7

Des Moines

All of a sudden I was unemployed.

And unemployable.

I remember thinking, Well, I’ve still got a few dollars in my pocket, so I’ll have one last big fling in LA – then I’ll go back to England. I honestly thought I’d have to sell Bulrush Cottage and go and work on a building site or something. I just resigned myself to the fact that it was over. None of it had ever seemed real, anyway. The first thing I did was check myself into a place called Le Parc Hotel in West Hollywood, paid for by Don Arden’s company, Jet Records. I was amazed Don had forked out for it, to be honest with you. The second he realises I ain’t going back to Black Sabbath, I said to myself, they’re gonna kick me out of this place – so I might as well enjoy it while I still can. You didn’t get a room at Le Parc – you got a little apartment-type thing with its own kitchen where you could make your own food. I never left. I just sat on the bed and watched old war films with the curtains closed. I didn’t see daylight for months. My dealer would come over and give me some blow or some pot, I’d get booze delivered from Gil Turner’s up on Sunset Strip, and every once in a while I’d get some chicks over to fuck. Although I dunno why anyone was prepared to fuck me, not in those days. I was eating so much pizza and drinking so much beer, I had bigger tits than Jabba the Hutt’s fat older brother.

I hadn’t seen Thelma or the kids for ages. I’d call them up from the phone in my room, but it felt like they were slipping away from me, which made me feel even more depressed. I’d spent more time with Black Sabbath than I ever had with my family. We’d come back from months on the road, take a three-week break, then go straight off to some farm or castle where we’d fuck around until we came up with some new songs. We did that for a decade, until all our personal lives were ruined: Bill’s marriage failed, Tony’s marriage failed, Geezer’s marriage failed. But I didn’t want to accept it, because it would mean losing my home and my kids, and I’d already lost my dad and my band.

I just wanted to shut everything out, make everything go away.

So I hid in Le Parc and drank.

And drank.

And drank.

Then, one day, this bloke called Mark Nauseef knocked on my door. He was a drummer, also managed by Don Arden, and he’d played with everyone from the Velvet Underground to Thin Lizzy. He told me that Sharon from Jet Records was coming over to pick something up from him – he was staying in one of the other apartments – but that he had to leave town for a gig. Then he handed me an envelope.

‘Would you do me a favour and give this to her?’ he asked. ‘I told Sharon just to call for you at reception.’

‘No worries,’ I said.

As soon as I closed the door, I got a knife and opened it.

Inside was five hundred dollars in cash. Fuck knows what it was for and I didn’t care. I just called up my dealer and bought five hundred dollars’ worth of coke. A few hours later, Sharon came over and asked if I had something to give her. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said, all innocent.

‘Are you sure, Ozzy?’

‘Pretty sure.’

But it didn’t take Einstein to work out what had happened. There was a massive bag of coke on the table next to a ripped-up envelope with ‘Sharon’ written on it in felt-tip pen.

Sharon gave me a monumental bollocking when she saw it, shouting and cursing and telling me I was a fucking disaster.

I guess I won’t be shagging her any time soon, then, I thought.

But she came back the next day, to find me lying in a puddle of my own piss, smoking a joint.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘If you want to get your shit together, we want to manage you.’

‘Why would anyone want to manage me?’ I asked her.

I couldn’t believe it, I really couldn’t. But it was a good job that someone wanted me, ’cos I was down to my last few dollars. My royalties from Black Sabbath were non-existent, I didn’t have a savings account, and I had no new income coming in. At first, Don wanted me to start a band called Son of Sabbath, which I thought was a horrendous idea. Then he wanted me to team up with Gary Moore. I wasn’t too keen on that, either, even though me and Sharon had gone to San Francisco with Gary and his bird one time, and we’d had a lot of fun. (I really thought I was in with Sharon on that trip, to be honest with you, but nothing happened: she just went back to her hotel at the end of the night, and left me dribbling into my beer.)

The worst idea that Don Arden had was for me and Sabbath to do gigs together, one after the other, like a double bill. I asked Sharon, ‘Is he having a laugh?’

But then Sharon started to take more control, and we decided that I should make a proper solo album.

I wanted to call it Blizzard of Ozz.

And little by little, things started to come together.

I’d never met anyone who could sort things out like Sharon could. Whatever she said she would do, she’d get it done. Or at least she’d come back to you and say, ‘Look, I tried my best, but I couldn’t make it happen.’ As a manager, you always knew exactly where you stood with her. Meanwhile, Sharon’s father would just shout and bully like some mob captain, so I tried to stay out of his way as much as I could. Of course, before I could make an album and go on tour, I needed a band. But I’d never held auditions before, and I didn’t have a clue how or where to start. So Sharon helped me out, taking me to see all these young, up-and-coming LA guitarists. But I wasn’t really in any state for it. I’d just find a sofa in the corner of the room and pass out. Then a friend of mine, Dana Strum – who’d auditioned to be my bass player – said to me, ‘Look, Ozzy, there’s one guy you really have to see. He plays with a band called Quiet Riot, and he’s red hot.’

So one night this tiny American bloke came over to Le Parc to introduce himself. The first thing that came into my mind was: he’s either a chick or gay. He had long, wet-looking hair, and this weirdly deep voice, and he was so thin he was almost not there. He reminded me a little of David Bowie’s guitarist, Mick Ronson.

‘How old are you?’ I asked, as soon as he walked through the door.

‘Twenty-two.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Randy Rhoads.’

‘Do you want a beer?’

‘I’ll take a Coke, if you have one.’

‘I’ll get you a beer. Are you a bloke, by the way?’

Randy just laughed.

‘Seriously,’ I said.

‘Er, yeah. Last time I checked.’

Randy must have thought I was a fucking lunatic.

Afterwards, we drove over to a studio somewhere so I could hear him play. I remember him plugging his Gibson Les Paul into a little practice amp and saying to me, ‘D’you mind if I warm up?’

‘Knock yourself out,’ I said.

Then he started doing these finger exercises. I had to say to him, ‘Stop. Randy, just stop right there.’

‘What’s wrong?’ he said, looking up at me with this worried expression on his face.

‘You’re hired.’

You should have heard him play, man.

I almost cried, he was so good.

Soon we were flying back to England for rehearsals. I quickly found out that although Randy looked like Mr Cool, he was an incredibly sweet, down-to-earth guy. A real gentleman, too – not at all what you’d expect of a flash American rock ’n’ roll guitar hero.

I couldn’t understand why he even wanted to get involved with a bloated alcoholic wreck like me.

At first, we stayed at Bulrush Cottage with Thelma and the kids. The first thing we wrote was ‘Goodbye to Romance’. Working with Randy was like night and day compared with Black Sabbath. I was just walking around the house one day, singing this melody that had been in my head for months, and Randy asked, ‘Is that your song, or a Beatles song?’ I said, ‘Oh no, it’s nothing, just this thing I’ve got stuck in my head.’ But he made me sit down with him until we’d worked it out.

He was incredibly patient – I wasn’t surprised at all when I found out that his mum was a music teacher. It was the first time I’d ever felt like I was an equal partner when it came to songwriting.

Another vivid memory of working with Randy was when we wrote ‘Suicide Solution’. We were at a party for a band called Wild Horses at John Henry’s, a rehearsal studio in London. Everyone else was fucked up on one thing or another, but Randy was sitting in a corner experimenting with riffs on his Flying V, and all of a sudden he just went Dah, Dah, D’La-Dah, DAH, D’La-Dah. I shouted over, ‘Whoa, Randy! What was that?’ He just shrugged. I told him to play what he’d just played, then I started to sing this lyric I’d had in my head for a while: ‘Wine is fine, but whiskey’s quicker/ Suicide is slow with liquor’. And that was it, most of the song was written, right there. The night ended with everyone on stage, jamming.

