5

Killing the Vicar (in Atrocity Cottage)

By the summer of 1972 – six months after Jess was born – we were back in America, this time to record a new album, which we’d decided to call Snowblind in honour of our new-found love of cocaine. By now, I was putting so much of the stuff up my nose that I had to smoke a bag of dope every day just to stop my heart from exploding. We were staying at 773 Stradella Road in Bel Air, a rented 1930s mansion complete with its own staff of maids and gardeners. The place was owned by the Du Pont family and it had six bedrooms, seven bathrooms, a private cinema (which we used for writing and rehearsing) and a swimming pool in the back, which was on stilts and looked out over all these woods and mountains. We never left the house. Booze, drugs, food, groupies – everything was delivered. On a good day there’d be bowls of white powder and crates of booze in every room, and all these random rock ’n’ rollers and chicks in bikinis hanging around the place – in the bedrooms, on the sofas, outside on the recliners – all of them as high as we were.

It would be almost impossible to exaggerate how much coke we did in that house. We’d discovered that when you take coke, every thought you have, every word you say, every suggestion you make seems like the most fabulous thing you’ve ever heard in your life. At one point we were getting through so much of the stuff, we had to have it delivered twice a day. Don’t ask me who was organising it all – the only thing I can remember is this shady-looking bloke on the telephone the whole time. But he wasn’t shady in the normal sense of the word: he was clean cut and had one of those Ivy League accents, and he’d wear white shirts and smart trousers, like he was on his way to work in an office.

I once asked him, ‘What the fuck do you do, man?’

He just laughed and fiddled nervously with his aviator shades. At that stage I didn’t care, as long as the coke kept coming.

My favourite thing to do when I was high was to stay up all night watching American telly. In those days there was only one thing on after the normal programming ended at midnight – a sales pitch by a bloke called Cal Worthington, who sold second-hand cars down in Long Beach or somewhere. His big joke was that he always appeared on air with his dog, Spot – but the dog was never actually a dog. It would be an alligator on a lead, or some crazy shit like that. He also had this catchphrase, ‘If I can’t make you a better deal, I’ll eat a bug!’, and did these stunts, like being strapped to the wing of an aeroplane as it did a loop-the-loop. After a few hours of snorting coke and watching that shit, you thought you were going insane. The funny thing is, he’s still at it today, old Cal. He must be about a thousand years old.

We fucked around so much at 773 Stradella Road, it’s a wonder we got any songs written at all. And it wasn’t just the coke. We got through a shitload of beer, too. I’d brought over these ‘party cans’ of best bitter from my local boozer. Each can held five pints, and you could fit six of them in one suitcase. It was like taking coal to Newcastle, but we didn’t care, ’cos we missed a good old English pint. We’d sit there by the pool, in ninety-degree sunshine, coked out of our minds, drinking stale Brummie piss, and looking out over Bel Air.

But then we had to tone things down because Thelma came to visit for few days – without the baby. The good behaviour didn’t last long, mind you. The second Thelma left for the airport to go back to England, we went straight back to being animals again. During our songwriting sessions, for example, no one could be arsed to walk upstairs for a slash, so we’d just go outside on to this little balcony and piss over the railing, which was only a couple of feet high. Then, one day, Tony gets this can of blue spray paint and sneaks round to the other side of the railing, and when Bill starts pissing, he sprays his dick with it. You should have heard the scream, man. It was priceless. But then, two seconds later, Bill blacks out, falls headfirst over the railing, and starts to roll down the hillside.

I said to Tony, ‘Gimme a look at that can, will yer?’

He passed it up to me, and there on the side, in big capital letters, it said: ‘WARNING. KEEP AWAY FROM SKIN. MAY CAUSE RASH, BLISTERING, CONVULSIONS, VOMITING, AND/OR FAINTING. IF ANY OF THESE SYMPTOMS OCCUR, SEEK MEDICAL CARE.’

‘Ah, he’ll be all right,’ I said.

And he was, eventually.

Although he did have a blue dick for a while.

In spite of all the arsing around, musically those few weeks in Bel Air were the strongest we’d ever been. For me, Snowblind was one of Black Sabbath’s best-ever albums – although the record company wouldn’t let us keep the title, ’cos in those days cocaine was a big deal, and they didn’t want the hassle of a controversy.

We didn’t argue.

So, after we’d recorded the new songs at the Record Plant in Hollywood, the name Snowblind was dropped, and our fourth album became known as just Vol. 4. We still managed to get a cheeky reference to cocaine in the liner notes, though. If you look closely enough, you’ll see a dedication to ‘the great COKE-Cola company of Los Angeles’.

And it was true – that album owed a lot to cocaine.

When I listen to songs like ‘Supernaut’, I can just about taste the stuff. The whole album’s like having someone pour a couple of lines into your ears. Frank Zappa once told me that ‘Supernaut’ was one of his favourite rock ’n’ roll tracks of all time, because you can hear the adrenaline. We were flying, y’know? In 1972, it had been only two years since the biggest compliment you could give us was that we were big in Carlisle. Now we had more money than the Queen – or so we thought – with three hit records in the charts, fans all over the world, and as much booze and drugs and chicks as we could ever want.

