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-to-day 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 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 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 ARSE-HOLE,’ 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 Parkinson -ian 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.