6

The End is Nigh

We recorded the next Black Sabbath album in a haunted house, out in the middle of absolutely fucking nowhere. I don’t know whose brilliant idea that was, but it wasn’t mine, that’s for sure. The name of the place was Clearwell Castle. It was in the Forest of Dean, on the Welsh border, and it scared the crap out of us from day one. It had a moat, a portcullis, four-poster beds in the rooms, big fireplaces everywhere, animal heads on the walls, and a big old dark musty dungeon, which we used as our rehearsal room. It had been built in 1728 on the site of an old Tudor manor house, and the locals told us that a headless figure would roam the corridors at night, moaning and wailing. We just laughed it off, but as soon as we’d unpacked our bags, we all started to get the willies, big time. At least that took the pressure off us, as far as the next album was concerned. We were more worried about sleeping alone in these spooky old rooms with swords and armour on the walls than coming up with another million-selling LP. We weren’t so much the Lords of Darkness as the Lords of Chickenshit when it came to that kind of thing. I remember when we went to see The Exorcist that Christmas in Philadelphia: we were so freaked out, we had to go and watch The Sting afterwards to take our minds off it. Even then, we all ended up sleeping in the same hotel room, because we were scared out of our minds. It’s funny, because years later Linda Blair – who played the satanic kid in that movie – ended up dating my mate Glenn Hughes from Deep Purple. She definitely liked musicians, it turned out. She even went out with Ted Nugent once. But she wouldn’t go near me.

Not a fucking chance.

Clearwell Castle certainly wasn’t our first choice of venue for making the new album. The plan had initially been to go back to the Bel Air mansion to write the next record, but then we found out we wouldn’t be able to do any recording in LA, because Stevie Wonder had installed a giant synthesizer in our favourite room at the Record Plant. So that idea was shelved. Probably a good job, too: we’d almost killed ourselves with cocaine the last time we’d made a record in LA. At Clearwell Castle, meanwhile, the only danger was scaring ourselves to death.

And of course we tried very, very hard to do just that.

We hadn’t been there a day before the practical jokes started. I was the first culprit: I realised that if you put a cartridge in our eight-track machine and turned down the volume all the way, when it reached the end of a song it would make this loud CHA-CHUNK-CHICK noise, which would echo off the stone walls. So I hid the machine under Tony’s bed. Just before he turned in for the night – after we’d spent the evening putting the willies up each other with a seance in the dungeon – I sneaked into his room, pressed ‘play’, and set the volume to zero. Then I ran out and hid in the room next door.

Eventually I heard Tony get into bed.

I waited.

Then, one by one, the lights in the castle went out, until it was pitch black. Apart from the occasional creak from the rafters, and the wind rattling the windows, there was just this eerie silence.

I waited.

And waited.

Then, out of the darkness: CHA-CHUNK-CHICK.

All I heard from Tony’s room was ‘AAAAGGGGGGHHH-HHH!’ and then a thump as he fell out of bed. Then the door burst open and Tony came charging out in his underpants, screaming, ‘There’s something in my fucking room! There’s something in my fucking room!’

I didn’t stop laughing for days.

But as much as the castle might have taken our minds off things, it didn’t help with the songwriting. The problem was that Vol. 4 had been a classic – by Black Sabbath’s standards, anyway. Which meant we wanted the follow-up to be another classic. But you can’t control that. To a certain extent, you’ve just got to be in the right place at the right time. I mean, I don’t think Michael Jackson sat down one day and said to himself, ‘Y’know what? Next year I’m gonna write an album called Thriller, and every song will be a corker, and then I’ll sell a million copies of it every week.’ You can’t plan that kind of thing.

Then again, we were terrified of becoming one of those bands who started off with a few albums that people thought were amazing, only to follow them up with one turd after another. None of us could really believe how our lives had changed since coming back from the Star Club in 1969. I think we all expected to wake up one day and find that it was all over, that our little scam had been exposed.

Personally, one of my biggest worries was about us moving too far away from what our fans wanted. I mean, I knew we couldn’t keep on doing ‘Iron Man’ for ever – we had to challenge ourselves – but we couldn’t put brass bands on every track or start doing abstract jazz bollocks, either. The name of the band was Black Sabbath – and as long as we were called Black Sabbath, it was gonna be hard to be accepted as anything else.

It’s like the guy who plays Batman in the movies. He might be a great actor, but if he goes off and plays a gay waiter in his next role, people will spend the entire movie wondering when he’s gonna rip off his tuxedo, put on a rubber suit, and jump out of the window.

So we had to be very careful.

To be honest with you, for a few days at Clearwell Castle, it felt like we didn’t know how to move on. For the first time ever, Tony seemed to be having a hard time coming up with new material. Which meant no riffs. And without riffs, we had no songs. It was that Dutch band, Golden Earring, that saved us in the end. We were listening to their latest album, Moontan, and something just clicked in Tony’s head. A couple of days later, he came down to the dungeon and started playing the riff to ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ . Like I said: every time we thought Tony couldn’t do it again, he did it again – and better. From that moment on, there was no more writer’s block.

Which was a huge relief.

But we still couldn’t concentrate in that bloody castle. We wound each other up so much none of us got any sleep. You’d just lie there with your eyes wide open, expecting an empty suit of armour to walk into your bedroom at any second and shove a dagger up your arse.

And the fucking seances we kept holding didn’t help. I dunno what we were thinking, ’cos they’re really dodgy, those things. You’ve got no idea who’s pushing the glass, and then you end up convincing yourself that your great aunt Sally is standing behind you with a sheet over her head. And when you’re doing it in a dungeon, it’s even worse.

Tony was the one who pulled the most pranks. One day he found an old dressmaker’s dummy in a cupboard, put a frock and a wig on it, then threw it out of a third-floor window just as Bill and Geezer were coming back from the pub. They almost shit their pants. Bill legged it so fast back up the drive-way, he must have broken the land speed record. Another time – I wasn’t around to witness this, but someone told me about it – Tony tied a piece of white thread to an old model sailing ship that was in one of the roadies’ bedrooms, and he fed the thread under the door and into another room. Then he waited until the roadie was in there alone and he gave it a little tug. The roadie looked up, and there on this dusty mantel-piece – which was supported by two gargoyles – the ship was ‘sailing’ all by itself. He ran out of that room and refused ever to go back in.

Bill got the worst of it, though. One night he’d been on the cider and had passed out on the sofa. We got this full-length mirror and lifted it over him, so it was only a few inches from his face. Then we poked him until he woke up. The second he opened his eyes, all he could see was himself staring back. To this day, I’ve never heard a grown man scream so loud. He must have thought he’d woken up in hell.

Bill started going to bed with a dagger after that.

The jokes got out of hand eventually. People started driving home at night instead of sleeping in their rooms. The funny thing is, the only genuinely dangerous thing that happened during our time at Clearwell Castle was when I got loaded and feel asleep with my boot in the fire. All I can remember is waking up at three o’clock in the morning with a funny feeling at the end of my leg, then jumping up, screaming, and hopping around the room with this flaming boot, looking for something wet to put it in. Everyone else thought it was hilarious.

