’ is nowhere near enough, is it? The guy is just a really wonderful human being. But in spite of Robin’s comedy show, Sharon had another seizure that night and she ended up in hospital again.

I got terribly paranoid whenever Sharon was in hospital. One stray germ, I thought, and she could get an infection and die. At first, I ordered the kids to wear face masks and gloves whenever they were around her. But then they’d bring the dogs, which drove me crazy. In fact, Sharon’s dog Minnie didn’t leave her side for one second during the chemo. I never saw that dog eat. I never saw it piss. By the end of the treatment, the dog was as dehydrated as Sharon was. One time I went to the hospital and they were both lying there, side by side, with matching drips. Minnie was like a guardian angel for Sharon. But she didn’t like me one bit. In fact, she didn’t like men, full stop. Even when she was on her last legs, that dog would always find the energy to growl at me. The last thing Minnie ever did was give me one of her withering looks, as if to say, ‘Urgh.’

I suffered physically during Sharon’s illness, too, but in my case it was self-inflicted. I’d drink a case of beer in the morning, smoke a shitload of dope at lunchtime, try to wake myself up again with speed, then go jogging. At least it dimmed the reality of the situation, but by the end I was a fucked-up shell of a human being. Then, one day, Sharon said to me, ‘For God’s sake, Ozzy, go and do some gigs. You’re driving everyone crazy.’

So that’s what I did. I’d already missed a few Ozzfest dates by then, but I rejoined the tour on August 22 in Denver. I was so uptight, I wouldn’t let anyone talk about cancer. If I heard the c-word, I freaked out. But a few nights later, when we were in another city—don’t ask me where—I was halfway through the set and I just thought, Fuck this, I can’t keep denying that this is happening. So I said to the crowd, ‘I want to tell you about Sharon’s progress. She’s doing well, and she’s going to beat this cancer. She’s going to kick it up the fucking arse!’

The crowd went mental. I swear to God, they lifted me up. It was magical. The power of people, when they focus on something positive, never fails to amaze me. A few days after that I went to see my physiotherapist about some back problems I’d been having. ‘There’s something I want to tell you,’ he said. ‘I can see by the look on your face that you’re terrified, but I want you to know that ten years ago I had what your wife’s got. And I made a full recovery.’

‘You survived the chemo?’ I said.

‘I didn’t even have chemo,’ he said.

It was the first truly positive thing I’d heard from anyone about Sharon’s illness. Or at least the first time I’d listened to anything positive. In my mind, cancer equalled death. And I think a lot of other people thought the same way I did. They’d say to me, ‘I’m so sorry to hear about Sharon,’ without even looking at me, like they knew she was dying. But this guy was different, and he changed my attitude right there and then.

And he was right: when the chemo was over, Sharon’s cancer seemed to have been completely destroyed.

I remember going to the hospital, and one of the doctors telling me, ‘Just so you understand, your wife’s going to spend as much time getting over the chemo as she did getting over the cancer.’

I said, ‘Let me tell you something about my wife. The second you give her the all-clear, she’ll be off and running—and you won’t be able to stop her.’

‘I don’t want to argue, Mr Osbourne,’ he said, ‘but, believe me, she’s not going to be able to do very much.’

A week later, she got the all-clear.

And you couldn’t see her for dust.

When we started to film The Osbournes, Sharon hadn’t spoken to her father for almost twenty years. It was terribly sad, because I knew that deep down, somewhere, she loved the guy. But after everything he’d done, she’d pretty much given up on him. She’d even told the kids that their grand-father had died during the war—although it didn’t take long for them to find out the real story. I remember the day it happened, in fact: we were all in the car together, driving through Beverly Hills, when Sharon suddenly hit the brakes, made an illegal U-turn, and pulled up outside Nate ’n Al’s delicatessen.

Before anyone could ask her what the fuck she was doing, she was leaning out of the window and screaming, ‘You fucking arsehole! YOU FUCKING ARSEHOLE!’

Then I saw Don standing there on the street. He immediately started to shout back. The last thing I remember is him coming right up to the car window, until he was only inches from Sharon’s face, and calling her a ‘fucking whore’. Then Sharon put her foot down and sped off, leaving him coughing and spluttering in a cloud of black smoke from the tires.