Phil Lynott from Thin Lizzy was there. That might have been the last time I saw him before he died, actually. He was a tragic case, was Phil. I mean, I thought he missed his mark so badly. Great fucking performer, great voice, great style, but the old heroin got him in the end.

Thank God I never got into that shit.

Randy loved Britain.

Every weekend, he’d get in the van and drive somewhere, just to have a look around. He went to Wales, Scotland, the Lake District, you name it. He also collected toy trains, so wherever he went, he’d buy one. He was a quiet bloke, very dedicated, didn’t like showing off, but he could be a laugh, too. One time we were in this bar and there was a guy in the corner playing classical music on the piano, so Randy goes up to him and says, ‘D’you mind if I join you?’ The guy looks at Randy, looks around the bar, sees me, and goes, ‘Er, sure.’ So then Randy gets out his Gibson, hooks up his little practice amp, and starts playing along to this Beethoven piece or whatever it was. But as he goes along, he starts throwing in all these rock ’n’ roll moves, and by the end of it he’s on his knees, doing this wild solo with his tongue hanging out. It was fucking hilarious. The whole bar was in stitches.

The funny thing is, I don’t think Randy really ever liked Black Sabbath much. He was a proper musician. I mean, a lot of rock ’n’ roll guitarists are good, but they have just one trick, one gimmick, so even if you don’t know the song, you go, ‘Oh, that’s so-and-so.’ But Randy could play anything. His influences ranged from Leslie West to jazz greats like Charlie Christian and classical guys like John Williams. He didn’t understand why people were into ‘Iron Man’, ’cos he thought it was so simple a kid could play it.

We had arguments about that, actually. I’d say, ‘Look, if it works, who cares if it’s simple? I mean, you can’t get much easier than the riff to “You Really Got Me” – but it’s awesome. When I first bought that single, I played it until the needle on my dad’s radiogram broke.’

Randy would just shrug and say, ‘I guess.’

One thing Sharon’s brother managed to get done when we were in England was find us a bass player – Bob Daisley, an Aussie bloke who’d been signed to Jet with a band called Widowmaker, which was how David knew him. I liked Bob immediately. He was a proper rock ’n’ roller – he wore denim jackets with cut-out sleeves and had his hair all blown out – and we’d go down the pub and do a bit of coke once in a while.

Another good thing about Bob was that he wasn’t just a bass player. He could chip in with songwriting, too.

And we had a laugh together – at first, anyway.

Getting a drummer wasn’t so easy.

We seemed to audition half of Britain before we finally came across Lee Kerslake, who’d played with Uriah Heep. He was all right, Lee – one of those big old pub blokes. Solid drummer, too. But the guy I’d really wanted – Tommy Aldridge, from the Pat Travers Band – wasn’t available.

Another early member of our line-up was a keyboard player from Ipswich called Lindsay Bridgewater. He was a very educated boy, was Lindsay, and he’d never met the likes of us before. I told him, ‘Lindsay, you look like a fucking school teacher. I want you to backcomb your hair, put on a white cape, get yourself some black lipstick and some black eyeliner. And while you’re playing, I want you to growl at the audience.’

The poor bloke didn’t last long.

I’d be talking out of my arse if I said I didn’t feel like I was in competition with Black Sabbath when we made Blizzard of Ozz. I wished them well, I suppose, but part of me was shitting myself that they were going to be more successful without me. And their first album with Dio was pretty good. I didn’t rush out and buy it, but I heard some tracks on the radio. It went to number nine in Britain and number twenty-eight in America. But by the time we’d got Blizzard in the can at Ridge Farm Studios in Surrey, I knew we had a cracking album of our own. We had a couple of cracking albums, actually, because we had a lot of material left over when we were done.

And it was magic to be in control – like I’d finally pulled something off. Then again, even if you think something’s brilliant, you never know if the general public’s going to pick up on it. But as soon as the radio stations got hold of ‘Crazy Train’, it was a done deal. The thing just exploded.

When the album came out in Britain in September 1980, it went to number seven in the album charts. When it came out in America six months later, it peaked at number twenty-one, but it eventually sold four million copies, making it one of Billboard’s Top 100 bestselling albums of the decade.

Reviews?

Didn’t read ’em.

A few nights before the tour started, I got Sharon in the sack for the first time. It had taken fucking long enough. We’d been at Shepperton Studios in Surrey, rehearsing for our first gig – which was going to be in Blackpool under the fake name of The Law – and we were all staying at the same hotel across the road. So I just followed Sharon back to her room. I think I might even have used my extra-special pick-up line: ‘Can I come back and watch your telly?’ The usual reply to this was, ‘Fuck off, I ain’t got one.’

But this time it worked.

I was shitfaced, obviously. So was Sharon – she must have been. All I remember is her deciding to take a bath, and me ripping off my clothes and jumping in with her. Then one thing led to another, as things tend to do when you jump in a bath with a chick.

I fell for Sharon so badly, man.

The thing is, before I met her, I’d never come across a girl who was like me. I mean, when me and Sharon went out, people used to think we were brother and sister, we were so similar. Wherever we went, we were always the drunkest and the loudest.

We got up to some crazy shit in those early days.

One night in Germany, we went to a big dinner with the head of CBS Europe, who were releasing Blizzard of Ozz over there. He was a big, bearded, cigar-chomping bloke, and very straight. I was out of my fucking clock, of course. So we’re all sitting there at this huge table, and halfway through the meal I get the idea to climb on the table and start doing a striptease. Everyone thinks it’s funny for a while. But I end up stark bollock naked, take a piss in the CBS guy’s carafe of wine, kneel down in front of him, and kiss him on the lips.

They didn’t think that was very funny.

We didn’t get a record played in Germany for years afterwards. I remember being on the plane, flying out of Berlin, with Sharon ripping up the contracts and saying, ‘Well, that’s another country gone.’

‘It was worth it for the striptease though, wasn’t it?’ I asked.

‘That wasn’t a striptease you were doing, Ozzy. It was a fucking Nazi goose-step. Up and down the table. That poor German bloke looked mortified. Then you put your balls in his fucking wine.’

‘I thought I pissed in his wine?’

‘That was before you pissed in his wine.’

Then we went to Paris, and I was still wasted from Berlin. I was crazy drunk, because people kept giving us all these free bottles of booze. By then, everyone had heard about what went on in Germany, so these very nervous record company people took us out for a drink at a nightclub. Everyone was talking about business, so to relieve the boredom I turned to the bloke next to me and said, ‘Hey, will you do me a favour?’

‘Sure,’ he said.

‘Punch me in the face.’

‘What?’

‘Punch me in the face.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘Look, I asked you to do me a favour, and you said you would. You promised. So punch me in the fucking face.’

‘No!’

‘Just punch me.’

‘Mr Osbourne, I’m sorry, but I can’t do that.’

‘Come on! YOU FUCKING PROMIS—’

BLAM!

The last thing I saw was Sharon’s fist approaching my face from across the table. Then I was flat out on the floor, my nose bleeding, feeling like half my teeth were gonna fall out.

I opened my eyes and saw Sharon looking down at me. ‘Are you happy now?’ she asked me.

I spat out some blood and snot. ‘Very happy, cheers.’