Geezer just looked at me and said, ‘Got a light, Ozzy?’

But the smile was soon wiped off his face when an ember flew off my boot and set the carpet on fire. All I can say is: thank God for the vat of cider that Bill kept behind his drum kit, which we used to douse the flames. I’m amazed it put the fire out, to be honest with you. I’d tasted Bill’s cider, so I half expected it to go up like a Molotov cocktail.

By the time we left Clearwell Castle, we at least had most of the new album written. So we moved on to Morgan Studios, just off Willesden High Road in north London, to finish it off.

Morgan Studios was a very popular place at the time, so whenever you did any work there, you’d run into other bands, and usually you’d end up going over to the little caff they had in there – it had a dartboard and served booze – and having a bit of a laugh. This time, though, when I went over to say hello to the band working next door to us, my heart sank. It was Yes. While we were working on our album in Studio 4, they were making Tales from Topographic Oceans in Studio 3. They were hippies, so they’d brought in all of these cut-out cows to make their recording space look ‘earthy’. I later found out that the cows even had electrically powered udders. No fucking kidding. They also had bales of hay all over the place, a white picket fence, and a little barn in the corner – like a kid’s plaything. I just said to myself, ‘And I thought Geezer was weird.’

During the whole time we were at Morgan Studios, the only member of Yes I ever saw in the caff was Rick Wakeman, their superstar keyboard player. He was famous for doing warp-speed Moog solos while dressed in a wizard’s cape, and it turned out he was the only regular bloke in Yes. In fact, he was always in the caff – usually drinking heavily – and he wasn’t into any of that cut-out-cow, hippy bullshit. He’d rather get out of his box and play darts with me.

We used to have a right few laughs, me and Rick – and we’ve remained friends to this day.

The bloke’s a born storyteller. Hanging out with him is like An Evening with… He once told me that he’d legally changed his name to Michael Schumacher in case the cops ever pulled him over for speeding and asked for his name. Then, when PC Plod told him to fuck off and demanded to see his driving licence, there it would be, in black and white. You’ve got to admire that kind of dedication to winding up the boys in blue.

He had a collection of about thirty Rollers and Bentleys back then – although I don’t know when he ever drove ’em, because whenever I saw him he was shitfaced. He was almost as bad as me. Then, a few years later, he had a bunch of heart attacks in a row and had to give it up.

You could tell that Rick was bored out of his mind with Tales from Topographic Oceans. One of the funniest stories I ever heard about him was from the time when Yes went on tour with that album. He got so fed up that halfway through one of the eight-hour twiddly bits, he got his roadie to order a curry and bring it to him on stage. Then he sat there at his keyboards, eating a chicken vindaloo under his cape while smoking a fag.

He didn’t last much longer in Yes after that.

Anyway, one day at Morgan Studios, when Rick seemed even more bored than usual, I asked him if he’d like to come over to Studio 4 and hear some of our new tracks. I remember playing the melody of ‘Sabbra Cadabra’ to him on my ARP 2600 synthesizer. There I was, murdering this riff with one grubby finger, going duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh-duh, with Rick watching me. And when I finally stopped, Rick just went, ‘Hmm, maybe it would sound better like this…’ leaned over the keyboard, and went diddly-diddly-diddly-diddly-dud-diddly-duh. His fingers moved so fast, I swear you couldn’t see the fucking things.

I asked him right then if he’d play on the album, and he said he’d love to, as long as we paid him his usual fee.

‘How much?’ I asked.

‘Two pints of Director’s best bitter.’

Apart from Rick, though, Yes lived like monks. They didn’t eat meat. They looked like they had yoga classes every day. And you’d never see them getting boozed up. The only rock ’n’ roll thing they did was smoke dope – and, as it happened, I’d just got another shipment of hash in from Afghanistan, and it was phenomenal. Really heavy-duty shit. Now I considered myself a bit of dope connoisseur in those days, and I was interested to see what Yes thought of this stuff. So one morning I took my brick of hash to the studio, went over to see Yes, and gave them a big lump of it. For some reason, the only one of them who was missing that day was Rick.

‘Here, lads,’ I said. ‘Stick a bit of this in your rollies.’

They said they’d try it immediately.

I went back to Studio 4, had a couple of joints myself, did some double-tracking for the vocals, nipped over to the caff for a cheeky five or six at lunchtime, came back, had another joint, then decided to check how Yes were doing.

But when I went into Studio 3, it was empty.

I found the chick from the reception desk and said, ‘Have you seen Yes anywhere?’

‘Oh, they all started to feel very unwell around lunchtime. They had to go home.’

By now, our album had a title – Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, after the track that had broken Tony’s writer’s block – and it was another stonker. Our last truly great album, I think. Even the artwork was spot on: it showed a bloke lying on his bed being attacked by demons in his sleep, with a skull and the number 666 above his head. I fucking loved that cover. And with the music we’d managed to strike just the right balance between our old heaviness and our new, ‘experimental’ side. On the one hand, you had tracks like ‘Spiral Architect’, which featured a full orchestra, and ‘Fluff’, which sounded almost like the Shadows (it was named in honour of Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman, the DJ who always played our records on Radio 1). On the other, there was ‘A National Acrobat’, which was so heavy it was like being hit over the head with a lump of concrete. I even got one of my own songs on the album: ‘Who Are You?’ I’d written it one night at Bulrush Cottage while I was loaded and fiddling around with a Revox tape machine and my ARP 2600.

We were all happy with Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, I think. Even Patrick Meehan and the record company were happy. Which meant only one thing, of course: things could only go down-hill from there.

I should have known that bad things were about to happen to Black Sabbath when we flew to America in 1974 and the bloke sitting next to me croaked it halfway across the Atlantic.

One minute I was hearing this choking noise – ‘uh, ugh, urrrgh’. The next I was sitting next to a corpse. I didn’t know what the fuck to do, so I pressed the button to call for a flight attendant.

‘Yes, sir, can I help you?’ said the chick, all prim and proper.

‘This bloke’s a goner, I reckon,’ I said, pointing at the lump beside me.

‘Sorry, sir?’

‘He’s kicked the bucket,’ I said, holding up the bloke’s floppy left arm. ‘Look at ’im. Dead as a fucking dodo.’

The stewardess started to panic. ‘What happened?’ she hissed, trying to cover him with a blanket. ‘Did he seem unwell?’

‘Well, he was making a bit of a choking noise,’ I said. ‘I just thought his peanuts had gone down the wrong way. Then he turned white, his eyes rolled back in his head, and the next thing I knew he’d kicked the bucket.’

‘Look,’ said the stewardess quietly. ‘We’re going to prop him up here against the window with this pillow. Please don’t mention this to the other passengers. We don’t want anyone panicking. To compensate for your inconvenience, we can reseat you in first class, if you’d like.’

