4

‘You Guys Ain’t Black!’

I was never the Romeo type, me.

Even after our first album went gold, I never got any good-looking chicks. Black Sabbath was a blokes’ band. We’d get fag ends and beer bottles thrown at us, not frilly underwear. We used to joke that the only groupies that came to our gigs were ‘two-baggers’ – you needed to put a couple of bags over their head before you could shag them; one wasn’t enough. And most of the time I was lucky even to get a two-bagger, to be honest with you. The chicks who wanted to shack up with me at the end of the night were usually three- or four-baggers. One night in Newcastle I think I had a five-bagger.

That was a rough night, that was. A lot of gin was involved, if I remember correctly.

But none of that stopped me trying to get my end away.

One of the places where I used to go cruising for a good old bonk was the Rum Runner nightclub on Broad Street in Birmingham, where an old school mate of Tony’s worked on the door. It was a famous place, the Rum Runner – years later, Duran Duran would become the resident band there – so it was magic to have someone on the inside who could get you in without any trouble.

One night, not long after we’d signed the record deal, I went to the Rum Runner with Tony. This was before we’d met Patrick Meehan, so we were still broke. We drove there in Tony’s second-hand car, which I think was a Ford Cortina. It was a piece of crap, anyway. Albert greets us at the door as usual, the bouncers unclip the rope to let us through, and the first thing I see is this dark-haired chick behind the counter in the cloakroom.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked Albert.

‘Thelma Riley,’ he told me. ‘Lovely gal. Brainy, too. But she’s divorced, and she’s got a kid, so watch yerself.’

I didn’t care.

She was beautiful, and I wanted to talk to her. So I did what I always did when I wanted to talk to a bird: I got fucking lollied. But something strange must have been going on that night, because the old get-as-dribblingly-drunk-as-possible strategy worked: I pulled her on the dance floor while Tony pulled her mate. Then we all drove back to Tony’s place in his Cortina, with me and Thelma having a snog and a fumble on the back seat.

Tony dumped Thelma’s friend the next day, but me and Thelma kept going. And when I finally couldn’t take any more of the bad atmosphere at 14 Lodge Road, we rented a flat together above a launderette in Edgbaston, a posh part of Birmingham.

A year or so later, in 1971, we got married in a registry office.

I thought it was what you did: get some dough, find a chick, get married, settle down, go to the pub.

It was a terrible mistake.

A few months before the wedding, Black Sabbath finally made it to America. Before we went, I remember Patrick Meehan’s dad calling us into a meeting at his London office, and telling us that we were going to be ‘ambassadors for British music’, so we should fucking behave ourselves.

We just nodded and ignored him.

Having said that, I made sure to go easy on the booze until we reached the airport. But what I didn’t know is that airports had bars – and I couldn’t resist a couple of cheeky ones to calm my nerves. So by the time I got to my seat, I was as pissed as a fart. Then we found out that Traffic were on the same plane. I couldn’t get over the fact that I was on the same flight as Steve Winwood. For the first time in my life, I began to feel like a proper rock star.

Even with all the booze I put away on the plane, it seemed to take for ever to get to JFK. I kept looking out of the window, thinking, How the fuck does this thing stay up in the air? Then we flew over Manhattan, where the World Trade Center was being built – half of it was still just scaffolding and steel girders – and landed as the sun was setting. It was a warm night, I remember, and I’d never experienced that warm-night-in-New-York vibe before. It had a distinctive smell, y’know? I thought it was great. Mind you, I was beyond pissed by this point. The flight attendant had to help me out of my seat, and then I fell down the steps.

By the time I got to immigration, the hangover had set it. My headache was so bad that I’d forgotten what I’d written as a joke on the visa-waiver form. Where it asked for your religion, I’d put ‘Satanist’. So the bloke takes the form off me and starts reading it. Then he pauses when he gets halfway down.

He looks up at me. ‘Satanist, huh?’ he says, in this thick Bronx accent, with a bored, tired look on his face.

Suddenly I’m thinking, Oh, shit.

But before I can start trying to explain myself, he just stamps the form and shouts, ‘NEXT!’

‘Welcome to New York’ said the sign above his head.

