Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

‘Who’s that?’ I asked Albert.

‘Thelma Riley,’ he told me. ‘Lovely gal. Brainy, too. But she’s divorced, and she’s got a kid, so watch yerself.’

I didn’t care.

She was beautiful, and I wanted to talk to her. So I did what I always did when I wanted to talk to a bird: I got fucking lollied. But something strange must have been going on that night, because the old get-as-dribblingly-drunk-as-possible strategy worked: I pulled her on the dance floor while Tony pulled her mate. Then we all drove back to Tony’s place in his Cortina, with me and Thelma having a snog and a fumble on the back seat.

Tony dumped Thelma’s friend the next day, but me and Thelma kept going. And when I finally couldn’t take any more of the bad atmosphere at 14 Lodge Road, we rented a flat together above a launderette in Edgbaston, a posh part of Birmingham.

A year or so later, in 1971, we got married in a registry office.

I thought it was what you did: get some dough, find a chick, get married, settle down, go to the pub.

It was a terrible mistake.

A few months before the wedding, Black Sabbath finally made it to America. Before we went, I remember Patrick Meehan’s dad calling us into a meeting at his London office, and telling us that we were going to be ‘ambassadors for British music’, so we should fucking behave ourselves.

We just nodded and ignored him.

Having said that, I made sure to go easy on the booze until we reached the airport. But what I didn’t know is that airports had bars—and I couldn’t resist a couple of cheeky ones to calm my nerves. So by the time I got to my seat, I was as pissed as a fart. Then we found out that Traffic were on the same plane. I couldn’t get over the fact that I was on the same flight as Steve Winwood. For the first time in my life, I began to feel like a proper rock star.

Even with all the booze I put away on the plane, it seemed to take for ever to get to JFK. I kept looking out of the window, thinking, How the fuck does this thing stay up in the air? Then we flew over Manhattan, where the World Trade Center was being built—half of it was still just scaffolding and steel girders—and landed as the sun was setting. It was a warm night, I remember, and I’d never experienced that warm-night-in-New-York vibe before. It had a distinctive smell, y’know? I thought it was great. Mind you, I was beyond pissed by this point.

The flight attendant had to help me out of my seat, and then I fell down the steps.

By the time I got to immigration, the hangover had set it. My headache was so bad that I’d forgotten what I’d written as a joke on the visa-waiver form. Where it asked for your religion, I’d put ‘Satanist’. So the bloke takes the form off me and starts reading it. Then he pauses when he gets halfway down.

He looks up at me. ‘Satanist, huh?’ he says, in this thick Bronx accent, with a bored, tired look on his face.

Suddenly I’m thinking, Oh, shit.

But before I can start trying to explain myself, he just stamps the form and shouts, ‘NEXT!’

‘Welcome to New York’ said the sign above his head.

We got our luggage from the carousel and went to queue in the taxi rank outside the arrivals hall. Fuck knows what all the businessmen with their suits and ties and briefcases were thinking, standing next to this long-haired, unwashed, pissed-up Brummie, wearing a tap around his neck and a pair of smelly old jeans with ‘Peace & Love’ and a CND symbol on one leg, and ‘Black Panthers Rule’ and a black fist symbol on the other.

As we waited, this massive yellow car drove by. It must have had nineteen or twenty doors on it.

‘I knew the cars here were big,’ I slurred, ‘but not that big!’

‘It’s a limousine, you idiot,’ said Tony.

Before we left England, we’d already recorded our follow-up to Black Sabbath. We had it in the can only five months after the release of the first record—which is unbelievable when you consider the lazy-arsed way albums are made these days. It was originally going to be called Warpiggers, which was a term for a black magic wedding or something. Then we changed it to War Pigs, and Geezer came up with these heavy-duty lyrics about death and destruction. No wonder we never got any chicks at our gigs. Geezer just wasn’t interested in your average ‘I love you’ pop song. Even when he wrote a boy-meets-girl lyric, it had a twist to it—like ‘N.I.B.’ off the first album, where the boy turns out to be the Devil. Geezer also liked to put a lot of topical stuff, like Vietnam references, into our songs. He had his ear to the ground, Geezer did.

We went back to Regent Sound in Soho to make the second record, although we’d spent a few weeks beforehand rehearsing in an old barn at Rockfield Studios in South Wales. Studio time cost a fortune back then, so we didn’t want to fuck around when the meter was running. And once our work was done at Regent Sound we moved to Island Studios in Notting Hill to do the final mix. That was when Rodger Bain realised we needed a few extra minutes of material. I remember him coming down from the control room one lunch break and saying,

‘Look, lads, we need some filler. Can you jam something?’ We all wanted to get started on our sandwiches, but Tony launched into this guitar riff while Bill played around with some drum patterns, I hummed a melody, and Geezer sat in the corner, scribbling down some lyrics.

Twenty minutes later, we had a song called ‘The Paranoid’. By the end of the day, it had become just ‘Paranoid’.

It’s always the way with the best songs: they come out of nowhere, when you’re not even trying. The thing with ‘Paranoid’ is that it doesn’t fit into any category: it was like a punk song years before punk had been invented. Mind you, none of us thought it was anything special when we recorded it. To us, it just seemed a bit half-arsed compared with ‘Hand of Doom’ or

‘Iron Man’ or any of those heavier numbers. But fucking hell, it was catchy; I was humming it all the way home from the studio. ‘Thelma,’ I said, when I got back to Edgbaston. ‘I think we might have written a single.’

She just gave me a look that said, That’ll be the day.

It’s funny, y’know: if you’d told us at the time that people would still be listening to any of those songs forty years into the future—and that the album would sell more than four million copies in America alone—we would have just laughed in your face.

But the fact is Tony Iommi turned out to be one of the greatest heavy rock riff-makers of all time. Whenever we went into the studio we’d challenge him to beat his last riff—and he’d come up with something like ‘Iron Man’ and blow everyone away.

But ‘Paranoid’ was a different class again. About two seconds after the suits at Vertigo heard that song, the name of the whole album became Paranoid. It wasn’t that they thought War Pigs might upset Americans because of Vietnam—at least not as far as I know. No, they were just freaking out about our little three-minute pop song, because they thought it might get played on the radio, and bands like ours never got played on the radio. And it made sense to give the album the same title as the single, to make it easier to promote in the record shops.

The suits were right. ‘Paranoid’ went straight to number four in the British singles chart and got us on Top of the Pops—alongside Cliff Richard, of all people. The only problem was the album cover, which had been done before the name change and now didn’t make any sense at all. What did four pink blokes holding shields and waving swords have to do with paranoia? They were pink because that was supposed to be the colour of the war pigs. But without ‘War Pigs’ written on the front, they just looked like gay fencers.