‘What’s the difference between business and first?’ I asked.

‘Champagne.’

‘Magic.’

That was the beginning of The End.

What I remember most about the tour to promote Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is everyone starting to get pissed off. By now Patrick Meehan had stopped being the magician on the end of the phone line who could get you a Rolls-Royce or a horse or a Scalextric set, and had started to become the annoying flash bastard who never gave you a straight answer when you asked him how much dough you were making.

Meanwhile, Tony was grumbling about doing all the work in the studio, which meant he had no personal life. He had a point. But then again, Tony loved being in the studio – he’d even started to produce the albums himself. Personally, I could never stand all the sitting around, smoking cigarettes, and listening to the same three seconds of guitar solo over and over again. I still can’t handle it to this day. It drives me fucking nuts. Once I’ve done my thing, I have to get out into the fresh air. But as technology improved during the seventies, the temptation was always to add one more track, then another, then another… Tony couldn’t get enough of all that stuff. He had the patience for it. And no one ever argued with him, because he was the band’s unofficial leader.

Geezer was also getting fed up, because he was tired of me asking him for lyrics all the time. I can see how that must have got on his tits after a while, but the guy was a genius. When we were at Morgan Studios, I remember calling him when he was taking a day off at his country house. I said, ‘C’mon, Geezer, I need some words for “Spiral Architect”.’ He grumbled a bit, told me to call him back in an hour, and put the phone down. When I spoke to him again, he said, ‘Have you got a pen? Good. Write this down: “Sorcerers of madness/Selling me their time/Child of God sitting in the sun…”’

I said, ‘Geezer, are you just reading this out of a book or something?’

I couldn’t believe it. The bloke had written a masterpiece in the time it took me to read one sentence.

I told him, ‘Keep that up and we’ll have the whole bloody album done by five o’clock.’

One reason why we weren’t getting on so well is that we’d all started to develop these coked-up, rock-star egos.

It was happening to a lot of bands in those days. When we did the CalJam Festival at the Ontario Motor Speedway in 1974, for example, there was all kinds of bollocks going on backstage with the other bands. Things like, ‘Well, if he’s got a pinball machine, then I want a pinball machine,’ or ‘If he’s got a quadraphonic sound system, then I want a quadraphonic sound system.’ People were starting to think they were gods. I mean, the scale of that CalJam thing was unbelievable: about 250,000 fans, with the performances ‘simulcast’ on FM radio and the ABC TV network. Rock ’n’ roll had never been done on that scale before. You should have seen the rig Emerson, Lake and Palmer had. Halfway through their set, Keith Emerson did a solo on a grand piano while it was lifted off the stage and spun around, end-over-end.

CalJam was a good gig for us, actually.

We hadn’t played live for a while, so we rehearsed in our hotel room without any amps. The next day we flew in by helicopter, ’cos all the roads were blocked. Then we just ripped through our set, with me wearing these silver moon boots and yellow leggings.

Deep Purple didn’t have such a good time, though. Ritchie Blackmore hated TV cameras – he said they got between him and the audience – so after a couple of songs he smashed the neck of his guitar through the lens of one of them, and then set his amp on fire. It was a heavy scene, and the whole band had to fuck off quick in a helicopter, because the fire marshals were after them. ABC must have been well pissed off, too. Those cameras cost an arm and a leg. I remember being on the flight back to England with Ritchie, actually. It was fucking crazy. I had four grams of coke hidden down my sock, and I had to get rid of it before we landed, so I started handing it out to the air hostesses. They were completely whacked out on the stuff after a while. My in-flight meal took a flight of its own at one point. Can you even imagine doing that kind of thing nowadays? When I think about it, I shudder.

Another crazy thing that happened around that time was getting to know Frank Zappa in Chicago. We were doing a gig there, and it turned out that he was staying at our hotel. All of us looked up to Zappa – especially Geezer – because he seemed like he was from another planet. At the time he’d just released this quadraphonic album called Apostrophe (’), which had a track on it called ‘Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow’. Fucking classic.

Anyway, so there we were at this hotel, and we ended up hanging out with his band in the bar. Then the next day we got word that Frank wanted us to come to his Independence Day party, which was going to be held that night at a restaurant around the corner.

We could hardly wait.

So come eight o’clock, off we went to meet Frank. When we arrived at the restaurant, there he was, sitting at this massive table, surrounded by his band. We introduced ourselves, then we all started to get pissed. But it was really weird, because the guys in his band kept coming up to me and saying, ‘You got any blow? Don’t tell Frank I asked you. He’s straight. Hates that stuff. But have you got any? Just a toot, to keep me going.’

I didn’t want to get involved, so I just went, ‘Nah,’ even though I had a big bag of the stuff in my pocket.

Later, after we’d finished eating, I was sitting next to Frank when two waiters burst out of the kitchen, wheeling a massive cake in front of them. The whole restaurant went quiet. You should have seen that cake, man. It was made into the shape of a naked chick with two big, icing-covered tits – and her legs were spread wide apart. But the craziest thing about it was that they’d rigged up a little pump, so champagne was squirting out of her vagina. You could have heard a pin drop in that place until the band finally started to sing ‘America the Beautiful’. Then everyone had to have a ceremonial drink of the champagne, starting with Frank.

When it was my turn, I took a long gulp, screwed up my face, and said, ‘Ugh, tastes like piss.’

Everyone thought that was hilarious.

Then Frank leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘Got any blow? It’s not for me – it’s for my bodyguard.’

‘Are you serious?’ I asked him.

‘Sure. But don’t tell the band. They’re straight.’

I saw Frank again a few years later, after he’d done a gig at the Birmingham Odeon. When the show was over, he asked me, ‘Is there anywhere we can get something to eat in this town? I’m staying at the Holiday Inn, and the food’s terrible.’

I told him, ‘At this time of night, there’s only the curry house on Bristol Street, but I don’t recommend it.’

Frank just shrugged and said, ‘Oh, that’ll do, I’ll have a go.’

So we all went to this dodgy Indian joint – me, Frank, Thelma and some Japanese chick that Frank was hanging out with at the time. I told Frank that the only thing on the menu he shouldn’t order, under any circumstances, was the steak. He nodded, looked at the menu for a while, then ordered the steak. When it arrived, I just sat there and watched him try to eat it.

‘Like old boots, is it?’ I said.

‘No, actually,’ replied Frank, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. ‘More like new ones.’

*

By the mid-seventies, everything had changed with Black Sabbath. In the early days, we used to hang out with each other all the time, and whenever we arrived in a new place for a gig, we’d walk around the town like a little gang, trying out the pubs and clubs, hitting on chicks, getting pissed. But as time went on, we saw less and less of each other. When me and Bill did our road trips, for example, we hardly spent any time with Tony or Geezer. Then even me and Bill started to drift apart. I was the noisy fucker who would always be throwing parties and having chicks in my room and getting up to all sorts of debauchery, and Bill would just want to stay in his bed and sleep.