Meanwhile, inside the car, there was just this stunned silence. I had no fucking idea how to explain what had just happened to the kids. Then Aimee’s little voice piped up from the back seat.

‘Mum, why did Tony Curtis call you a whore?’

‘BECAUSE TONY CURTIS IS A FUCKING ARSEHOLE,’ came the reply.

To this day, I have no idea why Aimee thought Don was Tony Curtis. Maybe that’s what Sharon had told her, or maybe she’d seen Tony Curtis on telly—at the time he was a dead-ringer for Don. But it didn’t matter, ’cos that’s when Sharon told the kids everything.

It wasn’t the only time we bumped into Don in LA. On another occasion we’d been to see a movie at the Century City shopping mall, and we were waiting for our car at the valet stand.

All of a sudden, I spotted Don behind Sharon.

‘Promise me you won’t go nuts,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘Just promise me.’

‘OK, I promise.’

‘Your father’s standing right behind you.’

The moment I said it, one of the valet guys turned up with our car. Thank God for that, I thought.

‘Get in the car,’ barked Sharon.

‘You’re not gonna do anything crazy, are you?’ I said to her.

‘No.’

‘You’re sure about that?’

‘GET IN THE FUCKING CAR.’

I got in the passenger side and closed the door. Sharon climbed into the driver’s seat.

Then she turned into this Satan woman. She floored the accelerator, mounted the kerb, and drove straight at her father. He had to dive into a hedge to get out of the way. She almost killed him—with about fifty people standing around as witnesses. It was terrifying.

After that we didn’t see or hear from Don for years. Then, at the end of the nineties, Sharon’s mother died. I don’t know all the ins-and-outs of it, but Sharon’s mum had taken a few funny turns over the years, and the upshot was that the two of them had stopped talking, too.

They’re a very intense family, the Ardens. They’ve always gone in for a lot of verbal abuse—which sometimes I think can be even worse than physical abuse. Anyway, a year or so after her mother died, we heard from the family in England that Don was sick and had fallen on hard times. Even though they still weren’t talking, Sharon sorted him out with a place to live.

Then I got a call from Sharon’s brother, David. ‘I’ve got some bad news,’ he said. ‘Don’s got Alzheimer’s.’

There was no way I could keep that from Sharon.

At first she brushed it off, and said she was supporting him financially anyway. But I said to her, ‘Look, I don’t know what your real feelings are towards your father, but I strongly advise you, if you’ve got anything to say to him, even if it’s just to call him an arsehole again, do it now. Because with every day that goes by, he’s gonna be like a dying flame.’

The thing is, I’ve never believed in feuds. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been angry with people. Very angry—with people like Patrick Meehan, or that lawyer who tried to bill me for a drink, or Bob Daisley. But I don’t hate them. And I don’t wish them any harm. I reckon hating someone is just a total fucking waste of time and effort. What do you get out of it in the end?

Nothing. I’m not trying to come over like the Archangel Gabriel here. I just think that if you’re pissed off with someone, call them an arsehole, get it out of your system, and move on. It’s not like we’re on this earth very long.

Anyway, Sharon finally decided she wanted to see him again, so he came back into our lives. He even ended up in a couple of episodes of The Osbournes. And I was happy about it, y’know—even though he’d called me Vegetable for most of the time I knew him. Then, when Sharon decided she wanted to renew our wedding vows—she was still going through chemo at the time—we made Don part of the ceremony, which we held on New Year’s Eve at the Beverly Hills Hotel. We did it Jewish-style—with the little canopy, the broken glass, everything.

A lot of people came up to me that night and asked, ‘How come you and Sharon have stayed together all this time?’ My answer was the same then as it is now: I’ve never stopped telling my wife that I love her; I’ve never stopped taking her out for dinner; I’ve never stopped surprising her with little gifts. Unfortunately, back then, I’d never stopped drinking and taking drugs, either, so the ceremony ended much the same as our original wedding had: with me slumped in a corridor, pissed out of my brains.

The Don Arden I’d known since the early seventies just disappeared after that. The light was on but no one was home. It was a terrible way to die. I’m telling you, having seen what happened to my father-in-law, I wouldn’t wish Alzheimer’s on my worst fucking enemy. Even after everything that had gone down between us over the years—even though he’d played a part in Bob Daisley’s lawsuit—I felt truly sorry for him during his final years.

