Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

And of course we tried very, very hard to do just that.

We hadn’t been there a day before the practical jokes started. I was the first culprit: I realised that if you put a cartridge in our eight-track machine and turned down the volume all the way, when it reached the end of a song it would make this loud CHA-CHUNK-CHICK noise, which would echo off the stone walls. So I hid the machine under Tony’s bed. Just before he turned in for the night—after we’d spent the evening putting the willies up each other with a seance in the dungeon—I sneaked into his room, pressed ‘play’, and set the volume to zero.

Then I ran out and hid in the room next door.

Eventually I heard Tony get into bed.

I waited.

Then, one by one, the lights in the castle went out, until it was pitch black. Apart from the occasional creak from the rafters, and the wind rattling the windows, there was just this eerie silence.

I waited.

And waited.

Then, out of the darkness: CHA-CHUNK-CHICK.

All I heard from Tony’s room was ‘AAAAGGGGGGHHHHHH!’ and then a thump as he fell out of bed. Then the door burst open and Tony came charging out in his underpants, screaming, ‘There’s something in my fucking room! There’s something in my fucking room!’

I didn’t stop laughing for days.

But as much as the castle might have taken our minds off things, it didn’t help with the songwriting. The problem was that Vol. 4 had been a classic—by Black Sabbath’s standards, anyway. Which meant we wanted the follow-up to be another classic. But you can’t control that. To a certain extent, you’ve just got to be in the right place at the right time. I mean, I don’t think Michael Jackson sat down one day and said to himself, ‘Y’know what? Next year I’m gonna write an album called Thriller, and every song will be a corker, and then I’ll sell a million copies of it every week.’ You can’t plan that kind of thing.

Then again, we were terrified of becoming one of those bands who started off with a few albums that people thought were amazing, only to follow them up with one turd after another.

None of us could really believe how our lives had changed since coming back from the Star Club in 1969. I think we all expected to wake up one day and find that it was all over, that our little scam had been exposed.

Personally, one of my biggest worries was about us moving too far away from what our fans wanted. I mean, I knew we couldn’t keep on doing ‘Iron Man’ for ever—we had to challenge ourselves—but we couldn’t put brass bands on every track or start doing abstract jazz bollocks, either. The name of the band was Black Sabbath—and as long as we were called Black Sabbath, it was gonna be hard to be accepted as anything else.

It’s like the guy who plays Batman in the movies. He might be a great actor, but if he goes off and plays a gay waiter in his next role, people will spend the entire movie wondering when he’s gonna rip off his tuxedo, put on a rubber suit, and jump out of the window.

So we had to be very careful.

To be honest with you, for a few days at Clearwell Castle, it felt like we didn’t know how to move on. For the first time ever, Tony seemed to be having a hard time coming up with new material. Which meant no riffs. And without riffs, we had no songs. It was that Dutch band, Golden Earring, that saved us in the end. We were listening to their latest album, Moontan, and something just clicked in Tony’s head. A couple of days later, he came down to the dungeon and started playing the riff to ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ . Like I said: every time we thought Tony couldn’t do it again, he did it again—and better. From that moment on, there was no more writer’s block.

Which was a huge relief.

But we still couldn’t concentrate in that bloody castle. We wound each other up so much none of us got any sleep. You’d just lie there with your eyes wide open, expecting an empty suit of armour to walk into your bedroom at any second and shove a dagger up your arse.

And the fucking seances we kept holding didn’t help. I dunno what we were thinking, ’cos they’re really dodgy, those things. You’ve got no idea who’s pushing the glass, and then you end up convincing yourself that your great aunt Sally is standing behind you with a sheet over her head. And when you’re doing it in a dungeon, it’s even worse.

Tony was the one who pulled the most pranks. One day he found an old dressmaker’s dummy in a cupboard, put a frock and a wig on it, then threw it out of a third-floor window just as Bill and Geezer were coming back from the pub. They almost shit their pants. Bill legged it so fast back up the drive-way, he must have broken the land speed record. Another time—I wasn’t around to witness this, but someone told me about it—Tony tied a piece of white thread to an old model sailing ship that was in one of the roadies’ bedrooms, and he fed the thread under the door and into another room. Then he waited until the roadie was in there alone and he gave it a little tug. The roadie looked up, and there on this dusty mantelpiece—which was supported by two gargoyles—the ship was ‘sailing’ all by itself. He ran out of that room and refused ever to go back in.

Bill got the worst of it, though. One night he’d been on the cider and had passed out on the sofa. We got this full-length mirror and lifted it over him, so it was only a few inches from his face. Then we poked him until he woke up. The second he opened his eyes, all he could see was himself staring back. To this day, I’ve never heard a grown man scream so loud. He must have thought he’d woken up in hell.

Bill started going to bed with a dagger after that.

The jokes got out of hand eventually. People started driving home at night instead of sleeping in their rooms. The funny thing is, the only genuinely dangerous thing that happened during our time at Clearwell Castle was when I got loaded and feel asleep with my boot in the fire. All I can remember is waking up at three o’clock in the morning with a funny feeling at the end of my leg, then jumping up, screaming, and hopping around the room with this flaming boot, looking for something wet to put it in. Everyone else thought it was hilarious.

Geezer just looked at me and said, ‘Got a light, Ozzy?’

But the smile was soon wiped off his face when an ember flew off my boot and set the carpet on fire. All I can say is: thank God for the vat of cider that Bill kept behind his drum kit, which we used to douse the flames. I’m amazed it put the fire out, to be honest with you. I’d tasted Bill’s cider, so I half expected it to go up like a Molotov cocktail.

By the time we left Clearwell Castle, we at least had most of the new album written. So we moved on to Morgan Studios, just off Willesden High Road in north London, to finish it off.

Morgan Studios was a very popular place at the time, so whenever you did any work there, you’d run into other bands, and usually you’d end up going over to the little caff they had in there—it had a dartboard and served booze—and having a bit of a laugh. This time, though, when I went over to say hello to the band working next door to us, my heart sank. It was Yes. While we were working on our album in Studio 4, they were making Tales from Topographic Oceans in Studio 3. They were hippies, so they’d brought in all of these cut-out cows to make their recording space look ‘earthy’. I later found out that the cows even had electrically powered udders. No fucking kidding. They also had bales of hay all over the place, a white picket fence, and a little barn in the corner—like a kid’s plaything. I just said to myself,

‘And I thought Geezer was weird.’

During the whole time we were at Morgan Studios, the only member of Yes I ever saw in the caff was Rick Wakeman, their superstar keyboard player. He was famous for doing warp-speed Moog solos while dressed in a wizard’s cape, and it turned out he was the only regular bloke in Yes. In fact, he was always in the caff—usually drinking heavily—and he wasn’t into any of that cut-out-cow, hippy bullshit. He’d rather get out of his box and play darts with me.