We got our luggage from the carousel and went to queue in the taxi rank outside the arrivals hall. Fuck knows what all the businessmen with their suits and ties and briefcases were thinking, standing next to this long-haired, unwashed, pissed-up Brummie, wearing a tap around his neck and a pair of smelly old jeans with ‘Peace & Love’ and a CND symbol on one leg, and ‘Black Panthers Rule’ and a black fist symbol on the other.

As we waited, this massive yellow car drove by. It must have had nineteen or twenty doors on it.

‘I knew the cars here were big,’ I slurred, ‘but not that big!’

‘It’s a limousine, you idiot,’ said Tony.

Before we left England, we’d already recorded our follow-up to Black Sabbath. We had it in the can only five months after the release of the first record – which is unbelievable when you consider the lazy-arsed way albums are made these days. It was originally going to be called Warpiggers, which was a term for a black magic wedding or something. Then we changed it to War Pigs, and Geezer came up with these heavy-duty lyrics about death and destruction. No wonder we never got any chicks at our gigs. Geezer just wasn’t interested in your average ‘I love you’ pop song. Even when he wrote a boy-meets-girl lyric, it had a twist to it – like ‘N.I.B.’ off the first album, where the boy turns out to be the Devil. Geezer also liked to put a lot of topical stuff, like Vietnam references, into our songs. He had his ear to the ground, Geezer did.

We went back to Regent Sound in Soho to make the second record, although we’d spent a few weeks beforehand rehearsing in an old barn at Rockfield Studios in South Wales. Studio time cost a fortune back then, so we didn’t want to fuck around when the meter was running. And once our work was done at Regent Sound we moved to Island Studios in Notting Hill to do the final mix. That was when Rodger Bain realised we needed a few extra minutes of material. I remember him coming down from the control room one lunch break and saying, ‘Look, lads, we need some filler. Can you jam something?’ We all wanted to get started on our sandwiches, but Tony launched into this guitar riff while Bill played around with some drum patterns, I hummed a melody, and Geezer sat in the corner, scribbling down some lyrics.

Twenty minutes later, we had a song called ‘The Paranoid’. By the end of the day, it had become just ‘Paranoid’.

It’s always the way with the best songs: they come out of nowhere, when you’re not even trying. The thing with ‘Paranoid’ is that it doesn’t fit into any category: it was like a punk song years before punk had been invented. Mind you, none of us thought it was anything special when we recorded it. To us, it just seemed a bit half-arsed compared with ‘Hand of Doom’ or ‘Iron Man’ or any of those heavier numbers. But fucking hell, it was catchy; I was humming it all the way home from the studio. ‘Thelma,’ I said, when I got back to Edgbaston. ‘I think we might have written a single.’

She just gave me a look that said, That’ll be the day.

It’s funny, y’know: if you’d told us at the time that people would still be listening to any of those songs forty years into the future – and that the album would sell more than four million copies in America alone – we would have just laughed in your face.

But the fact is Tony Iommi turned out to be one of the greatest heavy rock riff-makers of all time. Whenever we went into the studio we’d challenge him to beat his last riff – and he’d come up with something like ‘Iron Man’ and blow everyone away.

But ‘Paranoid’ was a different class again. About two seconds after the suits at Vertigo heard that song, the name of the whole album became Paranoid. It wasn’t that they thought War Pigs might upset Americans because of Vietnam – at least not as far as I know. No, they were just freaking out about our little three-minute pop song, because they thought it might get played on the radio, and bands like ours never got played on the radio. And it made sense to give the album the same title as the single, to make it easier to promote in the record shops.

The suits were right. ‘Paranoid’ went straight to number four in the British singles chart and got us on Top of the Pops – alongside Cliff Richard, of all people. The only problem was the album cover, which had been done before the name change and now didn’t make any sense at all. What did four pink blokes holding shields and waving swords have to do with paranoia? They were pink because that was supposed to be the colour of the war pigs. But without ‘War Pigs’ written on the front, they just looked like gay fencers.

‘They’re not gay fencers, Ozzy,’ Bill told me. ‘They’re paranoid gay fencers.’

Top of the Pops was probably the biggest thing I’d done in my entire life at that point. Every week when I was growing up in Aston, the entire Osbourne family would get together around the telly to watch that show. Even my mum loved it. So when my folks heard I was going to be on, they were speechless. In those days, fifteen million people tuned in to Top of the Pops every week, and Pan’s People were still doing those hippy dances between the numbers.

It was fucking awesome, man.

I remember being really impressed by Cliff Richard, ’cos he did his song live, with a full orchestra.

