9

Betty, Where’s the Bar?

‘Someone’s gonna die before this is over,’ I said to Doc McGhee, on the second night of the Bark at the Moon tour. Doc was the American manager of Mötley Crüe, our support band, and a good mate of mine.

‘Someone?’ he said. ‘I don’t think someone’s gonna die, Ozzy. I think we’re all gonna die.’

The problem, basically, was Mötley Crüe – which back then still had the original line-up of Nikki Sixx on bass, Tommy Lee on drums, Mick Mars on guitar and Vince Neil on vocals. They were fucking crazy. Which obviously I took as a challenge. Just as I had with John Bonham, I felt like I had to out-crazy them, otherwise I wasn’t doing my job properly. But they took that as a challenge. So it was just wall-to-wall action, every minute of every day. The gigs were the easy part. The problem was surviving the bits in between.

The funniest thing about Mötley Crüe was that they dressed like chicks but lived like animals. It was an education, even for me. Wherever they went, they carried around this massive flight case full of every type of booze imaginable. The moment a gig was over, the lid would be thrown open, and the hounds of hell would be set loose.

Every night, bottles would be thrown, knives would be pulled, chair legs would be smashed, noses would be broken, property would be destroyed. It was like bedlam and pandemonium rolled into one, then multiplied by chaos.

People tell me stories about that tour and I have no idea if they’re true or not. They ask, ‘Ozzy, did you really once snort a line of ants off a Popsicle stick?’ and I ain’t got a fucking clue. It’s certainly possible. Every night stuff went up my nose that had no business being there. I was out of it the whole time. Even Tony Dennis got carried away. We ended up calling him ‘Captain Krell’ – Krell was our new name for cocaine – because he tried doing a line once, although I don’t think he ever did it again. Our wardrobe chick even made him a little suit with ‘CK’ written in Superman letters on the chest.

We all thought it was hilarious.

One of the craziest nights of all was in Memphis.

As usual, it started as soon as we finished the gig. I remember walking down the corridor backstage to the dressing-room area and hearing Tommy Lee say, ‘Hey dude, Ozzy. Check this out!’

I stopped and looked around to see where his voice was coming from.

‘In here, man,’ said Tommy. ‘In here.’

I pushed open a door and saw him on the other side. He was sitting on a chair with his back to me. Nikki, Mick, Vince and a bunch of roadies were all standing around, smoking fags, laughing, talking about the show, drinking beer. And there, in front of Tommy, on her knees, was this naked chick. She was giving him the mother of all blowjobs.

Tommy waved at me to come closer. ‘Hey, dude, Ozzy. Check it out!’

So I peered over his shoulder. And there it was: his dick. Like a baby’s arm in a boxing glove. The fucking thing was so big, the chick could only get about a third of it in her mouth, and even then I was surprised there wasn’t a lump sticking out of the back of her neck. I’d never seen anything like it in my life.

‘Hey, Tommy,’ I said. ‘Can you get me one of those?’

‘Dude, sit down,’ he said. ‘Take your pants off, man. She’ll do you after she’s done me.’

I started to back away. ‘I ain’t gonna get mine out with that thing filling up the room!’ I said. ‘It would be like parking a tugboat next to the Titanic. Have you got a licence for that, Tommy? It looks dangerous.’

‘Oh, dude, you don’t know what you’re miss—Oh, oh, oh, ah, urgh, urgh, ahhhhhh…’

I had to look away.

Then Tommy jumped up, zipped up his fly, and said, ‘Let’s get some eats, dude, I’m starving.’

We ended up in this place called Benihana – one of those Japanese steakhouse joints where they make the food on this big hot plate in front of you. While we waited for the food we drank beer and chasers. Then we got a jumbo-sized bottle of sake for the table. The last thing I remember is getting a massive bowl of wonton soup, finishing it, then filling the bowl to the brim with sake and downing it in one messy gulp.

‘Ahh!’ I said. ‘That’s better.’

Everyone just looked at me.

Then Tommy stood up and said, ‘Fuuuuuck, let’s get outta here, man. Any second now, Ozzy’s gonna blow.’

Then black.

Complete black.

Like someone yanking the cord from the back of a TV.

From what the others told me later, I got up from the table, said I was going to the bog, and never came back. To this day, I have no memory whatsoever of what I did for the next five hours.

But I’ll never forget waking up.

The first thing I heard was the noise:

NEEEEEEEEOOOOWWWWOOOM, NEEEEEEEEO -OOOWWWWOOOM, ZZZZMMMMMMMMMMM…

Then I opened my eyes. It was still dark, very dark, but there were thousands of little pinpricks of light everywhere. I thought to myself, What the fuck’s going on? Am I dead or what?

And still this noise:

NEEEEEEEEOOOOWWWWOOOM, NEEEEEEEEO -OOOWWWWOOOM, ZZZZMMMMMMMMMMM…

Then I could smell rubber and petrol.

Then I heard an air horn, right next to my ear.

BLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHMM!!!!!!!!!

I rolled over, screaming.

Then blinding lights – maybe twenty or thirty of them, as tall as an office block – coming towards me. Before I could pick myself up and run, I heard this terrible roaring noise, and a gust of wind blew sand and grit in my face.

I’d woken up on the central reservation of a twelve-lane free-way.

How or why I was there, I had no idea. All I knew was that I had to get off the freeway before I died – and that I had to take a piss, because my bladder was about to explode. So I waited for a gap in the headlamps, then legged it across all these lanes, still too pissed to go in a straight line. Finally I made it to the other side, having just missed a motorbike in the slow lane. I jumped the fence, ran across another road, and began to search for somewhere to take a slash.And that’s when I saw it: a white car parked in a lay-by.

Perfect, I thought, this’ll give me a bit of cover.

So I whip out my dick, but no sooner have I started to give the tire of this car a good old watering than all these coloured bulbs in the back window light up, and I hear this horribly familiar noise.

BLOOP-BLOOP-WHOOOO. BAARRRP!

I couldn’t fucking believe it. Of all the places in Memphis where I could’ve taken a piss, I’d managed to choose the wheel of an unmarked cop car, parked in a lay-by, waiting to bust people for speeding.

Next thing I knew this woman police officer was winding down her window. She leaned out and said, ‘When you’ve finished shaking that thing, I’m taking your ass to jail!’

Ten minutes later, I was in the nick.

Luckily, they only kept me in there for a couple of hours. Then I called Doc McGhee and got him to pick me up in the tour bus.

The first thing I heard when I climbed back on board was ‘Hey, dude, Ozzy. Check this out, man!’ And we were off again, into oblivion.

Someone went to jail for one thing or another every night of that tour. And because Mick and Nikki looked so alike – they both had this long, dark, girly hair – they’d sometimes get locked up for something the other one had done.

One night they’re sharing a room and Nikki gets up, stark naked, to go and buy a Coke from the vending machine in the corridor, next to the lift. Just as he’s pressing the button for the Coke, the lift doors open and he hears this gasping noise. Then he glances over and sees three middle-aged women standing there with these looks of horror of their faces. ‘Hi,’ he says, before turning around and walking casually back to his room. A few minutes later there’s a knock at the door. So Nikki says to Mick, ‘That’s probably one of the groupies. Why don’t you go and answer it.’ So Mick goes off to answer the door and he’s greeted by the hotel manager, a cop and one of the chicks from the lift. The chick shouts, ‘That’s him!’ and they drag Mick off to jail, even though he had no idea what he was supposed to have done.

The thing is, though, we were all so out of our minds all the time, it was quite normal not to know what we’d done.

Apart from waking up in the middle of a freeway, the worst moment for me was after we played Madison Square Garden in New York. For the after-show party, we went to this club in an old church. We were all hanging out in this private room, having a few drinks and a bit of coke, when some bloke came up to me and said, ‘Hey, Ozzy, would you like to have your photograph taken with Brian Wilson?’

‘Who the fuck’s Brian Wilson?’

‘Y’know, Brian Wilson. From the Beach Boys.’

‘Oh, him. Sure. Yeah. Whatever.’

Everyone had been talking about Brian Wilson a lot, because the week before, his brother Dennis – the one who’d been mates with Charles Manson in the 1960s – had drowned in LA. Dennis was only thirty-nine, so it was terribly sad. Anyway, I was told to go and meet Brian Wilson on the stairwell, so out I went, loaded up on booze and coke, and waited for him. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty minutes. Then thirty minutes. Finally, after another five minutes, Brian appeared. By then, I was thoroughly pissed off, thinking, What a dick. But at the same time I knew about Dennis, so I decided to give him a break. The first thing I said was: ‘Sorry to hear about your brother, Brian.’

He didn’t say anything. He just gave me this funny look, then walked off. That was it for me.

‘First you show up late,’ I said, raising my voice, ‘and now you’re just gonna fuck off without saying a single fucking word? I tell you what, Brian, why don’t we forget about the photograph so you can shove your head back up your arse, where it fucking belongs, eh?’