After all that time on the road, we’d just had enough of each other’s company. But when we didn’t spend any time together, all our problems grew in our heads, and we stopped communicating.

Then, all of a sudden, everything just blew up. For a start, the publishing rights to a lot of our early work had already been sold to a company called Essex Music ‘in perpetuity’, which was a posh way of saying for ever.

And there’d been other signs of trouble, like when London & County Bank went bust. I don’t know exactly what the deal was – I’m hardly the financial brain of Britain – but I know I had to sell the deeds to the land I’d bought from the cross-dressing farmer in order to save Bulrush Cottage. If me and Thelma hadn’t paid for the land with our own money, we’d have been fucked.

The biggest problem was our management. At some point we realised that we’d been stitched up. Although in theory Meehan would send us an allowance for whatever we wanted, whenever we asked for it, we didn’t actually have any control. We were supposed to have our own individual bank accounts, but it turned out they didn’t exist. So I’d have to go to his office and ask for a thousand quid or whatever. He’d say, ‘OK,’ and the cheque would turn up in the post. But after a while the cheques started to bounce.

So we fired him. Then all this legal crap started, with law-suits flying around all over the place. While we were working on the follow-up to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath – which we ended up calling Sabotage, in reference to Meehan’s bullshit – writs were being delivered to us at the mixing desk. That was when we came to the conclusion that lawyers rip you off just as much as managers do. You get charged for every penny they spend while they’re working for you, down to the last paperclip. And they’re happy to fuck around in court for the rest of their lives, as long as someone’s paying the bills. If it takes fifty years to win, that’s fine, as far as those guys are concerned.

We had this one lawyer working for us, and I ended up hating him. I just couldn’t stand the bloke because he was taking the piss. When we were recording Sabotage in Morgan Studios, he came over to see us one day and said, ‘Gentlemen, I’m going to buy you all a drink.’ I thought, Wow, I can’t believe this, the guy’s actually getting his wallet out for something. Then, at the end of the meeting, he took out this little notepad and started adding up what we’d all had, so he could bill us later. ‘Right. Ozzy, you had two beers, so that’s sixty pence,’ he went, ‘and Tony, you had one beer and—’

I said, ‘You’re fucking joking, right?’

But of course he wasn’t. That’s what lawyers do. They grease you down and stick their fist up your arse.

You can hear the frustration on Sabotage. There’s some heavy-duty shit on that album. One incredible track is ‘Supertzar’. I remember the day it was recorded: I walked into Morgan Studios and there was an entire forty-member choir in there along with an eighty-six-year-old harpist. They were making a noise like God conducting the soundtrack to the end of the world. I didn’t even attempt to put a vocal over the top of it.

One song I’m very proud of on that album is ‘The Writ’. I wrote most of lyrics myself, which felt a bit like seeing a shrink. All the anger I felt towards Meehan came pouring out. But y’know what? All that bullshit he pulled on us didn’t get him anywhere in the end. You should see him now: he looks like a fat, boozy old fuck. But I don’t hate him. Hating people isn’t a productive way of living. When all’s said and done, I don’t wish the bloke any harm. I’m still here, y’know? I still have a career. So what’s the point in hating anyone? There’s enough hate in the world as it is, without me adding to it. And I got a song out of it, at least.

Aside from ‘The Writ’, I can’t say I’m very proud of much else that happened in that period.

Like pulling a gun on Bill while I was having a bad acid trip at Bulrush Cottage. The gun wasn’t loaded. But he didn’t know that, and I didn’t tell him. He was very cool about it at the time, but we’ve never talked about it since, which means it was probably quite a big deal.

I had a few bad acid trips around that time, actually. Another night we were at Fields Farm, Bill’s old rented house, which a couple of roadies had taken over, and we were getting badly fucked up for some reason. There was a terrible vibe that night, because a kid had just drowned in the lake on the property while pissing around in a canoe, and the cops had torn the place apart, dredging the lake for the body, and searching for drugs. Not exactly the best time to be doing acid, in other words. But that didn’t stop us. All I can remember is wandering off into a field and meeting these two horses. Then one of them said to the other, ‘Fuck me, that bloke can talk,’ and I freaked out, big time.

I hit Thelma, too, which is probably the worst thing I ever did in my life. I started to get overpowering with her, and the poor woman must have been frightened to death. What made it even worse was that we’d just had our second kid – little Louis. Thelma really suffered with me, y’know, and I really regret that. If there’s one thing I wish for in my life, it’s that I could take it all back. But of course you never can never take violence back – of any kind – and I’ll take it to the grave with me. My own parents used to fight a lot, so maybe I thought that’s just what you do. But there’s no excuse. One night, when I was out of my tree on booze and pills, I hit Thelma so hard I gave her a black eye. We were meeting her father the next day, and I thought, Fucking hell, he’s gonna beat the crap out of me now. But all he said was, ‘So which one of you won, eh?’

The saddest thing is, it wasn’t until I became sober that I truly realised how disgusting my behaviour was. But I do now, trust me.

While all that fucked-up stuff was going on, we decided to make another album – this time hauling all our gear and crew to America and booking into Criteria Studios in Miami. The title we’d decided on was Technical Ecstasy, although I can’t say I was 100 per cent enthusiastic. By now, our albums were getting ridiculously expensive to make. We’d recorded Black Sabbath in one day. Sabotage took about four thousand years. Technical Ecstasy didn’t take quite as long, but the cost of doing it in Florida was astronomical.

At the same time as our sales were falling, the record company wasn’t as interested as it used to be, we’d just got a million-dollar tax bill from the IRS in America, we couldn’t afford to pay our legal bills, and we didn’t have a manager. At one point, Bill was the one manning the phones. Worse than all that, though, we’d lost our direction. It wasn’t the experimentation with the music. It was more that we didn’t seem to know who we were any more. One minute you had an album cover like Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, with the bloke being attacked by demons on it, and the next you had two robots having sex while they’re going up a fucking escalator, which was the art-work for Technical Ecstasy.

I’m not saying the album was all bad – it wasn’t. For example, Bill wrote a song called ‘It’s Alright’, which I loved. He sang it, too. He’s got a great voice, Bill, and I was more than happy for him to do the honours. But I’d started to lose interest, and I kept thinking about what it would be like to have a solo career. I’d even had a T-shirt made with ‘Blizzard of Ozz’ written on the front. Meanwhile, in the studio, Tony was always saying, ‘We’ve gotta sound like Foreigner,’ or, ‘We’ve gotta sound like Queen.’ But I thought it was strange that the bands that we’d once influenced were now influencing us. Then again, I’d lost the plot with the booze and the drugs, and I was saying a lot of bad things, making trouble, being a dick-head.

In fact, my boozing was so bad during the Technical Ecstasy sessions in Florida, I checked myself into a loony bin called St George’s when I got back home. It’s real name was the Stafford County Asylum, but they changed it to make people feel better about being insane. It was a big old Victorian place. Dark and dingy, like the set of a science-fiction movie. The first thing the doctor said to me when I went in there was, ‘Do you masturbate, Mr Osbourne?’ I told him, ‘I’m in here for my head, not my dick.’

