8

While I was Sleeping

We were in the tour bus, on our way from Tennessee to

Florida, when Randy broke the news.

‘I don’t think I want to be a rock ’n’ roller any more,’ he said.

I waited for him to crack a smile. But he didn’t.

We were sitting at a little picnic table in the kitchen area of the bus, which was like a five-star hotel on wheels. It had TVs hanging from the ceiling, shag-pile carpets, air-conditioning, limo-style windows, a flash gold and white paint job, and – of course – a fully stocked bar.

I’d been drinking gin all night. After that bad scene at the Alamo, I’d gone easy on the Courvoisier for a while.

Randy was smoking fags and sipping from a can of Coke. He hardly touched the booze. He only liked that horrible aniseed shit. What’s it called? Anisette. Like a thick, milky liqueur thing. Didn’t do drugs, either. Mind you, he made up for it with the fags. He could have won a gold medal in the Lung Cancer Olympics, could Randy Rhoads.

‘Are you joking with me?’ I said, trying not to choke on my drink.

‘No, Ozzy, I’m serious.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

It was long after midnight – maybe three or four in the morning – and me and Randy were the only ones still awake. Sharon was in the bedroom at the back. Rudy and Tommy were sprawled out on the bunks, along with some of the crew members who travelled with us, like Rachel Youngblood, an older black lady who did all our wardrobe, hair and make-up.

I was amazed they could sleep, ’cos the bus was rattling and shaking and groaning like it was gonna fall to pieces. It was a seven-hundred-mile journey from Knoxville to Orlando, and the driver was going like the clappers. I remember looking out of the window at all the headlamps of the cars and trucks flying past in the other direction and thinking, Any minute now, the wheels are gonna come off this thing. I had no idea that the driver had a nose full of coke. I only found that out later from the coroner’s report.

Mind you, I had no idea about anything, me. I was out of my skull with all the booze and the coke and the fuck-knows-what-else I was shoving down my throat, twenty-four hours a day.

But I knew I didn’t want Randy to leave.

‘How could you quit now?’ I said to him. ‘We’ve only just broken through, man. Sharon says Diary of a Madman might sell even more copies than Blizzard. It’s going fucking gangbusters all over the world. Tomorrow night we’re playing with Foreigner!’

Randy just shrugged and said, ‘I want to go to university. Get a degree.’

‘Are you mad?’ I said. ‘Keep this up for a couple of years and you can buy your own fucking university.’

At least that made him smile.

‘Look,’ I went on. ‘You’re just knackered. Why don’t you get some rest, give yourself a bit of a break, y’know?’

‘I could say the same thing to you, Ozzy.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘That’s your fourth bottle of gin in twenty-four hours.’

‘Keeps me happy.’

‘Ozzy, why do you drink so much? What’s the point?’

The right answer to that question was: because I’m an alcoholic; because I have an addictive personality; because whatever I do, I do it addictively. But I didn’t know any of that back then.

All I ever knew was that I wanted another drink.

So I just gave Randy a blank look.

‘You’ll kill yourself, y’know?’ said Randy. ‘One of these days.’

‘Goodnight Randy,’ I said, draining my glass. ‘I’m off to bed.’

When I opened my eyes a few hours later, it was getting light. Sharon was lying next to me in her dressing-gown. My head felt like a pile of toxic shit.

I couldn’t understand why I’d woken up so early. The gin should have knocked me out until at least mid-afternoon.

Then I heard the noise.

It sounded like an engine at full revs. I thought we must have been overtaking a truck.

BBBBBBRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRMMMM…

Whatever it was that was making the din seemed to move away from the bus, but then all of a sudden it came back, even louder than before

BBBBBBRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRMMMMMMMMMM-MMMMMMBBBBBBRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRMMMMMM MMM…

‘Sharon?’ I said. ‘What the fuck is that noi—’

Then my head smashed into the bed frame as all the windows of the bus exploded.

I could smell fuel.

For a second, there was nothing but blackness.

Next thing I know I’m looking out of the porthole-shaped window next to my left arm. I can see black smoke and people with their heads in their hands, screaming. So I jump out of bed – stark bollock naked apart from a pair of greasy old underpants – and force open the bedroom door. There are tiny fragments of glass everywhere, and a fucking massive hole in the roof. Then I notice that the entire bus has been bent into a V-shape.

The first thing that comes into my head is that the driver must have lost control on the freeway. We must have crashed.

Then I’m coughing from the stench of the fuel and the smoke from the fire outside.

And I think: Fire and fuel. Oh, fuck.

‘EVERYONE GET OFF THE FUCKING BUS!’ I start to shout. ‘IT’S GONNA BLOW! IT’S GONNA BLOW!’

Panic.

Numb legs.

Sharon screaming.

I was still sozzled from the gin. My head was throbbing. My eyes were all crusty and raw. I looked for an emergency exit, but there wasn’t one. So I ran to the open door at the front of the bus instead, pulling Sharon along behind me. Then I looked around for the others, but all the bunks were empty. Where the fuck had everyone else gone? Where the hell was Randy?

I jumped out of the bus and landed on grass.

Grass?

At that point I thought I must have been dreaming.

Where was the road? Where were the cars? I’d expected to see twisted metal, blood, spinning hub-caps. But we were parked in the middle of a field, surrounded by a bunch of over-the-top, coke-dealer-style mansions. I saw a sign that said, ‘Flying Baron Estates’. Then, next to one of the houses, a gigantic fireball – like something from the set of a James Bond film. That’s where all the smoke was coming from. There was wreckage strewn around it. And what looked like…

Oh, Jesus Christ. I almost threw up when I saw that shit.

I had to turn away.

Aside from the smoke, it was a clear day – but it was early, so there was still a kind of muggy haze in the air.