We weren’t on Cloud Nine. We were on Cloud Ten-and-a-Half.

And we still really cared about the music. We wanted to impress ourselves before we impressed anyone else. If other people happened to like what we were doing, that was just a bonus. That’s how we ended up doing songs like ‘Changes’, which didn’t sound like anything we’d ever done before. When a lot of people hear the name Black Sabbath, all they think of is the heavy stuff. But there was a lot more to us than that – especially when we started making an effort to get away from all that black magic shit. With ‘Changes’, Tony just sat down at the piano and came up with this beautiful riff, I hummed a melody over the top, and Geezer wrote these heartbreaking lyrics about the break-up Bill was going through with his wife at the time. I thought that song was brilliant from the moment we first recorded it.

I had to keep listening to it, over and over again. I’m still like that today: if I put it on my iPod, I’ll drive everyone nuts by singing along to it for the rest of the day.

Eventually we started to wonder where the fuck all the coke was coming from. All we knew was that it arrived in the back of unmarked vans, packed inside cardboard boxes. In each box there were about thirty vials – ten across, three deep – and each one had a screw-on top, sealed with wax.

I’m telling you: that coke was the whitest, purest, strongest stuff you could ever imagine.

One sniff, and you were the king of the universe.

But as much as we loved being human vacuum cleaners, we knew it would have been a big deal, getting caught with one of our dodgy shipments. Especially in America. And I didn’t much fancy the idea of spending the rest of my life bent over in an LA prison with the cock of some 280 lb gang member up my arse. The trouble was, of course, being constantly strung-out just made me even more paranoid, and after a while I’d convinced myself that our Ivy League dealer was FBI, or LAPD, or the fucking CIA.

Then, one night, me and the lads went down to Hollywood to see The French Connection at the cinema. Big mistake, that was. The plot was based on a true story about two undercover New York cops busting an international heroin-smuggling ring. By the time the credits rolled, I was hyperventilating.

‘Where the fuck would someone be getting vials of coke with wax seals on them?’ I said to Bill.

He just shrugged.

Then we went to the bog to do another couple of lines.

A few days later, I was lying by the pool, smoking a joint and drinking a beer, trying to get my heart to slow down, when the shady-looking bloke came over and sat down next to me. It was morning, and he had a cup of coffee in one hand and a copy of the Wall Street Journal in the other.

I hadn’t been to bed.

Now’s my chance to feel this bloke out, see how dodgy he is, I thought. So I leaned over and said, ‘Did you ever see that movie, The French Connection?’

He smiled and shook his head.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You should, y’know. It’s very interesting.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ the bloke chuckled. ‘But why go and see a movie when I had a part in the real thing?’

As soon as I heard that, I broke out into this horrible prickly sweat. This guy was bad news. I just knew it.

‘Listen, man,’ I said. ‘Who do you work for?’

He put down his newspaper and took a sip of his coffee. ‘The United States government,’ he said.

I almost jumped off my recliner and made a dive for the hedge. But my head was spinning, and I hadn’t felt my legs since the night before. That’s it, I thought: we’re all fucked now.

‘Jesus Christ, man, relax,’ he said, seeing the look on my face. ‘I’m not the FBI. You’re not about to get busted. We’re all friends here. I work for the Food and Drug Administration.’

‘the what?’

‘The FDA.’

‘You mean, all that coke… it’s coming from—’

‘Think of it as a gift from Santa Claus, Ozzy. Because you know what they say about Santa Claus, don’t you?

‘No?’

‘There’s a lot of snow where he comes from.’

Before I could work out if the bloke was being serious, he looked at his watch and said he had a meeting to attend. So he finished his coffee, got up, patted me on the back, and fucked off. I thought no more of it. Then I went back inside the house for a bit more coke and a few hits on the bong.

So there I am on the sofa, with all these sealed vials of coke lined up in front of me – along with a big bowl of pot – and I’m cutting up my first line of the day. But then I start to sweat again – that same horrible, prickly sweat as before. Fuck me, I’m thinking, the paranoia’s really bad today. At that moment Bill strolls into the room with a beer in his hand and goes, ‘It’s like a furnace in here, Ozzy. Why don’t you switch on the AC?’ Then he pokes his head out of the patio door to get his first sunlight in days.

I thought, What’s ‘the AC’ when it’s at home? Then it clicked: air conditioning. I always used to forget that the mod cons in America were so much more advanced than they were in Britain. I’d only recently got used to the novelty of an indoor shitter, never mind automated climate control. So I got up and started looking for the thermostat. Must be on the wall somewhere around here, I said to myself. After a few minutes – bingo! – I found it in a little nook by the front door. So I turned down the temperature and went back to my coke and pot.

Magic.

But as soon as I’d got the first line up my nose, I heard something.

Was it…?

Nah.

Shit, it sounded like…

Suddenly Bill threw himself through the open patio door, with this wild-eyed look on his face. At the same time, I heard doors slamming at the other end of the house and what sounded like three big blokes falling down the stairs. Then Tony, Geezer and one of the roadies – an American bloke called Frank – came puffing into the room. Everyone was half-dressed apart from Frank, who was still in his underwear.