In the end, we put him in a care home.

I remember he had this wax build-up in his ears, and whenever we went to see him, I used to put these drops in for him. I don’t know why I thought it was my job, I just did it. I suppose it probably had something to do with the immense pity I felt for him. This vicious, powerful, frightening man had become a child.

‘Dad,’ said Jack one day. ‘When you’re on the telly, d’you think people are laughing with you or at you?’

The question had obviously been bothering him for a while.

‘Y’know what,’ I said to him, ‘as long as they’re laughing, I don’t care.’

‘But why, Dad? Why would you want to be a clown?’

‘Because I’ve always been able to laugh at myself, Jack. Humour has kept me alive over all these years.’

And it’s true, y’know. I mean, it doesn’t take much to rattle my cage, either—although, as I’m getting older, I increasingly think, Fuck it, what’s the point, it’ll all work out one way or another—but humour has saved my life too many times to count. And it didn’t start with The Osbournes. Even in Black Sabbath, I was the clown. I was always the one making the others crack up.

But I felt bad for Jack.

It couldn’t have been easy for him, especially during those first two years of the show, when I was this shaking, mumbling, fucked-up wreck. I can’t even imagine it, to be honest with you. Same goes for Kelly. When we all became these mega-celebrities, it was the first time I really understood why all these young Hollywood starlets get doped up and go into rehab every other day of the week. It’s the pressure—it’s fucking ridiculous. Non-stop. Day-in, day-out. I mean, the first year we went on air, Kelly sang ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ at the MTV

Movie Awards. She had to come down this big flight of stairs with every star in the business sitting there, watching her. But she just took it by the horns. And of course she ended up loving every minute of it, as did the audience.

But she had her problems, like we all do. And it broke my heart when Jack started to get fucked up too. He took Sharon’s cancer as hard as I did, to the point where he ended up on OxyContin, which they call ‘hillbilly heroin’ in LA. I remember we had this huge blow up about it, and I said, ‘What the fuck, Jack? Why are you going around getting pissed all the time?

You’ve never wanted for a thing! What have you ever wanted for?’

He just looked at me and said, ‘A father.’

I won’t forget that moment in a hurry.

It was the first time I’d really had to face the cost of how I’d been living all those years—the cost to my son, who I loved so much, who I was so proud of, but who I’d never been there for. It was a terrible feeling.

All I could say was: ‘Jack, I’m so sorry.’

Jack got sober after that. But I didn’t.

By August 2003, I was shaking so much that I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t hold anything, I couldn’t communicate. It got to the point where Sharon started to get pissed off with my doctors. The stuff they were giving me seemed to be making me worse, not better.

So then I got a new doctor, Allan Ropper, who was based in the same teaching hospital in Boston where I’d been told I didn’t have MS in the early nineties. He was treating Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease at the time—Sharon had read an article about him in People magazine. The first thing Dr Ropper did when we flew out to see him was throw away all the pills I was on. Then he checked me into hospital for five days and ran every test ever invented on me. After that, I had to wait another week for the results, Finally, me and Sharon went back to his office to find out what the fuck was wrong with me, once and for all.

‘I’ve think I’ve got to the bottom of this,’ he said. ‘Basically, Mr Osbourne, you have a very, very rare condition, which is caused by your mother and your father both having the same damaged chromosome in their DNA. And when I say it’s very rare, think one-in-a-billion rare.

The good news is that it’s not MS or Parkinson’s disease. The bad news is that we don’t really have a name for it. The best description is probably Parkinsonian syndrome.’

‘Is that what’s been giving me the tremor?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘And it’s hereditary? It has nothing to do with the booze or the drugs?’

‘The alcohol and some of the drugs you were taking were definitely making it worse. But they weren’t the primary cause.’

‘Can you treat it?’

‘Yes. But first I have to tell you something, Mr Osbourne. If you keep drinking, and if you keep abusing drugs, you’ll have to find another doctor, because I won’t have you as a patient.

I’m a busy man, I have a very long waiting list, and I can’t afford to have my time wasted.’