Later that night, I was lying in bed in the hotel room, having the worst comedown from cocaine you could ever imagine. I was shivering and sweating and having all these paranoid fantasies. So I rolled over and tried to give Sharon a cuddle, but she just moaned and pushed me away.

‘Sharon,’ I whimpered, ‘I think I’m dying.’

Silence.

So I tried again: ‘Sharon, I think I’m dying!’

Again, silence.

One more time: ‘Sharon, I think I’m—’

‘Die quietly then. I need to sleep. I’ve got a meeting in the morning.’

We’d wind each other up all the time, me and Sharon.

One night, we went for a drink together in a hotel. We took a seat in the corner, then I went up to the bar to get the beers in. But I got distracted by a guy in a wheelchair – a Hell’s Angel. We ended up having a bit of a laugh, me and this bloke, and I ended up completely forgetting I was supposed to be taking the drinks back to Sharon. Then I heard this voice from the corner of the room.

‘Ozzy! OZZY!’

Oh shit, I thought, I’m gonna get a right old bollocking now. So, on my way over, I came up with this ridiculous story. ‘Sorry, darling,’ I said, ‘but you’ll never guess what happened to that guy. He was telling me all about it, and I just couldn’t tear myself away.’

‘Let me guess: he fell off his motorbike.’

‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘It’s much worse than that. He’s suffering from blowback.’

‘He’s suffering from what?’

‘Blowback.’

‘What the fuck is blowback?’

‘Don’t you know?’

The word had just popped into my head, so now I was desperately trying to think of what it could be.

‘No, Ozzy, I don’t know what blowback is.’

‘That’s crazy.’

‘WELL, WHAT THE FUCK IS IT, THEN?’

‘It’s this thing you can get from a chick when they give you a handjob. What happens is, they’re wanking you off, and then just as you’re about to blow your wad, they put their thumb over the end of your knob, and sometimes – if you’re really unlucky, like that poor bloke over there – the sperm flies straight back down your tubes and, well, y’know…’

‘For the millionth time, Ozzy, no, I don’t know.’

‘Well, it, er… knocks out your spinal column.’

‘Oh my God!’ said Sharon, looking really shocked. ‘That’s awful. Go and buy that poor man another drink.’

I couldn’t believe that she’d bought it.

I never gave it another thought until a couple of weeks later, when I was sitting outside a Jet Records board meeting. All I could hear was Sharon saying the word ‘blowback’ over and over again, and all the blokes in the room going, ‘What? Blowback? What the fuck are you talking about?’

Then Sharon came storming out, bright red in the face, and screamed, ‘You fucking BASTARD, Ozzy!’

Smack.

Sharon was managing me virtually single-handed when we did the Blizzard of Ozz tour. It was the first time in my career that I’d ever seen anyone plan things so carefully. Before we even started, she said, ‘We can go two ways, Ozzy. We can open for a bigger act, like Van Halen, or we can headline smaller venues. I think we should headline smaller venues, because that way you’ll always have sold-out shows, and when people see sold-out signs, they want to go. Also, you’ll be seen as a top-billing act from day one.’

It turned out to be a brilliant move.

Everywhere we went, the venues were full, and there were more people queuing up outside.

Mind you, we worked our arses off for it.

This was my chance, and I knew I was only going to get one. Me and Sharon both knew it, actually, so we went out and did every radio station, every television station, every interview we could get. Nothing was too small. Every record or ticket we sold counted.

I learned that when Sharon’s on a mission, when she wants to get something done, she’ll fucking throw herself at it, lock, stock and barrel, and she’ll not stop fighting until well after the bell’s rung. When she’s got a bee up her arse, you can’t stop her. Whereas, with me, if it hadn’t been for her pushing all the time, I doubt I would have had the same success. In fact, I know I wouldn’t.

Sharon didn’t take anything for granted. It was in her blood and how she was raised. She used to tell me that her family either had the horn of plenty, the cornucopia, or nothing. One day they had the Rolls-Royce and a colour TV in every room; the next they were hiding the car and the tellies were being repossessed. It was a real boom-and-bust household.

I trusted Sharon, like I’d never trusted anyone before on the business side of things. And that’s essential for me, because I don’t understand contracts. I choose not to understand them, I suppose, because I can’t stand all the bullshit and backstabbing.

But Sharon wasn’t only good with money. She knew how to manage my image, too. She had me out of my grubby old Black Sabbath get-up in a second. ‘When Randy’s mum came over from LA, she thought you were a roadie,’ she told me. Then she got a hairdresser over to bleach my hair. It was the eighties – you had to be flamboyant like that. People laugh at it, but when you go to a gig nowadays, you don’t know who’s in the band and who’s in the audience, because they all look the fucking same. At least when somebody got on stage with a big glossy hairdo, they looked special.

Mind you, my stage rags got so outrageous at one point, people used to think I was a drag queen. I’d wear spandex trousers and these long coats studded with rhinestones. Looking back now, I’m not embarrassed by those clothes, but I am embarrassed by how bloated I was. I was a fat, boozy, pizza-eating fuck. You should have seen my face, it was fucking massive. It wasn’t surprising, either, given how much Guinness I was putting away on a daily basis. I’m telling you, man, one pint of Guinness is like eating three dinners.

Another person I learned to trust on that tour was Tony Dennis. He was this little Geordie bloke who kept turning up to the gigs every night, without fail. It was the middle of winter, but all he’d wear over his T-shirt was this little jeans jacket. He must have frozen his nuts off when he was queuing up to get in. He came to so many shows I ended up letting him in for free, even though I couldn’t understand a fucking word he said. It was all, ‘Why-eye, y’nah, Tuhni I-uhmi, haweh man, lyke.’ For all I knew, he could have been calling me a cunt.

Anyway, we were in Canterbury, and it was minus five or something, and I asked him, ‘How do you get around, Tony?’

‘I just hitch-hike, man.’

‘And where d’you sleep?’

‘Train stations. Telephone boxes. Ahl awa the place, y’nah?’

‘I tell you what,’ I said. ‘If you want to take care of the bags for us, we’ll get you a room.’

And he’s been with me ever since, has Tony. He’s like a family member. He’s a great guy, a really wonderful human being. I’m so reliant on him, and he’s so efficient, it’s amazing. Nothing’s ever too much trouble for him, and I trust him completely. I could leave a big pile of dough on the table, come back two years later, and it would be exactly where I’d left it. He was there for my children, too, in the dark years. They still call him Uncle Tony. And all because of that one night in Canterbury when I asked him how he got around.

After our first night in the hotel opposite Shepperton Studios, me and Sharon were bonking all over the place. We couldn’t stop. And we didn’t carry on behind closed doors, either. The people around us knew exactly what was happening. Some nights Sharon would go out of one door and Thelma would come in the other. I was knackered all the time, having two women on the go. I don’t know how those French blokes do it. When I was with Sharon, for example, I’d end up calling her ‘Tharon’, which earned me more than a few black eyes.

Looking back now, of course, I should have just left Thelma.

But I didn’t want to because of the kids. I knew that if we got a divorce, it would be terrible for them, because the kids always suffer the most in a break-up. And the thought of losing my family was unbearable to me. It was just too painful, I couldn’t take it.