Next morning, I’m lying in the hotel room, my head pounding. The phone starts ringing and Sharon answers it. ‘Yes, no, yes, OK. Oh, he did, did he? Hmm. Right. Don’t worry, I’ll deal with it.’ Click. She hands me the phone and says,

‘You’re calling Brian Wilson.’

‘Who the fuck’s Brian Wilson?’

I get smacked on the head with the receiver.

Smack.

‘Ow! That fucking hurt!’

‘Brian Wilson is the Living Musical Legend you insulted last night,’ says Sharon. ‘And now you’re going to call him and apologise.’

The memories start to come back.

‘Hang on a minute,’ I say. ‘Brian Wilson was the one who insulted me!’

‘Oh yeah?’ says Sharon.

‘Yeah!’

‘Ozzy, when Brian Wilson reached over to shake your hand, the first thing you said was: “Hello, Brian, you fucking arse-hole, I’m glad to hear your brother’s dead.”’

I sit bolt upright.

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘No, the fucking cocaine you keep shoving up your nose said that.’

‘But I would remember.’

‘Everyone else seems to remember perfectly well. They also remember you told him to shove his head up his arse, because that’s where it belongs. Here, this is Brian’s number. Apologise.’

So I called him and apologised. Twice.

Since then, I’ve bumped into him a few times over the years. We’re cool now, me and Brian. Although we never did get around to taking that photograph.

If any of us had a near-death experience on the Bark at the Moon tour, it was me. Amazingly, though, it didn’t have anything to do with booze or drugs – not directly, anyway. It happened when we took a forty-eight-hour break after a gig in New Orleans to shoot the video for ‘So Tired’ in London. It was an insane distance to travel in that amount of time, but in those days MTV was just starting to become a big part of the music business, and if you could get them to play one of your videos on heavy rotation, it just about guaranteed that your album would go platinum. So we always put a lot of money and effort into them.

The plan was to fly from New Orleans to New York, take Concorde to London, shoot the video, take Concorde back to New York, then connect to the next venue. It was a gruelling schedule, not helped by the fact that I was chronically pissed. The only thing that kept me from passing out was all the cocaine I was snorting.

When we finally got to the studio in London, the first thing the director said to me was, ‘OK, Ozzy, just sit in front of this mirror. When I give the word, it’s gonna explode from behind.’

‘All right,’ I said, wondering what kind of high-tech special effects they were going to use.

But there were no special effects. There was just an old mirror and a bloke standing behind it with a hammer in his hand. I don’t know who the fuck they were using as a props guy, but obviously no one had told him about theatrical mirrors, which are designed to break without killing anyone. So, halfway through the song, the bloke swings his hammer, the mirror explodes, and I get a faceful of glass. It was a good job I was so loaded: I didn’t feel a thing. I just spat out all the blood and glass and went, ‘Yeah, cheers.’

Then I got up and had another can of Guinness.

I didn’t think any more of it until I was halfway across the Atlantic on Concorde. I remember pressing the button for another drink and the stewardess coming over and almost dropping her tray with fright. ‘Oh my God!’ she squealed. ‘Are you OK?’ It turned out the pressure from being up at nearly sixty thousand feet had caused all the tiny bits of glass lodged in my skin to rise to the surface, until my face had literally exploded. It had just popped, like a squashed tomato.

When Sharon turned around to look, she almost passed out.

An ambulance was waiting for me at JFK when we landed. It wasn’t the first time I’d been wheeled off Concorde. I used to get so pissed on those flights, Sharon would have to carry me through immigration on a luggage trolley with my passport Scotch taped to my forehead. And then when they asked her if she had anything to declare, she’d just point at me and go, ‘Him’.

In the hospital in New York they put me under and tried to pull out as much of the broken glass as they could with tweezers. Then they gave me some drugs to reduce the swelling. I remember coming to in this white room, with white walls, and people all around me covered in white sheets and thinking, Fuck, I’m in the morgue. Then I heard a hissing noise next to my bed.

Pssst, pssst.

I looked down and there was this kid holding up a pen and a copy of Bark at the Moon.

‘Will you sign this for me?’ he asked.

‘Fuck off,’ I told him. ‘I’m dead.’

By the time the tour ended, we were all still alive, but my prediction that someone would die still came true. It happened when Vince Neil went back to his house at Redondo Beach in LA and got fucked up with the drummer from Hanoi Rocks. At some point they ran out of booze and decided to drive to the local bottle shop in Vince’s car, which was one of those low-slung, ridiculously fast, bright red De Tomaso Panteras. Vince was so loaded he drove head-on into a car coming in the opposite direction. The bloke from Hanoi Rocks was dead by the time they got him to hospital.

I didn’t see much of Mötley Crüe after the tour, although I kept in touch with Tommy, on and off. I remember going to his house years later with my son Jack, who must have been about thirteen.

‘Wow, dude, come in,’ said Tommy, when I rang the door-bell. ‘I can’t believe it. Ozzy Osbourne’s in my house.’

There were some other guests there, too, and after we’d all been given the tour of his place, Tommy said, ‘Hey, dudes, check this out.’ He tapped a code into a keypad in the wall, a hidden door slid open, and on the other side there was this padded sex chamber with some kind of heavy-duty harness thing swinging from the ceiling. The idea was that you’d take a chick in there, strap her to this contraption, then fuck the living shit out of her.

‘What’s wrong with a bed?’ I asked Tommy. Then I turned around and realised that Jack had walked into the room with the rest of us. He was standing there, his eyes bulging. I felt so embarrassed, I didn’t know where to fucking look.

I didn’t take him to Tommy’s again after that.

By the time the Bark at the Moon tour ended, me and Sharon’s fights had reached another level of craziness. Part of it was just the pressure of being famous. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I ain’t complaining: my first three solo albums eventually sold more than ten million copies in America alone, which was beyond anything I could have hoped for. But when you’re selling that many records, you can’t do anything normal any more, ’cos you get too much hassle from the public. I remember one night when me and Sharon were staying in a Holiday Inn. It was maybe three or four in the morning, and we were both in bed. There was a knock on the door, so I got up to answer it, and these guys in overalls just brushed past me and walked into the room.

When Sharon saw them she said, ‘Who the fuck are you? What are you doing in our room?’

They went, ‘Oh, we’re just interested in seeing how you live.’

Sharon threw something at them and they brushed past me again on their way out.

All they wanted to do was come in and stare. That was it.

We stopped staying in cheap hotels after that.

I mean, I’m usually happy to meet fans, but not when I’m asleep with my wife at four in the morning.

Or when I’m eating. It drives me nuts when people come up to me when I’m in a restaurant with Sharon. It’s a big taboo with me, that is. The worst is when they say, ‘Hey, you look like you’re somebody famous! Can I have your autograph?’

‘I tell you what,’ I want to say to them, ‘why don’t you go away and find out who you think I am, come back again, and then I’ll give you my autograph.’

But fame wasn’t the biggest problem for me and Sharon. That was my drinking, which was so bad I couldn’t be trusted with anything. When we were in Germany doing a gig, for example, I went on a tour of the Dachau concentration camp and was asked to leave because I was being drunk and disorderly. I must be the only person in history who’s ever been thrown out of that fucking place.

Another thing I did when I was drunk was get more tattoos, which drove Sharon mental. Eventually she said, ‘Ozzy, if you get one more tattoo, I’m gonna string you up by your bollocks.’

That night, I went out and got ‘thanks’ tattooed on my right palm. It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. I mean, how many times do you say ‘thanks’ to people during your lifetime? Tens of thousands, probably. Now all I had to do was raise my right hand. But Sharon didn’t appreciate the innovation. When she noticed it the next morning – I’d been trying to keep my hand under the kitchen table, but then she asked me to pass the salt – she drove me straight to a plastic surgeon to get the tattoo removed. But he told me he’d have to cut off half of my hand to get rid of the thing, so it stayed.

When we left the hospital, Sharon thanked the doctor for his time.

I just raised my right palm.

Another time we were in Albuquerque in the middle of winter, freezing cold, ice and snow everywhere. I was pissed and coked out of my fucking mind and decided to take a ride on this aerial tramway thing, which goes ten thousand feet up the Sandia Mountains to a restaurant and observation deck at the top. But there was something wrong with the cable car, and it swung to a halt halfway up the mountain.

‘What do you do if you get stuck up here?’ I asked the bloke at the controls, after we’d been dangling there for ages.

‘Oh, there’s an escape hatch in the roof,’ he said, pointing to this hatch above our heads.

‘But how do you climb up there?’ I asked.

‘There’s a ladder right behind you. All you have to do is pull it out. It’s very simple.’

‘Is the hatch locked?’

‘No.’

Big mistake, telling me that. As soon as I knew there was a ladder and an unlocked hatch I had to try it out. So I pulled out the ladder and started to climb up to the ceiling.