I’d never been spoken to like that by a doctor before. And the way he looked at me, I knew he was serious.

‘OK, doc,’ I said. ‘I’ll try my hardest.’

‘Good. I’m going to put you on two pills a day. You should see a vast improvement in your health.’

That was the understatement of the century, that was.

My tremors calmed down almost overnight. I could walk again. My stammer improved. I even managed to get back into the studio and record a new version of ‘Changes’ with Kelly.

I’d been promising to do a song for Kelly ever since I named one of the tracks on Ozzmosis after Aimee. She was always saying, ‘How come Aimee got a song and I didn’t?’ In fact, I’d done a song for Jack, too—‘My Little Man’—which is also on Ozzmosis. So I owed Kelly—and I wanted to help her out, anyway, ’cos she’s my special girl, y’know? I mean, I love all my children the same, but Kelly always seems to end up in the firing line, for some reason.

So we did ‘Changes’, one of my favourite songs of all time, with the lyrics changed slightly for a father and daughter. It was so good, I thought we might have a Christmas number one on our hands. Then we flew back to England in December to promote it. By then, I was off the booze—on Dr Ropper’s orders—but I was still fucking around with all kinds of pills. You don’t just stop being a drug addict overnight. I was Russian Rouletting it every day. At the time, I was into chloral hydrate, which is the world’s oldest sleeping medication or something. But it was still a big improvement on the ridiculous amount of narcotics I’d been taking only a few months earlier, and I got through an appearance with Kelly on Top of the Pops with no problems. Then I drove up to Welders House with my assistant Tony for the weekend.

MTV already had a camera crew up there, because by then a lot of our family routines had become old hat, and they were desperate for some new material. But there wasn’t much to shoot. I had this Yamaha Banshee 350cc quad bike—like a bullet on wheels—and I’d gun it around the fields for hours on end. So I spent most of the weekend doing just that. And on Monday morning, December 8—the day ‘Changes’ went on sale—I took the bike out again.

By this point, the crew were a bit cheesed off, I think. They didn’t even have the cameras rolling. I remember getting off the bike to open a gate, closing it after everyone had gone through, getting back on the bike, racing ahead along this dirt trail, then slamming on the brakes as I went down a steep embankment. But the trouble with that quad bike was that it didn’t have one of those twisty throttles like you get on a motorbike. It just had a little lever that you pushed to go faster. And it was very easy to knock the lever by accident, while you were trying to control the bike, especially when it became unstable. That’s exactly what happened when I got to the bottom of the embankment: the front wheels hit a pothole, my right hand slipped off the handlebar and slammed into the lever, the engine went fucking crazy, and the whole thing shot out from under me and did a backflip in the air, throwing me on to the grass. For about a millionth of a second, I thought, Oh well, that wasn’t so bad.

Then the bike landed on top of me.

Crack.

When I opened my eyes, my lungs were full of blood and my neck was broken—or so my doctors told me later.

OK, now I’m dying, I thought.

It was the Nazis’ fault, believe it or not. The pothole was a little crater, made by a German bomb that had been dropped during the war. I didn’t know it at the time, but the land around Welders is full of them. The German pilots would bottle out before they reached the big cities—where they might get shot down—so they’d dump their bombs over Buckinghamshire, claim they’d carried out their mission, then fuck off home.

I can’t remember much of the next two weeks. For the first few hours, I was slipping in and out of consciousness all the time. I have this vague memory of Sam, my security guard, lifting me on to the back of his bike and driving me back across the field. Then all I can remember are glimpses of the inside of an ambulance, followed by lots of doctors peering down at me.

‘How did you get him to an ambulance?’ one of them said.

‘We put him on the back of a bike,’ replied a voice I didn’t recognise.

‘You could have paralysed him! He’s got a broken neck, for God’s sake. He’ll be lucky to walk again.’

‘Well, how were we supposed to get him out of the forest?’

‘A helicopter was on its way.’

‘We didn’t know that.’

‘Clearly.’

Then everything started to melt away.

Apparently the last thing I did before losing consciousness was to pull on a doctor’s sleeve and whisper in his ear, ‘Whatever you do, don’t fuck up my tattoo.’