On the other hand I’d never known what it was like to fall in love before I met Sharon – even though we didn’t exactly have a normal romance. I mean, Sharon was piggy in the middle when I was still married to Thelma, and in the beginning she was drinking nearly as much as I was. When we weren’t shagging, we were fighting. And when we weren’t fighting, we were drinking. But we were inseparable, couldn’t stay away from each other. On the road we’d always share a room together, and if Sharon ever had to go away on business, I’d spend hours and hours talking to her on the phone, telling her how much I loved her, how much I couldn’t wait to see her again. I’d never done that with anyone before. In fact, I can honestly say that I didn’t have a clue what love was about until I met Sharon. I’d been confusing it with infatuation. Then I realised that when you’re in love, it’s not just about the messing around in the sack, it’s about how empty you feel when they’re gone. And I couldn’t stand it when Sharon was gone.

But as badly as I’d fallen for Sharon, I knew things couldn’t go on the way they were. For a while, I’d thought I could have the best of both worlds – my family, and the woman I loved – but something had to give. So that Christmas, with the British leg of the tour over, I told Thelma everything, because for some stupid drunk reason I thought that would make things better. Not the most fucking brilliant idea I ever had.

Thelma went up like a bottle of pop, kicked me out, and told me she needed time to think.

Then Don Arden put in his size-ten boot. He called Thelma to a meeting down in London and told her he was putting his son David back in charge of me, to get me away from Sharon. But the truth was, he was also shitting himself that Sharon was going to leave Jet Records and go it alone, which could end up costing him a fortune, especially if she took me with her – which is exactly what she did in the end. But Don should have known that if Sharon has her mind set on something, she’ll do it, no matter what. And if someone tries to stop her, she’ll just try twice as hard.

David didn’t last five minutes.

Before we took the Blizzard of Ozz tour to America in April 1981, we went back to Ridge Farm and recorded Diary of a Madman. To this day, I don’t know how we got that album done so quickly. It took us just under three weeks, I think.

We were all living in this crappy little flat while we were doing the sessions, and I’ll always remember the morning when I woke up and heard this amazing acoustic riff coming out of Randy’s room. I burst through his door, still in my underpants, and he was sitting there with a very uptight-looking classical instructor, having a lesson.

‘What was that you just played?’ I said, while the instructor stared at me like I was the Loch Ness Monster.

‘Ozzy, I’m busy!’

‘I know, but what was that you just played?’

‘Mozart.’

‘Right. We’re nicking it.’

‘We can’t nick Mozart.’

‘I’m sure he won’t mind.’

It ended up being the intro to ‘Diary of a Madman’ – although by the time Randy had finished messing around with it, there was hardly any Mozart left.

The rest of the album was a blur. We were so rushed for time that we ended up mixing it on the road. My producer, Max Norman, would send tapes to my hotel room, and I’d call him on payphones and tell him to add a bit more bass here or a bit more midrange there.

It was around then that Bob and Lee started to bitch and moan about everything, which drove me fucking nuts. I’d look over and they’d be huddled in the corner, whispering like schoolgirls. From the very beginning, Bob had always wanted to call the band a name, instead of it just being Ozzy Osbourne. I didn’t understand that. Why would I want to leave one band just to join another, with everyone going, ‘Shall we do this gig or that gig? Hmm, let’s think about that’? I mean, if Bob and Lee had come into Jet’s offices and said, ‘We want to be in an equal-share band with Ozzy,’ I would have said, ‘Nah, thanks, I’ve had enough of that. I want to be my own boss. See ya.’ But Bob could be pushy, and if it wasn’t for Sharon he probably would have bullied me into doing exactly what he wanted. You see, I have this problem where I just tend to roll over and go along with things. Sometimes I think it’s because I don’t play an instrument, which makes me feel like I don’t deserve to be in the room, y’know?

Anyway, at some point I remember Sharon coming up to us, very excited, and saying, ‘Great news, guys. The tickets for the Palladium in New York just went on sale, and they sold out in an hour!’ We were all cheering and whooping and doing high fives. Then Sharon went off to take a phone call. When she came back she had an even bigger smile on her face and said, ‘You’ll never guess what: the Palladium want us to do two shows in one night.’

I couldn’t believe it: everything was really taking off. But Bob and Lee went very quiet then disappeared for one of their little chin-wags. When they came back, they said, ‘Well, if we’re doing two shows, we want double our travel expenses and double our pay.’ That was a bit much for me. None of us had seen any real dough at that point, and the Ardens had put up the cash for everything – the studio time, the hotels, the food, the equipment, the staff, you fucking name it. Where did they think the money was coming from – the sky? The fact was, every last penny had to be paid back to Don, but Bob and Lee didn’t have to worry about that because they were basically session players.

I wanted them gone after that. I said to Sharon, ‘If we carry on like this, every five minutes there’s going to be another row, and I’ve had enough of that bullshit.’

So that was the end of Bob and Lee, although I worked with Bob a few times over the years, until he started suing me every other day of the week.

It’s sad, y’know, what money does to people. Always money. But I honestly believe that if Bob and Lee had stayed on, I wouldn’t be where I am today. The bad vibes would have made it impossible to get anything done. Luckily, Sharon had been working on replacements for them for a while – they’d been getting on her tits for a long time – and she managed to sign up Tommy Aldridge, the drummer I’d wanted from the start, and a bass player called Rudy Sarzo, who’d worked with Randy in Quiet Riot. And that was that.

When the second album was finally done, we packed up our stuff, got on a plane, and went to LA for a week of rehearsals and record company meetings before the tour began in Maryland.

Don’t ask me who bought the doves.

All I know is that Sharon showed them to me when we were in the limo on the way over to the Century City headquarters of CBS Records, a few days after we’d flown into LA.

‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ she said. ‘Listen. They’re cooing. Aw.’

Our meeting with CBS was a big deal.

Although Blizzard of Ozz had been a hit in England, we badly needed success in America, ’cos we were broke. Everything depended on it. Since going out on the road, we’d been living hand-to-mouth, sleeping in flea-infested hotel rooms, one of us handcuffed to a briefcase full of all the cash we had left in the world. Which was fuck-all, pretty much. We hadn’t even been paid the advance for Diary of a Madman, ’cos Sharon couldn’t prise it out of her father’s sweaty hands. Meanwhile, Thelma was talking about a divorce, which meant I could lose everything all over again.

‘What d’you want doves for, anyway?’ I asked Sharon, swigging from the bottle of Cointreau I’d brought with me.

Sharon gave me one of her looks.

‘Don’t you remember, Ozzy? Our conversation? Last night? They’re for the meeting. When we get in there, you’re going to throw the doves in the air so they fly around the room.’

‘What for?’

‘Because that’s what we agreed. And then you’re going to say “rock ’n’ roll” and give them the peace sign.’ I couldn’t remember any of it. It was only eleven o’clock in the morning, but I was already on Planet Booze. I hadn’t stopped since the night before. Or the night before that.

I’d even forgotten why we were going to see CBS. But then Sharon reminded me: ‘They need a kick up the arse because they bought Blizzard of Ozz from my father for a pathetically small sum of money, so they’re probably expecting it to bomb, which is exactly what Black Sabbath’s last two albums did in America. You’re nothing in this country as a solo artist, Ozzy. Forget about the sold-out shows in Britain. You’re starting from scratch here. When you go into this meeting, you’ve got to make an impression, show them who you are.’

‘With doves?’ I said.

‘Exactly.’

I put down the bottle and took the birds from Sharon.

‘Why don’t I bite their heads off?’ I said, holding them up in front of my face. ‘That’ll make an impression.’

Sharon just laughed, shook her head, and looked out of the window at the blue sky and the palm trees.

‘I’m serious,’ I said.