We all looked at each other.

Then in unison, we shouted: ‘Sirens!’

*

It sounded like the entire fucking LAPD was coming up the driveway. We were being busted! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

‘GET THE COKE! GET THE COKE!’ I started to scream.

So Frank dived towards the coffee table, grabbed the vials of coke, but then just ran around in circles, his hair standing on end, a fag still in his mouth, his briefs riding up into his arse crack.

Then I remembered something else.

‘GET THE POT! GET THE POT!’

Frank dived back towards the coffee table and grabbed the big bowl of pot, but when he did that he dropped the coke. So he ended up scrabbling around on the floor, trying to balance everything in his arms. Meanwhile, I couldn’t even move. Even before the sirens, my heart had been going at triple speed. Now it was beating so fast I thought it was gonna crack open my rib cage.

B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-bum!

B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-bum!

B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-bum!

By the time I pulled myself together, Bill, Geezer and Tony had all bolted. So it was just me and Frank, and enough coke to march the Bolivian army to the moon and back.

‘Frank! Frank!’ I shouted. ‘Over ’ere. The bog. Quick!’

Somehow Frank managed to haul himself and all the drugs over to the bog, which was just off the hallway near the front door, and we dived inside and locked the door behind us.

The sirens were fucking deafening now.

Then I heard the brakes of the police cars squealing as they pulled up outside. Then a radio crackling. Then a knock at the door.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

‘Open up!’ shouted one of the cops. ‘C’mon, open up!’ By now, me and Frank were kneeling on the floor. In our panic, we’d tried to get rid of the pot before the coke – first by washing it down the sink, then by flushing it down the bog. Big mistake. The sink and the bog couldn’t take it, and they’d started to overflow with all this brown, lumpy water. So we tried forcing some of the pot down the U-trap, using the end of the bog brush. But it wouldn’t go. The pipes were backed up.

And we still had to get rid of all the coke.

‘There’s nothing else for it,’ I said to Frank. ‘We’re gonna have to snort all the coke.’

‘Are you fucking out of your mind?’ he said. ‘You’ll die!’

‘Have you ever been to prison, Frank?’ I said. ‘Well, I have, and I’m telling you right now, I ain’t going back.’

So I started to break open the vials and tip the coke on to the floor. Then I got down on all fours, pressed my nose against the tiles, and started to vacuum up as much of the stuff as I could.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

‘Open the door! We know you’re in there!’

Frank was looking at me like I was insane.

‘Any second now,’ I told him, my face bright red, my legs tingling, my eyeballs throbbing, ‘they’re gonna break down that door, and we’ll be fucked.’

‘Oh, man,’ said Frank, joining me on all fours. ‘I can’t believe I’m about to do this.’

We must have snorted about six or seven grams each before I heard the tapping noise outside the door.

‘SHHH! Listen,’ I said.

There it was again: tap, tap, tap, tap…

It sounded like footsteps…

Then I heard the front door open and a woman’s voice. She was speaking in Spanish. The maid! The maid was letting in the cops. Fuck! I broke open another vial and put my nose to the floor again.

A male voice: ‘Good morning, ma’am,’ he said. ‘I believe someone at this residence pressed the emergency call button?’

I stopped, mid-sniff.

Emergency call button?

The maid said something in Spanish again, the man replied, then I heard two sets of footsteps in the hallway and the man’s voice getting louder. The cop was inside the house!

‘It’s usually located right next to the AC thermostat,’ he said. ‘Yep, here it is – right on the wall. If you press this button, ma’am, it sounds an alarm down at the Bel Air station and we dispatch some officers to make sure everything is OK. Looks as though someone might have pressed it by accident when they were adjusting the thermostat. Happens more often than you’d think. Let me just reset the system – there we go – and we’ll be on our way. Any problems, just give us a call. Here’s our number. Or hit the button again. We have someone on call twenty-four hours a day.’

‘Gracias,’ said the maid.

I heard the front door close and the maid walk back towards the kitchen. All of the air came out of my lungs. Holy shit: that had been a close one. Then I looked over at Frank: his face was a mask of white powder and snot, and his left nostril was bleeding.

‘You mean…?’ he said.

‘Yeah.’ I nodded. ‘Someone needs to teach Bill how to use that fucking thing.’

The constant fear of getting busted wasn’t the only downside to coke. It got to the point where practically every word out of my mouth was coked-up bollocks. For fifteen hours straight, I’d tell the lads how much I loved them more than anything else in the world. Even me and Tony – who never had conversations – would have nights when we’d be up for hours, hugging each other and saying, ‘No, really, I love you, man – I really love you.’

Then I’d go to bed, wait for my heart to stop beating at eight times its usual speed, then fall into this fucking horrific withdrawal. The comedowns were so bad that I used to pray. I’d say, ‘God, please let me sleep, and I promise I’ll never do cocaine again, as long as I live.’

Then I’d wake up with my jaw aching from spouting so much bullshit the previous night.

And I’d do another line.