I didn’t last long in that place. I’m telling you, the docs in those funny farms are more bonkers than the patients.

Then Thelma bought me some chickens.

She probably thought it would help bring me down to earth. And it did, for about five minutes. But then the novelty wore off – especially when I realised that Thelma expected me to feed the fucking things and clean out their shit. So I started trying to find a reason to get rid of them.

‘Thelma,’ I said to her, one morning, after I’d finally had enough. ‘Where did you get those chickens from? They’re broken.’

‘What do you mean, they’re broken?’

‘They’re not laying any eggs.’

‘Well, it would help if you fed them, John. Besides, they’re probably stressed out, poor things.’

‘Why d’you say that?’

‘Come on, John. You put up a sign beside their coop that says, “Oflag 14”. I know they can’t read, but still.’

‘It’s just a joke.’

‘Firing warning shots over their heads every morning probably isn’t helping much, either.’

‘Everyone needs a bit of encouragement.’

‘You’re scaring the living daylights out of them. You’ll give one of them a heart attack if you keep it up.’

Here’s hoping, I thought.

As the weeks and months went by, I kept forgetting to feed the chickens, and they kept forgetting to lay any eggs. All I would hear from Thelma was: ‘John, feed the chickens.’ Or: ‘John, remember to feed the chickens.’ Or: ‘John, did you feed the chickens?’

It was driving me fucking nuts.

I was trying to have a break – making Technical Ecstasy had been knackering, mainly thanks to all the boozing involved – but I couldn’t get any peace. If it wasn’t Thelma, it was the lawyers. If it wasn’t the lawyers, it was the accountants. If it wasn’t the accountants, it was the record company. And if it wasn’t the record company, it was Tony or Bill or Geezer, worrying about the ‘new direction’ or complaining about our tax bills.

The only way I could handle it was to get loaded all the time.

Then one day I finally lost it.

I’d been up all night – a lock-in at the Hand & Cleaver, followed by more boozing at home, then a few toots of coke, then some dope, then some more coke, then a blackout around breakfast time to refresh myself, then some coke to wake me up again. By then it was time for lunch. So I had a bottle of cough syrup, three glasses of wine, some more coke, a joint, half a packet of cigarettes and a Scotch egg. But no matter how much I put away, I couldn’t get rid of this horrendous restless feeling. I’d often get that feeling after coming home from America: I’d find myself standing in the kitchen for hours, just opening and closing the fridge door; or sitting in the living room in front of the telly, flipping from one channel to the next, never watching anything.

But this time, something was different.

I was going insane.

There was nothing else for it: I was gonna have to go back down the Hand & Cleaver and sort myself out.

I was just about to leave the house when I heard Thelma coming down the stairs. She walked into the kitchen and said, ‘I’m going to my mum’s to get the kids.’ I watched as she picked up a pile of Good Housekeeping magazines from the table and started putting them in her bag. Then she stopped and turned to look at me standing there beside the fridge in my underpants and my dressing-gown, fag in mouth, giving my balls a good old scratch.

‘Did you feed the chickens?’ she said.

‘I told you, they’re broken.’

‘Just feed them, John, for God’s sake. Or, y’know what? Let them die – I don’t care any more.’

‘I’m going down the pub.’

‘Wearing the terrycloth bathrobe you got for Christmas?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Classy, John. Very classy.’

‘Have you seen my slippers?’

‘Try the dog bed. I’ll be back at eight.’

Next thing I knew I was staggering out of the house in a pair of welly-boots – I couldn’t find my slippers – heading in the direction of the pub. As I walked I kept trying to tighten the cord around my dressing-gown. I didn’t want to be flashing a loose bollock at any passing farmers; especially not the bearded cross-dressing loony from down the road.

When I got to the gate at the bottom of the driveway I suddenly had a change of heart. ‘You know what?’ I said to myself. ‘I’m going to feed those chickens. Fuck it. If it keeps her happy, I’ll do it.’ So I turned around and started wobbling back in the direction of the house. But I was thirsty now, so I went over to where the Range Rover was parked, pulled open the door, and reached into the glove box for my emergency bottle of Scotch.

Swig. Ahhh. That’s better! Burp.

On I went into the garden… But then I had another change of heart. Fuck the chickens! I thought. Not one of those little fuckers has ever laid any eggs for me! Fuck them! Fuck them all!

Swig. Ahhh. Burp. I lit another fag.

Then I remembered that I still hadn’t finished the fag that was already in my mouth, so I flicked it into Thelma’s vegetable patch. I changed direction again, this time heading towards the shed.

I threw open the door and stood there, looking up at my Benelli semi-automatic on the gun rack. I picked it up, opened the chamber to see if it was loaded – it was – then I set about stuffing the pockets of my dressing-gown full of cartridges. Next I reached up to the top shelf for the jerry can of petrol that the gardener kept there for my lawnmower – the one I used to ride to the pub every so often for a laugh (Patrick Meehan’s office had got it for me, even though I’d asked them for a combine harvester).

So, with the jerry can in one hand, the shotgun in the other, and the Scotch under my arm – still puffing away on my fag – I lurched into the garden and towards the chicken coop. The sun was setting now, and the sky had gone all red and orange. In my head, the only thing I could hear was Thelma saying, ‘John, feed the chickens. John, have you fed the chickens?’

Then our accountant going, ‘Lads, this is serious. This is a million-dollar tax bill from the IRS.’

And Geezer saying, ‘We’re calling the album Technical Ecstasy. We need a new direction. We can’t do that black magic shit for ever.’

It wouldn’t stop.

Over and over.

‘John, feed the chickens.’

‘Lads, this is serious.’

‘We’re calling the album Technical Ecstasy.’

‘John, did you feed the chickens?’

‘A million-dollar tax bill.’

‘John, feed the chickens!’

‘We need a new direction.’

‘This is serious.’

‘We can’t do that black magic shit for ever.’

AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!

When I reached the coop I put down the jerry can and the gun, knelt down by the ‘Oflag 14’ sign and took a look inside. The chickens clucked and nodded their little beaks.

‘Anyone laid any eggs?’ I asked – like I didn’t already know the answer to that fucking question. ‘Didn’t think so,’ I said, standing up. ‘Too bad.’

Then I picked up the gun.

Safety off.

Aim.

Cluck-cluck.

Bang-bang!

Aim.

Squawk!

Bang-bang!

Aim.

Squaaawwwwwwwwwkkkkkkkkkk!!!!!

BANG!

The sound of the gun was fucking deafening, and it echoed across the fields for what seemed like miles in all directions. And with every shot there was a white flash that lit up the coop and the garden around it, followed by a strong whiff of gun-powder. I was feeling much better now.

Much, much better.

Swig. Ahhh. Burp.

