Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

Life at home was made more complicated because Thelma’s son was living with us. His name was Elliot, and he must have been four or five at the time. I adopted him, actually. He was a good kid, but for some reason we never got on. Y’know, some people just don’t hit it off with their children. That was me and Elliot. I spent the whole time when I was home screaming at him or whacking him around the ear ’ole. And it’s not like he ever did anything bad to deserve it. I wish I could have been better with him, because he’d had a rough time before I came along: his dad had fucked off before Elliot had ever known him. When he got older, he told me he saw his old man in the pub one time, but he couldn’t bring himself to talk to him.

Which is terribly sad, really.

But I wasn’t much of a substitute. It probably didn’t help that my boozing was so over the top, which made me volatile. And, of course, my ego was out of control. To tell you the truth, I must have been a horrendous stepdad.

And if I loved Thelma, I certainly didn’t treat her like I did. If I’ve got any regrets about my life, that’s one of them. For years, I acted like a married bachelor, sneaking around, banging chicks, getting so wasted down the pub that I’d fall asleep in the car on the street outside. I put that woman through hell. I should never have married her. She didn’t deserve it: she wasn’t a bad person, and she wasn’t a bad wife. But I was a fucking nightmare.

Nine months to the day after me and Thelma got married, she got pregnant. At that point, we still hadn’t seen much dough from all the record sales and the touring, but we knew how well the band was doing, so we assumed that Patrick Meehan would soon be sending us a royalty cheque big enough to buy Buckingham Palace. In the meantime, the usual agreement stood: anything I wanted, I just picked up the phone. So Thelma suggested that we should go house hunting. We couldn’t live in a little flat with a screaming baby, she said, so why not move to a proper place? We could afford it, after all.

I was all for it.

‘Let’s live in the country,’ I said, imagining myself in a tweed suit with green welly-boots, a Range Rover and a shotgun.

For the next few months, every time I came off the road for a few days, we climbed into our brand-new green Triumph Herald convertible—I’d got it for Thelma, because I couldn’t drive—and go looking for houses in the countryside. Eventually we found one we both liked: Bulrush Cottage in Ranton, Staffordshire. They were asking just over twenty grand for the place, which seemed reasonable enough. It had four bedrooms, a sauna, there was room for a little studio and, best of all, it had plenty of land. But we kept on looking, just to make sure.

Then, one day, in a tea shop in Evesham, Worcestershire, we decided that we’d seen enough: we’d make an offer on Bulrush. It felt like I’d finally grown up. But just as we were starting to get excited about our new life in the country, Thelma suddenly went ‘Shhh!’ and said, ‘Can you hear that?’

‘What?’ I said.

‘That clicking noise.’

‘What clickin…?’ Then I heard it, too.

It was more of a tick than a click.

Tick, tick, tick, tick.

I looked down and saw a big puddle under Thelma’s chair. Something was dripping from under her dress. Then one of the tea ladies started wailing about the mess on the floor.

‘Oh my God,’ said Thelma. ‘My waters have broken!’

‘What d’you mean?’ I said. ‘You’ve pissed yerself?’

‘No, John—my waters have broken.’

‘Eh?’

‘I’m having the baby.’

I jumped up so quickly my chair fell over. Then my whole body went numb with panic. I couldn’t think. My heart was like a drum roll. The first thing that came into my head was: I’m not drunk enough. The bottle of cognac I’d gone through in the car had already worn off. I’d always thought that Thelma would go off to hospital to have the baby. I didn’t think it could just happen—in the middle of a fucking tea shop!

‘Is anyone in here a doctor?’ I shouted, looking desperately around the room. ‘We need a doctor. Help! We need a doctor!’

‘John,’ hissed Thelma. ‘You just need to drive me to hospital. We don’t need a doctor.’

‘We need a doctor!’

‘No, we don’t.’

‘Yeah, we do,’ I moaned. ‘I don’t feel well.’

‘John,’ said Thelma, ‘you need to drive me to hospital. Now.’

‘I don’t have a driving licence.’

‘Since when has the law stopped you from doing anything?’

‘I’m drunk.’

‘You’ve been drunk since 1967! C’mon, John. Hurry.’

So I got up, paid the bill, and led Thelma outside to the Herald. I had no idea how to work the thing. My parents had never owned a car, and I’d always assumed that I’d never be able to afford one, so I hadn’t taken the slightest bit of interest in learning how to drive. All I knew was the basics, like how to tune the radio and wind down the windows.

But gears? Choke? Clutch?

Nah.

The car jerked backwards and forwards on its springs like a pissed kangaroo for about twenty minutes before I got it moving. In the wrong direction. Then I finally found first gear.

‘John, you’re going to have to put your foot down,’ said Thelma, between groans.

‘My foot’s shaking,’ I told her. ‘I can hardly keep it on the pedal.’

My hands were shaking, too. I was terrified that our baby was going to end up plopping out of Thelma and on to the dashboard, where it might blow away, because the hood was still down. I could imagine the headline: ‘ROCKER’S TOT IN FREAK M-WAY TRAGEDY’.

‘Seriously, John. Arrrgh! Drive faster. Arrrgh! I’m having contractions!’

‘The car won’t go any faster!’

‘You’re only going ten miles an hour.’

After what seemed like a thousand years, we made it to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Edgbaston. Then all I had to do was stop the car. But every time I put my foot on the middle pedal it just started bouncing up and down again and making this horrible noise. It’s a miracle I didn’t crash into the back of an ambulance, to be honest with you. But somehow I managed to get the wheels to stop moving, and then get Thelma out of her seat—not easy when she was screaming and puffing—and into the maternity ward.

A few hours later, at 11.20 p.m., little Jessica Osbourne was born—so I became a father for the first time. The date was January 20, 1972. It was one of those cold, clear winter nights.

Through the hospital window, you could see all these gleaming constellations in every direction.

‘What should we give her as a middle name?’ said Thelma, holding Jessica up to her chest.

‘Starshine,’ I said.

By the summer of 1972—six months after Jess was born—we were back in America, this time to record a new album, which we’d decided to call Snowblind in honour of our new-found love of cocaine. By now, I was putting so much of the stuff up my nose that I had to smoke a bag of dope every day just to stop my heart from exploding. We were staying at 773 Stradella Road in Bel Air, a rented 1930s mansion complete with its own staff of maids and gardeners.

The place was owned by the Du Pont family and it had six bedrooms, seven bathrooms, a private cinema (which we used for writing and rehearsing) and a swimming pool in the back, which was on stilts and looked out over all these woods and mountains. We never left the house. Booze, drugs, food, groupies—everything was delivered. On a good day there’d be bowls of white powder and crates of booze in every room, and all these random rock ’n’ rollers and chicks in bikinis hanging around the place—in the bedrooms, on the sofas, outside on the recliners—all of them as high as we were.