It was amazing how quickly it took over our lives. It got to the point where we couldn’t do anything without it. Then it got to the point where we couldn’t do anything with it, either.

When I finally realised the pot wasn’t enough to calm me down from all the coke, I started getting into Valium. Then eventually I moved on to heroin, but thank God I didn’t like that stuff. Geezer tried it, too. He thought it was fucking brilliant, but he was sensible. He didn’t want to get involved. Frank, the roadie, wasn’t so lucky – heroin ruined him in the end. I haven’t heard from Frank in years now, and I’d be amazed if he survived, to be honest with you. I hope he did, I really do, but when heroin gets hold of you, it’s usually The End.

During the making of Vol. 4, we all had moments when we were so fucked up that we just couldn’t function. With Bill, it was when he was recording ‘Under the Sun’. By the time he got the drums right on that song, we’d renamed it ‘Everywhere Under the Fucking Sun’. Then the poor bloke came down with hepatitis and almost died. Meanwhile, Geezer ended up in hospital with kidney problems. Even Tony burned out. Just after we’d finished the album, we did a gig at the Hollywood Bowl. Tony had been doing coke literally for days – we all had, but Tony had gone over the edge. I mean, that stuff just twists your whole idea of reality. You start seeing things that aren’t there. And Tony was gone. Near the end of the gig he walked off stage and collapsed.

‘Severe exhaustion,’ the doctor said.

That was one way of putting it.

At the same time, the coke was fucking up my voice, good and proper. When you’re taking heavy-duty amounts of cocaine, this white gunk starts to trickle down the back of your throat, and you find yourself doing that phlegm-clearing thing all the time – like a sniff, but deeper and gunkier. And that puts a lot of stress on that little titty thing that hangs down at the back of your throat – the epiglottis, or the ‘clack’, as I’ve always called it. Anyway, I was taking so much coke that I was clearing away the phlegm every couple of minutes, until eventually I tore my clack in half. I was lying in bed at the time in the Sunset Marquis hotel, and I just felt it flop down inside the back of my throat. It was horrific. Then the fucking thing swelled up to the size of a golf ball. I thought: Right, this is it – I’m gonna die now.

So I went to see a doctor on Sunset Boulevard.

He asked, ‘What’s the problem, Mr Osbourne?’

‘I’ve sucked my clack,’ I croaked.

‘You’ve what?’

‘My clack.’

I pointed at my throat.

‘Let’s have a look,’ he said, getting out his lollipop stick and his little flashlight. ‘Open wide. Say “ ahh” for me now.’

So I opened my mouth and closed my eyes.

‘Holy mother of Christ!’ he said. ‘How in God’s name did you do that?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Mr Osbourne, your epiglottis is the size of a small light bulb, and it’s glowing almost as brightly. I don’t even need to use my flashlight.’

‘Can you fix it?’

‘I think so,’ he said, writing out a prescription. ‘But whatever it is you’ve been doing, stop doing it.’

That wasn’t the end of our medical problems, though. When it was time to go back to England, we were all terrified of taking home an STD from one of the groupies and giving it to our other half. Catching some exotic disease was always a big worry when we were in America. I remember one time during a particularly wild night at a hotel somewhere, Tony came running out of his room, going, ‘Aargh! My knob! My knob!’ I asked him what was wrong, and he told me that he’d been messing around with this groupie when he looked down and saw all this yellow pus coming out of her. He thought he was about to die.

‘Did the pus smell funny?’ I asked him.

‘Yeah,’ he said, white in the face. ‘I almost puked.’

‘Ah.’

‘What d’you mean, “ah”?’

‘Was it the blonde chick?’ I asked. ‘The one with the tattoo?’

‘Yeah. And?’

‘Well, that probably explains it then.’

‘Ozzy,’ said Tony, getting visibly angry. ‘Stop fucking around, this is serious. What are you talking about?’

‘Look, I ain’t a doctor,’ I said. ‘But I don’t think the yellow stuff was pus.’

‘Well what was it then?’

‘Probably the banana I stuck up there earlier.’

I don’t think Tony knew whether to be relieved or even more worried after that.

Of course, one failsafe way to make sure you never gave anything dodgy to your missus was to get a shot of penicillin. I’d learned that after getting the clap one time. But in those days we didn’t know any dodgy doctors, which meant the only way to get a ‘safety shot’ was to check yourself into the emergency room of the nearest hospital.

So that’s what we did after making Vol. 4.

By then we’d left Bel Air and were on the road in small-town America somewhere, doing a few shows before our flight back home. I’ll never forget the scene: me, Tony, Geezer, and pretty much the entire road crew – I don’t know what Bill was up to that day – checking ourselves into this hospital one night. And of course no one had the bottle to tell the good-looking chick on the front desk why we were there, so they were all going, ‘Go on, Ozzy, you tell her, you don’t care, you’re fucking crazy, you are.’ But even I couldn’t bring myself to say, ‘Oh, hello there, my name’s Ozzy Osbourne, and I’ve been bonking groupies for a couple of months, and I think my knob might be about to fall off, would you mind terribly giving me a shot of penicillin to make sure my missus doesn’t get whatever I’ve got?’