Sharon was in LA, so Tony called her and put the chief doc on the line. He told her everything, and they agreed I had to go straight into surgery.

I was very badly injured. As well as breaking my neck, I’d fractured eight of my ribs and punctured my lungs, which was why they were filling up with blood. Meanwhile, when my collar-bone broke it cut through a main artery in my arm, so that there was no blood supply. For a while the docs thought they were gonna have to chop it off. Once they were done operating on me, they put me into a ‘chemical coma’, ’cos it was the only way I was going to be able to handle the pain. If I’d copped it then, it would have been a fitting end for me: I’d spent my whole adult life trying to get into a chemical coma. They kept me under for eight days in the end. Then they started to bring me slowly back to consciousness. It took another six days for me to fully wake up. And during that time I had the most fucking insane dream. It was so vivid, it was more like a hallucination. All I can say is that the NHS must have loaded me up with some top-quality gear, ’cos I can still picture every detail like it was yesterday.

It started off with me in Monmouthshire—where I used to go to rehearse with Black Sabbath and my solo bands. It was raining—pissing it down. Then I was in this corridor at Rockfield Studios, and in front of me was a camouflaged fence, like something they might have had in the trenches during World War Two. To my left was a window. When I looked through it, on the other side was Sharon, having a party. She couldn’t see me, but I could see her. I followed her out of this party and watched as she met up with some handsome, wealthy guy, who had his own plane. In the dream I thought, There’s my wife, and she’s leaving me. It was terribly sad. The guy had a landing strip in his back yard, and at the end of it was a big gun.

Then, all of a sudden, he could see me—so I offered him some telescopic night-vision sights, because I wanted him to like me. He told me to fuck off, and I felt rejected all over again. At that point, all the guests from the party came running on to the lawn. The crowd got bigger and bigger until in the end it became this big music festival.

That was when Marilyn Manson showed up.

It was fucking nuts, man.

Next, I was on the rich guy’s plane going to New Zealand, and they were serving draught Guinness in the cockpit. I suppose that must have had something to do with my son Louis’s wedding in Ireland, which I was missing because I was in hospital. In New Zealand it was New Year’s Eve. Jack was there—he’d bleached his hair completely white and he was letting off fire crackers. Then he got arrested.

At that point, Donovan strolled into the dream and started to play ‘Mellow Yellow’.

What made all this even freakier was that I kept coming around, so some aspects of the dream were real. For example, I thought I was living in a fish ’n’ chip shop, but in fact my bed was right next to the hospital kitchen, so I could smell them cooking. Then I saw my guitarist Zakk Wylde—which in the dream I thought was impossible, because he lived in America—but I later learned that he’d flown over to see me, so he was really there.

I also saw him wearing a frilly dress, dancing with a mop and a bucket.

But that wasn’t real.

Or at least I hope it wasn’t.

‘Ozzy, Ozzy, can you hear me?’

It was Sharon.

After almost two weeks, they’d finally brought me out of the coma.

I opened my eyes.

Sharon smiled and dabbed at her face with a tissue.

‘I’ve got news for you,’ she said, squeezing my hand.

‘I had a dream,’ I told her, before she could say anything more. ‘You left me for a rich guy with an aeroplane.’

‘What are you talking about, Ozzy? Don’t be silly. No one’s leaving anyone. Everyone loves you. You should see the flowers that your fans have left outside. You’ll be touched.

They’re beautiful.’ She squeezed my hand again and said, ‘Do you want to hear the news?’

‘What is it? Are the kids OK?’

‘You and Kelly are at number one. You finally fucking did it.’

‘With “Changes”?’

‘Yes! You even broke a record, Ozzy. It’s never taken anyone thirty-three years from having their first song in the charts to getting a number one. Only Lulu has even come close.’

I managed a smile. ‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’ I said. Then I laughed.

Not a good idea, with eight broken ribs.

Normally, I hate Christmas. I mean, if you’re an alcoholic and you’re drinking, Christmas is the best thing in the world. But if you ain’t drinking, it’s fucking agony. And I hate the fact that you have to buy everyone a gift. Not because I’m tight—it’s just that you do it out of obligation, not because you want to.

It’s always seemed like total bullshit to me.