We didn’t take the piss out of him or anything – after all, it hadn’t been that long since I’d been singing ‘Living Doll’ in front of my parents. I think the song he did was ‘I Ain’t Got Time Any More’. I haven’t seen the tape for years – maybe it was wiped so the reels could be reused, which was the BBC’s policy back then. I’ll tell you one thing, though: I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if Cliff looked older on that 1970 Top of the Pops episode than he does now. He ages in reverse, that bloke. Every time I see him, he’s lost another couple of years.

When it was our turn to go on, my whole body went numb with fear. The other three didn’t have to play a note – they just had to look the part and tap their feet in time to the backing track. But I had to sing live. It was my first time on telly and I was shitting myself like I’d never shit myself before. Pure terror. The inside of my mouth was so dry, it felt like I had a ball of cotton wool in there. But I got through it.

My mum and dad watched us at home on the telly – or so my brothers told me a few days later.

If they were proud, they didn’t say so. But I like to think they were.

That song changed everything for us. And I loved playing it. For a week or two we even had screaming girls showing up at our gigs and throwing their knickers at us, which was a nice change, although we were obviously a bit worried about pissing off our regular fans. Straight after Top of the Pops, we did a gig in Paris, and at the end of the show this beautiful French chick stayed behind. Then she took me back to her place and fucked the shit out of me. I didn’t understand a word she said the entire night.

Which is sometimes the best way with one-night stands.

I thought America was fabulous.

Take pizza, for example. For years, I’d been thinking, I wish someone would invent a new kind of food. In England, it was always egg and chips, sausage and chips, pie and chips… anything and chips. After a while it just got boring, y’know? But you couldn’t exactly order a shaved Parmesan and rocket salad in Birmingham in the early seventies. If it didn’t come out of a deep-fat fryer, no one knew what the fuck it was. But then, in New York, I discovered pizza. It blew my mind wide fucking open. I would buy ten or twenty slices a day. And then, when I realised you could buy a great big pizza all for yourself, I started ordering them wherever we went. I couldn’t wait to get back home and tell all my mates: ‘There’s this incredible new thing. It’s American and it’s called pizza. It’s like bread, but it’s better than any bread you’ve tasted in your life.’ I even tried to recreate a New York pizza for Thelma one time. I made some dough, then I got all these cans of beans and pilchards and olives and shit and put them on top – it must have been about fifteen quid’s worth of gear – but after ten minutes it just came dribbling out of the oven. It was like somebody had been sick in there. Thelma just looked at it and went, ‘I don’t think I like pizza, John.’ She never called me Ozzy, my first wife. Not once in the entire time I knew her.

Another incredible thing I discovered in America was the Harvey Wallbanger – a cocktail made with vodka, Galliano and orange juice. They knocked your fucking head off, those things. I drank so many Wallbangers that I can’t even stand the smell of them now.

One whiff and I’ll vomit on cue.

And then there were the American chicks, who were nothing like English chicks. I mean, when you pulled a chick in England, you gave her the eye, one thing led to another, you took her out, you bought her this and that, and then about a month later you asked if she fancied a good old game of hide the sausage. In America, the chicks just came right up to you and said, ‘Hey, let’s fuck.’ You didn’t even have to make any effort.

We found that out on our first night, when we stayed at a place called Loew’s Midtown Motor Inn, which was on Eighth Avenue and 48th Street, a sleazy part of town. I couldn’t sleep, ’cos I had jet lag, which was another wild new experience. So I’m lying there, wide awake at three o’clock in the morning, and there’s a knock on the door. I get up to answer it, and there’s this scrawny-looking chick standing there in a trench coat, which she unbuttons in front of me. And she’s completely starkers underneath.

‘Can I come in?’ she whispers, in this throaty, sexy voice.

What was I supposed to say? ‘No thanks, darlin’, I’m a bit busy.’

So, of course, I go to town on this chick until the sun comes up. Then she picks up her coat off the floor, gives me a peck on the cheek, and fucks off.

Later, when we’re all at breakfast, trying to work out where you put the maple syrup – Geezer was pouring it over his hash browns – I go, ‘You’ll never guess what happened to me last night.’

‘Actually,’ said Bill, with a little cough, ‘I think I can.’