‘Ozzy, you’re not going to bite their heads off.’

‘Yeah, I am.’

‘No, you’re not, silly.’

‘Yeah, I fucking am. I’ve been feeling a bit peckish all morning.’

Sharon laughed again. I loved that sound more than I loved anything else in the world.

The meeting was bullshit. A bunch of fake smiles and limp handshakes. Then someone told me how excited they were that Adam Ant was coming to America. Adam Ant? I almost chinned the cunt when he said that. It was obvious none of them gave a shit. Even the PR chick kept looking at her watch. But the meeting went on and on while all these suits with gold watches spouted meaningless corporate marketing bollocks, until eventually I got pissed off waiting for Sharon to give me the cue to throw the doves in the air. In the end I just got up, walked aross the room, sat down on the arm of the PR chick’s chair, and pulled one of them out of my pocket.

‘Oh, cute,’ she said, giving me another fake smile. Then she looked at her watch again.

That’s it, I thought.

I opened my mouth wide.

Across the room, I saw Sharon flinch.

Then I went chomp, spit.

The dove’s head landed on the PR chick’s lap in a splatter of blood. To be honest with you, I was so pissed, it just tasted of Cointreau. Well, Cointreau and feathers. And a bit of beak. Then I threw the carcass on to the table and watched it twitch.

The bird had shit itself when I bit into its neck, and the stuff had gone everywhere. The PR chick’s dress was flecked with this nasty brown-and-white goo, and my jacket, a horrible yellow eighties thing with a Rupert the Bear-style pattern on it, was pretty much ruined. To this day, I have no fucking idea what was going on in my head. I mean, the poor dove. But I’ll tell you one thing: it made an impression, all right.

For a split second, all you could hear was everyone taking a breath at the same time and the photographer in the corner going click-click-click.

Then pandemonium.

The PR chick started screaming, ‘Ew, ew, ew!’, while a bloke in a suit ran over to the bin in the corner and puked. Then alarms started going off, as someone yelled into the intercom for security.

‘GET THIS ANIMAL OUT OF HERE! NOW!’

At that moment I took the other dove out of my pocket.

‘Hello, birdie,’ I said to it, giving it a kiss on the head. ‘My name’s Ozzy Osbourne. And I’m here to promote my new album, Blizzard of Ozz.’

Then I opened my mouth and everyone in the room went ‘NOOOOOO!’ People were covering their eyes with their arms and screaming at me to stop it and get the fuck out. But instead of biting its head off, I let it go, and it flapped happily around the room.

‘Peace,’ I said, as two massive security guards burst into the room, grabbed me by the arms, and dragged me out backwards.

The panic in that place was insane, man.

Meanwhile, Sharon was pissing herself laughing. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. I think it was just her reaction to the shock of it, more than anything else. She’d also been pretty pissed off with CBS for not showing enough enthusiasm about the album, so in a way she was probably glad I’d just given them the fright of their lives, even if it was the most horrific thing she’d ever seen. ‘You are banned from the CBS building, you freakshow,’ said the chief security bloke, after he’d pushed me out of the front door of the building into the hundred-degree LA heat. ‘If I see you here again, I’ll have you arrested, d’you understand?’

Sharon followed me outside, then she grabbed me by the collar, and kissed me.

‘That poor fucking creature,’ she said. ‘We’ll be lucky if CBS doesn’t pull the plug on the whole record after that performance. They might even sue us. You bad, bad, bad boy.’

‘So why aren’t you giving me a bollocking, then?’ I asked her, confused.

‘Because the press are going to fucking love it.’

That night, we went back to Don Arden’s house, where we were staying with Rudy and Tommy, our new rhythm section. Don’s house was a big Spanish-style deal at the top of Benedict Canyon, above Beverly Hills, with red tiles on the roof and a huge iron gate to keep the little people away. Apparently Howard Hughes had built the place for one of his girlfriends. Don had bought it after making a ton of dough from ELO, and now he lived up there like a king, with Cary Grant as his neighbour. When were in town, Don would put us up in the one of the ‘bungalows’ on the grounds. He used another one of the bungalows as the LA headquarters of Jet Records.

I was so shitfaced by the time our limo pulled up in the driveway, I barely knew what planet I was on. Then I went off with Rudy to one of the rooms at the back of the house where Don had a TV, a drinks cabinet and a ‘wet bar’. I’d moved on from Cointreau to beer by that point, which meant I needed to take a slash every five seconds. But I couldn’t be arsed to walk all the way to the bog, so I just pissed in the sink. Which wasn’t a problem until Don walked past the door in his dressing-gown, on his way to bed.

All I heard was this voice from behind me, loud enough to register on the Richter scale. ‘OZZY, ARE YOU PISSING IN MY FUCKING SINK?’

Oh, shit.

I squeezed my dick to stop the piss.

He’s gonna kill me, I thought. He’s gonna fucking kill me.

Then I had an idea: if I whip around really quick while zipping up my fly, everything will be fine. So that’s what I started to do. But I was so loaded, my hand slipped off my dick as I turned, and this jet of piss came spraying out – straight at Don.

He jumped backwards and it missed him by a fraction of an inch.

To this day, I’ve never seen a human being so angry. I swear, I thought he was gonna rip my head off and take a shit down my windpipe. The bloke was livid: red in the face, shaking, spit flying out of his mouth. The whole deal. It was terrifying. When he was done calling me every name under the sun – and a few more – he said, ‘GET OUT. GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, YOU FUCKING ANIMAL. GET OUT! GET OUT NOW!’

Then he stomped off to find Sharon. A couple of minutes later, from the other end of the house, I heard, ‘AND YOU’RE EVEN WORSE, BECAUSE YOU’RE FUCKING HIM!’

All in all, I have great memories of that first American tour.

And it wasn’t just because Blizzard of Ozz had sold a million copies by the time we’d finished. It was because I had such fabulous people around me. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve Randy Rhoads. He was the only musician who’d ever been in my band. He could read music. He could write music. He was so dedicated that he would find a classical guitar instructor in every town we went to and get a lesson. He’d give his own lessons, too. Whenever we were on the West Coast, he’d find time to go to his mother’s school and tutor the kids. He worshipped his mum, Randy did. I remember when we were recording Blizzard of Ozz at Ridge Farm, he asked if he could write a song and name it ‘Dee’ in her honour. I told him to go for it.

And I was having the greatest nights of my life with Sharon. We’d do stuff together that I’d never done before, like clubbing in New York. It couldn’t have been more different to when I went to New York with Black Sabbath – in those days, I wouldn’t even leave my room, ’cos I was always scared shitless. Coming from England, I thought the place was full of gangsters and villains. But Sharon took me out. We used to go to this bar called PJ’s, do coke, meet all these random people and have crazy adventures. We even hung out with Andy Warhol a few times – he was friends with a chick called Susan Blonde, who worked for CBS. He never said a word. He’d just sit there and take pictures of you with this freaky look on his face. Strange, strange bloke, that Andy Warhol.

I hung out a lot with Lemmy from Motörhead on that tour, too. He’s a very close friend of the family now. I love that guy. Wherever there’s a beer tent in the world, there’s Lemmy. But I’ve never seen that man fall down drunk, y’know? Even after twenty or thirty pints. I don’t know how he does it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he outlived me and Keith Richards.

Motörhead opened a few shows for us on that tour. They had this old hippy bus – it was the cheapest thing they could find – and all Lemmy would carry around with him was this suitcase full of books. That’s all he had in the world, apart from the clothes on his back. He loves reading, Lemmy. He’ll spend days at a time doing it. He came up to stay with us at the Howard Hughes house one time, and he wouldn’t leave the library.