‘Where are we? What’s happening?’ I kept saying, over and over. I’d never felt so totally fucking out-of-it in my life. It was worse than the worst acid trip I’d ever had. Then I noticed what looked like an air strip and a hangar. Next to the hangar, a woman in riding gear was walking next to a horse, like nothing had happened – like this was an everyday fucking occurrence. I was thinking, This is a nightmare, I’m dreaming, this can’t be real.

I stood there, in a trance, while our keyboard player, Don Airey, ran back to the bus, grabbed a miniature fire extinguisher from somewhere, jumped off the bus, then pointed it in the direction of the flames.

It spluttered and dribbled uselessly.

Meanwhile, Sharon was trying to do a head count, but people were scattered all over the field. They were just pointing at the flames and wailing and sobbing.

Now I could make out the remains of a garage around the flames. It looked as though there were two cars inside.

Something must have crashed into it.

And whatever it was must also have ripped the hole in our tour bus and taken out half the trees behind it.

Then Sharon went over to Don – ‘El-Doom-O’, we used to call him, ’cos he was always expecting the worst – and screamed, ‘What happened? Tell me, what the fuck happened?’ But Don was crouched down in a ball and couldn’t talk. So Sharon turned to Jake Duncan, our Scottish tour manager. But he couldn’t say anything, either. Next thing I knew, Sharon took off her shoe and just started beating Jake around the head with it.

‘Where are Randy and Rachel? Where are Randy and Rachel?’

All Jake could do was point towards the flames.

‘I don’t understand,’ Sharon said. ‘I don’t understand.’

I didn’t understand, either. Nobody had said, ‘Oh, by the way, Ozzy, on the way to Orlando, we’re gonna stop off at a bus depot in Leesburg to fix the air conditioning.’ Nobody had said, ‘Oh, and by the way, Ozzy, the bus depot is part of this dodgy housing estate with an air strip.’ Nobody had said, ‘Oh, yeah, and your driver – who’s been up all night, out of his mind on cocaine – also happens to be pilot with an expired medical certificate who’s going to borrow some bloke’s plane without his permission and then, while you’re fast asleep, take your lead guitarist and your make-up artist on a sight-seeing trip above the tour bus, before dive-bombing into it.’

Nobody had said anything like that at all.

Then the house next to the garage catches fire, and without even thinking I’m running towards it – still half-pissed, still in my underpants – to make sure no one’s inside. When I get to the front door, I knock, wait for about two seconds, then barge in.

In the kitchen an old bloke is making coffee. He almost falls off his chair when he sees me.

‘Who the hell are you?’ he says. ‘Get out of my house!’

‘There’s a fire!’ I shout at him. ‘Get out! Get out!’

The guy was clearly insane, ’cos he just picked up a broom from the corner and tried to push me away with it. ‘Get out of my house, you little bastard! Go on, fuggarf!’

‘YOUR FUCKING HOUSE IS ON FUCKING FIRE!’

‘GEDDOUT! GEDDOUT, GODAMMIT!’

‘YOUR HOUSE IS—’

Then I realised he was stone deaf. He wouldn’t have heard if the entire fucking planet had exploded. He certainly couldn’t hear a word this long-haired, raving English loony in his under-pants was telling him. I couldn’t think what to do, so I just ran to the other side of the kitchen, where there was a door which led to the garage. I opened it, and the fucking thing practically blew off its hinges from the force of the fire.

The old bloke didn’t tell me to get out of his house again after that.

We only learned the full story much later. The bus driver was called Andrew C. Aycock. Six years earlier, he’d been involved in a fatal helicopter crash in the United Arab Emirates. Then he’d got a job working for the Calhoun Twins, a Country & Western act who owned the company that was doing the transportation for our tour. When we stopped at the bus depot to fix the air conditioning, Aycock decided to try his luck at flying again. So, without asking, he took a plane belonging to a mate of his.

Don and Jake were the first to go up with him. Everything was fine: the take-off and landing went smoothly. Then it was Randy and Rachel’s turn. There’s a photograph of the two of them standing beside the plane, just before they got on. They’re both smiling. I saw it once, but I could never look at it again. I’m told that Rachel agreed to go up only after Aycock promised not to pull any stunts while they were in the air. If he promised her that, he was a fucking liar as well as a coked-up lunatic: everyone on the ground said he buzzed the tour bus two or three times before the wing clipped the roof a few inches from where me and Sharon were sleeping. But the most insane thing – and the one fact I still can’t get my head around, nearly thirty years later – is that the bloke was going through a heavy-duty divorce at the time, and his soon-to-be-ex missus was standing right next to the bus when he crashed the plane into it. He’d picked her up at one of the tour venues, apparently, and was giving her a ride home.

A ride home? The woman he was divorcing?

At the time, there was a lot of talk that he might have been trying to kill her, but who the fuck knows? Whatever he was trying to do, he came down so low that even if he’d managed to miss the tour bus, he would have hit the trees behind it.

Don watched the whole thing happen.

I feel bad for him, ’cos it must have been a terrible thing to see. When the wing hit the bus, Randy and Rachel were thrown through the windscreen, or so I was told. Then the plane – minus its wing – smashed into the trees behind, fell into the garage, and exploded. The fire was so intense, the cops had to use dental records to identify the bodies.

Even now I don’t like talking or thinking about it.

If I’d been awake, I would have been on that fucking plane, no question. Knowing me, I’d have been on the wing, pissed, doing handstands and backflips. But it makes no sense to me that Randy went up.

He hated flying.