Turned out we’d all had a knock on our door that night: it was our tour manager’s ‘Welcome to America’ present. Although, judging by the way my chick looked in daylight – she couldn’t have been a day under forty – he’d got obviously a bulk deal.

During the two months of our American tour, we covered distances that we couldn’t have imagined back in England. We played the Fillmore East in Manhattan. We played the Fillmore West in San Francisco. We even went to Florida, where I swam in an outdoor swimming pool for the first time: it was mid-night, I was out of my mind on dope and booze, and it was beautiful. I also saw my first proper turquoise ocean in Florida.

Bill hated flying, so we drove between a lot of the gigs, which became a bit of a ritual for us. Me and Bill’s epic road trips ended up being the highlights of all our American tours. We spent so much time together in the back of rented GMC mobile homes, we became as thick as thieves. Bill got his brother-in-law Dave to do the driving eventually, so we could drink more and take more drugs. It’s funny, you learn a lot about people when you’re on the road like that. Every morning, for example, Bill would have a cup of coffee, a glass of orange juice, a glass of milk, and a beer. Always in the same order.

I asked him why he did it once.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘the coffee’s to wake me up, the orange juice is to give me some vitamins to stop me getting sick, the milk’s to coat my stomach for the rest of the day, and the beer’s to put me back to sleep again.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Makes sense.’

Funny bloke, Bill. I remember one time, we had the GMC loaded full of beer and fags, and Dave was driving. We were going from New York to somewhere a long way further down the East Coast, so we’d got up early, even though we’d had a big night. Dave kept complaining that he’d eaten a dodgy pizza before going to bed. It tasted like rat’s piss, he said. So I’m sitting in the passenger seat at seven or eight o’clock in the morning, bleary-eyed and hung over; Bill’s crashed out in the back; and Dave’s driving along with this funny look on his face. I wind down the window and light up a fag, then look over and see Dave turning green.

‘You all right, Dave?’ I said, blowing smoke into the cabin.

‘Yeah, I’m—’

Then he lost it.

Bleeeeeugh!

He threw up all over the dashboard, and these half-digested lumps of cheese and dough and tomato sauce started to dribble into the air vents and on to my box of cigarettes. Just the sight and the smell were enough to make me come out in sympathy.

‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘Dave, I think I’m gonna—’

Bleeeeeugh!

So now there were two stomachfuls of vomit all over the inside of this van. The smell was fucking abominable, but Bill didn’t notice a thing – he was still passed out in the back.

We pulled over at the next truck stop and I ran out and asked the chick in the shop if she had any air freshener. There was no way I was even going to try to clean up the puke, but we needed to do something about the smell. It seemed like even the drivers of the cars overtaking us on the freeway were holding their noses. But the chick in the shop didn’t understand a fucking word I was saying. Finally, she goes, ‘Oh, you mean this?’ And she gives me a can of spearmint air spray. Then she says to me, ‘Personally, I don’t recommend it.’

Fuck it, I thought, and I bought it anyway. Then I ran back to the GMC, slammed the door, and while Dave pulled out of the parking spot I started spraying the stuff all over the place.

Then, all of a sudden, there’s this grunt and a rustling noise from behind us. I look over my shoulder and see Bill sitting bolt upright, looking very unwell. He could take the smell of our puke, but the spearmint air spray had tipped him over the edge.

‘Christ!’ he goes. ‘What the fuck is that sm—’

Bleeeeeugh!

Our first gig in America was at a club in New York called Ungano’s, at 210 West 70th Street. Then after that we did a show at the Fillmore East with Rod Stewart and the Faces. We were pissed off with the Faces, actually, because they didn’t give us any time for a sound check. And Rod kept well out of our way. Looking back now, I don’t suppose he was too happy about having Black Sabbath supporting him. We were the unwashed hooligans and he was the blue-eyed boy. He was all right though, Rod; always very polite. And I thought he was a phenomenal singer.

Two months felt like an eternity to be so far away from home, and we missed England like crazy – especially when we started talking about how much we couldn’t wait to go down the pub and tell everyone about America, which was like going to Mars in those days. Very few Brits ever made it over, because the air fares were so expensive.

Practical jokes ended up being the best way to take our minds off home. One of the things we found hilarious was the American accent. Every time a hotel receptionist called me ‘Mr Ozz-Burn’, we’d all crack up laughing. Then we came up with this prank to play in hotel restaurants. During the meal, one of us would sneak off to the front desk and get them to page a ‘Mr Harry Bollocks’. So the others would be sitting there eating their hamburgers and this bellhop would rush into the room, ringing his little bell, and shout, ‘Is there a Mr Hairy Bollocks here? I’m looking for Hairy Bollocks.’