But Christmas 2003 was the exception. Me and Kelly might not have got the Christmas number one—we were outsold in the last week by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules, with their cover version of ‘Mad World’—but I got to live another day. Which is pretty unbelievable, when you think about it. The only sadness I have from that time is that none of my old Black Sabbath bandmates called to say they liked ‘Changes’, or to say, ‘Well done on getting to number one.’ Even if they’d called to say they thought it was a piece of shit, it would have been better than silence. No wonder it was raining so hard in Monmouthshire when I was there in the dream.

But whatever, man. It ain’t a big deal.

The hospital where I’d been in the coma, Wexham Park, couldn’t have been better. But I pissed them off in the end. I wanted to go home, ’cos I’d had enough, but they told me there was no way I could leave. I mean, at that point I couldn’t walk; I had a neck brace on; my arm still hadn’t come back to life; and I was in excruciating fucking pain. But my dream had fucked me up. I was convinced that Sharon was flying around the world in a private jet with a hot tub in the back, while being shagged senseless by some billionaire. If I was in hospital, I thought, I had no chance of getting her back. But by the time Sharon had raced over to the hospital with the kids to tell me for the millionth time that everything was OK, that it was all just a dream, it was too late: I’d managed to sign myself out. So Sharon had to get a hospital bed for me at Welders House and a home-help nurse to wipe my arse and shake my dick. For weeks, the only way I could get from room to room was in a wheelchair, and every night I had to be carried upstairs to go to bed.

But eventually I made a full recovery. Or as full as anyone could expect. My short-term memory seemed worse, but maybe that was just age, or the sleeping pills. And my ribcage is still full of screws and bolts and metal rods. When I walk through an airport metal detector these days, a klaxon goes off in the Pentagon.

But I can’t complain, y’know? I remember when I first went back to America after the crash, and I had to go to the doc for a check-up. He took all these X-rays of my chest, put them up on the viewing box, and started to whistle through his teeth. ‘Nice work,’ he said.

‘Must have been a bit pricey, though. What did it cost ya? Seven figures? Eight?’

‘Nothing, actually,’ I said.

He couldn’t believe it. ‘What d’you mean?’

‘National Health Service,’ I said, and shrugged.

‘Holy crap,’ he went. ‘No wonder you guys put up with the weather.’

Once I was out of the wheelchair and the neck brace, it was time to renegotiate our contract with MTV—again. But I couldn’t face another season of The Osbournes.

Enough was enough.

Anyway, by then MTV had killed the show by trying to wring every last ounce of dough out of it. It seemed to be on twenty-four hours a day. And when you overdo a show like that, people get bored. You want the folks at home to be saying, ‘Oh, it’s nine o’clock. Time for The Osbournes.’ You want them to be jacked up for it. But when it’s on every night, they just say,

‘Meh, it’ll be on tomorrow.’ They did the exact same thing with Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

It was brilliant for five minutes, then you couldn’t get away from it.

Another problem was that after three years of doing the show, we’d filmed just about everything we could ever film. So, for the last season, we had to come up with all these gimmicks—and we were so famous that we were mobbed whenever we left the house. It started to feel a bit fake, which was the exact opposite of what The Osbournes was all about.

So that was the end of it. By 2005 the show was over, Fort Apache was taken down, and the crew moved out. Not long after, Jack and Kelly moved out too. But I like to think we made our mark on TV. And especially on MTV. They love reality shows now, that lot. You have to stay up until three in the morning just to catch a music video these days. And, of course, a lot of people have tried to take credit for The Osbournes now that it’s over. But I’ve never been in any doubt about who were the true creators of The Osbournes.

They’re called The Osbournes.

One of the great things about the show was that it allowed Sharon to go off and have a successful career in TV. After she got through her chemotherapy, all I wanted was for Sharon to be happy, and when she got the gig as a judge on The X Factor, she loved it. When Sharon wanted to leave after the fourth season, I said to her, ‘Look, are you absolutely sure this is what you want to do, because if it is then I’m completely behind you.’ And in the end, it worked out very well for her, because now she’s having the time of her life doing America’s Got Talent.

I must say I thought my life would become a bit more normal after The Osbournes ended.