A few weeks earlier, I’d been drinking with him in a bar in Chicago. We were about to take a ten-day break from the tour, and Randy was asking how long it would take him to drive from New York to Georgia, where we were starting up again. I asked why the fuck he would want to drive all the way from New York to Georgia when there was an invention called the aeroplane. He told me he’d been freaked out by the Air Florida plane that had crashed into a bridge in Washington a few days earlier. Seventy-eight people had died. So Randy wasn’t exactly the type of person to go clowning around in a bullshit four-seat piece of shit. He didn’t even want to get on a jet run by a big commercial airline.

Some weird fucking unexplained shit went on that morning, because Rachel didn’t like planes, either. She had a weak heart, so she would hardly have wanted to do a loop-the-fucking-loop. A lot of people say, ‘Oh, they were pissing around, typical fucking rock stars.’ I want to set the record straight: Rachel was in her late fifties and had a heart condition; Randy was a very level-headed guy and he was afraid of flying. None of it makes any sense.

By the time the fire engines arrived, the flames had already burned themselves out. Randy was gone. Rachel was gone. I finally put on some clothes and took a beer from what was left of the fridge in the bus. I couldn’t handle the situation. Sharon was running around trying to find a telephone. She wanted to call her father. Then the cops arrived. Good ol’ boy types. They weren’t too sympathetic.

‘Ozzy Ozz-Burn, huh?’ they said. ‘The bat-eating madman.’

We checked into some shithole called the Hilco Inn in Leesburg and tried to hide from the press while the police did their thing. We had to call Randy’s mum and Rachel’s best friend Grace, which was horrendous.

All of us wanted to get the fuck out of Leesburg, but we had to stay put until all the paperwork was done.

None of us could get our heads around the situation. Everything had been magic one minute, and the next it had taken such an ugly, tragic turn.

‘Y’know what? I think this is a sign that I ain’t supposed to do this any more,’ I said to Sharon.

By then I was having a total physical and mental breakdown. A doctor had to come over and shoot me up with sedatives. Sharon wasn’t doing much better. She was in a terrible state, poor Sharon. The one thing that gave us some comfort was a message from AC/DC saying, ‘If there’s anything we can do, let us know.’ That meant a lot to me, and I’ll always be grateful to them for it. You learn who your friends are when the shit hits the fan. In fact, AC/DC must have known exactly what we’d been going through, ’cos it had only been a couple of years since their singer Bon Scott had died from alcohol poisoning, also at a tragically young age.

The morning after the crash I called my sister Jean, who told me that my mother had been on a bus when she’d seen a newspaper stand with the headline, ‘OZZY OSBOURNE – AIRCRASH DEATH’. My poor old mum had gone crazy. Then later that day, I went back to the dodgy housing estate with Randy’s brother-in-law. The bus was still there, twisted into the shape of a boomerang, next to the ruins of the garage. And there, in the corner, untouched in all the ash and rubble, was a perfect little cut-out section of the Gibson T-shirt that Randy had been wearing when he died. Just the logo, nothing else. I couldn’t believe it – it was so spooky.

Meanwhile, outside the hotel, all these kids had started to hang around. I noticed that some of them were wearing the Diary of a Madman tracksuits we’d had made for the tour, so I said to Sharon, ‘We’re not selling those things, are we?’ When she said ‘no’, I walked up to this kid and asked, ‘Where did you get the tracksuit from?’

He said, ‘Oh, I went in and got it off the bus.’

I went fucking crazy. Almost ripped his head off.

Eventually all the paperwork was done – the only drug they found in Randy’s body was nicotine – and the cops let us leave. They were glad to see us go, I imagine.

Then we had to do two funerals in one week, and it was fucking heavy-duty on all of us, especially Sharon, who suffered terribly. She couldn’t even listen to the Diary of a Madman album again for years.

Randy’s funeral was held at the First Lutheran Church in Burbank. I was one of the pallbearers. They had big pictures of Randy all around the altar. I remember thinking: It’s only been a few days since I was sitting on the bus with him, calling him mad for wanting to go to university. I felt so bad. Randy was one of the greatest guys who’d ever been in my life. And I suppose I felt guilty, too, because if he hadn’t been in my band, he wouldn’t have died. I don’t know how Randy’s mother survived the funeral – she must be some kind of woman. Her little baby had died. She was divorced, Delores was, so her kids meant everything to her. And Randy really loved her – he absolutely adored her. For years after, every time me and Sharon used to see Dee, we felt terrible. I mean, what can you say? It’s gotta be any parent’s worst nightmare when they lose their child like that.

After the service there was a motorcade from Burbank to San Bernardino, about an hour away. Randy was laid to rest at a place called Mountain View Cemetery, where his grand -parents were buried. I made a vow there and then to honour his death every year by sending flowers. Unlike most of my vows, I kept it. But I’ve never been back to his graveside. I’d like to go there again one day, before I finally join him on the other side.

Rachel’s funeral couldn’t have been more different. It was at a black gospel church somewhere in South LA. She was very big on her church, Rachel was. And during the service they’re all singing gospel and diving on the floor and shouting, ‘Jesus Loves You, Rachel!’ I’m thinking, What the fuck’s all this about? It’s a joyous experience, an African-American funeral. There’s no moping around.

The following week I did the David Letterman show. It was surreal, man. As soon as I’d sat down and the band stopped playing, Dave said to me, ‘Let’s just get right to it, Ozzy. From what I hear, you bit the head off a…’

I couldn’t believe he was going there.

‘Oh, don’t,’ I said. But it was too late.

Dave was very cool with me overall – he was very nice, very sympathetic – but I was in no mood for the bat story. Shock is a very weird thing, and the funerals had been bad.

At the end of the interview, Dave said to me, ‘I know that recently there’s been a personal and professional tragedy in your life. Quite honestly, I’m surprised that you went ahead with your commitment to be here, and I appreciate that, and I know you want to take a minute to explain.’