But it was too late to turn around and walk away.

So when the girl asked me what the problem was, I just turned bright red and blurted, ‘I think I broke my ribs.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Here’s a ticket. See this number? They’ll call it out when the doctor’s ready to see you.’

Then it was Geezer’s turn to go up.

‘I’ve got whatever he’s got,’ he said, pointing at me.

Eventually the doctors twigged. I don’t know who came clean with them, ’cos I certainly didn’t. I just remember this bloke in a white suit coming up to me and going, ‘Are you with the others?’ and me nodding. Then he showed me into this room with Tony, Geezer and about half a dozen other hairy English blokes all bent over with their trousers down, their lily-white arses ready for their penicillin jabs.

‘Join the line,’ he said.

It was September when we got back to England.

By that time the deal to buy Bulrush Cottage had gone through, and Thelma, Elliot and the baby were already settled in. It always made me smile, going home to Bulrush Cottage – mainly because it was on a little country road called Butt Lane. ‘Welcome to Butt Lane,’ I used to say to visitors, ‘the arsehole of Britain.’

It wasn’t just me and Thelma and the baby who got a new place to live around that time. I also sorted out a bigger house for my mum and dad. As always, Patrick Meehan’s office took care of the dough side of things, although when the land behind Bulrush Cottage was put up for sale we bought it with our own money – or rather, money we made by selling the Rolls-Royce that Patrick Meehan had given Tony, which Tony had then given to us. I think that was the first time we’d bought anything with our own money. To this day, I don’t know why we did it. Maybe it’s ’cos Thelma dealt with all the paperwork. I made her do it because the farmer who sold us the land was a cross-dresser, and I didn’t want to go anywhere near him. Fucking hell, man, the first time I saw that bloke, I thought I was hallucinating. He had this big bushy beard and he’d drive his tractor down Butt Lane while wearing a frock and curlers in his hair. Other times you’d see him by the side of the road, his frock hitched up, taking a slash. And the funny thing is, no one would bat an eyelid.

Tony and Geezer also bought houses when they got back. Tony got a place in Acton Trussell, on the other side of the M6; and Geezer bought somewhere down in Worcestershire. It took Bill a bit longer to find his rock ’n’ roll retreat, so in the meantime he rented a place called Fields Farm, out near Evesham. In less than three years, we’d gone from piss-poor backstreet kids to millionaire country gents. It was unbelievable.

And I loved living in the country.

For starters, I suddenly had enough room to get even more toys sent over from Patrick Meehan’s office. Like a seven-foot-tall stuffed grizzly bear. And a gypsy caravan with a little fireplace inside. And a myna bird called Fred, who lived in the laundry room. He could do a wicked impression of a washing machine, could Fred. Or at least he could until I put a shotgun in his face and told him to shut the fuck up.

I have to say I really pigged out on the calls to Patrick Meehan’s office after we moved into Bulrush Cottage. Everything I’d ever wanted as a kid, I had them deliver. I ended up with a whole shed full of Scalextric cars, jukeboxes, table football games, trampolines, pool tables, shotguns, crossbows, catapults, swords, arcade games, toy soldiers, fruit machines… Every single thing you could ever think to ask for, I asked for it. The guns were most fun. The most powerful one I had was this Benelli five-shot semi-automatic. I tried it out on the stuffed bear one time. Its head just exploded – you should have fucking seen it, man. Another thing I’d do is get these mannequins and tie them to this tree trunk in the garden and execute them at dawn. I’m telling you, it’s really terrifying what booze and drugs will do to your mind if you take them for long enough. I was out of control.

Obviously, the most important thing I needed to sort out after moving to the country was a ready supply of drugs. So I called up one of my American dealers and got him to start sending me cocaine via air mail, on the understanding that I’d pay him the next time I was over there on tour. It worked a treat, although I ended up waiting for the postman all day like a dog. Thelma must have thought I was buying dirty magazines or something.

Then I found a local dope dealer who said he could get me some really strong hash from Afghanistan. He wasn’t wrong, either. The first time I smoked that stuff it almost knocked my fucking head off. It came in massive slabs of black resin, which would last even me for weeks. There was nothing I loved more than when someone came over to Bulrush Cottage and said, ‘Dope? Nah, I don’t smoke that stuff. Never has any effect on me.’

If you said that, you were mine.

The first person who claimed to be immune to dope was our local fruit ’n’ veg man, Charlie Clapham. He was a right old character, Charlie was, and he became a good friend. One night, after we’d been to the pub, I got out the tin of Afghan hash and said, ‘Try this.’

‘Nah, never works on me, that stuff.’

‘Go on, Charlie, try it, just once. For me.’

So he grabbed the brick out of my hands and before I could say anything he bit off a huge chunk of it. He must have eaten at least half an ounce. Then he burped in my face and said, ‘Urgh, that tasted ’orrible.’

Five minutes later, he said, ‘See? Nothing,’ and went home.

It must have been about one o’clock in the morning when he left, and the poor fucker was meant to be at his market stall by four. But I knew there was no way he’d be doing a normal day’s work.