The guy went mental.

‘What the hell are you doing? You can’t do that! Stop! Stop!’

That just egged me on even more. I opened the hatch, felt this blast of icy wind, and pulled myself up on to the roof, by which time the guy and everyone else in the cable car was screaming and begging me to come back down. Then, just as I was getting my balance, the car started to move again. I almost slipped and went splat onto the rocks thousands of feet below, but I kept my balance by putting out my arms like I was surfing. Then I started to sing ‘Good Vibrations’. I stayed up there until we were almost at the top.

The funny thing is I hate heights. I get vertigo going up a doorstep. So when I saw the cable car from the ground the next day – stone-cold sober, for once – I almost threw up. It makes me shiver even now, just thinking about it.

Doing crazy stuff like that always led to another argument with Sharon. On one occasion I lost it so badly with her, I picked up a vodka bottle and threw it in her direction. But the second it left my hand, I realised what I’d done: it was going straight for her head. Oh, fuck, I thought, I’ve just killed my wife. But it missed by an inch, thank God. The neck went straight through the plaster in the wall above her head and just stuck there, like a piece of modern art.

Sharon would always find ways to retaliate, mind you. Like when she’d take a hammer to my gold records. And then I’d retaliate to her retaliation by saying I didn’t want to go on stage that night. One time, I shaved my head to try to get out of doing a show. I was hung over, knackered and pissed off, so I just thought, Fuck it, fuck them all.

But that shit didn’t work with Sharon.

She just took one look at me and said, ‘Right, we’re getting you a wig.’ Then she dragged me and a couple of the roadies to this joke shop which had a Lady Godiva wig in the window that had been there for five hundred years, with dead flies and dust and dandruff and God knows what else embedded in it. I put it on and everyone pissed themselves laughing.

But it turned out to be quite cool in the end, that wig, because I rigged it with blood capsules. Halfway through the show I’d pretend to pull out my hair and all this blood would come running down my face. It looked brilliant. But after the bat-biting incident, everyone thought it was real. At one gig, this chick in the front row almost fainted. She was screaming and pointing and crying and shouting, ‘It’s true what they say! He is crazy!’

*

‘Darling,’ said Sharon, a few months after the Bark at the Moon tour, when she found out that she was pregnant with Kelly. ‘I’ve heard about this great place in Palm Springs where you can take a break before the next tour. It’s a hotel, and they have classes every day where they teach you how to drink like a gentleman.’

‘Really?’ I said.

In my head, I was going, That’s it! I’ve been doing it wrong. That must be why I’ve been getting these terrible hangovers. I need to learn how to drink like James Bond!

‘What’s the name of this place?’ I said.

‘The Betty Ford Center. Have you heard of it?’

‘Nope.’

‘Well, it just opened, and it’s run by the wife of a former president. I think you’ll have a good time there.’

‘Sounds magic,’ I said. ‘Sign me up.’

‘Actually, I’ve already booked you in for the week after the baby’s due,’ Sharon replied.

In the end, Kelly arrived on October 28, 1984. It was an eventful birth, to say the least. For some insane reason, Sharon had decided that she didn’t want an epidural. But then as soon as the contractions started, she went, ‘I’ve changed my mind! Get me the anaesthetist!’ Now, for Sharon to say that meant that she was in fucking agony – ’cos my wife can take a bit of pain, certainly a lot more than I can. But the nurse wasn’t having any of it. She goes, ‘Mrs Osbourne, you do realise that there are people in third world countries who give birth without an epidural all the time, don’t you?’ Big mistake, that was. Sharon sat up in bed and screamed, ‘LISTEN, YOU FUCKHEAD, THIS ISN’T A FUCKING THIRD WORLD COUNTRY, SO GET ME A FUCKING ANAESTHETIST!’

An hour later, Kelly came out into the world, screaming – and she hasn’t stopped since, bless her. She’s a real chip off the old block, is Kelly. I think that’s why I’ve always felt so protective of her. It certainly wasn’t easy, leaving my beautiful little girl with Sharon and the nurses only a few hours after she was born, but at the same time I knew I had to get my drinking under control. With any luck, I thought, I’ll come home from Palm Springs a new man. So the next morning I got on the plane, drank three bottles of champagne in first class, landed at LAX twelve hours later, threw up, had a few toots of cocaine, then passed out in the back of a limo as it drove me to the Betty Ford Center. I hope this place is relaxing, I thought, ’cos I’m knackered.

I’d never even heard the word ‘rehab’ before. And I certainly didn’t know that Betty Ford – the wife of President Gerald Ford – had been an alcoholic herself. While I was on tour I never spent much time watching telly or looking at newspapers, so I had no idea what a big deal the clinic was, or that the press had been calling it ‘Camp Betty’. In my head, I imagined this beautiful oasis of a hotel out in the middle of the Californian desert, with a shimmering swimming pool outside, a golf course, lots of hot chicks in bikinis everywhere, and all these Hugh Hefner types in velvet smoking jackets and bow ties, leaning against an outdoor bar, while a middle-aged woman with a voice like Barbara Woodhouse said, ‘OK, gentlemen, after me: take the olive, stir it around the martini, pick up the glass with your fingers arranged like so. That’s right, good, good. Now, take a sip, count to three, and do it again. Slowly, slowly.’

This is going to be my dream holiday of a lifetime, I said to myself.

But when I got there, the place looked more like a hospital than a hotel. Mind you, the grounds were stunning: freshly sprinkled lawns, tall palm trees and man-made lakes everywhere, and these huge, brown, alien-looking mountains looming in the background.

I walk in the door and Betty herself is waiting for me. She’s a tiny little thing. Polo-neck sweater, big hairdo. Not much of a sense of humour, by the look of it.

‘Hello, Mr Osbourne,’ she goes. ‘I’m Mrs Ford. I spoke with your wife Sharon a few days ago.’

‘Look, Betty, d’you mind if I check in a bit later?’ I say. ‘I’m gasping. Terrible flight. Where’s the bar?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The bar. It must be around here somewhere.’

‘You do know where you are, don’t you, Mr Osbourne?’

‘Er, yeah?’

‘So you’ll know that we don’t… have a bar.’

‘How do you teach people to drink properly, then?’

‘Mr Osbourne, I think your wife might have misled you slightly. We don’t teach you how to drink here.’

‘You don’t?’

‘We teach you not to drink.’

‘Oh. Maybe I should stay somewhere else, then.’

‘I’m afraid that’s not an option, Mr Osbourne. Your wife was… How can I put this? She was very insistent.’

I can’t even begin to describe the disappointment. It was almost as bad as the boredom. After one hour in that place, I felt like I’d been there a thousand years. The thing I hated most about the weeks that followed was talking about my drinking in front of all these strangers during the group sessions. Although I learned some pretty cool things. One bloke was a dentist from LA. His wife found out about his drinking and she was on his case twenty-four hours a day. So he emptied the tank of wind-screen-washer fluid in his BMW, refilled it with gin and tonic, disconnected the plastic tube from the nozzles on the bonnet, and re-routed it so it came out of one of the air vents under the dashboard. Whenever he wanted a drink, all he had to do was get in his car, put the tube in his mouth, pull on the indicator stalk, and he’d get a squirt of G&T down his throat. It worked brilliantly, apparently, until one day there was a really bad traffic jam and he turned up at work so out of his shitter that he accidentally drilled a hole in the head of one of his patients.

I’m telling you, the ingenuity of alcoholics is something else. If only it could be put to some kind of good use. I mean, if you said to an alcoholic, ‘Look, the only way for you to get another drink is to cure cancer,’ the disease would be history in five seconds.

As well as the group sessions, I had to see a therapist on my own. It was hard, being sober and having to discuss all the things I’d just found out were wrong with me. Like being dyslexic and having attention deficit disorder. (They didn’t add the word ‘hyperactivity’ to it until a few years later.) It explained a lot, I suppose. The shrink said that my dyslexia had given me a terrible insecurity complex, so I couldn’t take rejection or failure or pressure of any sort, which was why I was self-medicating with booze. She also said that because I was poorly educated, and knew I was poorly educated, I always thought people were taking me for a ride, so I didn’t trust anyone. She was right, but it didn’t help that I usually was being taken for a ride – until Sharon came along. Mind you, I had moments of coked-up paranoia when I didn’t trust my wife, either.

The shrink also told me that I have an addictive personality, which means that I do everything addictively. And, on top of that, I have an obsessive-compulsive disorder, which makes it all ten times worse. I’m like a walking dictionary of psychiatric disorders, I am. It blew my mind. And it took me a long time to accept any of it.

My stay in Camp Betty was the longest I’d been without drink or drugs in my adult life, and the comedown was horrendous. Everyone else was going through the same thing, but I can’t say that made me feel any better. At first, they put me in a room with a guy who owned a bowling alley, but he snored like an asthmatic horse, so I moved and ended up with a depressive mortician. I said to him, ‘Look, if you suffer from depression, why the fuck do you work in a mortuary?’

‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘It’s just what I do.’

The mortician snored even louder than the bowling alley guy – he was like a moose with a tracheotomy. The whole room shook. So I ended up spending every night on the sofa in the lobby, shivering and sweating.

Eventually, Sharon came to get me. I’d been in there six weeks. I looked better – I’d lost a bit of weight – but I’d got the whole rehab thing wrong. I thought it was supposed to cure me. But there ain’t no cure for what I’ve got. All rehab can do is tell you what’s wrong with you and then suggest ways for you to get better. Later, when I realised it wasn’t a solution by itself, I used to go there just to take the heat off myself a bit when things got out of hand. Rehab can work, but you’ve got to want it. If you really want to quit, you can’t say, ‘Well, I want to quit today, but I might have a drink next week at my friend’s wedding.’ You’ve got to commit, then live each day as it comes. Every morning, you’ve got to wake up and say, ‘OK, today’s gonna be one more day without a drink,’ or a cigarette, or a pill, or a joint, or whatever it is that’s been killing you.

That’s as much as you can hope for when you’re an addict.

The first gig I did after Betty Ford was in Rio de Janeiro.

I was legless before I even got on the plane.

By the time we reached Rio, I’d got through a whole bottle of Courvoisier, and was passed out in the aisle. Sharon tried her best to move me – but I was like a dead fucking body. In the end she got so pissed off with me that she grabbed the stainless steel fork from her meal tray and began stabbing me with it. I soon fucking moved after that. But at least I now knew what I was – a full-blown, practising alcoholic. I couldn’t pretend any more that I was just having fun, or that boozing was something everyone did when they got a bit of dough. I had a disease, and it was killing me. I used to think, Even an animal won’t go near something again if it makes it sick, so why do I keep going back to this?

The gig was Rock in Rio, a ten-day festival featuring Queen, Rod Stewart, AC/DC and Yes. One and a half million people bought tickets. But I was disappointed by the place. I’d expected to see the Girl from Ipanema on every corner, but I never saw a single one. There were just all these dirt-poor kids running around like rats. People were either outrageously rich or living on the streets – there didn’t seem to be anything in between.

I’ll always remember meeting Ronnie Biggs, the Great Train Robber, on that trip. In those days he was living in exile in Brazil, and he seemed to be making the best of it – he claimed he shagged two and a half thousand chicks while he was there. But it was still a kind of prison for him, because he was so homesick. He came over to the hotel wearing a T-shirt that said, ‘Rio – a Wonderful Place to Escape to’, but he just kept asking, ‘So, what’s it like in England, Ozzy? Do they still have this shop, or that shop, or this beer, or that beer?’

I felt sorry for the guy. No one in their right mind would give him a job, so he’d get all these English tourists over to his house, charge them fifty quid each, get them to buy him some beers and a bag of dope, then tell them the Great Train Robbery story. He called it ‘The Ronnie Biggs Experience’. I suppose it was better than being in prison. He was all right, Ronnie, y’know. He wasn’t a bad guy, and everyone knew that he wasn’t even on the train when the driver was assaulted, yet he was sent down for thirty years. You can rape a kid and kill a granny and get less than thirty years nowadays. People say, ‘He got away with it in the end, didn’t he?’ But I don’t think he did. I mean, the bloke was so unhappy. I wasn’t surprised when he finally came back to Britain, even though it meant getting arrested at Heathrow and thrown straight in the slammer.

Home’s home, in the end, even if it’s behind bars. At least he got his freedom at the finish, although it was only ’cos the guy was on his deathbed. Ronnie always said his last wish was ‘to walk into a Margate pub as an Englishman and buy a pint’. But from what I’ve heard, he’s going to have to wait until the next life for that pleasure.

The summer after Rock in Rio, I agreed to do Live Aid with Black Sabbath. Sharon was already pregnant again, and we didn’t want to fly to Philadelphia, so we decided to take the QE2 to New York instead, then drive the rest of the way.

After the first hour at sea, we regretted it. In those days we were used to getting to New York in three hours on Concorde. The QE2 took five fucking days, which felt more like five billion years. I mean, what the fuck are you supposed to do on a ship, apart from puke your guts out ’cos you’re feeling sea sick? By the end of day one, I was hoping we might hit an iceberg, just to liven things up a bit. And the boredom only got worse from there. In the end I went to see the ship’s doctor and begged him for sedatives to put me out for the rest of the way. I woke up forty-eight hours later, just as we were pulling into port. Sharon was so pissed off – she’d had to entertain herself while I was out cold – it’s a miracle she didn’t throw me over-board. ‘Remember me? You arsehole,’ was the first thing she said when I opened my eyes.

To be honest with you, I was stressed out about doing Live Aid. I hadn’t talked to Tony for years, so it wasn’t exactly the most comfortable of situations. Then the organisers put us between Billy Ocean and the Four fucking Tops… at ten o’clock in the morning. I don’t know what they were thinking. People kept telling us that they needed more black acts in the show, so maybe they thought we were black – like when we played Philadelphia on our first American tour.

It didn’t get off to a good start.

When I was in the lobby of the hotel, checking in before the gig, this bloke comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, Ozzy, can I have a photograph?’ and I go, ‘Sure, yeah.’ Then the bloke goes, ‘Sorry, I have to do this,’ and hands me a lawsuit. It was from my father-in-law. He’d served me – before a fucking charity gig.

When everyone backstage heard about the writ – don’t ask me what it was about, or what happened to it, ’cos I left it all to Sharon – one of the roadies came up to me and said, ‘He’s quite a character, your father-in-law, isn’t he?’

‘What d’you mean?’ I asked him.

‘He said the cover of Born Again reminded him of his grand-children.’

If you haven’t seen that cover – Born Again was Black Sabbath’s third album after I left – it’s of an aborted demon baby with fangs and claws. What an unbelievable thing to say!

On the one hand, doing Live Aid was brilliant: it was for a great cause, and no one can play those old Black Sabbath songs like me, Tony, Geezer and Bill. But on the other hand, it was all a bit embarrassing. For a start, I was still grossly overweight – on the video, I’m the size of a planet. Also, in the six years since I’d left the band, I’d become a celebrity in America, whereas Black Sabbath had been going in the other direction. So I got preferential treatment, even though I hadn’t asked for it. It was just stupid little things, like I got a Live Aid jacket and they didn’t. But it still felt awkward. And I didn’t handle it with much grace, because my coked-up rock star ego was out of control. Deep down, a part of me wanted to say to them, ‘You fired me and now I don’t need you, so fuck you.’ Looking back now, all I can think is, Why was I like that? Why did I have to be such a dickhead?

But the gig went smoothly enough. We just checked in to the hotel, met up at the sound check, ran through the set list, got up there, did the songs and fucked off home.

As for Don Arden’s lawsuit, it probably shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise. Jet Records had taken a big hit when we left. And a lot of other things were going wrong for him too.

For example, it was around that time Sharon’s brother David ended up in court in England for allegedly kidnapping, black-mailing and beating up an accountant called Harshad Patel. It was a very bad scene. David was sentenced to two years in Wandsworth for whatever part he had in it, but he only served a few months. By the end of it, he’d been moved to Ford Open Prison.

Then they went after Don, who was still living in the Howard Hughes house at the top of Benedict Canyon. In the end, Don realised he was going to be extradited, so he went back of his own accord to stand trial. Then he hired the best lawyers in London and got off, scot-free.

A few months after Live Aid, on November 8, 1985, Jack was born. I was too pissed to remember much of it – I spent most of the time in the pub opposite the hospital – but I remember Sharon wanting to have him circumcised. I didn’t put up a fight. I mean, the funny thing is, even though my mother was a Catholic, she had me circumcised. None of my brothers had it done – just me. I remember asking my mum what the fuck she was thinking, and she just went, ‘Oh, it was fashionable.’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘It was fashionable to cut my dick off!’ I remember shouting at her.

But I have to admit, it is cleaner that way. And because Jack was part-Jewish – because of Don Arden, whose real name was Harry Levy – it seemed like the right thing to do.

The most amazing thing about Jack being born is that he was our third kid in three years. We hadn’t planned it that way. It just happened. Every time I came off the road, me and Sharon would get in the sack together – as you do – one thing would lead to another, then nine months later Sharon would be giving birth to another little Osbourne.

It was crazy, really, because I ended up touring the world as the Prince of Darkness with three little kids in tow, which wasn’t exactly good for the image. For a few years I spent most of my time between gigs in a panic trying to find Jack’s comfort blanket, which was this little yellow teddy bear thing called Baby. Jack would go fucking insane if he didn’t have Baby to cuddle and chew on. But we were travelling so much, Baby would always end up getting left behind. I became obsessed with that fucking bear. I’d come off stage after singing ‘Diary of a Madman’, and the first thing I’d say was, ‘Where’s Baby? Has anyone seen Baby? Make sure we don’t lose Baby.’