‘All I can say is that I lost two of the greatest people in my life,’ I said, trying not to choke up. ‘But it ain’t gonna stop me because I’m about rock ’n’ roll, and rock ’n’ roll is for the people, and I love people, and that’s what I’m about. I’m going to continue because Randy would have liked me to, and so would Rachel, and I’m not going to stop, ’cos you can’t kill rock ’n’ roll.’

If it sounds a bit over-the-top, it’s ’cos I was as pissed as a fart. It was the only way I could function.

In private, I wasn’t so sure that you couldn’t kill rock ’n’ roll. ‘It’s not meant to be,’ I kept telling Sharon. ‘Let’s call it a day.’

But she wasn’t having any of it. ‘No, we are not calling it a day. This is what you’re meant to do, Ozzy. Nothing’s gonna stop us.’ If Sharon hadn’t given me that speech a few times, I’d never have gone on a stage again.

I don’t know who started making the calls to find a new guitarist. Sharon was a mess, totally distraught, so maybe her father’s office organised it from LA. But eventually the search became a welcome distraction, a way to take our minds off things. I remember at one point I phoned Michael Schenker, the German guy who had played with UFO. He was like, I’ll do you this favour, but I want a private jet, and I want this, and I want that. I said to him, ‘Why are you stipulating your demands at this point? Just get me though the next show and we’ll talk about it.’ But he just kept saying, Oh, I’ll need this and I’ll need that. So in the end I said, ‘Y’know what? Go fuck yourself.’

He’s nuts anyway, Schenker, so I don’t hold it against him.

Our first stand-in was Bernie Tormé, a tall, blond Irish guy who had played with Ian Gillan’s band. Bernie was in an impossible situation, trying to take Randy’s place, but he couldn’t have been more helpful. Having been thrown in at the deep end, he did an incredible job for a few nights, before leaving to record with his own band. Next we hired Brad Gillis, from Night Ranger, and he got us through to the end of the tour.

I honestly don’t know how we did any of those gigs after Randy died. We were all in a state of shock. But I suppose being on the road was better than sitting around at home, thinking about the two incredible people we’d lost, and how we’d never get them back.

A few weeks after Randy died, I asked Sharon to marry me. ‘If there’s one good thing that could come out of all the shit we’ve been through on this tour,’ I told her, ‘it would be making you my wife.’

She said yes. So I put a ring on her finger, and we set a date.

Then the booze wore off and I changed my mind.

After everything that had gone down with Thelma, I was terrified of going through it all again. But then I got over the fear. I was in love with Sharon, and I knew I didn’t want anyone else. So, a few weeks later, I proposed again.

‘Will you marry me?’ I asked her.

‘Fuck off.’

‘Please?’

‘No.’

‘Please?’

‘All right then, yes.’

It went on like that for months. We had more engagements than most people have wedding guests. After the first one, it was usually Sharon who called them off. One time, when we were driving to a meeting in LA, she threw her ring out of the car window ’cos I hadn’t come home the night before. So I went out and bought her another one. Then I got pissed and lost it, but I didn’t realise until after I’d got down on one knee.

So that one was a non-starter.

But a couple of days later, I bought her another ring and we got engaged yet again. But then I was walking home after a twenty-four-hour bender, and I passed a graveyard. There was one freshly dug grave with a bunch of flowers on top. Beautiful flowers, actually. So I nicked them and gave them to Sharon when I got home. She almost burst into tears, she found it so touching.

Then she made this little sobbing noise and went, ‘Oh, Ozzy, and you even wrote me a note, how sweet!’

Suddenly I was thinking: What note? I can’t remember writing any note.

But it was too late. Sharon was already opening up the envelope and pulling out the card.

‘In loving memory of our dearest Harry,’ it said.

That was another ring out of the fucking window.

And I got a black eye, for good measure.

I proposed to her seventeen times in the end. You could track me home by the trail of rings. They weren’t fucking cheap, either. But they got a lot cheaper as time went on, that’s for sure.

Then, as soon as I’d signed the decree-whatever-the-fuck-it’s-called to make my divorce with Thelma official, Sharon chose July 4 as our wedding day – so I’d never forget the anniversary.

‘At least it’s not the first of May,’ I said to her.

‘Why?’

‘That’s the date Thelma chose so I’d never forget the anniversary.’

With things getting serious with Sharon, she started to get heavy with me about all the cocaine I was doing. She was fine with the booze, but the coke – no way. The fact that our psycho bus driver had been high on coke when he killed Randy and Rachel made it even worse.

Every time I took the stuff, I’d get a bollocking – to the point where I had to start hiding it from her.

But that caused even more problems.

One time, we were staying in one of the bungalows at the Howard Hughes house, and I’d just bought this eight-ball – an eighth of an ounce of coke – from my dealer.

‘This stuff’s gonna knock your head off,’ the bloke had told me.

As soon as I got back to the bungalow I went over to the bookshelves and hid the plastic bag inside this hardback novel. ‘Third shelf up, six books to the left,’ I kept repeating, so I’d remember. I was planning to save it for a special occasion, but that night I was having a bit of a bad comedown, so I decided to have a little toot. I made sure that Sharon was asleep, tiptoed out of the bedroom, went over to the bookshelves, counted three up and six across, then opened up the novel. No coke. Fuck.

Maybe it was six shelves up and three books from the left?

Still no coke.

So I sneaked out of the bungalow and knocked on the window of the room where Tommy was staying. ‘Pssst!’ I whispered. ‘Hey, Tommy! Are you awake, man? I can’t find the fucking coke.’

The second I said that, there was this clattering noise behind me.

Sharon had flung open the window of our bungalow.