Bill would laugh so hard he’d make himself ill.

But the biggest culture shock was at a gig in Philadelphia. It was mostly black guys in the audience, and you could tell they hated our music. We did ‘War Pigs’ and you could have heard a fucking pin drop. One guy, a big tall fella with a massive Afro, spent the whole gig sitting up on a high window ledge, and every few minutes he’d shout out, ‘Hey, you – Black Sabbath!’

I thought, Why the fuck does he keep saying that? What does he want? I didn’t realise he thought my name was Black Sabbath.

Anyway, about halfway through the gig, at the end of one of the songs, this guy does it again: ‘Hey, you – Black Sabbath!’

By this point I’d had enough. So I walked to the edge of the stage, looked up at him, and said, ‘All right mate, you win. What the fuck do you want? Just tell me. What is it, eh?’

And he peered down at me with this puzzled look on his face.

‘You guys ain’t black,’ he said.

That was our only bad gig, mind you.

None of us could believe how well the Black Sabbath album had gone down in America. It was a monster. Warner Bros, our American record company, were so pleased with it they told us they were going to delay the release of Paranoid until January the following year.

We were getting such big crowds wherever we played, we even started to get a few groupies.

Our first really crazy groupie experience was in a Holiday Inn, out in California somewhere. Now, usually, Patrick Meehan booked us into the shittiest of places; it wasn’t unusual for all four of us to share a single room in some dodgy motel on the out-skirts of town for five bucks a night. So the Holiday Inn was luxurious by our standards: my room had a bath and a shower and a phone and a telly. It even had a waterbed – which were all the rage in those days. I loved those things, actually; it was like falling asleep on a tire floating in the middle of the ocean.

Anyway, so we’re in this Holiday Inn, and I’ve just finished talking to Thelma on the phone when there’s a knock at the door. I open it and there’s this beautiful chick standing there in a little dress. ‘Ozzy?’ she goes. ‘The gig was awesome. Can we talk?’

In she comes, pulls off her dress, we get down to business, and then she fucks off before I can even ask her name.

Five minutes later, there’s another knock on the door. I’m thinking, She probably left something in the room. So I get up to answer it. But it’s a different chick.

‘Ozzy?’ she goes. ‘The gig was awesome. Can we talk?’

Off comes her dress, down go my trousers, and after five minutes of my hairy arse bobbing up and down on top of her while we’re floating around on this waterbed, it was ‘Nice meeting you’, ‘Cheerio’, and off she went.

These Holiday Inns are fucking magic, I thought. Then there was another knock on the door.

You can guess what happened next.

I banged three chicks that night. Three. Without even leaving my hotel room. To be honest with you, I was flagging a bit with the last one. I had to use the special reserve tank.

Eventually I decided to find out where the fuck all these groupies were coming from. So I went to the bar but it was completely empty. Then I asked the guy in the lobby, ‘Where is everyone?’ He went, ‘Your British friends? Try the pool.’ So I took the lift up to the pool on the roof, and when the doors opened I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was like Caligula up there: dozens of the most amazing-looking chicks you could ever imagine, all stark naked, and blowjobs and threesomes going on left, right and centre. I lit up a joint, sat down on a recliner between two lesbian chicks, and began to sing ‘God Bless America’.

But it wasn’t just groupies who followed us around America. We also got a lot of loonies – the kind of people who took the black magic thing seriously. Before we even left for America, someone had sent us a film of a black magic parade in San Francisco, held in our honour. There was a bloke who looked like Ming the Merciless sitting in a convertible Rolls-Royce while all these half-naked chicks danced around him in the streets. The bloke’s name was Anton LaVey and he was the High Priest of the Church of Satan or some bollocks, and the author of a book called The Satanic Bible.

We just thought, What the fuck?

I have a theory, y’know, about people who dedicate their lives to that kind of bullshit: they’re just in it because of all the sexual debauchery they can get up to.

Which is fair enough, I suppose.