The chickens – the ones who hadn’t already gone off to meet their maker – were going nuts.

I waited a moment for the smoke to clear.

Aim.

Cluck-cluck.

Bang-bang!

Aim.

Squawk!

Bang-bang!

Aim.

Squaaawwwwwwwwwkkkkkkkkkk!!!!!

BANG!

By the time I was done there was blood and feathers and bits of beak all over the fucking place. It looked as though someone had thrown a bucket of chicken guts at me and then emptied a pillow over my head. My dressing-gown was ruined. But I felt fucking fabulous – like someone had just lifted a three-ton anvil off my back. I put down the shotgun, picked up the jerry can, and started emptying it over what was left of the chickens. I lit up another fag, took a long drag, stood well back, then flicked it into the coop.

Whoooooooooossssshhhhh!

Flames everywhere.

Then I took the leftover cartridges out of my pocket and started throwing them into the fire.

Bang!

Bang!

Bang-bang-bang!

‘Heh-heh-heh,’ I went.

Then something moved behind me.

I almost fell over the gun and shot myself in the nuts with fright. I turned around to see a chicken legging it away from me. That little fucker! I heard myself letting out this weird, psycho noise – ‘Eeeeaaaargggghhhh!’ – then, without even thinking, I set off after it. I didn’t know what the fuck was wrong with me, or why I was doing what I was doing. All I knew was that I was possessed with this insane, uncontrollable rage at all chickenkind. Kill the chicken! Kill the chicken! Kill the chicken!

But let me tell you something: it’s not fucking easy, catching a chicken, especially when it’s getting dark and you haven’t slept for twenty-four hours and you’re fucked up on a shitload of booze and coke and you’re wearing a dressing-gown and welly-boots.

So I clomped back over to the shed, found a sword, and came out with it raised above my head, Samurai-style. ‘Die, you chicken bastard, die!’ I shouted, as the chicken made a last-ditch run for the fence at the end of the garden, its little beak nodding so fast it looked like its head could fly off at any second. I’d almost caught up with it when the front door of my neighbour’s house burst open. Then this little old lady – Mrs Armstrong, I think her name was – came running out with a garden hoe in her hands. She was used to all kinds of crazy shit going on at Bulrush Cottage, but this time, I don’t even think she could believe it. With the coop burning and the rounds from my gun exploding every few minutes, it was like a scene from an old World War Two movie.

Bang!

Bang!

Bang-bang-bang!

At first I didn’t even notice her. I was too busy chasing the chicken, which ended up bolting under the fence and legging it up Mrs Armstrong’s driveway, out of her gate, and down Butt Lane in the direction of the pub. Then I looked up and our eyes met. I must have been quite a sight, standing there in my dressing gown with a crazed look on my face, splattered with blood, and holding up a sword, my garden on fire behind me.

‘Ah, good evening, Mr Osbourne,’ she said. ‘I see you’re back from America.’

There was a long silence. More cartridges exploded behind me. I didn’t know what to say, so I just nodded.

‘Unwinding, are we?’ she asked.

I wasn’t the only one going out of my mind with the stress of the band imploding.

I remember one time, Geezer phoned me up and said, ‘Look, Ozzy, I’m sick of touring just to pay the lawyers. Before we go on the road again, I wanna know what we’re gonna get.’

And I said to him, ‘Y’know what, Geezer, you’re right. Let’s call a meeting.’

So we had a meeting, and I was the first one to speak up.

‘Look, lads,’ I said, ‘I think it’s crazy that we’re doing gigs to pay the lawyers. What d’you think, Geezer?’

Geezer just shrugged and said, ‘Dunno.’

That was it.

I’d had enough. There didn’t seem to be any point any more. None of us was getting on. We were spending more time in meetings with lawyers than we were writing songs; we were all exhausted from touring the world pretty much non-stop for six years; and we were out of our minds on booze and drugs. The final straw was a meeting with Colin Newman, our accountant, where he told us that if we didn’t settle our tax bills soon, we’d be going to prison. In those days, the tax rate for people like us was something like 80 per cent in the UK and 70 per cent in America, so you can imagine the amount of dough we owed. And after the taxes, we still had our expenses to pay. We were broke, basically. Wiped out. Geezer might not have had the bollocks to say anything in front of the others, but he was right: there was no point in being in a rock ’n’ roll band just to worry about money and writs all the time.

So one day I just walked out of a rehearsal and didn’t come back.

Then I got a call from Norman, my sister Jean’s husband.

Now, he’s a lovely guy, Norman – in many ways the older brother I never had. But whenever he called, it usually meant something heavy was going down with the family.

This time was no different.

‘It’s your dad,’ said Norman. ‘You should go and see him.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘He’s not well, John. He might not make it through the night.’

I immediately felt sick and numb. Losing a parent had always been my worst fear, ever since I was a little kid, when I would go up to my dad’s bed and shake him awake because I thought he wasn’t breathing. Now the fear was coming true. I knew my dad had been ill, but I hadn’t thought he was at death’s door.

When I pulled myself together, I got in the car and went to see him.

My whole family was already there by his bedside, including my mum, who was just absolutely devastated.

Dad was riddled with cancer, it turned out. It was out of control, because he’d refused to go and see a doctor until they had to carry him away in an ambulance. He’d stopped working only a few months before. He was sixty-four, and they’d offered him an early retirement deal. ‘I’m gonna have some time to do the garden now,’ he’d told me. So he did the garden. But as soon as he’d done the garden, that was it. Game over.

I was terrified of seeing him, to be honest with you, because I knew what to expect. My dad’s younger brother had died the year before from liver cancer. I’d visited him on the ward and it had shocked the crap out of me, so much so that I’d burst into tears. He bore no resemblance to the guy I’d known. He didn’t even look human.

When I got to the hospital this time, my dad had just come out of surgery, and he was up and running. He looked all right, and he managed a smile. They had him on the happy juice, I imagine. Although, as one of my aunties used to say, ‘God always gives you one good day before you die.’ We talked a little, but not much. The funny thing is, when I was growing up, my dad never used to say anything like, ‘You wanna watch those cigarettes,’ or, ‘Stop going to the pub all the time,’ but that day he told me, ‘Do something about your drinking, John. It’s too bloody much. And stop taking sleeping pills.’

‘I’ve left Black Sabbath,’ I told him.

‘They’re finished then,’ he said. Then he fell asleep.

The next day, he took a dive. One of the worst things about it was seeing my mum so distraught. In hospitals back then, the sicker you got, the further they moved you from the other patients. By the end of the day, my dad had been shoved into this broom cupboard in the corner, with mops and buckets and tubs of bleach all over the place. They’d put bandages around his hands like he was a boxer, and they’d tied him to the bars of this giant cot, because he’d kept pulling out his IV tube. It really fucked me up, seeing him like that, the man I adored, the man who’d taught me that even if you don’t have a good education, you can still have good manners. At least he was loaded on all kinds of drugs, so he wasn’t in too much pain. When he saw me, he smiled, stuck his thumbs up through his bandages and went, ‘Speeeeed!’ – it was the only drug he knew the name of. Mind you, then he said, ‘Take these fucking pipes out of me, John, they hurt.’

