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 arse-hole 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 ne
ver 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—’
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