Don Arden found him in there and threw a fit. He stormed to the lounge and shouted, ‘Sharon! Who the fuck is that caveman in my library? Get him out! Get him out of my house!’

‘Relax, Dad. It’s just Lemmy.’

‘I don’t care who he is. Get him out of here!’

‘He’s in a band, Dad. They’re supporting Ozzy.’

‘Well, for Christ’s sake at least get him a deckchair and put him out by the pool. He looks like the undead.’

Then Lemmy came strolling into the room. Don was right: he looked horrendous. We’d been out on the piss the night before, and his eyes were so red, they looked like puddles of blood.

But as soon as he saw me, he stopped dead in his tracks.

‘Fuck me, Ozzy,’ he said. ‘If I look half as bad as you do, I’m going back to bed, right now.’

When I finally got back to Bulrush Cottage at the end of 1981, I made a big effort to sort things out with Thelma. We even booked a holiday to Barbados with the kids.

Trouble is, if you’re a chronic alcoholic, Barbados isn’t the place to go. As soon as we got to the resort, I realised you could drink at the beach twenty-four hours a day. Which I saw as a challenge. We got there at five o’clock and I was legless by six. Thelma was used to seeing me pissed, but I was on another level altogether in Barbados.

All I remember is that at some point we bought tickets for a day trip around the bay on this olde worlde pirate ship. They had music and dancing and a walk-the-plank competition and all that kids’ stuff. Meanwhile, the big attraction for the adults was a barrel of rum punch they had at the ship’s bar. I just about jumped into that thing.

Every two minutes, it was glug-glug-glug.

After a few hours of that, I stripped down to my underpants, danced around the deck, then dived off the ship into these shark-infested waters. Unfortunately, I was too pissed to swim, so this big fucking Barbadian guy had to jump in after me and save my life. The last thing I remember is being hauled back on board and then falling asleep in the middle of the dance floor, still dripping wet. When the ship got back to the harbour, I was still there, dribbling and snoring. Apparently the captain came over and asked the kids, ‘Is that your dad?’ They went, ‘Yeah,’ then burst into tears.

Not exactly Father of the Year.

When we got on the plane to go home, Thelma turned to me and said, ‘This is the end, John. I want a divorce.’

I thought, Ah, she’s just pissed off because of the pirate ship incident. She’ll come to her senses.

But she never did.

When the plane landed at Heathrow, someone from Jet Records had organised a helicopter to pick me up and take me to a meeting about the Diary of a Madman tour. I said goodbye to the kids, kissed them on the heads, then Thelma looked at me for a long time.

‘It’s over, John,’ she said. ‘This time, it’s really over.’

I still didn’t believe her. I’d behaved so badly over the years, I thought she’d put up with anything. So I climbed into the helicopter and off I went to this country hotel, where Sharon was waiting with all these set designers and lighting technicians.

They led me into a conference room with a scale model of the Diary of a Madman stage in the middle of it.

It looked incredible.

‘The beauty of this stage,’ one of the technical guys told me, ‘is that it’s easy to carry, and easy to put together.’

‘It’s brilliant,’ I said. ‘Really brilliant. Now all we need is a midget.’

The idea had come to me in Barbados. Every night on the tour, halfway through ‘Goodbye to Romance’, we’d stage the execution of a midget. I’d shout, ‘Hang the bastard!’ or something like that, and this little guy would be hoisted up with a fake noose around his neck.

It would be magic.

So, before we went out on the road, we held midget auditions.

Now, most people don’t realise that little people who are in the entertainment business are all in competition for the same jobs, so they’re forever backstabbing each other. When you hold auditions, they’ll come walking in and say, ‘Oh, you don’t want to work with that last guy. I did Snow White and the Seven with him a couple of years ago, and he’s a pain in the arse.’ It always cracked me up when a midget talked about being in Snow White and the Seven. They’d say it with a completely straight face, too, like they thought it was some hip and cool underground thing to do.

After a few days of searching, we finally found just the right bloke for the job. His name was John Allen, and, funnily enough, he was an alcoholic. He’d get shitfaced after the gigs and start chasing groupies. He was paranoid, too. He carried this little penknife in a holster. One day I asked him what it was for and he said, ‘Just in case the noose slips.’ I said, ‘You’re three feet tall and you’ll be dangling twenty feet off the ground, so what are you gonna do, cut the rope? You’ll end up like a fucking pancake!’

He was a funny guy, that John Allen. He had a completely normal-sized head, so he’d be sitting opposite you on a bar stool, and you’d forget that his feet couldn’t touch the ground. But when he got loaded he’d lose his balance, so one moment he’d be there, and the next you’d hear this thump and he’d be on the floor. We used to play jokes on him all the fucking time. When we were on the tour bus, we’d wait until he passed out, then we’d put him on the highest bunk bed, so when he woke up he’d roll over and go, ‘Aarrgh!’ Splat.

He was as bad as me when it came to drinking. One time, he was so out of his shitter at Los Angeles airport that he missed his flight, so we had to send one of the roadies to pick him up. The roadie just grabbed him by the back of his trousers and threw him into the luggage compartment under the tour bus.

Then this woman came running over and shouted, ‘Hey, I saw what you did to that poor little man! You can’t treat him like that!’

The roadie just looked at her and said, ‘Fuck off. He’s our midget.’

Then this little head poked out from between the suitcases and went, ‘Yeah, fuck off, I’m his midget.’

When the tour started at the end of 1981, I was a wreck. I was in love with Sharon, but at the same time I was cut to pieces by losing my family. Then the fights between me and Sharon started to get even crazier than before. I’d get drunk and try to hit her, and she’d throw things at me. Wine bottles, gold discs, TVs – you name it, it would all come flying across the room. I ain’t proud to admit that a few of my punches reached their target. I gave her a black eye once and I thought her dad was gonna rip me into pieces. But he just said, ‘Watch yourself.’ It’s shameful, what I did when I was loaded. The fact that I ever raised my hand against a woman disgusts me. It was a fucking atrocious, unforgivable way to behave, and there’s no excuse for it, ever. And like I said before, it’s something I’ll take to the grave with me. I don’t know why Sharon stuck around, to be honest with you.

Sometimes she’d wake up in the morning and I’d be gone, ’cos I’d hitch-hiked back to Bulrush Cottage. But every time I got home, Thelma would tell me to fuck off. That went on for weeks. It was fucking me up, fucking up the kids, fucking up Thelma.

And I can only imagine what it was doing to Sharon.

It took me a long, long time to get over the break-up with Thelma. It tore me apart. I’ve said to my kids, ‘I don’t want you to think I jumped away from you and clicked my heels and said, “ bon voyage”. It wasn’t like that at all. It just about destroyed me.’

But eventually my little trips to Bulrush Cottage ended. The last time I went there it was pissing it down with rain and already getting dark. As soon as I walked through the gate, this heavy-set bloke popped out of nowhere and said, ‘Oi, where d’you think you’re going, eh?’

‘This is my house,’ I told him.

The bloke shook his head. ‘No it ain’t. This is your ex-wife’s house. And you’re not allowed within fifty yards of it. Court order. If you take one step further, you’re spending the night in jail.’

He must have been a bailiff or something.

From the garden, I could hear Thelma laughing inside the house. She was with her divorce lawyer, I think.

‘Can I at least get some clothes?’ I asked.