On more than one occasion we had to send our private jet halfway across America just to get Baby back from the hotel were we’d stayed the previous night. We’d drop twenty grand on jet fuel, just to rescue Baby. And don’t think we didn’t fucking try to just buy Jack a replacement. He was too smart for that – he wouldn’t have any of it. You’d find a comfort blanket that was absolutely identical in every way to Baby, but Jack would take one look at it, throw it back at you, and bawl his eyes out until he got his real Baby back. And of course as time went on, Baby ended up having major surgery after being eaten by Sharon’s dog a few times, so in the end there was no mistaking him.

As much as I was drunk and absent a lot of the time, I loved being a dad. It’s just so much fun watching these little people you’ve brought into the world as they develop and grow up. Sharon loved being a mum, too. But enough was enough after a while. After Jack was born, I remember her saying to me, ‘Ozzy, I can’t have you anywhere near me next time you finish a tour. I feel like I’ve been pregnant for ever, I can’t do it any more.’

So I went and got the snip. What a strange experience that was.

‘You know this can’t be reversed, don’t you, Mr Osbourne?’ said the doc.

‘Yeah.’

‘So you’re sure about this?’

‘Oh, yeah.’

‘Absolutely sure?’

‘Doc, believe me, I’m sure.’

‘OK then, sign this form.’

After the operation, my balls swelled up to the size of watermelons. They ached terribly, too. ‘Hey, Doc,’ I said. ‘Can you give me something that will leave the swelling but take away the pain?’

All in all, I don’t recommend it, as far as elective surgery goes. When you pop your load after you’ve had the snip, nothing but dust comes out. It’s like a dry sneeze. Really weird, man.

Then, nine months later, Sharon got broody again. So I had to go back to the doc and ask him to unsnip me.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ he said. ‘I told you that couldn’t be done. But we can always try, I suppose.’

It didn’t work. As the doc said, it’s very hard to reverse a snip. Maybe if I’d gone back to get my pipes cleaned out, it would have been OK. Who knows? But we gave up on having any more kids after that. Still, five kids in one lifetime ain’t bad – and I love them all so much.

They’re the best things that ever happened to me, no question about it.

Another problem with getting the snip was that it made me think I suddenly had the freedom to do whatever I wanted to – or at least whatever I thought I wanted to, when I was pissed out of my skull. But my wife was brought up in a rock ’n’ roll environment, and she can sniff out a lie from six thousand miles away. And I’m the world’s worst liar, anyway.

So she knew exactly what I was up to. Of course, she hated it, but she put up with it. At first.

It wasn’t like I was having affairs. I just wanted to think I was Robert Redford for an hour. But I was never any good at that game. Most of the time, when I was with a chick, she’d be calling an ambulance or carrying me back to my hotel room in a cab while I puked my guts out. I’d start the night like James Bond, and end it like a pile of shit on the floor. And the guilt that followed was always fucking lethal. I hated it. I felt like such an arsehole. And I’m a terrible hypochondriac, so I’d always be shitting myself that I’d caught some rare and deadly virus. I can catch a disease off the telly, me. I’ll be taking some pill to help me get to sleep, then I’ll see an ad for it on TV, and the voiceover will say, ‘Side-effects may include vomiting, bleeding and, on rare occasions, death’ and I’ll convince myself I’m halfway to the morgue. It got to the point where I had doctors coming over to look at my dick twice a week, just to be on the safe side.

Then AIDS came along.

I wasn’t worried at first. Like most people, I thought it was a gay thing. And no matter how drunk or high I got, I never felt the urge to jump in the sack with some hairy-arsed bloke.

But it didn’t take long for everyone to realise that you don’t have to be gay to get AIDS. Then, one night, I bonked this chick in the Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood. As soon as I was done, I just knew something wasn’t right. So, at two in the morning, I called the front desk and asked if they had a doctor on duty. They did – those fancy hotels always have their own in-house quacks – so he came up to my room, checked out my tackle and told me I should go and have a test.

‘What d’you mean, a test?’ I asked him.

‘An HIV test,’ he said.

That was it, as far as I was concerned. I was a goner.

For a few days I drove myself halfway insane with worry. I was impossible to be around. Then I blurted everything out to Sharon. You can imagine how that went down. Think of that 100-megaton bomb the Russians once set off in the Arctic.

That was Sharon when I told her that I had to get an HIV test ’cos I’d bonked some dodgy chick from a hotel bar. Angry doesn’t even begin to describe it. It was such a bad scene, I began to think that being dead might actually be better than being alive for another bollocking.

Anyway, I got the test. And then a week later, I went with Sharon to get the results.

I’ll never forget the doctor walking into that little room, sitting down, getting out his file, and going, ‘Well, Mr Osbourne, the good news is that you don’t have herpes, the clap or syphilis.’

The second he said that, I knew something was up.

‘What’s the bad news?’ I asked him.

‘Well, I’m afraid there’s no easy way to tell you this,’ he said, as my whole body went numb with fear. ‘But you’re HIV positive.’

I literally fell to my knees, put my hands over my head, and screamed, ‘WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN I’M HIV POSITIVE? THAT’S A FUCKING DEATH SENTENCE, YOU ARSEHOLE!’

You’ve got to remember, in those days HIV wasn’t treatable like it is now. If you got HIV, it meant you’d get AIDS – and then you’d die. The End. And if I was HIV positive, then it probably meant that Sharon was HIV positive, too. Which meant I’d killed the mother of my kids.

I couldn’t even look at Sharon, I felt so fucking terrible. She must have hated me at that moment. But she didn’t say anything. I suppose the shock of it must have been as bad for her as it was for me.

Then the phone on the doctor’s desk rang. I was still on my knees and screaming at this point, but I soon shut up when I realised it was the lab, calling about my results. I listened as the doctor ummed and ahhed for a while. Then he put down the receiver and went, ‘Actually, Mr Osbourne, let me clarify: your test was borderline, not positive. That means we need to run it again. Sorry for the confusion.’

Confusion? If I hadn’t been such a mess, I would have got up and chinned the bastard.

But I was in no state for anything.

‘How long will that take?’ I croaked, trying not to throw up.

‘Another week.’

‘I won’t last a week,’ I said. ‘Seriously, doc, I’ll have topped myself by then. Is there any way of getting it faster?’

‘It’ll be expensive.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘OK then. I’ll get it for you overnight. In the meantime, Mrs Osbourne, I suggest you get a test, too.’

Sharon nodded, her face white.

The next day we went back for my results. I’d been a fucking wreck all night, but Sharon wasn’t exactly in the mood to give me any sympathy. The only thing she was in the mood for was divorce. I honestly thought my marriage was over.

‘So, Mr Osbourne,’ began the doc. ‘We ran another test on you, and I’m delighted to say that you don’t seem to have HIV – although we should do the test one more time, to be sure.’

I put my head in my hands, released all the air from my lungs, and thanked God like I’d never thanked Him before. Meanwhile, I heard Sharon let out a sob of relief and blow her nose.

‘The confusion seems to have arisen from the state of your immune system,’ the doc went on. ‘Basically, Mr Osbourne, your immune system currently isn’t functioning. At all. At first, the lab couldn’t understand it. So they did some more blood-work, and then they came across some – well, er, some lifestyle factors that probably explain the anomaly.’

‘Lifestyle factors?’

‘Your blood contains near-fatal quantities of alcohol and cocaine, Mr Osbourne, not to mention a number of other controlled substances. The lab’s never seen anything like it.’

‘So I really don’t have HIV?’

‘No. But your body thinks it does.’

‘Well, that’s a relief.’

‘Mr Osbourne, you might not be HIV positive, but your life is still in grave danger if you don’t take it easier.’

I nodded, but by then I wasn’t even listening. I was too busy planning the drink I needed to celebrate. Mind you, I did change my lifestyle in one way – I never cheated on Sharon again.

With the AIDS crisis over, I flew back to England to prepare for the next tour. I’d only been back a week or two when I got a frantic call from Sharon, who was still in California.

‘Ozzy, get on the next plane out here.’

She sounded terrible.

‘What? Why?’ I said.

‘Just go to the airport, buy a ticket, then call the Beverly Hills Hotel and let me know which flight you’re on.’

‘Is everything OK?’

‘No. One more thing, Ozzy.’

‘Yeah?’

‘DO. NOT. GET. DRUNK.’

Click.

Fifteen hours later, I was walking through immigration at LAX when about ten thousand flashbulbs went off. I thought there must have been a royal visit going on or something. Then a reporter shoved a TV camera in my face and said, ‘What do you think, Ozzy?’

‘Oh, er, well, the chicken was a bit soggy,’ I said. ‘But other than that, it was a pretty decent flight.’

