I Am Ozzy by Ozzy Osbourne
After a few days of searching, we finally found just the right bloke for the job. His name was John Allen, and, funnily enough, he was an alcoholic. He’d get shitfaced after the gigs and start chasing groupies. He was paranoid, too. He carried this little penknife in a holster. One day I asked him what it was for and he said, ‘Just in case the noose slips.’ I said, ‘You’re three feet tall and you’ll be dangling twenty feet off the ground, so what are you gonna do, cut the rope? You’ll end up like a fucking pancake!’
He was a funny guy, that John Allen. He had a completely normal-sized head, so he’d be sitting opposite you on a bar stool, and you’d forget that his feet couldn’t touch the ground. But when he got loaded he’d lose his balance, so one moment he’d be there, and the next you’d hear this thump and he’d be on the floor. We used to play jokes on him all the fucking time. When we were on the tour bus, we’d wait until he passed out, then we’d put him on the highest bunk bed, so when he woke up he’d roll over and go, ‘Aarrgh!’ Splat.
He was as bad as me when it came to drinking. One time, he was so out of his shitter at Los Angeles airport that he missed his flight, so we had to send one of the roadies to pick him up. The roadie just grabbed him by the back of his trousers and threw him into the luggage compartment under the tour bus.
Then this woman came running over and shouted, ‘Hey, I saw what you did to that poor little man! You can’t treat him like that!’
The roadie just looked at her and said, ‘Fuck off. He’s our midget.’
Then this little head poked out from between the suitcases and went, ‘Yeah, fuck off, I’m his midget.’
When the tour started at the end of 1981, I was a wreck. I was in love with Sharon, but at the same time I was cut to pieces by losing my family. Then the fights between me and Sharon started to get even crazier than before. I’d get drunk and try to hit her, and she’d throw things at me. Wine bottles, gold discs, TVs – you name it, it would all come flying across the room. I ain’t proud to admit that a few of my punches reached their target. I gave her a black eye once and I thought her dad was gonna rip me into pieces. But he just said, ‘Watch yourself.’ It’s shameful, what I did when I was loaded. The fact that I ever raised my hand against a woman disgusts me. It was a fucking atrocious, unforgivable way to behave, and there’s no excuse for it, ever. And like I said before, it’s something I’ll take to the grave with me. I don’t know why Sharon stuck around, to be honest with you.
Sometimes she’d wake up in the morning and I’d be gone, ’cos I’d hitch-hiked back to Bulrush Cottage. But every time I got home, Thelma would tell me to fuck off. That went on for weeks. It was fucking me up, fucking up the kids, fucking up Thelma.
And I can only imagine what it was doing to Sharon.
It took me a long, long time to get over the break-up with Thelma. It tore me apart. I’ve said to my kids, ‘I don’t want you to think I jumped away from you and clicked my heels and said, “ bon voyage”. It wasn’t like that at all. It just about destroyed me.’
But eventually my little trips to Bulrush Cottage ended. The last time I went there it was pissing it down with rain and already getting dark. As soon as I walked through the gate, this heavy-set bloke popped out of nowhere and said, ‘Oi, where d’you think you’re going, eh?’
‘This is my house,’ I told him.
The bloke shook his head. ‘No it ain’t. This is your ex-wife’s house. And you’re not allowed within fifty yards of it. Court order. If you take one step further, you’re spending the night in jail.’
He must have been a bailiff or something.
From the garden, I could hear Thelma laughing inside the house. She was with her divorce lawyer, I think.
‘Can I at least get some clothes?’ I asked.
‘Wait here.’
Five minutes later, some of my old stage clothes came flying out of the door and landed on the grass. By the time I’d picked them up and stuffed them into a carrier bag they were soaked through. Then the door opened again, and out came my seven-foot-tall stuffed grizzly bear, his head in shreds after the time I opened fire on him with the Benelli. That bear was pretty much the only thing I got out of that divorce, along with the knackered old Merc that the cats had scratched up. Thelma got the house, every last penny I had in the bank, and a weekly allowance. I also wanted to pay for the kids to go to private schools. It was the least I could do.
I felt terribly sorry for myself that night.
Trying to carry a seven-foot bear back to London didn’t exactly make things easier. It wouldn’t fit in the cab with me, so I had to order a second cab, just for the bear. Then I had to leave it propped up against a bus stop on the street outside Sharon’s house on Wimbledon Common while I carried my bags into the hallway. But instead of going back out to get the bear, me and Sharon decided that it would be funnier to put one of her frilly kitchen aprons on it, and then get her friends to come outside and see it. But while we were trying to organise all that, someone nicked the fucking thing. I was heartbroken. I loved that bear.
As for the kids, once the damage is done with a divorce, you can’t ever make it right, although we’ve since become close again. And divorce was a much bigger deal back then.
In LA today, if your marriage breaks up, your wife will marry me, and I’ll marry your ex-wife, and we’ll all have fucking dinner and holidays in Mexico together. That ain’t cool with me. I don’t understand how people can do that. I haven’t seen Thelma for decades.