But we didn’t want anything to do with it. A lot of people were still freaked out by Sharon Tate’s murder, so we didn’t want to come off like members of Charles Manson’s ‘Family’. I mean, only a few months earlier we’d been playing at Henry’s Blues House in front of a few dozen people, and now we were playing the Forum in LA in front of twenty thousand fans. We loved being big in the US, and we didn’t want to do anything to fuck it up.

Mind you, we did bump into some members of the Manson Family at the Whiskey A Go Go on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles one night. They were very weird people – somewhere-else people, if you know what I mean. Not on the same wavelength as the rest of the world. They gave me the willies, big time. The funny thing is, though, before he turned psycho, Manson had been a big part of the LA music scene. If he hadn’t gone to jail, we probably would have ended up hanging out with him. It blew my mind when I learned that he’d been pals with Dennis Wilson from the Beach Boys. The Beach Boys had even covered one of Manson’s songs, ‘Never Learn Not to Love’. But from what I heard, Dennis ended up getting so spooked by Manson and his friends that he fled his own house. He just woke up and fucked off one day. Then Manson had a bullet delivered to Wilson’s new place. The bloke must have been shitting bricks.

There was a lot of mad stuff like that going on in those days.

LA was a crazy place in 1970. The flower power thing was still a huge deal. When you drove around, you’d see all these people with long hair and bare feet, just sitting around on street corners, smoking weed and strumming guitars. The locals probably thought we were crazy, too, I suppose. I remember walking into an liquor store on Sunset Boulevard one time and asking for twenty fags. The woman behind the counter said, ‘What do you want twenty fags for? Get out of here, you fucking pervert!’

She must have thought I was a sex fiend. Of course, at the time I didn’t have a clue that ‘fag’ doesn’t mean cigarette in America.

As much as we tried to avoid them, the Satanists never stopped being a pain in the arse. About a year after the first tour, we were playing a gig in Memphis and this bloke wearing a black cloak ran on stage. Under normal circumstances, if a fan climbed on stage, I’d put my arm around him and we’d have a good old head bang for a bit. But this bloke looked like one of the satanic loonies, so I told him to fuck off out of it and pushed him away, towards Tony. Before I knew it, one of our roadies was running on stage with a metal bar raised above his head, and he twatted the guy in the face. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. ‘What the fuck are you doing, man?’ I shouted. ‘You can’t do that!’

The roadie turned around and said, ‘Yes I fucking can. Look.’

The satanic bloke was lying on the stage with his cloak wide open. In his right hand was a dagger.

I almost fell backwards into one of the speaker cabinets, I was so freaked out. If it hadn’t been for our roadie, Tony might have been a goner.

By the time we headed back to our motel that night, everyone was shaken up. But the fuckers had found out where we were staying, and in the car park of the motel were more guys in black robes, their hoods up, chanting. We were too knackered to deal with it, so we just ignored them and made our way to our rooms, which faced on to the street. A few seconds later, one of the roadies started jabbering and screaming – it turned out that someone had drawn an inverted cross in blood on his door.

I can’t say we were scared. But after the incident with the guy on the stage, we weren’t in the mood to take any more bullshit. So we called the police. Of course, they found the whole thing extremely funny.

They just wouldn’t fuck off, those Satanists. I’d walk out of my hotel room in the morning, and they’d be right outside my door, sitting in a circle on the carpet, all dressed in black hooded capes, surrounded by candles. Eventually I couldn’t take it any more. So, one morning, instead of brushing past them as I usually did, I went up to them, sat down, took a deep breath, blew out their candles, and sang ‘Happy Birthday’.

They weren’t too fucking happy about that, believe me.

We were on the road non-stop for two years after our first American tour. Between 1970 and 1972, we must have crossed the Atlantic six times. We spent so much time in the air, we ended up being on first-name terms with the PanAm flight attendants. And even though we were exhausted and ill half the time from the jet lag, the booze and the drugs, it was a fucking blast. We did everything, saw everything, met everyone.

We even went to an Elvis gig.

It was at the Forum in LA. We were so far up in the nose-bleeds, it seemed to take longer to get to our seats than it did for the King to do his set. He looked like an ant from where we were sitting, and I couldn’t get over the fact that his band played for ages before he came on. Then he did only a few numbers before he buggered off again. We were sitting there thinking, Is that it? Then this voice came booming out over the Tannoy: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building.’

‘Lazy fat bastard,’ I said, before remembering where I was.