Fat fucking chance. Welders House almost burned down three times, for a start. Then I nearly murdered a cat burglar in the middle of the night in my own bathroom.

I swear this kind of crazy shit only ever happens to me.

If it hadn’t been for my dodgy bladder, I wouldn’t even have seen the guy. But I’m up and down during the night like a fiddler’s elbow, I am. It’s because I drink so much liquid, even when I’m not boozing. The cups of tea I make are the size of soup bowls. And I can get through a dozen of them a day. Whatever I do, it’s always to excess.

Anyway, the break-in happened just before dawn on Monday, November 22, 2004. I woke up busting for a piss, and luckily I wasn’t loaded on anything more than the usual pills, so I wasn’t staggering around, falling into things. I just got out of bed, stark bollock naked, and walked into the bathroom, which leads through to this little vanity area. I switched on the lights and lifted up the toilet seat, and as I did so, I glanced towards Sharon’s dressing table.

There he was: a bloke about my height, dressed head-to-toe in black, a ski mask over his face, crouched down, but with nowhere to hide.

It’s hard to describe the kind of fright you get when something like that happens. But then the urgency of the situation takes over. As soon as he knew that I’d seen him, the bloke legged it to the window and tried to climb out. For some reason—God knows why, given how much of a chickenshit I am—I ran after him and got him in a headlock before he could get his whole body through the gap. So there he is, this cat burglar, on his back with his eyes twinkling up at me, and I’ve got my arm around his throat. Suddenly I’m thinking: Right, what now?

We seemed to be there for ages, neither of us saying anything, while I decided what to do.

If I pull him back inside, I thought, he might have a crow-bar, or a gun. I also thought he might have had a friend outside, waiting to help out in an emergency. And I wasn’t exactly up for a fight at four o’clock in the morning. I didn’t have my Rambo attire on, put it that way. So then I thought, Why don’t I just kill the bastard? I mean, he was in my house, and I hadn’t invited him. But did I really want to live with the fact that I’d taken someone’s life, when I knew I could have let him go?

In the end, I just threw the fucker out of the window, which was on the second floor. I could hear him crash through the branches of a tree on his way down. Then I watched him hobbling across the field, yelping with every step. With any luck, he broke something.

He got away with two million quid’s worth of jewellery, and the cops never caught him. The stuff was insured, but you never get back the full value with those things. I suppose I should have shouted for Sharon to press the alarm button, but I didn’t think. And she didn’t know anything about it until it was all over.

But it’s only stuff, isn’t it? And it could have been a lot worse. He could have beaten me over the head with a baseball bat while I was asleep. He could have raped Sharon. I mean, you hear people down the pub saying, ‘Oh, I’d fucking love that to happen to me, I’d show the bastard,’ but believe me, when you’re taken by surprise like that, it’s a lot different.

I’ve bought a few guns since then, mind you, so if there’s ever another bloke, he won’t have it so easy. Then again, I don’t know if I’d have the nerve to shoot someone. And you’ve gotta be fucking careful with guns. It’s like my father always said to me, if you ever pull a weapon on somebody—no matter what it is—you’ve got to be fully prepared to use it, because if you’re not, the other guy will see the doubt in your eyes, and he’ll take it off you and use it on you instead. Then you’re really in trouble.

The day after the burglary, the press went crazy, as they always do with stories about me.

‘NAKED OZZY’S RAGE AS HE FIGHTS JEWELLERY ROBBER AT HIS HOME’ said the Sun’s headline. Then some of the other papers sent reporters to Aston to write about how I’d robbed Sarah Clarke’s clothes shop, and how it was ironic that I was now complaining about being a victim of burglary. I thought that was a bit of a stretch, to be honest with you. I was just a stupid kid when I broke into Sarah Clarke’s; I was hardly the fucking night stalker. And I learned my lesson.

In 1965, the clothes I nicked were worth about twenty-five quid, and I thought that was all the money in the world. I never would have believed that forty years later I’d have two million pounds’ worth of stuff for someone to pinch—and enough left over to not really notice when it was gone. It’s ridiculous, really. My life should never have happened the way that it did. But, believe me, I’m grateful. Not a day goes by without me thinking about where I came from, and where I ended up, and how no one in their right fucking mind would have put a bet on it turning out that way.