And, to be honest with you, I think it’s for the best.
By the time we took the Diary of a Madman tour to America, we were experts at midget-hanging. But there were some other problems with the show – like the medieval chain-mail suit I used to wear during a few of the numbers. As soon as I worked up a sweat, it was like being wrapped in razor blades. By the end of the night, I was carved up like a slice of roast beef. We also had a lot of trouble with our stage props. For example, we had these kabuki curtains that dropped down from above the stage in two parts, instead of parting in the middle like normal theatrical curtains do. The curtains would go down halfway through the show, and then when they were pulled up again, this mechanical arm with a giant God-like hand on the end of it would come out from under the drum riser and soar above the audience, with me crouching down in the palm. When the arm was fully extended, flames would shoot out of one of the fingers, and I’d stomp on this pedal by my foot, which would activate a catapult behind me, and about fifty pounds of raw meat would be flung into the audience.
Then I’d stand up and shout, ‘ROCK ’N’ ROLL!’
It was fucking awesome.
But, of course, what can go wrong will go wrong – and pretty much everything went wrong on the second night of the US tour. It was New Year’s Eve, and we were at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and Sports Arena, playing to a crowd of tens of thousands. First the smoke machine went on the blink. It was coughing out so much dry ice that no one could see what the fuck they were doing. Then, for some reason, one of the kabuki curtains wouldn’t come down, so we couldn’t get the giant God-like hand ready for its entrance. I remember standing there in my chain-mail suit, watching as Sharon literally swung from this curtain, trying to get it to fall. ‘Drop, you bastard, drop!’ she was screaming.
Eventually, after a couple of roadies joined in, they got the thing unstuck. But then the mechanical arm for the hand got caught up in the carpet on the floor of the stage and started to pull it from under the giant speaker cabinets behind the band, making them wobble like crazy. ‘TIMBER!’ one of the roadies shouted. For what might have been the longest thirty seconds of all our lives, Sharon, my assistant Tony and a bunch of roadies were wrestling with this carpet, trying to untangle it from the mechanical arm, to stop the whole fucking set collapsing.
Finally the carpet was pulled free, someone gave me a shove from behind, the kabuki curtains went up again, and before I knew it I was crouching down in the hand as it rose into the air, with th
The crowd thought it was all part of the show and went fucking wild.
It became one of our trademarks, throwing butchers’ off-cuts into the audience. As well as the catapult, we used to get the midget to come on stage with buckets of innards and throw them into the audience before he was hung. It was our version of the custard-pie fights I used to love seeing on telly when I was a kid. But then the audience got involved, and the fans started to bring their own meat, and throw it at us. When we finished a gig, it looked like the Trail of fucking Tears. You’d never get that kind of shit past health and safety today.
And it was amazing how quickly it got out of control.
One time this cop came up to me after a show and said, ‘Have you any idea what you’re doing to the youth of America?’
Then he showed me this Polaroid photograph of a kid in the queue outside the gig with an ox’s head on his shoulders.
‘Holy crap,’ I said. ‘Where did he get that from?’
‘He killed it on his way to the gig.’
‘Well, I hope he was hungry.’
It was insane what the kids would bring. It started with just cuts of meat, but then it moved on to entire animals. We had dead cats, birds, lizards, all kinds of stuff. One time, someone threw this huge bullfrog on to the stage, and it landed on its back. The fucking thing was so big, I thought it was someone’s baby. I got a terrible fright. I started screaming, ‘WHAT’S THAT? WHAT’S THAT? WHAT’S THAT?’ Then it rolled over and hopped away.
With every gig, it just got crazier and crazier. Eventually people started to throw things on stage with nails and razor blades embedded in them – joke shop stuff, mainly, like rubber snakes and plastic spiders. Some of the crew started to get freaked out about it, especially after a real snake ended up on stage one night. It was well and truly pissed off about being on stage with Ozzy Osbourne, that snake was. One of the roadies caught it with one of those big nets on a stick you use to clean swimming pools.
Tony – who had a small walk-on part in the show – was the jumpiest when it came to the creepy-crawlies. Basically, all he had to do was put on this suit of armour and bring me a drink on stage during a break while the scenery was changed. But it took the poor bloke about half an hour to get the suit on and off, and he spent the whole time shitting himself about something being thrown at him. So one night, just to wind him up, I threw a rubber snake in his direction, and when he jumped backwards, one of the roadies dropped a piece of string down his back. Tony went mental. He had that suit of armour off in about three seconds, until he was standing there with nothing on but these grey tights. He was so freaked out I swear his voice went up by three octaves.
It brought the house down.
I’m telling you: something crazy happened on every night of that tour.
And then on January 20, 1982 we played the Veterans Auditorium in Des Moines, Iowa. I’ll never forget the name of that place, that’s for sure. Or how to pronounce it: ‘DEE-Moyn’.
The gig was going great. The God-like hand was working without any hitches. We’d already hung the midget.
Then, from out of the audience came this bat.
Obviously a toy, I thought.
So I held it up to the lights and bared my teeth while Randy played one of his solos. The crowd went mental.