‘Wait here.’

Five minutes later, some of my old stage clothes came flying out of the door and landed on the grass. By the time I’d picked them up and stuffed them into a carrier bag they were soaked through. Then the door opened again, and out came my seven-foot-tall stuffed grizzly bear, his head in shreds after the time I opened fire on him with the Benelli. That bear was pretty much the only thing I got out of that divorce, along with the knackered old Merc that the cats had scratched up. Thelma got the house, every last penny I had in the bank, and a weekly allowance. I also wanted to pay for the kids to go to private schools. It was the least I could do.

I felt terribly sorry for myself that night.

Trying to carry a seven-foot bear back to London didn’t exactly make things easier. It wouldn’t fit in the cab with me, so I had to order a second cab, just for the bear. Then I had to leave it propped up against a bus stop on the street outside Sharon’s house on Wimbledon Common while I carried my bags into the hallway. But instead of going back out to get the bear, me and Sharon decided that it would be funnier to put one of her frilly kitchen aprons on it, and then get her friends to come outside and see it. But while we were trying to organise all that, someone nicked the fucking thing. I was heartbroken. I loved that bear.

As for the kids, once the damage is done with a divorce, you can’t ever make it right, although we’ve since become close again. And divorce was a much bigger deal back then.

In LA today, if your marriage breaks up, your wife will marry me, and I’ll marry your ex-wife, and we’ll all have fucking dinner and holidays in Mexico together. That ain’t cool with me. I don’t understand how people can do that. I haven’t seen Thelma for decades.

And, to be honest with you, I think it’s for the best.

By the time we took the Diary of a Madman tour to America, we were experts at midget-hanging. But there were some other problems with the show – like the medieval chain-mail suit I used to wear during a few of the numbers. As soon as I worked up a sweat, it was like being wrapped in razor blades. By the end of the night, I was carved up like a slice of roast beef. We also had a lot of trouble with our stage props. For example, we had these kabuki curtains that dropped down from above the stage in two parts, instead of parting in the middle like normal theatrical curtains do. The curtains would go down halfway through the show, and then when they were pulled up again, this mechanical arm with a giant God-like hand on the end of it would come out from under the drum riser and soar above the audience, with me crouching down in the palm. When the arm was fully extended, flames would shoot out of one of the fingers, and I’d stomp on this pedal by my foot, which would activate a catapult behind me, and about fifty pounds of raw meat would be flung into the audience.

Then I’d stand up and shout, ‘ROCK ’N’ ROLL!’

It was fucking awesome.

But, of course, what can go wrong will go wrong – and pretty much everything went wrong on the second night of the US tour. It was New Year’s Eve, and we were at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and Sports Arena, playing to a crowd of tens of thousands. First the smoke machine went on the blink. It was coughing out so much dry ice that no one could see what the fuck they were doing. Then, for some reason, one of the kabuki curtains wouldn’t come down, so we couldn’t get the giant God-like hand ready for its entrance. I remember standing there in my chain-mail suit, watching as Sharon literally swung from this curtain, trying to get it to fall. ‘Drop, you bastard, drop!’ she was screaming.

Eventually, after a couple of roadies joined in, they got the thing unstuck. But then the mechanical arm for the hand got caught up in the carpet on the floor of the stage and started to pull it from under the giant speaker cabinets behind the band, making them wobble like crazy. ‘TIMBER!’ one of the roadies shouted. For what might have been the longest thirty seconds of all our lives, Sharon, my assistant Tony and a bunch of roadies were wrestling with this carpet, trying to untangle it from the mechanical arm, to stop the whole fucking set collapsing.

Finally the carpet was pulled free, someone gave me a shove from behind, the kabuki curtains went up again, and before I knew it I was crouching down in the hand as it rose into the air, with this ocean of screaming kids below me. By that time I was convinced that something else was going to go wrong. So when the arm was fully extended, I covered my eyes and prepared to get my nuts blown off by the pyro, but the flames shot out of the finger without a problem. I was so relieved I almost wept. Then it was time for the final gimmick, so I stomped on the pedal beside my foot to activate the catapult. But what I didn’t know was that some dipshit from the stage crew had set the catapult the previous night rather than just before the show, so the elastic had gone all limp. When I pressed the button, it just went phut, and instead of this massive payload of pigs’ bollocks and cows’ entrails flying into the audience, it smacked me at 20 mph in the back of the head. The last thing I remember is screaming ‘Aaaarrgh!’ and feeling all this blood and innards dribbling down the back of my neck.

The crowd thought it was all part of the show and went fucking wild.

It became one of our trademarks, throwing butchers’ off-cuts into the audience. As well as the catapult, we used to get the midget to come on stage with buckets of innards and throw them into the audience before he was hung. It was our version of the custard-pie fights I used to love seeing on telly when I was a kid. But then the audience got involved, and the fans started to bring their own meat, and throw it at us. When we finished a gig, it looked like the Trail of fucking Tears. You’d never get that kind of shit past health and safety today.

And it was amazing how quickly it got out of control.

One time this cop came up to me after a show and said, ‘Have you any idea what you’re doing to the youth of America?’

Then he showed me this Polaroid photograph of a kid in the queue outside the gig with an ox’s head on his shoulders.

‘Holy crap,’ I said. ‘Where did he get that from?’

‘He killed it on his way to the gig.’

‘Well, I hope he was hungry.’

It was insane what the kids would bring. It started with just cuts of meat, but then it moved on to entire animals. We had dead cats, birds, lizards, all kinds of stuff. One time, someone threw this huge bullfrog on to the stage, and it landed on its back. The fucking thing was so big, I thought it was someone’s baby. I got a terrible fright. I started screaming, ‘WHAT’S THAT? WHAT’S THAT? WHAT’S THAT?’ Then it rolled over and hopped away.

With every gig, it just got crazier and crazier. Eventually people started to throw things on stage with nails and razor blades embedded in them – joke shop stuff, mainly, like rubber snakes and plastic spiders. Some of the crew started to get freaked out about it, especially after a real snake ended up on stage one night. It was well and truly pissed off about being on stage with Ozzy Osbourne, that snake was. One of the roadies caught it with one of those big nets on a stick you use to clean swimming pools.

Tony – who had a small walk-on part in the show – was the jumpiest when it came to the creepy-crawlies. Basically, all he had to do was put on this suit of armour and bring me a drink on stage during a break while the scenery was changed. But it took the poor bloke about half an hour to get the suit on and off, and he spent the whole time shitting himself about something being thrown at him. So one night, just to wind him up, I threw a rubber snake in his direction, and when he jumped backwards, one of the roadies dropped a piece of string down his back. Tony went mental. He had that suit of armour off in about three seconds, until he was standing there with nothing on but these grey tights. He was so freaked out I swear his voice went up by three octaves.

It brought the house down.

I’m telling you: something crazy happened on every night of that tour.

And then on January 20, 1982 we played the Veterans Auditorium in Des Moines, Iowa. I’ll never forget the name of that place, that’s for sure. Or how to pronounce it: ‘DEE-Moyn’.

The gig was going great. The God-like hand was working without any hitches. We’d already hung the midget.

Then, from out of the audience came this bat.

Obviously a toy, I thought.

So I held it up to the lights and bared my teeth while Randy played one of his solos. The crowd went mental.

Then I did what I always did when we got a rubber toy on stage.

CHOMP.

Immediately though, something felt wrong. Very wrong.

For a start, my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid, with the worst aftertaste you could ever imagine. I could feel it staining my teeth and running down my chin.

