Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

‘Where the fuck did you think it was, Bill?’ I said. ‘The hanging gardens of fucking Babylon? So, I’m on the shitter, and I’ve got this right old cliffhanger of a Richard the Third coming down the pipe—’

Geezer groaned.

‘—and I’m looking straight ahead at this shelf in front of me. My mum’s put a tin of talcum powder on there, right? She loves that stuff. When you go to the bog after she’s taken a bath it looks like Santa’s fucking grotto in there. Anyway, it’s that cheap brand of talc, the one with the black and white polka dots on the side…’

‘Polka Tulk,’ said Tony.

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘Polka Tulk!’ I looked around the table, grinning. ‘Fucking brilliant, eh?’

‘I don’t get it,’ said Bill, his mouth still full. ‘What’s your mum’s smelly old armpits got to do with our band?’

‘The Polka Tulk Blues Band,’ I said. ‘That’s our name!’

The table went so quiet you could almost hear the steam rising from the four mugs of tea in front of us.

‘Anyone got a better idea?’ said Tony.

Silence.

‘It’s settled then,’ he said. ‘We’re the Polka Tulk Blues Band—in honour of Ozzy’s mum’s smelly old armpits.’

‘Oi!’ I said. ‘Enough of that! I won’t have a fucking word said against my mum’s smelly old armpits.’

Bill roared with laughter, and more blobs of egg and sauce flew out of his mouth.

‘You two are just animals,’ said Geezer.

The name wasn’t the only decision we had to make. Also put to the vote was whether we needed more band members. In the end we agreed that the kind of songs we’d be playing—dirty, heavy, Deep South blues—tended to work better with a lot of instruments, so ideally we could use a saxophonist and a bottleneck guitarist to give us a fuller sound. Tony knew a sax player called Alan Clark, and a mate of mine from school, Jimmy Phillips, could play bottleneck.

To be honest with you, we also wanted to copy the line-up of Fleetwood Mac, whose second album—Mr Wonderful—had just come out and blown us all away. Tony was especially taken with Fleetwood Mac’s guitarist, Peter Green. Like Clapton before him, Green had played for a while with John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers, but he was now a fully qualified rock god in his own right. That seemed to be how guitarists made the big time: they joined an established act, then they left to front their own projects. Fortunately for us, Tony had been taken off the market by his injury just when he was about to be snapped up by a big-name act.

Their loss was our gain.

That weekend, we met up for our first rehearsal at a community centre in Six Ways, one of the older and shittier parts of Ashton. There was only one problem: we could barely hear the PA above the noise of the A34 underpass outside. Making the din even worse were the cars and trucks circling the massive concrete roundabout they’d just built on top of the fucking thing. They were pouring so much concrete in Aston in those days that we might as well have bought some fur hats and started calling each other comrade. I mean, for fuck’s sake, the place was grey enough as it was without adding more fucking grey everywhere.

To cheer things up a bit, I went out one night with an aerosol can—I’d had a few beers—and did some ‘decorating’. One of the things I graffitied on a wall by the roundabout was ‘Iron Void’. Fuck knows what was going on in my head.

The rehearsals went all right, considering I’d never sung with a proper band before. Basically, the lads would just jam, and then Tony would give me a nod when he thought I should sing. For lyrics, I just came out with whatever bollocks was in my head at the time.

It wasn’t easy for Geezer, either. He didn’t have enough dough at the time to buy a bass, so he did the best he could with his Telecaster—you can’t put bass strings on a normal guitar, ’cos it would snap the neck. I think Tony was worried about Geezer at first, but it turned out that he was a fucking awesome bass player—a total natural. And he looked more like a rock star than anyone else in the band.

Our first gig was up in Carlisle, thanks to Tony’s old Mythology contacts. That meant driving two hundred miles up the M6 in Tony’s rusty old shitbox of a van, with the motorway stopping and starting all the time, ’cos they hadn’t finished tarmacking it. The van’s suspension had died along with the dinosaurs, so whenever we went round a corner everyone had to lean in the opposite direction to stop the wheel arch from scraping on the tire. We soon learned that it’s almost impossible to lean in the opposite direction of a turn, so this horrible smell of burning rubber kept wafting into the cabin, sparks were flying all over the place, and you could hear this violent grinding noise as the wheel gradually etched a big fucking hole in the body-work. ‘It’s a good job you know how to use a welder,’ I said to Tony. Another problem was the windscreen wipers: they didn’t work. Well, they did for a bit, but it was raining so hard that by the time we’d reached Stafford the motor had conked out. So Tony had to pull over to the hard shoulder in the pissing rain while me and Bill fed a piece of string out of the window, tied it to the wiper, then strung it back through the other window. That way we could wipe the windscreen manually, with me tugging on one end of the string, then Bill tugging on the other.

All the way to fucking Carlisle.

But the eight-hour drive was worth it.

When we finally arrived in Carlisle, I just couldn’t stop staring at the flyer for our first official gig. It said:

C.E.S. PROMOTIONS Proudly Present…

’68 Dancing for Teens and Twenties

County Hall Ballroom, Carlisle

Saturday August 24th, 7.30 p.m. to 11.30 p.m.—

The New, Exciting Group from Birmingham, POLKA TULK

BLUES BAND (With ex-member of

MYTHOLOGY)

plus

CREEQUE

Non-stop dancing (Admission 5/-)

This is it, I said to myself.

It’s finally happening.

The gig itself was amazing, apart from almost crapping my pants with stage fright. It was afterwards that the trouble started. We were packing up our stuff—roadies were a luxury we couldn’t afford—and this giant of a bloke with bright red hair and some kind of pus-filled rash on his face came up to me. He was holding a pint glass and his troll of a chick was standing next to him. ‘Oi, you,’ he went. ‘D’you like my girlfriend?’

‘Say again?’ I said.

‘You ’eard me. D’you like my girlfriend? You were looking at her. Fancy giving her one, do you?’

‘You must have got me mixed up with someone else,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t looking at anything.’

‘You were looking at her. I saw ya. With my own two fucking eyes. Fancy having a go, do you?’

By now, the bloke was so close to me that I could smell the sweat on his T-shirt. He was enormous, and he had a head on him like a fucking anvil. He was even bigger than my old mate, the bully-basher from Birchfield Road. There was no way out. I knew exactly what was going to happen next. I’d either say, ‘No, honestly mate, I don’t like your girlfriend,’ and he’d reply, ‘You calling her ugly, are you, you Brummie cunt?’ then rip my head off. Or I’d go,

‘Funny you should say that, ’cos I was just thinking how much I’d love to give your girlfriend a good old seeing to,’ and he’d reply, ‘Yeah, I thought so, you Brummie cunt,’ then rip my head off.

I was fucked, either way.

Then I had an idea: maybe if I got someone else involved, it would take the pressure off.

‘Hey, Bill,’ I shouted over to the other side of stage. ‘Come over here a second, will yer?’

Bill strolled over, hands in pockets, whistling. ‘What’s up, Ozzy?’