Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

It wasn’t just me and Thelma and the baby who got a new place to live around that time. I also sorted out a bigger house for my mum and dad. As always, Patrick Meehan’s office took care of the dough side of things, although when the land behind Bulrush Cottage was put up for sale we bought it with our own money—or rather, money we made by selling the Rolls-Royce that Patrick Meehan had given Tony, which Tony had then given to us. I think that was the first time we’d bought anything with our own money. To this day, I don’t know why we did it. Maybe it’s ’cos Thelma dealt with all the paperwork. I made her do it because the farmer who sold us the land was a cross-dresser, and I didn’t want to go anywhere near him. Fucking hell, man, the first time I saw that bloke, I thought I was hallucinating. He had this big bushy beard and he’d drive his tractor down Butt Lane while wearing a frock and curlers in his hair.

Other times you’d see him by the side of the road, his frock hitched up, taking a slash. And the funny thing is, no one would bat an eyelid.

Tony and Geezer also bought houses when they got back. Tony got a place in Acton Trussell, on the other side of the M6; and Geezer bought somewhere down in Worcestershire.

It took Bill a bit longer to find his rock ’n’ roll retreat, so in the meantime he rented a place called Fields Farm, out near Evesham. In less than three years, we’d gone from piss-poor backstreet kids to millionaire country gents. It was unbelievable.

And I loved living in the country.

For starters, I suddenly had enough room to get even more toys sent over from Patrick Meehan’s office. Like a seven-foot-tall stuffed grizzly bear. And a gypsy caravan with a little fireplace inside. And a myna bird called Fred, who lived in the laundry room. He could do a wicked impression of a washing machine, could Fred. Or at least he could until I put a shotgun in his face and told him to shut the fuck up.

I have to say I really pigged out on the calls to Patrick Meehan’s office after we moved into Bulrush Cottage. Everything I’d ever wanted as a kid, I had them deliver. I ended up with a whole shed full of Scalextric cars, jukeboxes, table football games, trampolines, pool tables, shotguns, crossbows, catapults, swords, arcade games, toy soldiers, fruit machines… Every single thing you could ever think to ask for, I asked for it. The guns were most fun. The most powerful one I had was this Benelli five-shot semi-automatic. I tried it out on the stuffed bear one time. Its head just exploded—you should have fucking seen it, man. Another thing I’d do is get these mannequins and tie them to this tree trunk in the garden and execute them at dawn. I’m telling you, it’s really terrifying what booze and drugs will do to your mind if you take them for long enough. I was out of control.

Obviously, the most important thing I needed to sort out after moving to the country was a ready supply of drugs. So I called up one of my American dealers and got him to start sending me cocaine via air mail, on the understanding that I’d pay him the next time I was over there on tour. It worked a treat, although I ended up waiting for the postman all day like a dog.

Thelma must have thought I was buying dirty magazines or something.

Then I found a local dope dealer who said he could get me some really strong hash from Afghanistan. He wasn’t wrong, either. The first time I smoked that stuff it almost knocked my fucking head off. It came in massive slabs of black resin, which would last even me for weeks.

There was nothing I loved more than when someone came over to Bulrush Cottage and said,

‘Dope? Nah, I don’t smoke that stuff. Never has any effect on me.’

If you said that, you were mine.

The first person who claimed to be immune to dope was our local fruit ’n’ veg man, Charlie Clapham. He was a right old character, Charlie was, and he became a good friend. One night, after we’d been to the pub, I got out the tin of Afghan hash and said, ‘Try this.’

‘Nah, never works on me, that stuff.’

‘Go on, Charlie, try it, just once. For me.’

So he grabbed the brick out of my hands and before I could say anything he bit off a huge chunk of it. He must have eaten at least half an ounce. Then he burped in my face and said,

‘Urgh, that tasted ’orrible.’

Five minutes later, he said, ‘See? Nothing,’ and went home.

It must have been about one o’clock in the morning when he left, and the poor fucker was meant to be at his market stall by four. But I knew there was no way he’d be doing a normal day’s work.

Sure enough, when I saw him a few days later, he grabbed me by the collar and said,

‘What the fuck was that shit you gave me the other night? By the time I got to the market I was hallucinating. I couldn’t get out of the van. I was just lying in the back with the carrots, a coat over my head, screaming. I thought the Martians had landed!’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, Charlie,’ I told him.

‘Can I come over tomorrow night and have some more?’ he said.

I rarely slept in my own bed at Bulrush Cottage. I was so loaded every night, I could never make it up the stairs. So I’d sleep in the car, in my caravan, under the piano in the living room, in the studio or outside in a bale of hay. When I slept outside in winter, it wasn’t unusual for me to wake up blue in the face with icicles on my nose. In those days, there was no such thing as hypothermia.

Crazy shit would happen all the time at that house. The fact that I was usually pissed up and fucking around with my shot-guns didn’t help. That’s a great combination, that is—booze and shotguns. Very fucking safe. One time I tried to jump over a fence in the back garden while holding one of my guns. I’d forgotten to put the safety on and my finger was resting on the trigger, so as soon as I hit the ground, it went BAM! BAM! BAM! and almost blew my leg off.

It’s a miracle I ain’t an amputee.

I’d shoot anything that moved in those days. I remember when we got rid of Thelma’s Triumph Herald and replaced it with a brand-new Mercedes—after yet another call to Patrick Meehan’s office. The car was always covered in scratches, and we couldn’t work out why. I’d get it resprayed, park it in the garage overnight, but the next morning the paintwork would be covered in all these nicks and gouges again. It was costing me an arm and a leg. Then I realised what was happening: we had a family of stray cats living in the garage, and when it was cold they’d climb up on the Merc’s bonnet, because it was nice and warm. So, one day, I came back from a long session at the Hand & Cleaver, got my shotgun, and just fucking obliterated the place. I got two or three of them that first time. Then I kept going back every day, picking them off, one by one.

But y’know, that’s one of my regrets—the cruelty to animals. I could have found another way to get rid of those cats, but like I said, I was out of control. It got so bad, people started to call my house Atrocity Cottage, not Bulrush Cottage. It was me who came up with the name—I just blurted it out one night when I was pissed—but from then on it stuck.

People would come to stay with us and they’d never be the same again. Take my old mate Jimmy Phillips, the bloke who’d played bottleneck guitar in Polka Tulk. He got so fucked up on booze and Afghan hash over at Bulrush Cottage one night that he ended up taking a shit in the kitchen sink. Then there was the time when one of my old schoolfriends from Birmingham brought his new wife over for a visit. The day after they arrived, I woke up in the morning with a terrible headache and a big hairy arm around my shoulder. I thought my mate must have been having a go at Thelma while I was asleep, so I jumped out of bed, ready to chin the bastard. But then I realised what had happened: I’d got up in the middle of the night to take a piss and had gone back to the wrong room. Talk about an awkward fucking situation. I was stark naked, too—so I just grabbed my trousers from the floor and dived back into the bed, put them on under the sheets, and then staggered back to my own room, with no one saying a word.