It was an education, that gig. It was the first time I’d seen merchandising sold so professionally at a venue. You could buy Elvis drinks coasters, Elvis bog-seat warmers, Elvis mug and spoon sets, Elvis dolls, Elvis watches, Elvis jumpsuits. Anything you could think of, they’d put the name ‘Elvis’ on it and wanted to sell it to you with an Elvis Coke and an Elvis hot dog. And the fans seemed only too happy to buy it.

He must have been the richest bloke on the planet.

It didn’t take us long to start getting into drugs big time. You couldn’t really get cocaine in Birmingham back then, so I didn’t try it until a gig in Denver with a band called Mountain in early 1971. Mountain’s guitarist and lead singer was a guy called Leslie West, and it was him who introduced me to the old waffle dust – we called it that ’cos it made you stay up all night, talking bollocks – although he insists to this day that I’d been taking it long before then. He’s got a bit of a bee up his arse about it, in fact. But I just say to him, ‘Listen, Leslie, when you come from Aston and you fall in love with cocaine, you remember when you started. It’s like having your first fuck!’

We were at a hotel after the show, and Leslie was cutting up a line. ‘D’you want a bit?’ he asked me.

At first I said, ‘Whoa, fucking hell, man, no way.’

But he kept saying, ‘Go on, just a bit, it’s all right.’

He didn’t exactly have to try very hard to persuade me.

Then it was, sniff-sniff-ahh.

I was in love, immediately. It’s the same with just about every drug I’ve ever taken: the first time I try it, that’s how I want to feel for the rest of my life. But it never works out that way. You can chase it all you want, but, believe me, you’ll never get that first-time high again.

The world went a bit fuzzy after that.

Every day I’d be smoking dope, boozing, having a few toots of coke, fucking around with speed or barbiturates or cough syrup, doing acid, you name it. I didn’t know what day it was most of the time. But at some point we made it back to Island Studios in Notting Hill to record our third album, Master of Reality, again with Rodger Bain.

I can’t remember much about it, apart from the fact that Tony detuned his guitar to make it easier to play, Geezer wrote ‘Sweet Leaf’ about all the dope we’d been smoking, and ‘Children of the Grave’ was the most kick-ass song we’d ever recorded. As usual, the critics hated it, although one of ’em described us as ‘Titanic’s house band on the eve of Armageddon’, which sounded about right to me. And the music press obviously didn’t put anyone off buying it, because Master of Reality was another monster hit, reaching number five in Britain and number eight in America.

But we never had a chance to enjoy our success. And I certainly didn’t have much time to enjoy married life. In fact, I was starting to realise that getting married so young might not have been such a clever idea. I would get this crazy restless feeling whenever I was at home, like I was going out of my mind. The only way I could handle it was to get loaded.

Life at home was made more complicated because Thelma’s son was living with us. His name was Elliot, and he must have been four or five at the time. I adopted him, actually. He was a good kid, but for some reason we never got on. Y’know, some people just don’t hit it off with their children. That was me and Elliot. I spent the whole time when I was home screaming at him or whacking him around the ear ’ole. And it’s not like he ever did anything bad to deserve it. I wish I could have been better with him, because he’d had a rough time before I came along: his dad had fucked off before Elliot had ever known him. When he got older, he told me he saw his old man in the pub one time, but he couldn’t bring himself to talk to him. Which is terribly sad, really.

But I wasn’t much of a substitute. It probably didn’t help that my boozing was so over the top, which made me volatile. And, of course, my ego was out of control. To tell you the truth, I must have been a horrendous stepdad.

And if I loved Thelma, I certainly didn’t treat her like I did. If I’ve got any regrets about my life, that’s one of them. For years, I acted like a married bachelor, sneaking around, banging chicks, getting so wasted down the pub that I’d fall asleep in the car on the street outside. I put that woman through hell. I should never have married her. She didn’t deserve it: she wasn’t a bad person, and she wasn’t a bad wife. But I was a fucking nightmare.

Nine months to the day after me and Thelma got married, she got pregnant. At that point, we still hadn’t seen much dough from all the record sales and the touring, but we knew how well the band was doing, so we assumed that Patrick Meehan would soon be sending us a royalty cheque big enough to buy Buckingham Palace. In the meantime, the usual agreement stood: anything I wanted, I just picked up the phone. So Thelma suggested that we should go house hunting. We couldn’t live in a little flat with a screaming baby, she said, so why not move to a proper place? We could afford it, after all.