‘I mean about the kid. The dead kid. Any comment?’

‘What?’

‘The suicide. Your thoughts?’

‘I have no idea what you’re talki—’

Before I could say any more, about ten security guards pushed the cameraman out of the way and formed a circle around me. Then they escorted me outside and bundled me into a black limo.

Waiting on the back seat was Howard Weitzman, my lawyer.

‘The kid’s name is – or rather was – John McCollum,’ he explained, handing me a copy of the Los Angeles Times. ‘Nineteen years old. Big fans of yours. According to his parents, he was drinking and listening to Speak of the Devil when he shot himself with his father’s .22. He was still wearing headphones when they found him. And they’re blaming it all on you.’

‘Me?’

‘The father says his son was just doing what the lyrics of “Suicide Solution” told him to do.’

‘But Speak of the Devil is a live album of Black Sabbath songs. “Suicide Solution” isn’t even on there.’

‘Right.’

‘And has he actually read the lyrics?’

‘Look, you and I both know the song’s about the perils of too much liquor, but he doesn’t see it that way.’

‘He thinks I want my fans to kill themselves? How the fuck does he think I plan to sell any more records?’

‘That’s not all, Ozzy. They’re saying that your songs have subliminal messages embedded in them, instructing the young and impressionable to “get a gun”, “end it now”, “shoot-shoot-shoot”, that kind of thing. It’s all in the lawsuit. I’ll have a copy sent over to your hotel.’

‘How much are they suing me for?’

‘Everything. Plus damages.’

‘You’re kidding me.’

‘Unfortunately not. We’re on our way to a press conference right now. Let me do the talking.’

The press conference was at a tennis club. I was jet-lagged, pissed (I couldn’t help myself) and in shock. It got even worse when I was led on to this little podium to face the cameras. I was used to being interviewed by music magazines or whatever, but not by this hardcore national media gang. It was like being back in the classroom with Mr Jones. The reporters were throwing questions at me so hard and so fast, I almost wanted to duck for cover.

One guy said, ‘Listen, Mr Osbourne, isn’t it true that you sing on one of your songs, “Paranoid”, “I tell you to end your life”?’

I had to take a moment to run through Geezer’s lyrics in my head. Then I said to him, ‘No, I sing “ enjoy life”.’

But the other reporters were already shouting their follow-up questions, so no one could hear.

‘It’s ENJOY life,’ I kept repeating. ‘ENJOY life.’

No one listened.

‘Ozzy,’ said another reporter. ‘Mr McCollum’s attorney says he went to one of your concerts, and that it was like being at Nuremberg, with the crowd chanting your name. Any comment?’

‘Nuremberg?’ I should have said, ‘I don’t think Hitler spent much of his time at Nuremberg making the peace sign and shouting “rock ’n’ roll”.’ But I didn’t. I couldn’t get my words out. I just froze.

Then they started asking about ‘Suicide Solution’. All I can remember is Howard Weisman shouting above the crowd, ‘The song is autobiographical. It’s about Mr Osbourne’s well-publicised battle with alcoholism, which he believes is a form of suicide, as evidenced by the tragic death of Mr Osbourne’s good friend Bon Scott, lead singer of the Australian band AC/DC.’

‘But Ozzy,’ shouted the reporters, ‘isn’t it true that…’

Finally, it was over and I went back to the hotel, shaking. I flopped down on the bed, flicked on the TV, and there was Don Arden, discussing the case. ‘To be perfectly honest, I would be doubtful as to whether Mr Osbourne knew the meaning of the lyrics – if there was any meaning – because his command of the English language is minimal,’ he said.

I suppose it was his way of showing support.

The press conference was very frightening, and it gave me a taste of what was to come. I became public enemy number one in America. I opened a newspaper one morning in New York and there was a picture of me with a gun pointed at my head. They must have cut and pasted it together ’cos I’d never posed for it, but it freaked me out. Then I started to get death threats wherever I went. The cops would use them to try to get me to cancel gigs. One time in Texas, the local police chief called up our tour manager and said, ‘There’s been some dynamite stolen from the local quarry, and we’ve had a letter from an anonymous source saying it’s going to be used to blow up Ozzy.’

I was scared for the kids, more than anything. I told the nannies never to stop for anyone on the street. It was 1986, just over five years since John Lennon had signed a copy of Double Fantasy for a fan and then been shot by the same bloke. And I was well aware that it was often the fans who could be the most psycho. One guy started to follow me around with this five-million-year-old mammoth tusk. Another bloke sent me a video of his house: he’d painted my name over every single thing, both outside and in. Then he sent me another video of this little girl wearing a pair of welly-boots and dancing to ‘Fairies Wear Boots’.

He was insane, that guy. He built a tomb so that me and him could spend the rest of eternity together. I could think of better fucking things to do with eternity, to be honest with you. It got to the point where the cops had to take him into custody every time I played a gig anywhere near where he lived. And if I did a signing at a record shop in the area, they’d make me wear a bullet-proof jacket, just to be safe.

I got well and truly pissed off with the crazy stuff after a while. I remember one time, me and my assistant Tony were on a flight from Tokyo to LA. There’d been a six-hour delay at the gate, and they’d handed out free drinks coupons, so everyone was pissed. But this one American chick wouldn’t leave me alone. She was sitting behind me, and every two seconds she’d tap me on the back of my head and go, ‘I know you.’

Tony kept saying to her, ‘Now, missus, please just go away. We don’t want to be bothered,’ but she wouldn’t listen.

In the end, she got out of her seat, came round, and wanted a photograph. So I let her take one. Then she went, ‘I got it! You’re Ozzy Bourne!’

I’d had enough. ‘FUCK OFF!’ I shouted.

A stewardess came over and told me not to be rude to the other passengers.

‘Well, keep that woman away from me then!’ I told her.

But she kept coming back. And back. And back.

Finally, I thought, Right, I’m gonna do something about this.

In those days, I used to carry around these things called Doom Dots. They’re basically chloral hydrate, and they come in little gel caps. All you do is stick a pin in the end and squirt the stuff into someone’s drink. When you hear about people being ‘slipped a Mickey’, that’s what they’re being given – a Doom Dot. Anyway, I waited for this chick to get up and go for a piss, then reached behind me, and squirted a Doom Dot into her glass of wine.

When she came back, I told Tony, ‘Keep looking behind me, and tell me what’s happening.’

He said, ‘Whey, she’s ahl-reet right now, but she’s leaning forward a bit. She’s lookin’ a bit dazed. Oh, hang on now –

she’s goin’, she’s goin’, she’s—’

I felt a jolt in the back of my seat.

‘What happened?’ I asked Tony.

‘Face down on the tray. Fast asleep.’

‘Magic,’ I said.

‘Aye. It’s just a shame she didn’t get her soup oot the way first, lyke. Poor lass. She’s gonna be covered.’

But the Jesus freaks were the worst. While the ‘Suicide Solution’ case was going through the courts they followed me around everywhere. They would picket my shows with signs that read, ‘The Anti-Christ Is Here’. And they’d always be chanting: ‘Put Satan behind you! Put Jesus in front of you!’

One time, I made my own sign – a smiley face with the words ‘Have a Nice Day’ – and went out and joined them. They didn’t even notice. Then, just as the gig was about to start, I put down the sign, said, ‘See ya, guys,’ and went back to my dressing room.

The most memorable Jesus-freak moment was in Tyler, Texas. By then, the death threats were coming in pretty much every day, so I had this security guy, a Vietnam vet called Chuck, who was with me at all times. Chuck was so hardcore he couldn’t even go into a Chinese restaurant. ‘If I see anyone who looks like a Gook, I’m gonna take ’em out,’ he’d say. He had to turn down a tour with me in Japan ’cos he couldn’t handle it. Whenever we stayed in a hotel, he’d spend the night crawling around on his belly through the undergrowth in the garden or doing push-ups in the corridor. Really intense guy.

Anyway, in Tyler, we did the gig, went out on the town, and got back to the hotel at about seven in the morning. I’d agreed to meet a doctor in the lobby at noon that day – my throat had been bothering me – so I went to bed, got a few hours’ sleep, then Chuck knocked on my door and off we went to see the quack. But the doctor was nowhere to be found, so I said to the chick on the front desk, ‘If a bloke in a white coat turns up, just tell him I’m in the coffee shop.’

But I didn’t have a clue that the local evangelist guy had been doing this TV campaign about me in the run-up to the gig, telling everyone that I was the Devil, that I was corrupting the youth of America, and that I was going to take everyone with me to hell. So half the town was out to get me, but I had no idea. There I was, sitting in this coffee shop, with Chuck twitching and muttering beside me. Thirty minutes went by. No doctor. Then another thirty minutes. Still no doctor. Then, finally, this guy comes in and says, ‘Are you Ozzy Osbourne?’

‘Yeah.’

