I Am Ozzy

by Ozzy Osbourne; Chris Ayres

  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 strait-laced 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 hemi-sphere. 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.