Sure enough, when I saw him a few days later, he grabbed me by the collar and said, ‘What the fuck was that shit you gave me the other night? By the time I got to the market I was hallucinating. I couldn’t get out of the van. I was just lying in the back with the carrots, a coat over my head, screaming. I thought the Martians had landed!’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, Charlie,’ I told him.

‘Can I come over tomorrow night and have some more?’ he said.

I rarely slept in my own bed at Bulrush Cottage. I was so loaded every night, I could never make it up the stairs. So I’d sleep in the car, in my caravan, under the piano in the living room, in the studio or outside in a bale of hay. When I slept outside in winter, it wasn’t unusual for me to wake up blue in the face with icicles on my nose. In those days, there was no such thing as hypothermia.

Crazy shit would happen all the time at that house. The fact that I was usually pissed up and fucking around with my shot-guns didn’t help. That’s a great combination, that is – booze and shotguns. Very fucking safe. One time I tried to jump over a fence in the back garden while holding one of my guns. I’d forgotten to put the safety on and my finger was resting on the trigger, so as soon as I hit the ground, it went BAM! BAM! BAM! and almost blew my leg off.

It’s a miracle I ain’t an amputee.

I’d shoot anything that moved in those days. I remember when we got rid of Thelma’s Triumph Herald and replaced it with a brand-new Mercedes – after yet another call to Patrick Meehan’s office. The car was always covered in scratches, and we couldn’t work out why. I’d get it resprayed, park it in the garage overnight, but the next morning the paintwork would be covered in all these nicks and gouges again. It was costing me an arm and a leg. Then I realised what was happening: we had a family of stray cats living in the garage, and when it was cold they’d climb up on the Merc’s bonnet, because it was nice and warm. So, one day, I came back from a long session at the Hand & Cleaver, got my shotgun, and just fucking obliterated the place. I got two or three of them that first time. Then I kept going back every day, picking them off, one by one.

But y’know, that’s one of my regrets – the cruelty to animals. I could have found another way to get rid of those cats, but like I said, I was out of control. It got so bad, people started to call my house Atrocity Cottage, not Bulrush Cottage. It was me who came up with the name – I just blurted it out one night when I was pissed – but from then on it stuck.

People would come to stay with us and they’d never be the same again. Take my old mate Jimmy Phillips, the bloke who’d played bottleneck guitar in Polka Tulk. He got so fucked up on booze and Afghan hash over at Bulrush Cottage one night that he ended up taking a shit in the kitchen sink. Then there was the time when one of my old schoolfriends from Birmingham brought his new wife over for a visit. The day after they arrived, I woke up in the morning with a terrible headache and a big hairy arm around my shoulder. I thought my mate must have been having a go at Thelma while I was asleep, so I jumped out of bed, ready to chin the bastard. But then I realised what had happened: I’d got up in the middle of the night to take a piss and had gone back to the wrong room. Talk about an awkward fucking situation. I was stark naked, too – so I just grabbed my trousers from the floor and dived back into the bed, put them on under the sheets, and then staggered back to my own room, with no one saying a word.

I’ve never seen them again to this day.

And, as time went on, things got even crazier. At one point – don’t ask me why – I started to wear medical uniforms all the time. My assistant, David Tangye, bought them for me. You’d see us staggering up and down these country lanes between the pubs, out of our minds on booze, dope, acid – you name it – wearing these green American-style scrubs, with stethoscopes around our necks.

Every once in a while, the lads from Led Zeppelin would also come over to Bulrush Cottage. Robert Plant didn’t live too far away, actually, and I’d go over to his place, too. I remember one night at Plant’s house – not long after we’d got back from Bel Air – I taught him how to play seven-card stud. That was a big fucking mistake. As I explained the rules, he said he wanted to place bets – ‘just to see how it works, y’know?’ – and then he kept raising the stakes. I was just beginning to think what a fucking idiot he must be when he pulled out a royal flush, and I had to give him fifty quid.

He fleeced me, the cheeky bastard.

After a few nights out with Zeppelin, I worked out that their drummer, John Bonham, was as fucking nuts as I was, so we’d spend most of the time trying to out-crazy each other. That was always the way with me, y’know? I’d try to win people over with my craziness, like I had in the playground at Birchfield Road. But, of course, behind the mask there was a sad old clown most of the time. Bonham was the same, I think.

He would just drink himself to fucking bits. One time, we got his assistant, a guy called Matthew, to drive us to a club in Birmingham in my car. But when it was time to go home, Bonham was so pissed, he thought it was his car, so he locked all the doors from inside and wouldn’t let me in. I ended up standing in the car park shouting, ‘John, this is my car. Open the door!’

‘Fuck off,’ he said, through the window, as Matthew revved the engine.

‘John, for crying out—’

‘I said fuck off.’

‘BUT THIS IS MY CAR!’

Then something finally clicked inside his head. ‘Well, you should fucking get in then, shouldn’t you?’ he said.