‘PUT SATAN BEHIND YOU! PUT JESUS IN FRONT OF YOU! PUT SATAN BEHIND YOU! PUT JESUS IN FRONT OF YOU! PUT SATAN BEHIND YOU! PUT JESUS IN FRONT OF YOU!’

It was the preacher from the telly. And it turned out that the coffee shop was full of his disciples, so as soon as he started to do his nutty Jesus bullshit, all these other people joined in, until I was surrounded by forty or fifty Jesus freaks, all red in the face and spitting out the same words.

Then Chuck went fucking mental. The whole thing must have triggered some sort of ’Nam flashback, ’cos he just flipped. Stage-five psycho. The guy must have taken down about fifteen of the Jesus freaks in the first ten seconds. There were teeth and Bibles and glasses flying everything.

I didn’t stick around to see what happened next. I just elbowed the preacher in the nuts and legged it.

The funny thing is, I’m actually quite interested in the Bible, and I’ve tried to read it several times. But I’ve only ever got as far as the bit about Moses being 720 years old, and I’m like, ‘What were these people smoking back then?’ The bottom line is I don’t believe in a bloke called God in a white suit who sits on a fluffy cloud any more than I believe in a bloke called the Devil with a three-pronged fork and a couple of horns. But I believe that there’s day, there’s night, there’s good, there’s bad, there’s black, there’s white. If there is a God, it’s nature. If there’s a Devil, it’s nature. I feel the same way when people ask me if songs like ‘Hand of Doom’ and ‘War Pigs’ are anti-war. I think war is just part of human nature. And I’m fascinated by human nature – especially the dark side. I always have been. It doesn’t make me a Devil worshipper, no more than being interested in Hitler makes me a Nazi. I mean, if I’m a Nazi, how come I married a woman who’s half Jewish?

All those Jesus freaks ever had to do was listen to my records, and it would have been obvious. But they just wanted to use me for publicity. And I suppose I didn’t care that much, ’cos every time they attacked me, I got my ugly mug on the telly and sold another hundred thousand records. I should probably have sent them a Christmas card.

But in the end, even the American legal system came down on my side.

The ‘Suicide Solution’ lawsuit was filed in January 1986, and was thrown out in August of that year. At the court hearing, Howard Weitzman told the judge that if they were gonna ban ‘Suicide Solution’ and hold me responsible for some poor kid shooting himself, then they’d have to ban Shakespeare, ’cos Romeo and Juliet’s about suicide, too. He also said that the song lyrics were protected by the right of free speech in America. The judge agreed, but his summing up wasn’t exactly friendly. He said that although I was ‘totally objectionable and repulsive, trash can be given First Amendment protection, too’.

I had to read that sentence about five times before I realised that the bloke had actually ruled in our favour.

The one thing the McCollums were right about was that there was a subliminal message in ‘Suicide Solution’. But it wasn’t ‘Get the gun, get the gun, shoot-shoot-shoot’. What I actually say is ‘Get the flaps out, get the flaps out, bodge-bodge-bodge’. It was a stupid dirty joke we had at the time. If a chick took her kit off, we said she was getting her flaps out – her piss flaps. And ‘bodge’ was just a word we had for fuck. So I was basically saying, ‘Get a chick naked and give her one,’ which was a whole fucking lot different to saying, ‘Blow your brains out.’

But the media was obsessed with that stuff for a long time. Which was great PR as far as we were concerned. It got to the point where if you put a ‘parental advisory’ sticker on your album saying it contained explicit lyrics, you sold twice as many copies. Then you had to have one of those stickers, otherwise the album wouldn’t chart.

After a while, I started to put subliminal messages in as many of my songs as I could. For example, on No Rest for the Wicked, if you play ‘Bloodbath in Paradise’ backwards, you can clearly hear me saying, ‘Your mother sells whelks in Hull.’

The saddest thing about that period wasn’t that the Jesus freaks kept giving us a hard time. It was that my old bandmates Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake decided to have a go, too. It started to feel like someone had put a bull’s-eye on my forehead, just ’cos I’d made a bit of dough.

They claimed we owed them money for Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman, so they sued us. And we fought, because we didn’t owe them anything. Bob and Lee were what’s known as paid-to-play musicians. They got a weekly rate for recording, a different rate for touring and another rate to stay at home. I even paid for the fucking petrol they used to drive to and from the studio. Yes, they helped write some of the songs on the first two albums, but they got publishing royalties for that – and they still get them to this day. So what more did they want? I’m obviously no great legal brain, but from what I understand they said I wasn’t a solo artist and that we were all part of a band. But if I was just the singer and we were all at the same level, how come I auditioned them? And how come I was talking about Blizzard of Ozz for years before I met them? And where the fuck are all their hit records, before and after the two albums with me?

People ask me why we didn’t just settle. But that’s what Michael Jackson did, and look what happened to him. If you’ve got a bit of hard-earned dough in the bank and you say to someone who’s suing you, ‘OK, how much will it cost to make this go away?’ that opens the door for every loony and arsehole in the world to try to get the next load off you. You have to stand up for yourself, ’cos it can be a nasty game, this business – especially when people think you go to bed at night on a big mountain of cash.

In the end Bob and Lee’s lawsuit got thrown out of every court in America. What really pisses me off is that Bob and Lee never said to me, ‘Ozzy, we’ve gotta sit down. We wanna have a talk to you.’ They just kept blasting off in all fucking directions. The first I knew about it was when I got served. They’d been creeping around behind my back, calling up other people who’d played on my albums and trying to get them involved. I’d done fuck-all wrong, but they made me feel like the criminal of the century, and it really got up my arse after a while.

Sharon protected me from a lot of the details, ’cos she knows how much I worry. In the end she just snapped and re-recorded Bob and Lee’s parts on those two albums. When they were re-released, a sticker was put on the covers telling people all about it. I didn’t have anything to do with that decision, and I can’t say I feel good about it. I told Sharon that I was uncomfortable with it, but I get it, y’know? I understand why she felt she had to do it. Every time we got past one hurdle, another one would come up. It never stopped. The case went on for twenty-five years after Blizzard of Ozz was recorded. All I wanted to do was get on with being a rock ’n’ roller, and instead I ended up being Perry fucking Mason, giving depositions here, there and everywhere.

What really kills me is that I worked with Bob for years, and I was very fond of him and his family. He’s a very talented bloke. We were good friends. I certainly didn’t turn around and sue him when they put my balls to the fire for ‘Suicide Solution’, even though he wrote some of the lyrics. But sometimes in life you’ve gotta move on. Eventually, I had to stop talking to him or seeing him, ’cos I was frightened I might say the wrong thing – and then it would be lawsuit time again. Also, I just hate fucking confrontations. It’s one of my biggest failings.

I never want to go through any of that bullshit again. Before I work with anyone now, I tell them to get themselves a lawyer, have their lawyer write up a contract with my lawyer, then read it, think about it, make sure they’re happy with it, make double and triple sure they’re happy with it, and then never say that anyone ripped them off.

Because I don’t do that – no matter what Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake might say.

My last good memory of the eighties, before everything went dark, was being sent to Wormwood Scrubs. Not because I’d broken the law again – amazingly – but because I was asked to play a gig there.

What a crazy experience that was. I might have been in a few police station lock-ups over the years, but I hadn’t set foot in a proper slammer since I’d walked out of Winson Green in 1966. The iron bars, the balconies, even the guards all looked the same as they had twenty years before, but it was the smell that really brought it all back to me: like a public shitter, times ten. Bad enough to make your eyes water. I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would want to work in one of those places. I suppose they’re all ex-army, so they’re used to it.

Maybe that’s what I would have done in the end if the army hadn’t told me to fuck off.

I was invited to do the gig because the prison had its own band, called the Scrubs, which had both guards and inmates in it. They’d written a song and donated the royalties to charity. Then they wrote to me and asked if I fancied doing a gig with them. The deal was that they’d play a set, then I’d play my set, then we’d do a jam of ‘Jailhouse Rock’.

So we get to the prison and they let me through all the fences and gates and doors, then they show me into this back room where there’s a big fat guy making a pot of tea. He’s a nice jolly chap, very friendly, and offers me a cup of tea.

I ask him, ‘How long are you in here for, then?’

‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I’ll never get out of here.’

We keep chatting for a while and I’m drinking this cup of tea, but then curiosity gets the better of me and I say, ‘So, how come you’re in here for such a long stretch?’

‘I murdered eight people.’

That’s a bit heavy duty, I think, but we carry on talking. Then curiosity gets the better of me again. ‘So, how did you do it?’ I ask, taking another sip of my tea. ‘I mean, how did you kill all those people?’

‘Oh, I poisoned them,’ he says.

I just about threw the mug of tea at the wall. And whatever had been in my mouth came out of my nose. It’s funny, when you think of a murderer, you always picture some tall, dark, evil-looking monster. But it can be just a nice, normal, jolly fat bloke, with a loose wire somewhere.