Then I did what I always did when we got a rubber toy on stage.
CHOMP.
Immediately though, something felt wrong. Very wrong.
For a start, my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid, with the worst aftertaste you could ever imagine. I could feel it staining my teeth and running down my chin.
Then the head in my mouth twitched.
Oh, fuck me I thought. I didn’t just go and eat a fucking bat, did I?
So I spat out the head, looked over into the wings, and saw Sharon with her eyes bulging, waving her hands, screaming, ‘NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IT’S REAL, OZZY, IT’S REAL!’
Next thing I knew I was in a wheelchair, being rushed into an emergency room. Meanwhile, a doctor was saying to Sharon, ‘Yes, Miss Arden, the bat was alive. It was probably stunned from being at a rock concert, but it was definitely alive. There’s a good chance Mr Osbourne now has rabies. Symptoms? Oh, y’know, malaise, headache, fever, violent twitches, uncontrollable excitement, depression, a pathological fear of liquids…’
‘Not much chance of that,’ muttered Sharon.
‘Mania is usually one of the final symptoms. Then the patient gets very lethargic, falls into a coma, and stops breathing.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘That’s why eating a bat is generally a bad idea, from a medical standpoint.’
‘Isn’t there a vaccine?’
‘It’s usually best administered beforehand, but, yes, we can give him a shot. A few shots, actually.’
Then the doctor went to get a syringe the size of a grenade launcher.
‘OK, Mr Osbourne,’ he said. ‘You’ll need to take off your pants and bend over.’
I did as he said.
‘This might sting a bit.’
That was the last thing I heard.
Every night for the rest of the tour I had to find a doctor and get more rabies shots: one in each arse cheek, one in each thigh, one in each arm. Every one hurt like a bastard. I had more holes in me than a lump of fucking Swiss cheese. But it was better than getting rabies, I suppose. Not that anyone would have noticed the difference if I’d gone insane. Meanwhile, the press were going nuts. The next morning, I was the ‘And finally…’ item on just about every news show on the planet. Everyone thought I’d bitten the head of a bat on purpose, instead of it being a simple misunderstanding. For a while, I was worried we might be closed down, and a couple of venues did go ahead and ban us. The fans didn’t help, either. After they heard about the bat, they started bringing even crazier stuff to the gigs. Going on stage was like being at a butchers’ convention.
And, of course, the animal rights people were going nuts. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals sent people to ‘monitor’ our gigs. The crew would fuck with them all the time. They’d say, ‘Oh, Ozzy’s going to throw eighteen puppies into the audience tonight, and he won’t sing a note until they’ve all been slaughtered.’
The ASPCA believed every word of it.
They even pulled over our tour bus in Boston. I remember all these do-gooders jumping on and seeing Sharon’s Yorkshire terrier – Mr Pook – and having a fit. One of the guys shouted, ‘OK, this bus isn’t going any further. I want that dog taken into protective custody. Now!’
What did they think was going to happen? That we were going to start mowing down Yorkshire terriers with a machine-gun halfway through ‘You Lookin’ at Me Lookin’ at You’?
A few nights later, we were playing Madison Square Garden in New York. The whole place stank of shit. It turned out that they’d had a circus in there the week before, and the animals were still locked in their cages underneath the bleachers at the back. One of the venue managers came over and invited the crew to see them. But as soon as he saw me, he went, ‘I didn’t mean you.’
‘Why not?’ I said.
?
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
‘What the fuck do you think I’m going to do?’ I asked him. ‘Bite the head off an elephant?’
If you’d asked anyone on the Diary of a Madman crew which member of the band might not make it through the tour – me, Randy, Rudy or Tommy – they’d have put all their money on me.
Like the song said, the way I was boozing was a kind of suicide. It was only gonna be a matter of time.
Sharon was convinced something bad would happen. So whenever I’d been drinking in the hotel, she’d steal all my clothes, so there was no way I could leave and get into any trouble – unless I was prepared to walk down to the lobby stark bollock naked.
It worked, most of the time.
But then we got to San Antonio, Texas. As usual, I got shit-faced in the hotel. And, as usual, Sharon nicked my clothes. But she made the mistake of leaving one of her evening gowns in the room. It was this dark green frilly thing, and with a bit of ripping and tearing at the seams I got it on. Then I found some running shoes, and I was off.
So there I was in Sharon’s evening dress, on the loose, slinging this bottle of Courvoisier around the streets of San Antonio, looking for trouble. I think we might have had a photo shoot going on that day, but I can’t remember for sure. I do know that I was blasted. Then I got this sudden urge to take a piss, as you do when you’re blasted. Actually, it was more than an urge: my bladder felt like a hot cannon ball. I had to go, right there, right then. But I was in the middle of this strange town in Texas, and I didn’t have a clue where the public bogs were. So I looked around, found a quiet corner, and started taking a slash against this crumbly old wall.
Ahhhh. That’s better.
Then I heard this voice behind me.
‘You disgust me.’
‘What?’ I turned around to see this old timer in a cowboy hat, staring at me like I’d just molested his gran.