‘IS THIS WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR, YOU FUCKING DRUG ADDICT?’ she shouted, emptying the bag of coke on to a sheet of paper.

‘Sharon,’ I said. ‘Be cool. Don’t do anything cra—’

But then she goes puff, and blows all the coke into the garden.

Before I even have time to react, Sharon’s Great Dane comes lolloping out from his kennel, and starts licking up the coke from the grass like it’s the best thing he’s ever tasted in his life. I’m thinking, This ain’t gonna be good news. Then the dog’s tail goes straight out – BOING! – and he takes this enormous shit. I’ve never seen such a big shit in my life, and it goes all over the water fountain in the courtyard. Then the dog takes off. He’s a fucking huge dog, this Great Dane, so when he runs he does some damage, knocking over plant pots, denting cars, trampling over flower beds, but he keeps it up for three days and three nights straight, his tongue hanging out, his tail still standing on end.

By the time the coke wore off, I swear the dog had lost four pounds. He’d developed a bit of a taste for the old waffle dust, too.

He was always trying to sniff it out after that.

We got married in Hawaii on the way to a gig in Japan. It was a small ceremony on the island of Maui. Don Arden showed up, but only because he wanted Sharon to sign some paper-work. My mum and my sister Jean came, too. Tommy was my best man. The funny thing about getting married in America was that we needed to get a blood test before they’d give us a licence. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the bloke from the lab had called back and said, ‘Mr Osbourne, we appear to have found some blood in your alcohol.’

There was a lot of drinking at that wedding, not to mention seven bottles of Hennessy in the wedding cake. If you’d been breathalysed after eating a slice of that stuff, you’d have gone to jail. And I was smoking some killer weed, too.

‘Maui-wowy’, the local dealer called it.

The stag night was a joke. I got so fucked up in the hotel, I missed it. There’s a photograph of me crashed out in the room as everyone’s getting ready to leave. Fucking classic. The wedding night was even worse. I didn’t even make it back to the room to spend the night with my new wife. At five in the morning, the hotel manager had to call her room and say, ‘Will you please come and get your husband. He’s asleep in the corridor and blocking the maids.’

*

It wasn’t long after I almost pissed in my new father-in-law’s face that he stopped calling me Ozzy. He took to calling me ‘Vegetable’ instead. As in, ‘Fuck off, Vegetable,’ or, ‘Die, Vegetable,’ or, ‘Get out of my fucking house, right now, Vegetable.’ I could understand why the bloke was upset – no one likes to get piss splashed in their direction – but I thought that was a bit much.

Mind you, it was nothing compared with how he’d talk to Sharon. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have your own father say such fucking horrific things to you, but Sharon could take it. She was unbelievably tough like that. And I suppose she was just used to it. Most of the time it was me who got upset. I’d sit there and ask myself, How can a human being even come up with that shit? Never mind say it to their own flesh and blood. It was just the vilest stuff, from the depths of the lowest places.

Then, the next thing you knew, they were friends again.

That’s how Sharon was raised – and why she’s so extreme. But I needed someone like her in my life, because she could stand up to me. In fact, standing up to me was nothing compared with standing up to her father.

In the end, what happened between Sharon and her old man was tragic. At the time, I was too out of it on booze and drugs to know exactly what went down, and it’s not my place to say much about it now. All I know is that Sharon found out that Don was having an affair with a girl younger than she was; that we left Jet Records, which made Don go apeshit; and that we had to pay him $1.5 million to buy out our contract and stop him bankrupting us with lawsuits. There had always been bad blood between the two of them, but it got out of control. Eventually, they stopped talking to each other altogether, and the silence continued for almost twenty years.

If any good came out of that situation, it was that we borrowed as much dough as we could to buy out all of my contracts, so that we weren’t controlled by anyone. I remember Sharon going in for a meeting with Essex Music and saying, ‘OK, how much do you want to fuck off? This is going to get ugly, because we’re not playing along any more. Just give us the number, and we’ll pay it.’

A week later, I had my own publishing company.

Meanwhile, Don might have thought I was a vegetable, but from the moment Sharon bought out my contract, he never stopped trying to get it back – usually by attempting to fuck up our marriage. He could be a really devious guy when he wanted to be, could my father-in-law. One time, for example, I was staying with Sharon at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and we’d rented this very conspicuous white Rolls-Royce Corniche to ride around town in. But then I got shitfaced, we had this crazy fight about something, and Sharon fucked off, saying she was going back to England. Literally two minutes after she walked out of the door, the phone rang. It was Don. ‘I need to talk to you, Veg… er, Ozzy,’ he said. ‘It’s urgent.’

Looking back, he must have had someone outside the hotel, looking out for Sharon driving the Roller by herself. Otherwise, how would he have known that I was alone? The last thing I wanted to do was talk to him, but I couldn’t say no. The guy was terrifying. If you believed the rumours, he kept a loaded gun in his desk.

So Don came over and started telling me the most vile things you could ever imagine about my wife. It was the most disgusting stuff I’d ever heard. It was inhuman, what he said. And he was talking about his own daughter.

Eventually, he paused for breath, then asked me, ‘Did you know all that, Ozzy? Did you know what your wife’s really like?’

Obviously, he wanted me to go crazy, leave Sharon, return to Jet Records, and start over.

But I wasn’t gonna give him the pleasure.

He had no right to come to my room and make up all this horrendous bullshit about my wife. I didn’t believe a single fucking word of it. Anyway, whatever Sharon had done, it couldn’t have been any worse than what I’d done. And it certainly wasn’t anywhere near as bad as what Don himself was doing. But I thought that the best way to piss him off would be just to act like it was no big deal.

‘Yeah, Don,’ I said. ‘I know all that about Sharon.’

‘You do?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And?’