Even though I was pissed all the time in the seventies, the one thing I really wanted to do more than just about anything was get my driving licence. And fucking hell, man, I tried. I took my test more times than I can remember while I lived at Bulrush Cottage – and I failed every time. I’d just get intimidated, y’know? After my first couple of attempts, I started to go down to the Hand & Cleaver beforehand to sort out my nerves, but more often than not I’d end up being shitfaced by the time I got in the car with the examiner, and then I’d drive like a cunt. Then I thought the problem might be the car, so I called Patrick Meehan’s office and asked for a Range Rover to replace the Merc. When that didn’t work, I asked for a Jag. But it was a V12, so every time I put my foot down, I woke up in a hedge.

Eventually I took the test in a Roller.

That didn’t work, either.

Finally I went to the doctor and asked for some pills to calm me down, so he wrote me a prescription for a sedative. On the box, it said, ‘DO NOT MIX WITH ALCOHOL’, which was like showing a red rag to a bull as far as I was concerned. Still, I managed to limit myself to only three or four pints that day. Unfortunately, that just meant I smoked twice as much Afghan hash. The good news was that when I got into the car with the examiner, I didn’t feel intimated at all. The bad news was that when I stopped for the first traffic light, I nodded off.

I gave up on the tests after that, but I kept driving anyway. Whenever I gave anyone a ride, they’d ask, ‘Do you have a licence yet?’ and I’d answer, ‘Oh yeah, of course.’

Which was sort of true.

I had a TV licence.

But I didn’t want to push my luck too far, so I started trying to come up with other ways of getting around.

Which is why I ended up getting a horse.

Now, I’m generally not cool with horses – they don’t have brakes and they’ve got their own brains. But I was bored of going down to the Hand & Cleaver on my lawnmower, so I went to see a dealer and said, ‘Look, can you get me a horse that’s a bit on the lazy side?’

A few days later, this chick turned up at the cottage with this pure white gelding – a male with its nuts chopped off – called Turpin. ‘He’s very laid back,’ she told me. ‘He won’t give you any trouble at all. The only things he doesn’t like are very loud hissing noises – like the air brakes on a truck. But you won’t get anything like that around here.’

‘Oh no,’ I said, laughing. ‘It’s very quiet out here in Ranton.’

So I called Patrick Meehan’s office to get him to send the breeder some dough, and that was that: I was the proud owner of one lazy horse. I kept him at the farm up the road, because they had a little paddock and someone who could feed him and clean out his stable.

Of course, the second I got Turpin I thought I was John Wayne. I started riding him up and down Butt Lane, wearing a cowboy hat and this leather shirt that I’d bought in LA, singing the theme to Rawhide. After a few days of that I started to feel pretty comfortable in the saddle, so one lunchtime I decided to take him past the Hand & Cleaver to show the locals, and maybe stop off for a cheeky one at the same time. Off we went down Butt Lane, clippety-clop, clippety-clop. Now, that summer, the Hand & Cleaver had put these picnic tables outside, so I knew I’d have an audience. And I couldn’t wait to see everyone’s jaws drop when I turned up.

On I went, clippety-clop, clippety-clop.

Two minutes later, I’d arrived.

Sure enough, all these people were sitting outside with their pints and their bags of pork scratchings, and they started oohing and ahhing when they saw this beautiful white horse. Then I pulled on the reins to get Turpin to stop, and started to dismount. But just as I was about to swing my leg over the saddle, a milk delivery truck came around the bend. At first, I ignored it – that truck used to drive up Butt Lane every week – but then a thought popped into my head: I hope that thing doesn’t have air bra—

TTSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHH went the truck.

The second those air brakes went off, Turpin’s ears went back and he took off like a fucking Grand National winner. First he bolted in the direction of the truck, with me hanging on to the saddle for dear life, one foot out of the stirrups, my cowboy hat dangling from my neck by the strap. Then he realised he was going in the wrong direction, so he turned around and started galloping back towards the farm. He charged past the Hand & Cleaver at such a fucking speed, the faces of the people outside were just a blur. Meanwhile, I was screaming at the top of my lungs, ‘Staaarghp! You fucker! Staaarghp!’ Which is exactly what he did, as soon as he got back to his paddock – he stopped dead, sending me flying over his head and a fence.

I landed in a cowpat.

Turpin got a new owner after that.

Then, a few days later, I killed the vicar. Or at least I thought I did.

It was an accident.

You see, in those days, out in the countryside, vicars would make house calls. They didn’t need a reason to come and see you. You’d just hear a knock on your door and there would be a bloke in his frock and his dog collar, wanting to talk about the weather.

So one day, while I was down the pub, the vicar came round to Bulrush Cottage for one of his visits, and Thelma invited him in for a cup of tea. The trouble was, Bulrush Cottage wasn’t set up for entertaining vicars – there were beer cans and shotguns and bongs all over the place – and Thelma didn’t have a clue what to feed him, either. So she rummaged around in the kitchen until she found this nasty-looking cake in an old tin. With no better option, she gave him a slice, even though it looked and tasted like shit.

What Thelma had forgotten was that the week before, my local dope dealer had given me some dodgy hash. It was stale or something, so it was crap to smoke, but it was still as potent as ever. And rather than letting it go to waste, I’d grated it into a bowl with some cake mix and baked it. The trouble was, the lump of dope was enormous, and I only had half a tin of cake mix in the cupboard, so the cake ended up being about 80 per cent dope and 20 per cent mix. I almost barfed when I tasted it.