Then the head in my mouth twitched.

Oh, fuck me I thought. I didn’t just go and eat a fucking bat, did I?

So I spat out the head, looked over into the wings, and saw Sharon with her eyes bulging, waving her hands, screaming, ‘NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IT’S REAL, OZZY, IT’S REAL!’

Next thing I knew I was in a wheelchair, being rushed into an emergency room. Meanwhile, a doctor was saying to Sharon, ‘Yes, Miss Arden, the bat was alive. It was probably stunned from being at a rock concert, but it was definitely alive. There’s a good chance Mr Osbourne now has rabies. Symptoms? Oh, y’know, malaise, headache, fever, violent twitches, uncontrollable excitement, depression, a pathological fear of liquids…’

‘Not much chance of that,’ muttered Sharon.

‘Mania is usually one of the final symptoms. Then the patient gets very lethargic, falls into a coma, and stops breathing.’

‘Oh my God.’

‘That’s why eating a bat is generally a bad idea, from a medical standpoint.’

‘Isn’t there a vaccine?’

‘It’s usually best administered beforehand, but, yes, we can give him a shot. A few shots, actually.’

Then the doctor went to get a syringe the size of a grenade launcher.

‘OK, Mr Osbourne,’ he said. ‘You’ll need to take off your pants and bend over.’

I did as he said.

‘This might sting a bit.’

That was the last thing I heard.

Every night for the rest of the tour I had to find a doctor and get more rabies shots: one in each arse cheek, one in each thigh, one in each arm. Every one hurt like a bastard. I had more holes in me than a lump of fucking Swiss cheese. But it was better than getting rabies, I suppose. Not that anyone would have noticed the difference if I’d gone insane. Meanwhile, the press were going nuts. The next morning, I was the ‘And finally…’ item on just about every news show on the planet. Everyone thought I’d bitten the head of a bat on purpose, instead of it being a simple misunderstanding. For a while, I was worried we might be closed down, and a couple of venues did go ahead and ban us. The fans didn’t help, either. After they heard about the bat, they started bringing even crazier stuff to the gigs. Going on stage was like being at a butchers’ convention.

And, of course, the animal rights people were going nuts. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals sent people to ‘monitor’ our gigs. The crew would fuck with them all the time. They’d say, ‘Oh, Ozzy’s going to throw eighteen puppies into the audience tonight, and he won’t sing a note until they’ve all been slaughtered.’

The ASPCA believed every word of it.

They even pulled over our tour bus in Boston. I remember all these do-gooders jumping on and seeing Sharon’s Yorkshire terrier – Mr Pook – and having a fit. One of the guys shouted, ‘OK, this bus isn’t going any further. I want that dog taken into protective custody. Now!’

What did they think was going to happen? That we were going to start mowing down Yorkshire terriers with a machine-gun halfway through ‘You Lookin’ at Me Lookin’ at You’?

A few nights later, we were playing Madison Square Garden in New York. The whole place stank of shit. It turned out that they’d had a circus in there the week before, and the animals were still locked in their cages underneath the bleachers at the back. One of the venue managers came over and invited the crew to see them. But as soon as he saw me, he went, ‘I didn’t mean you.’

‘Why not?’ I said.

‘You can’t be trusted around animals.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

‘What the fuck do you think I’m going to do?’ I asked him. ‘Bite the head off an elephant?’

If you’d asked anyone on the Diary of a Madman crew which member of the band might not make it through the tour – me, Randy, Rudy or Tommy – they’d have put all their money on me.

Like the song said, the way I was boozing was a kind of suicide. It was only gonna be a matter of time.

Sharon was convinced something bad would happen. So whenever I’d been drinking in the hotel, she’d steal all my clothes, so there was no way I could leave and get into any trouble – unless I was prepared to walk down to the lobby stark bollock naked.

It worked, most of the time.

But then we got to San Antonio, Texas. As usual, I got shit-faced in the hotel. And, as usual, Sharon nicked my clothes. But she made the mistake of leaving one of her evening gowns in the room. It was this dark green frilly thing, and with a bit of ripping and tearing at the seams I got it on. Then I found some running shoes, and I was off.

So there I was in Sharon’s evening dress, on the loose, slinging this bottle of Courvoisier around the streets of San Antonio, looking for trouble. I think we might have had a photo shoot going on that day, but I can’t remember for sure. I do know that I was blasted. Then I got this sudden urge to take a piss, as you do when you’re blasted. Actually, it was more than an urge: my bladder felt like a hot cannon ball. I had to go, right there, right then. But I was in the middle of this strange town in Texas, and I didn’t have a clue where the public bogs were. So I looked around, found a quiet corner, and started taking a slash against this crumbly old wall.

Ahhhh. That’s better.

Then I heard this voice behind me.

‘You disgust me.’

‘What?’ I turned around to see this old timer in a cowboy hat, staring at me like I’d just molested his gran.

‘You’re a disgrace, d’ya know that?’

‘My girlfriend nicked my clothes,’ I explained. ‘What else was I supposed to fucking wear?’

‘It ain’t the dress, you limey faggot piece o’ dirt. That wall you’re relieving yourself on is the Alamo!’

‘The Aalawot?’

Before he could answer, two fat Texan coppers came puffing around the corner, radios crackling.

‘That’s the one,’ said the old bloke. ‘Him… in the dress.’

BAM!

I was face down in the dirt, being handcuffed.

It took a moment for it all to click. I’d definitely heard of the Alamo – I’d seen the John Wayne movie a few times. So I knew it was this big-deal place where lots of Americans had been killed while they were fighting the Mexicans. But I hadn’t made the connection between the old wall I was pissing on and the ruins of a sacred national monument.

‘You’re a Brit, ain’tcha?’ one of the cops said to me.

‘So?’

‘Well, how would you feel if I urinated on Buckingham Palace, huh?’

I gave it some thought. Then I said to him, ‘I’ve no idea. I don’t fucking live there, do I?’

That went down a treat, that did.

Ten minutes later, I was sharing a jail cell with a 280 lb Mexican bloke who’d just murdered his wife with a brick, or some crazy shit. He must have thought he was hallucinating when he saw me show up in a green frock. I was thinking, Christ, he’s going to think I’m the ghost of his missus, and then he’s going to try to give her one last dick up the arse.

But all he did was grunt and stare.

I was in the cage for about three hours. Some of the cops and their friends came over to look at me. Maybe some of them had bought Blizzard of Ozz, I don’t know. But they gave me a pretty easy ride. They did me for public intoxication, instead of the more heavy-duty desecration of a venerated object, which would have meant a year in the slammer. And they let me out in time for the gig. Although the chief came down personally to tell me that, as soon as the show was over, I had to leave town and never show my ugly mug again.

That one piss cost me a fortune in lost San Antonio gigs over the years. And rightly so; I suppose: pissing on the Alamo wasn’t the cleverest thing I’d ever done. It wasn’t so much like pissing on Buckingham Palace as pissing on one of the monuments at a Normandy beach. Unforgivable. A few years later, I apologised in person to the Mayor, promised never to do it again, and donated ten grand to the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. He let me play in the town again after that, although it took more than a decade for it to happen.

When I finally went back, I remember this scrawny Mexican kid coming up to me after the show.

‘Ozzy, is it true you got busted for pissing on the Alamo?’ he asked me.

‘Yeah,’ I told him. ‘It’s true.’

‘Shit, man,’ he said. ‘We piss on it every night on our way home.’