‘And what, Don? I love her.’

‘If you want to get the marriage annulled, we can always arrange that for you, y’know?’

‘No thanks, Don.’

I could never believe what that guy was willing to do to his own family. Years later, for example, we found out that when he’d been managing me – and before then, even – he’d used Sharon as a shield. All of his companies, credit cards, bank accounts and loans were in her name. Basically Don didn't exist on paper, so if he didn’t pay his bills, he couldn’t be sued. And that included his tax bills, which he just fucking ignored – in England and America. Which left Sharon on the hook for everything without her ever knowing it. Then one day, out of the blue, she got a letter from the IRS saying she owed them, big time. By the time they’d added up all the unpaid taxes, interest and penalties, it came to seven figures. Don had taken her to the fucking cleaners.

‘I don’t know what your father’s made of,’ I said to her, ‘because I could never do that to my children.’

It drove Sharon halfway round the bend, that tax bill.

In the end, I said, ‘Look, whatever you’ve got to pay, just pay it, because I don’t want to live another day with this fucking thing hanging over us. You can’t avoid tax, so just get it done, and we’ll cut back on our expenses and work around it.’ That kind of thing happens a lot in the music business. When Sammy Davis Jr died, I heard that he left his wife with a seven-million-dollar tax bill, which took her a fucking eternity to pay off.

And there ain’t nothing you can do about it. You’ve just got to put on a brave face and dig deep.

But it was worth going through all that bullshit with Don to get my freedom. All of a sudden I could do whatever I wanted, no matter what he said. Like when I was in New York one time and I met up with my lawyer, Fred Asis, a great guy, ex-military. He told me that he had a meeting later with another one of his clients, a band called Was (Not Was), who were going crazy because their lead singer hadn’t shown up at the studio for a session.

‘I’ll stand in for him, if you want,’ I said, half joking.

But Fred took it seriously. ‘OK, I’ll ask them,’ he said.

Next thing I know I’m in this studio in New York, doing a rap on this song called ‘Shake Your Head’. I had a right old laugh – especially when I heard the final version, which had all these hot young backing-singer chicks on it. I still love that song today. It’s funny, y’know, because I’d always admired the Beatles for starting out as a bubblegum pop group and then getting heavier and heavier as their albums went on, and here was me going in the opposite direction.

But it wasn’t until years later that I heard the full story. I was at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood, and Don Was was there. By that time he’d become one of the biggest producers in the music business, and Was (Not Was) were huge. I remember him rushing over to me and gasping, ‘Ozzy, I’ve gotta tell you something about that song we did, “Shake Your Head”. This is gonna blow your mind.’

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘Well, remember how we had all those backing singers on there?’

‘Yeah.’

‘One of them ended up going off on her own and making a few albums. You might have heard of her.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Madonna.’

I couldn’t believe it: I’d made a record with Madonna. I told Don to re-release it, but for whatever reason he couldn’t get clearance. So we ended up re-recording it, with Kim Basinger taking Madonna’s place.

I did quite a few duets back in the eighties. One with Lita Ford – ‘Close My Eyes Forever’ – ended up being a Top-Ten single in America. I even did a version of ‘Born to be Wild’ with Miss Piggy, but I was disappointed when I found out she wouldn’t be in the studio at the same time as me (maybe she’d found out about my job at the Digbeth slaughterhouse). I was just having some fun, y’know? It wasn’t about money. Although, after we bought out Don Arden and the publishers and had paid off our tax bills, the dough finally started to roll in. I remember opening an envelope from Colin Newman one morning, dreading another final demand. Instead, there was a royalty cheque for $750,000.

It was the most money I’d ever had in my life.

After the divorce with Thelma went through, a part of me wanted to say to her, ‘Fuck you. Look at me – I’m fine.’

So I bought a house called Outlands Cottage in Stafford shire, not far from where she lived. It was a thatched house, and pretty much the first thing I did after moving in was to set the fucking roof on fire. Don’t ask me how I did it. All I remember is a fireman turning up in his truck, whistling through his teeth, and going to me, ‘Some house-warming party, eh?’ And then after he put the fire out, we got shitfaced together. Mind you, he might as well have let the place burn down, ’cos the smell of charred thatch is fucking horrendous, and it never went away after that.

Sharon hated Outlands Cottage from the get-go. She’d fuck off to London and wouldn’t want to come home. I suppose I’d half expected or wanted Thelma to call me up in tears and beg me to come back to her. She never did. Although she did call me once to say, ‘So, I see you got married again, YOU FUCKING ARSEHOLE,’ before slamming the phone down.

Eventually, I began to realise that as much as I loved being close to Jess and Louis, it was bad news, living around the corner from my ex-wife. At one point I even tried to buy back Bulrush Cottage. Then I made the mistake of taking Sharon with me when I went to see the kids. It was fine until we dropped them off and went for a drink at a hotel. Then I got all pissed and sentimental. I told Sharon I never wanted to go back to America, that I missed my kids, that I missed living next to the Hand & Cleaver, that I wanted to retire. Then, when I refused to get in the car to go home – it was actually our accountant Colin Newman’s BMW, which we’d borrowed for the day – she went over the edge. She climbed into the driver’s seat, put it in gear, and floored the accelerator. It was fucking terrifying. I remember jumping out of the way and then legging it on to the lawn in front of the hotel. But Sharon just crashed the car through this flower bed and kept coming at me, with the wheels churning up all the grass and sending lumps of turf flying all over the place.

And it wasn’t just me she nearly killed.