He died at 11.20 p.m. on January 20, 1978: in the same hospital, on the same date, at the same time as Jess had been born six years earlier. That coincidence still floors me to this day. The cause of death was given as ‘carcinoma of the oesophagus’, although he also had cancer of the intestines and cancer of the bowel. He hadn’t eaten or gone to the bog by himself for thirteen weeks. Jean was with him when he passed away. The doctors told her they wanted to find out why their Frankenstein experiment on him the previous day in surgery hadn’t worked, but she wouldn’t let them do an autopsy.

I was in the car, on my way to Bill’s house, listening to ‘Baker Street’ by Gerry Rafferty, at the moment he passed away. As soon I pulled up in Bill’s driveway, he was standing there, with a grim look on his face. ‘Someone’s on the phone for you, Ozzy,’ he said.

It was Norman, giving me the news. To this day, whenever ‘Baker Street’ comes on the radio, I hear Norman’s voice and feel that intense sadness.

His funeral was a week later, and he was cremated. I really hate the way traditional English funerals are organised: you’re just starting to get over the shock of the death, then you have to go through it all over again. The Jews have a far better idea: when someone dies, you bury them as soon as possible. At least that way you get it all out of your system quickly.

The only way I could handle my father’s funeral was to get out of my skull. I got up that morning and poured myself a neat whisky; then I kept going all day. By the time they brought the coffin to the house where my mum and dad had been living, I was halfway to another planet. The coffin was sealed, but for some stupid fucking pissed reason I decided I wanted to see Dad again, one last time, so I got one of the pallbearers to unscrew the lid. A bad idea, that was. In the end, we all took it in turns to look at him. But he’d been dead a week, so as soon as I peered into the coffin, I regretted it. The undertaker had put all this greasepaint on him, so he looked like a fucking clown. That wasn’t the way I wanted to remember my father – but as I’m writing this now, that’s the picture I see in my head. I’d rather have remembered him being tied to that hospital cot, smiling and sticking his thumbs up, and going, ‘Speeeeed!’

Then we all got in the hearse with the coffin. My sisters and my mother started howling like wild animals, which freaked the fuck out of me. I’d never experienced anything like it before. They teach you how to handle life in England, but they don’t teach you a thing about death. There’s no book telling you what to do when your mum or dad dies.

It’s like, You’re on your own now, sunshine.

If there’s one thing that sums up my father, it’s the indoor bathroom he built at 14 Lodge Road, so we wouldn’t have to use a tin bathtub in front of the fire any more. He hired a professional contractor to do most of the work, but only a few weeks after it was finished all this damp started coming in through the wall. So my dad went off to the hardware shop, bought what he needed, and replastered the wall himself. But the damp came back. So my dad plastered it again. Then it came back again and again and again. By this time he was on a mission. And you couldn’t stop my dad when he was on a mission. He came up with all kinds of crazy concoctions to put on that wall and stop the damp. It went on for ever, his anti-damp crusade. Then, finally, after a few years, he got this heavy-duty industrial tar from the GEC factory, smeared it all over the wall, plastered over the tar, then went out and bought some yellow and white tiles, and laid them on top.

‘That should fucking do it,’ I remember him saying.

I’d forgotten all about it until years later, when I went back to the house to do a documentary with the BBC. By that time, there was a Pakistani family living there, and every wall in the house had been painted white. It was eerie, seeing the place like that. But then I walked into the bathroom – and on the wall were my dad’s tiles, still up there, like the day they were laid. I just thought, He fucking did it in the end, my old man.

You couldn’t wipe the smile off my face for the rest of the day.

I miss my dad a lot, even now. I just wish we could have sat down and had a good old man-to-man conversation about all the stuff I never knew to ask him when I was a kid, or was too pissed and busy being a rock star to ask him when I was in my twenties.

But I suppose that’s always the way, isn’t it?

The day I left Black Sabbath, we were at Rockfield Studios in South Wales, trying to record a new album. We’d just had another soul-destroying meeting about money and lawyers, and I couldn’t take it any more. So I just walked out of the studio and fucked off back to Bulrush Cottage in Thelma’s Mercedes. I was shitfaced, obviously. And then, like a pissed dickhead, I started to slag off the band in the press, which wasn’t fair. But y’know, when a band splits up, it’s like a marriage ending – for a while, all you want to do is hurt each other. The bloke they found to replace me after I walked out was another Brummie, called Dave Walker, a guy I’d admired for a long time, actually – he’d been with Savoy Brown and then Fleetwood Mac for a while.

But for whatever reason things didn’t work out with Dave, so when I came back a few weeks later, everything was back to normal – on the surface, at least. No one really talked about what happened. I just turned up in the studio one day – I think Bill had been trying to act as peacemaker on the phone – and that was the end of it. But it was obvious things had changed, especially between me and Tony. I don’t think anyone’s heart was in what we were doing any more. Still, as soon as I came back, we picked up where we’d left off with the album, which we decided to call Never Say Die.

By now, we were starting to get our finances sorted out, thanks to Colin Newman, who advised us to make the album as tax exiles in another country, to avoid having to give 80 per cent of all our dough to the Labour government. We chose Canada, even though it was January and would be so cold that we wouldn’t be able to walk outside without our eyeballs freezing over. So we booked ourselves into Sounds Interchange Studios and flew off to Toronto.

But even three thousand miles away from England the old problems soon came up again.

For example, I spent just about every night getting seriously fucked-up at a place called the Gas Works, opposite the apartment block where I was staying. One night I went over there, came back, passed out, and woke up an hour later with this incredible heartburn. I remember opening my eyes and thinking, What the fuck? It was pitch black, but I noticed this red glow in front of me. I had no idea what it was. Meanwhile, the heartburn was getting worse and worse. Then suddenly I realised what had happened: I’d fallen asleep with a cigarette in my hand. I was on fire! So I jumped out of bed, tore off my clothes, bundled them up with the smouldering sheets, ran to the bathroom, dumped the whole lot in the bath, turned on the cold water, and waited for the smoke to clear. By the time I was done, the room was a fucking bomb site, I was stark bollock naked, my sheets were ruined and I was freezing to death.

I was thinking, What the fuck do I do now? Then I had an idea: I ripped down the curtains and used them as sheets instead. It worked great, until the boot-faced maid came in the next morning.

She went mental.

‘WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY APARTMENT?’ she screamed at me. ‘GET OUT! GET OUT! YOU ANIMAL!’

Things weren’t going much better in the studio. When I mentioned in passing that I wanted to do a side project of my own, Tony snapped, ‘If you’ve got any songs, Ozzy, you should give them to us first.’ But then whenever I came up with an idea, nobody would give me the time of day. I’d say, ‘What do you think of this, then?’ and they’d go, ‘Nah. That’s crap.’