I was all for it.

‘Let’s live in the country,’ I said, imagining myself in a tweed suit with green welly-boots, a Range Rover and a shotgun.

For the next few months, every time I came off the road for a few days, we climbed into our brand-new green Triumph Herald convertible – I’d got it for Thelma, because I couldn’t drive – and go looking for houses in the countryside. Eventually we found one we both liked: Bulrush Cottage in Ranton, Staffordshire. They were asking just over twenty grand for the place, which seemed reasonable enough. It had four bedrooms, a sauna, there was room for a little studio and, best of all, it had plenty of land. But we kept on looking, just to make sure. Then, one day, in a tea shop in Evesham, Worcestershire, we decided that we’d seen enough: we’d make an offer on Bulrush. It felt like I’d finally grown up. But just as we were starting to get excited about our new life in the country, Thelma suddenly went ‘Shhh!’ and said, ‘Can you hear that?’

‘What?’ I said.

‘That clicking noise.’

‘What clickin…?’ Then I heard it, too.

It was more of a tick than a click.

Tick, tick, tick, tick.

I looked down and saw a big puddle under Thelma’s chair. Something was dripping from under her dress. Then one of the tea ladies started wailing about the mess on the floor.

‘Oh my God,’ said Thelma. ‘My waters have broken!’

‘What d’you mean?’ I said. ‘You’ve pissed yerself?’

‘No, John – my waters have broken.’

‘Eh?’

‘I’m having the baby.’

I jumped up so quickly my chair fell over. Then my whole body went numb with panic. I couldn’t think. My heart was like a drum roll. The first thing that came into my head was: I’m not drunk enough. The bottle of cognac I’d gone through in the car had already worn off. I’d always thought that Thelma would go off to hospital to have the baby. I didn’t think it could just happen – in the middle of a fucking tea shop!

‘Is anyone in here a doctor?’ I shouted, looking desperately around the room. ‘We need a doctor. Help! We need a doctor!’

‘John,’ hissed Thelma. ‘You just need to drive me to hospital. We don’t need a doctor.’

‘We need a doctor!’

‘No, we don’t.’

‘Yeah, we do,’ I moaned. ‘I don’t feel well.’

‘John,’ said Thelma, ‘you need to drive me to hospital. Now.’

‘I don’t have a driving licence.’

‘Since when has the law stopped you from doing anything?’

‘I’m drunk.’

‘You’ve been drunk since 1967! C’mon, John. Hurry.’

So I got up, paid the bill, and led Thelma outside to the Herald. I had no idea how to work the thing. My parents had never owned a car, and I’d always assumed that I’d never be able to afford one, so I hadn’t taken the slightest bit of interest in learning how to drive. All I knew was the basics, like how to tune the radio and wind down the windows.

But gears? Choke? Clutch?

Nah.

The car jerked backwards and forwards on its springs like a pissed kangaroo for about twenty minutes before I got it moving. In the wrong direction. Then I finally found first gear.

‘John, you’re going to have to put your foot down,’ said Thelma, between groans.

‘My foot’s shaking,’I told her. ‘I can hardly keep it on the pedal.’

My hands were shaking, too. I was terrified that our baby was going to end up plopping out of Thelma and on to the dashboard, where it might blow away, because the hood was still down. I could imagine the headline: ‘ROCKER’S TOT IN FREAK M-WAY TRAGEDY’.

‘Seriously, John. Arrrgh! Drive faster. Arrrgh! I’m having contractions!’

‘The car won’t go any faster!’

‘You’re only going ten miles an hour.’

After what seemed like a thousand years, we made it to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Edgbaston. Then all I had to do was stop the car. But every time I put my foot on the middle pedal it just started bouncing up and down again and making this horrible noise. It’s a miracle I didn’t crash into the back of an ambulance, to be honest with you. But somehow I managed to get the wheels to stop moving, and then get Thelma out of her seat – not easy when she was screaming and puffing – and into the maternity ward.

A few hours later, at 11.20 p.m., little Jessica Osbourne was born – so I became a father for the first time. The date was January 20, 1972. It was one of those cold, clear winter nights. Through the hospital window, you could see all these gleaming constellations in every direction.

‘What should we give her as a middle name?’ said Thelma, holding Jessica up to her chest.

‘Starshine,’ I said.