I had this guy called Pete Mertens working for me at the time. He was an old schoolfriend – very skinny, very funny, used to wear these outrageous checked jackets all the time. Anyway, when Sharon drove through the flower bed, Pete had to throw himself into a rose bush to get out of the way. All I remember is him standing up, brushing off his jacket, and going, ‘Fuck this – this ain’t worth two hundred quid a week. I’m off.’ (Later, he changed his mind and came back. Working for us might have been dangerous, but at least it was interesting, I suppose.)

In the end, the hotel manager came out and someone called the police. By then, I was hiding in a hedge. So Sharon got out of the car, came over to the hedge, and threw all her rings and jewellery into it. Then she turned around, stomped away, and called for a taxi.

I was there the next day, smelly and hung over, sifting through the soil for a fifty-grand Tiffany’s rock.

There were some other wild times at Outlands Cottage, before I finally realised that Sharon was right, and that we should move. One night I met this very strait-laced bloke down the pub – an accountant, I think he was – but he came back to the cottage for a joint afterwards, and then passed out on the sofa. So while he was asleep I pulled off his clothes and threw them on the fire. The poor bloke woke up at six in the morning, stark bollock naked. Then I sent him home to his wife in one of my chain-mail suits. It still makes me laugh to this day, the thought of him clanking off towards his car, wondering how the fuck he’s gonna explain himself.

Another one of my favourite tricks at Outlands Cottage was to shave off people’s eyebrows while they were asleep. Believe me, there’s nothing funnier than a bloke with no eyebrows. People don’t realise that your eyebrows provide most of your facial expressions, so when they’re gone, it’s hard to show concern or surprise or any of those other basic human emotions. But it takes people a while to realise what’s wrong. At first, they just look in the mirror and think, Christ, I look like shit today. One guy I did it to ended up going to see his doctor, ’cos he couldn’t work out what the fuck was up.

I went through a period of giving the eyebrow treatment to everyone: agents, managers, roadies, assistants, friends, friends-of-friends. Whenever someone turned up to a management meeting with a face that didn’t look quite right, you knew they’d spent the weekend at my house.

Pete Mertens often ended up being an unwilling accomplice in my drunken practical jokes. For example, one Christmas, I began to wonder what it would be like to get a dog pissed. So me and Pete got a piece of raw meat and put it at the bottom of a bowl of sherry, then we called over Sharon’s Yorkshire terrier – Bubbles, this one was called – and waited to see what would happen. Sure enough, Bubbles lapped up the bowl of sherry to get to the meat. Then about five minutes later he went cross-eyed and started to stumble around all over the place while howling along to the music we were playing. We’d done it: Bubbles was absolutely shitfaced. It was brilliant – until poor old Bubbles passed out in the middle of the living room. I was terrified that I’d killed him, so I pulled the fairy lights off the tree and wrapped them around his body, so I could tell Sharon he’d electrocuted himself by accident. But he was all right, thank God – although he had a nasty hangover the next morning, and he kept giving me these dirty looks, as if to say, ‘I know what you did, you bastard.’

Bubbles wasn’t the only animal who lived with us at Outlands Cottage. We also had a donkey called Sally – who used to sit in the living room with me and watch Match of the Day – and a Great Dane and a German shepherd. The thing I remember most about those dogs is the time I came home from the butchers’ with some pigs hooves. I put them in a jar on the kitchen table, thinking I could use them in a good old fry up, but when Sharon walked into the room, she gagged and went, ‘Ozzy, what the fuck is that smell? And what are those disgusting-looking things on the table?’ When I told her, she literally retched. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ozzy,’ she said, ‘I can’t eat that, feed them to the dogs.’ So I gave the hooves to the dogs, and they both started to look very unwell immediately. Then one puked while the other one hosed down the walls with shit.

Poor old Pete Mertons got to the point where he just couldn’t take it any more. He was living with us at the time, and the craziness was never-ending. The last straw for him was when I downed one too many sleeping pills after an all-night drinking session and had to be taken to hospital to get my stomach pumped. When the doc asked my name, I just went, ‘Pete Mertens,’ then never thought any more of it. But when Pete went for a check-up a couple of months later, his doctor took him into his office, closed the door, and said to him, ‘Now then Mr Mertens, we can’t be having that behaviour, can we?’ Pete didn’t know what the fuck the doc was on about, and the doc just thought Pete was trying to pretend like it never happened. I think the doc might even have sent him off for some counselling. And then eventually Pete found his file, with ‘sleeping pill overdose’ written at the top, and he went fucking mental with me.

Good bloke, Pete Mertens. Good bloke.

We moved so many times after we left Outlands Cottage that I can’t even remember half of the places. It was around this time that I learned my wife loves nothing more than buying and doing up houses. And because it takes so long to do them up, we always end up renting somewhere else while we’re waiting for the work to be done. Then, about three seconds after we’ve moved in, Sharon gets bored, so we sell up and buy another house – and we have to rent again while we’re doing that one up. It’s gone on like that for decades. Sometimes it feels like all we do with our money is renovate the Western fucking hemi-sphere. I got Sharon to count up all the houses once, and it turned out that in the twenty-seven years we’d been married, we’d lived in twenty-eight different places.

As I said, Sharon didn’t mind my drinking at first. She thought I was funny when I was drunk – probably ’cos she was usually drunk, too. But before long she changed her mind, and started to see the booze as being almost as bad as the coke. She said I’d gone from being a funny drunk to being an angry drunk. But one of the many problems with being an alcoholic is that when people tell you how bad you are when you’re drunk, you’re usually drunk. So you just keep getting drunk.

The funny thing is, I don’t even like the taste of booze. Not unless it’s drowned in fruit juice or some other sugary bullshit. It was always the feeling I was after. I mean, every now and again I enjoyed a good pint. But I never went to the pub to drink, I went to get fucking blasted.