The gig itself was surreal.

The smell of dope in the hall where we played almost knocked me off my feet. It was like a Jamaican wedding in there. Another thing that amazed me was that they had a bar right outside, where all the guards went. As for the members of the Scrubs, the bass player was a Vietnamese guy who’d burned thirty-seven people to death a few years earlier by pouring petrol through the letterbox of an underground club in Soho and putting a match to it (the biggest mass killing in British history at the time); the guitarist was a kid who’d murdered a drug dealer by beating him to death with an iron bar; and then there were a couple of guards who sang and played the drums.

I’ll never forget the moment when it was our turn to go on stage. Jake E. Lee had just left the band and Zakk Wylde had taken over as lead guitarist. He was young, with ripped muscles and long blond hair, and the second he walked out from the wings, the entire place started to wolf-whistle and scream, ‘Bend over, little boy, bend over, little boy!’ Then they all started to jump around, stoned out of their minds, while the riot-guards stood guard. It was insane. I’d said to Sharon before we went on, ‘At least if we’re crap, no one will walk out.’ Now I was thinking, No, they’ll just kill me.

At one point, I looked down and there in the front row was Jeremy Bamber, the bloke who murdered his entire family with a rifle at a farmhouse in Essex and then tried to make it look like his mentally ill sister had done it. His face had been on the front page of every tabloid in Britain for months. He gave me a big smile, did the old Bambinator.

At the end, when we were playing ‘Jailhouse Rock’, there was a full-on stage invasion, led by one of the kids who had tried to cut the head off that police officer, Keith Blakelock, during the Broadwater Farm riot. I knew it was him ’cos one of the guards on stage told me. The last thing I saw was this kid taking off a shoe and hitting himself on the head with it.

Fuck this for a game of soldiers, I thought. Nice seeing ya, I’m off now.

And I didn’t look back.

*

One morning, not long after that gig, Sharon asked me, ‘Did you have a good night last night, Ozzy?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘At Kelly’s birthday party. Did you have a good time?’

‘Yeah, I suppose.’

All I could remember was playing with the kids in the garden, making Jack laugh by tickling his tummy, telling a few funny jokes, and eating one too many slices of Kelly’s birthday cake. We’d even hired a clown for the occasion – a bloke called Ally Doolally – who’d put on a little puppet show. The rest was a bit of a blur, ’cos I’d also had one or two drinks.

‘You should have seen yourself,’ said Sharon.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I mean you should have seen yourself.’

‘I don’t understand, Sharon. I was a bit tipsy, yes, but it was a birthday party. Everyone was a bit tipsy.’

‘No, honestly, Ozzy, you should have seen yourself. Actually, would you like to see yourself? I have a video.’

Oh crap, I thought.

Sharon had filmed the whole thing. She put the tape in the machine, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. In my mind, I’d been the fun dad that everyone wants to have around. Then I saw the reality. Jack was terrified and in tears. Kelly and Aimee were hiding in the shed, also in tears. All the other parents were leaving and muttering under their breath. The clown had a bloody nose. And there was me, in the middle of it all, fat, pissed, cake all over my face, dripping wet from something or other, raving, screaming drunk.

I was a beast. Absolutely terrifying.

After I’d come out of the Betty Ford Center, I’d started to say to myself, ‘Well, I might be an alcoholic, but I have the perfect job for an alcoholic, so maybe it’s kind of all right that I’m an alcoholic.’

In a way, it was true. I mean, what other occupation rewards you for being out of your brains all the time? The more loaded I was when I got on stage, the more the audience knew it was gonna be a good night. The trouble was the booze was making me so ill that I couldn’t function without taking pills or cocaine on top of it. Then I couldn’t sleep – or I had panic attacks, or I went into these paranoid delusions – so I turned to sedatives, which I’d get from doctors on the road. Whenever I overdosed, which I did all the time, I’d just blame it on my dyslexia: ‘Sorry, Doc, I thought it said six every one hour, not one every six hours.’

I had a different doctor in every town – ‘gig doctors’ I called them – and played them off against each other. When you’re a drug addict, half the thrill is the chase, not the fix. When I discovered Vicodin, for example, I used to keep an old bottle and put a couple of pills in it, then I’d say, ‘Oh, Doc, I’ve got these Vicodins, but I’m running low.’ He’d look at the date and the two pills left in the jar, then whack me up another fifty. So I’d get fifty pills before every gig. I was doing twenty-five a day at one point.

Mind you, in America, if you’re a celebrity, you don’t have to try very hard to get doctors to give you whatever you want. One gig doctor would drive out to see me in his pick-up. In the back he had one of those tool cabinets full of little drawers, and in each drawer he had a different kind of drug. All the heavy shit you could ever want. Eventually Sharon found out what was going on and put her foot down. She grabbed the doc by the scruff of the neck and said, ‘Do not give my husband any drugs under any circumstances or you’re going to jail.’

Deep down, I knew that all the booze and drugs had turned sour on me; that I’d stopped being funny and zany and had started to become sad. I’d run miles to get a drink. I’d do anything for a drink. I used to keep a fridge full of beer in the kitchen, and I’d get up, first thing in the morning, knock off a Corona, and by twelve o’clock I was fucking blasted. And when I was doing Vicodin and all that other shit, I was always playing with my fucking nose. You can see how bad I was on Penelope Spheeris’s documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II. Everyone thought it was hysterical, me trying to fry an egg at seven o’clock in the morning after I’d been out on the piss all night, drinking bottle after bottle of vino.

Booze does terrible things to you when you drink as much as I did. For example, I started to shit myself on a regular basis. At first I made a joke out of it, but then it just stopped being funny. One time, I was in a hotel somewhere in England, and I was walking down the corridor to my room, but suddenly I felt this turd rumbling down the pipe. I had to go. Right then. It was either do it on the carpet or do it in my pants, and I’d had enough of doing it in my pants. So I squatted down, dropped my trousers, and took a dump right there in the corridor.

At that exact moment, a bellboy came out of the elevator, looked at me, and shouted, ‘What the hell are you doing?’

I couldn’t even begin to think how to explain. So I just held up my room key and said, ‘It’s all right, I’m staying here.’

‘No you’re fucking not,’ he said.

A lot of alcoholics shit themselves. I mean, think about it: a gallon of Guinness makes enough tarmac to pave ten miles of the M6. And when you come round the following day, your body wants to get rid of everything: it just wants to expel all the toxic crap you forced into it the night before. I tried to stop it by switching from Guinness to Hennessy. But I was fruiting it up with orange juice or Coca-Cola the whole time, which made it just as bad. And I was drinking four bottles of Hennessy a day, plus the cocaine and the pills and the beer. At first, I would barely get hangovers, but as time went on they started to get worse and worse, until I couldn’t handle them any more.

So I went back to rehab. I was just so sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. If you drink a liquid that makes you feel better, then that’s one thing. But if you drink a liquid that makes you feel worse than you did originally, then what’s the point? And I felt like I was dying.

I couldn’t face Betty Ford again, so I went to the Hazelden Clinic in Center City, Minnesota. It was winter, freezing cold. I spent the whole time shivering, throwing up and feeling sorry for myself.

On the first day, the therapist got a bunch of us together and said, ‘When you go back to your rooms tonight, I want you to write down how much you think drink and drugs have cost you since you started doing them. Just add it all up and come back to me.’

So that night I got out a calculator and started to do some sums. I kind of wanted to get a big number, so I grossly exaggerated a lot of things, like how many pints I had each day – I put twenty-five – and how much each of them cost. In the end I came up with this obscene number. Just a huge, ridiculous number. Something like a million quid. Then I tried to get some sleep, but I couldn’t.

The next day, I showed my calculations to the bloke, and he said, ‘Oh, very interesting.’

I was surprised, ’cos I thought he was gonna say, ‘Oh, come off it, Ozzy, give me some real numbers.’

Then he said, ‘So is this just from drinking?’

‘And drugs,’ I said.

‘Hmm. And you’re sure this is everything?’ he asked me.

‘It’s a million quid!’ I said. ‘How much more could it be?’

‘Well, have you ever been fined because of drinking?’

‘A few times, yeah.’

‘Have you ever missed any gigs or been banned from any venues because of drinking?’

‘A few times, yeah.’

‘Had to pay lawyers to get you out of trouble because of your drinking?’

‘A few times, yeah.’

‘Medical fees?’

‘Big time.’

‘And d’you think you might have lost record sales because your work was affected by drinking?’

‘Probably.’

‘Probably?’

‘OK, definitely.’

‘Final question: have you ever lost property or other assets in a divorce caused by your drinking?’

‘Yeah, I lost everything.’

‘Well, Ozzy, I did some research and some calculations of my own last night, and d’you want to know what I think your addictions have cost you?’

‘Go on then.’

He told me. I almost threw up.