‘See this tin?’ I remember saying to Thelma. ‘Don’t let anyone touch it.’

She mustn’t have been listening.

All she knew was that there was a tin with a skull and cross-bones marked on it, with some cake inside, and that she had a vicar to feed. So she gave him a slice.

He’d just swallowed his last mouthful when I got back from the pub. The second I saw him sitting there on the sofa with the little plate in front of him and crumbs everywhere, I knew it was bad news.

‘That really was a delicious slice of cake. Thank you very much, Mrs Osbourne,’ the vicar was saying. ‘Would you mind if I had another?’

‘Oh, not at all!’ said Thelma.

‘Thelma,’ I said, ‘I don’t think we have any more cake.’

‘Yes, we do, John, it’s in the kitch—’

‘WE. DON’T. HAVE. MORE. CAKE.’

‘Oh, I don’t want to be any trouble,’ said the vicar, standing up. Then he started to dab his brow with a handkerchief. Then he turned a funny colour.

I knew exactly what was coming next. You see, eating dope is very different to smoking it – it affects your whole body, not just your head. And it takes only the tiniest bit to send you over the edge.

‘Oh my,’ he said. ‘I think I’m feeling a little—’

BOOM!

‘Fuck! Vicar down!’ I shouted, rushing over to see if he was still breathing. Then I turned to look at Thelma. ‘What the fuck were you thinking?’ I said. ‘He’s gonna die! I told you not to touch that cake. He’s just eaten enough Afghan hash to knock out a bleedin’ elephant!’

‘How was I supposed to know the cake was dodgy?’

‘Because I told you!’

‘No, you didn’t.’

‘It’s in a tin with a skull and crossbones on the top!’

‘So what are we going to do?’ said Thelma, turning white.

‘We’re going to have to move the body, that’s what we’re going to have to do,’ I said. ‘Here, take his legs.’

‘Where are we taking him?’

‘Back to wherever he lives.’

So we carried the vicar to his car, put him on the back seat, found his address in the glove compartment, and I drove him home. He was out cold. Part of me honestly thought he was a goner, although I’d been drinking most of the day, so I can’t say I was thinking completely straight. All I knew is that for a man of the cloth – or anyone else – that much of my hash in one go could be lethal. But I kept telling myself that he’d just wake up with a really bad hangover, and we’d be OK.

When I got to his house I dragged him out of his car and propped him up on the steps to the front door. If I’d have been cleverer, I would have wiped my fingerprints off the car, but I just felt so terrible about what had happened, and I so badly wanted to believe that he’d be fine, I can honestly say it never even entered my head.

Still, I spent the entire night lying awake, waiting for the sirens. Clearly, I’d be the first person to get a knock on the door in the middle of the night if they did any tests on the vicar’s body. Who else in his parish would have given him a lethal slice of hash cake? But there were no sirens that night. And none the next day, either.

Then more days passed. Still nothing.

I was out of my fucking mind with guilt. So was Thelma.

But I didn’t want to go anywhere near the vicarage – it might look a bit suspicious – so every time I went to the Hand & Cleaver I’d make subtle enquiries. ‘Anyone bumped into the vicar lately?’ I’d say, all casual. ‘He’s a nice bloke, that vicar, isn’t he? I wonder what his sermon will be about on Sunday.’ Eventually someone mentioned that he must be off sick, ’cos he’d missed church and no one had seen him for a while.

That’s it, I thought. I killed him. I wondered if I should turn myself in. ‘It was an accident, Your Honour,’ I imagined myself saying to the judge. ‘A terrible, terrible accident.’ This went on for at least a week.

Then, one day, I walked into the pub and there he was, at the bar, in his frock, sipping a cranberry juice.

I almost hugged the bloke and gave him a kiss.

‘Oh, er, hello there, Vicar,’ I said, going light in the head with relief.

‘Ah, Mr Osbourne,’ he said, shaking my hand. ‘You know the funniest thing? I can’t remember how I got home from your house the other day. And the next morning I had this terrible, terrible flu.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear that, Vicar.’

‘Yes, yes, a very nasty business, that flu.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘I’ve never had flu like it.’

‘Well, I’m glad you’re feeling bett—’

‘I was having hallucinations for three days, you know? The most curious experience. I convinced myself that Martians had landed on the Vicarage lawn and were trying to organise a tombola.’

‘That’s terrible, Vicar. I hope you’re feeling better now.’

‘Oh, much better, thank you. Although I must have put on 40 pounds this week, I’ve been so incredibly hungry.’

‘Listen, Vicar,’ I said. ‘If there’s anything I can do for the church, anything at all, just let me know, OK?’

‘Oh, how kind of you. Do you play the organ, by any chance?’

‘Er, no.’

‘But you are in some kind of pop group, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Tell me, what do you call yourselves?’

‘Black Sabbath.’

‘Oh.’ The vicar frowned for a while. Then he looked at me and said, ‘That’s a rather peculiar name, isn’t it?’