I tried for a long time to drink like normal people do. When I was still married to Thelma, for example, I went to this wine-tasting at the Birmingham NEC. It was a food market or something around Christmas time. I thought, Fuck me, a wine tasting, that sounds like something a civilised, grown-up person might do. The next morning, Thelma said to me, ‘What did you buy?’ I said, ‘Oh, nothing.’ And she said, ‘Really? You must have bought something.’ I said, ‘Oh well, yeah – I guess I bought a couple of cases.’

Turned out I’d bought 144 cases.

I was so shitfaced, I’d thought I was buying 144 bottles. Then a delivery truck the size of the Exxon Valdez pulled up outside Bulrush Cottage and started unloading enough crates of wine to fill every room to the ceiling. It took months for me and the roadies to polish it all off. When we finally emptied the last bottle, we all went down the Hand & Cleaver to celebrate.

Mind you, it’s all bullshit with wine, isn’t it? It’s just fucking vinegar with a fizz, no matter what the tasters say. I should know, I owned a wine bar once: Osbourne’s, we called it. What a crock of shit that place was. I remember saying to one of the merchants, ‘Look, tell me, what’s a good wine?’ And she says to me, ‘Well, Mr Osbourne, if you like Blue Nun at two quid a bottle, then that’s a good wine. And if you like Chateau du Wankeur at ninety-nine quid a bottle, then that’s a good wine.’ I didn’t listen. In those days, it was my ego that ordered the wine. The most expensive bottle on the whole list, just to be big-headed. Then I’d wake up the next morning with a two-hundred-quid hangover. But eventually I came to realise something about two-hundred-quid hangovers: they’re exactly the fucking same as two-quid hangovers.

It wasn’t until Sharon found out that she was pregnant that she really started to try and change the way I was living.

We were on tour in Germany at the time. ‘I think something’s going on,’ she said. ‘I’ve been feeling so sick lately.’ So I staggered out to buy one of those pregnancy dip-stick things – and it turned the colour it goes when your missus is expecting. I couldn’t believe it, because only a few months before Sharon had gone through a miscarriage after being attacked by one of her mother’s dogs. I got a right old bollocking for that, because I was standing right behind her when it happened. I heard the low growl of that Dobermann and just froze on the spot, completely stiff, instead of running over and biting its head off, or whatever the fuck I was supposed to do. I’m a chickenshit when it comes to stuff like that. And I had no idea she was pregnant. It was only when we went to the hospital afterwards that the docs told us.

So it was a big deal when the test was positive in Germany.

‘Let’s do one more test, just to make sure,’ I said.

It went the same colour as the first one.

‘I tell you what,’ I said, holding the little strip of paper to the light. ‘Let’s do one more, just to make really sure.’

We must have done five tests in the end. When we were finally convinced it was true, I remember Sharon saying to me, ‘Right, Ozzy, I’m going to tell you this once, so you’d better listen. If you ever, ever bring any cocaine into this house, I’m going to call the police and have you sent to prison. Do you understand me?’

I had absolutely no doubt whatsoever that she meant it.

‘I understand,’ I said.

‘And what about the shotguns, Ozzy?’

‘I’ll get rid of them.’

They were sold the next day. I knew I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to Aimee. So that was it: goodbye to the Benelli semi-automatic that I’d used to kill the chickens at Bulrush Cottage, along with all my other guns.

I carried on boozing, though. Even more so, without any coke in the house. I couldn’t stop. But Sharon had lost all patience with that too, by then. The second I walked through the door, she’d be on my case.

You wouldn’t believe the things I’d do – the time and effort I would dedicate to sneaking a drink behind her back. I’d ‘pop to the supermarket’ next door, then walk straight through to the back of the grocery section, through the door to the store-room, climb out of the window at the back, jump over a wall, crawl through a hedge, and go to the pub on the other side. And then, after necking six pints in a row, I’d do the same in reverse.

The most unbelievable thing about my behaviour is that I was convinced it was entirely fucking normal.

Then I started trying to sneak booze into the house. One time, I got this big four-gallon bottle of vodka – the kind of bottle they put on display at a bar – but I couldn’t work out where to hide it. I ran around the house for ages, looking for the perfect place. Then it came to me: the oven! Sharon had never cooked a meal in her life, I said to myself, so she’d never look in there. And I was right: I got away with it for weeks. I’d say to Sharon, ‘I’ve just had an idea for a song. I think I’ll pop downstairs to the studio and get it down on tape.’ Then I’d pour myself a mug of vodka in the kitchen, neck it as fast as I could, and pretend like nothing had happened.

Then, one day, she twigged.

‘Sharon,’ I said, ‘I’ve just had an idea for a song. I think I’ll just—’

‘I found your song idea in the oven this morning,’ she said. ‘Then I poured your song idea down the sink.’

It was only a week or so after the oven incident, on September 2, 1983, that Aimee was born at the Wellington Hospital in St John’s Wood, London. She was a guiding light for us, she really was. It had been just over a year since Randy and Rachel had died, and we were only just starting to get over it. With Aimee, we had a brand new reason to feel good about life. She was such an innocent little thing, when you looked at her, you just couldn’t help breaking into a huge smile.

But no sooner had Aimee been born that it was time to go on the road again, this time to promote the Bark at the Moon album, which I’d just finished making with my new guitarist, Jake E. Lee. Sharon could have stayed at home, but that wasn’t her style, so we put a little cot in the back of the tour bus for Aimee and carried on. It was great for her: Aimee saw more of the world before her first birthday than most people do in a lifetime. I just wish I’d been sober for more of it. I was there physically, but not mentally. So I missed things you can never do over again: the first crawl, the first step, the first word.

If I think about it for too long, it breaks my heart.

In many ways I wasn’t really a father to Aimee. I was more like another kid for Sharon to look after.