Then, one day, Thelma called the studio and said she’d just had a miscarriage, so we all packed up our stuff and went back to England. But going home didn’t improve things between us, to the point where me and Tony weren’t speaking to each other at all. We didn’t argue. The opposite, really: just a complete lack of communication. And during the last sessions for the album in England, I’d given up. Tony, Bill and Geezer decided they wanted to do a song called ‘Breakout’, with a jazz band going da-dah-da-dah, DAH, and I just went, Fuck this, I’m off. That’s why Bill sang the vocals on ‘Swinging the Chain’. The bottom line was that ‘Breakout’ was stretching it too far for me. With tracks like that on the album, I thought, we might as well have been called Slack Haddock, not Black Sabbath. The only impressive thing about that jazz band as far as I was concerned was how much they could drink. It was incredible. If you didn’t get the takes done by midday, you were fucked, ’cos they were all too pissed.

Never Say Die bombed like none of our albums had ever done before in America, but it did OK in Britain, where it went to number twelve in the album charts, and got us a slot on Top of the Pops. Which was good fun, actually, ’cos we got to meet Bob Marley. I’ll always remember the moment he came out of his dressing room – it was next to ours – and you literally couldn’t see his head through the cloud of dope smoke. He was smoking the biggest, fattest joint I’d ever seen – and believe me, I’d seen a few. I kept thinking, He’s gonna have to lip-synch, he’s gonna have to lip-synch, no one can do a live show when they’re that high. But no – he did it live. Flawlessly, too.

There were other good things happening for Black Sabbath around that time, too. For example, after sorting out our finances, we’d decided to hire Don Arden as our manager, mainly because we’d been impressed by what he’d done for the Electric Light Orchestra. And for me, the best thing about being managed by Don Arden was getting to see his daughter Sharon on a regular basis. Almost immediately, I began falling in love with her from a distance. It was that wicked laugh that got me. And the fact that she was so beautiful and glamorous – she wore fur coats, and had diamonds dripping from everywhere. I’d never seen anything like it. And she was as loud and crazy as I was. By then, Sharon was helping to run the business with Don, and whenever she came over to see the band, we’d end up having a laugh. She was great company, was Sharon – the best. But nothing happened between us for a long time.

But I knew it was all over with Black Sabbath, and it was clear they’d had enough of my insane behaviour. One of my last memories of being with the band was missing a gig at the Municipal Auditorium in Nashville during our last US tour. I’d been doing so much coke with Bill while driving between shows in his GMC mobile home that I hadn’t slept for three days straight. I looked like the walking dead. My eyeballs felt like someone had injected them with caffeine, my skin was all red and prickly, and I could hardly feel my legs. But at five o’clock in the morning on the day of the gig, after we pulled into town, I finally hit the sack at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. It was the best fucking sleep I’d ever had in my life. It was like being six feet under, it was so good. And when I woke up, I felt almost normal again.

But I didn’t know that the key I’d used to get into my room was from one of the other Hyatt hotels we’d stayed at earlier in the tour, in another city. So while my bags had been sent to the right room by the tour manager, I’d gone to the wrong room. Which wouldn’t normally have been a problem: the key I had in my pocket just wouldn’t have worked and I would have gone down to reception and realised the mistake. But when I got to the room, the maid was still in there, plumping the pillows and checking that the minibar was full. So the door was open and I walked straight in. I just showed her the key – which had the right number and the Hyatt logo on it – and she smiled and told me to enjoy my stay. Then she closed the door behind her while I got into the wrong bed in the wrong room and fell asleep.

For twenty-four hours.

In the meantime, the gig came and went. Of course, the hotel sent someone up to my room to look for me, but all they found was my luggage. They had no idea I was zonked out on a different floor, in another wing of the hotel. The lads panicked, my ugly mug was plastered all over the local TV stations, the cops set up a special missing persons unit, the fans began to plan a candlelit vigil, the insurance company was on the phone, venues across America were preparing for the tour to be cancelled, the record company went apeshit, and Thelma thought she’d become a widow.

Then I woke up.

The first thing I did was call down to the front desk and ask them what time it was. ‘Six o’clock,’ the woman told me. Perfect timing, I thought. The gig was at eight. So I got out of bed and started looking for my suitcase. Then I realised that everything seeemed very quiet.

So I called back down to the front desk.

‘Morning or evening?’ I asked.

‘Sorry?’

‘You said it was six o’clock. Morning or evening?’

‘Oh, morning.’

‘Ah.’

Then I called the tour manager’s room.

‘Yeah?’ he croaked.

‘It’s me, Ozzy,’ I said. ‘I think there might be a problem.’

First there was silence.

Then tears – of rage. To this day, I’ve never had a bollocking like it.

It was Bill who told me I was fired.

The date was April 27, 1979 – a Friday afternoon.

We were doing some rehearsals in LA, and I was loaded, but then I was loaded all the time. It was obvious that Bill had been sent by the others, because he wasn’t exactly the firing type.

I can’t remember exactly what he said to me. We haven’t talked about it since. But the gist was that Tony thought I was a pissed, coked-up loser and a waste of time for everyone concerned. To be honest with you, it felt like he was finally getting his revenge for me walking out. And it didn’t come as a complete surprise: I’d had the feeling in the studio for a while that Tony was trying to wind me up by getting me to sing takes over and over again, even though there was nothing wrong with the first one.

I didn’t let it affect my friendship with Bill. I felt bad for the guy, actually, ’cos his mum had just died. Then not long after I was kicked out of Black Sabbath, his father died too. When I’d heard the news, I thought, Fuck the war, I’m still his mate, we’re still the same people who lived in a GMC together for months on end in America. So I drove straight up to Birming ham to see him.

He’d taken it really badly and I felt terrible for him. Then his dad’s funeral turned into a joke. They were carrying the coffin out of the church when they realised that someone in the funeral party had nicked the vicar’s car. The vicar refused to continue with the service until he got it back, but whoever had nicked the fucking thing couldn’t get the steering lock off, and ended up crashing into a garden. Imagine that kind of bullshit going down when you’re trying to lay your old man to rest. Unbelievable.

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel betrayed by what happened with Black Sabbath. We weren’t some manufactured boy band whose members were expendable. We were four blokes from the same town who’d grown up together a few streets apart. We were like a family, like brothers. And firing me for being fucked up was hypocritical bullshit. We were all fucked up. If you’re stoned and I’m stoned, and you’re telling me that I’m fired because I’m stoned, how can that fucking be? Because I’m slightly more stoned than you are?

But I don’t give a fuck any more – and it worked out for the best in the end. It gave me the shove up the arse I needed, and it probably made it a lot more fun for them, making records with a new singer. I don’t have anything bad to say about the guy they hired to replace me, Ronnie James Dio, who’d previously been with Rainbow. He’s a great singer. Then again, he ain’t me, and I ain’t him. So I just wish they’d called the band Black Sabbath II.

That’s all.