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 elder-berry 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 under -water. 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 re-form 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 photo-graphers 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 anti-depressants, 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.’