Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

We had this one lawyer working for us, and I ended up hating him. I just couldn’t stand the bloke because he was taking the piss. When we were recording Sabotage in Morgan Studios, he came over to see us one day and said, ‘Gentlemen, I’m going to buy you all a drink.’ I thought, Wow, I can’t believe this, the guy’s actually getting his wallet out for something.

Then, at the end of the meeting, he took out this little notepad and started adding up what we’d all had, so he could bill us later. ‘Right. Ozzy, you had two beers, so that’s sixty pence,’

he went, ‘and Tony, you had one beer and—’

I said, ‘You’re fucking joking, right?’

But of course he wasn’t. That’s what lawyers do. They grease you down and stick their fist up your arse.

You can hear the frustration on Sabotage. There’s some heavy-duty shit on that album.

One incredible track is ‘Supertzar’. I remember the day it was recorded: I walked into Morgan Studios and there was an entire forty-member choir in there along with an eighty-six-year-old harpist. They were making a noise like God conducting the soundtrack to the end of the world. I didn’t even attempt to put a vocal over the top of it.

One song I’m very proud of on that album is ‘The Writ’. I wrote most of lyrics myself, which felt a bit like seeing a shrink. All the anger I felt towards Meehan came pouring out. But y’know what? All that bullshit he pulled on us didn’t get him anywhere in the end. You should see him now: he looks like a fat, boozy old fuck. But I don’t hate him. Hating people isn’t a productive way of living. When all’s said and done, I don’t wish the bloke any harm. I’m still here, y’know? I still have a career. So what’s the point in hating anyone? There’s enough hate in the world as it is, without me adding to it. And I got a song out of it, at least.

Aside from ‘The Writ’, I can’t say I’m very proud of much else that happened in that period.

Like pulling a gun on Bill while I was having a bad acid trip at Bulrush Cottage. The gun wasn’t loaded. But he didn’t know that, and I didn’t tell him. He was very cool about it at the time, but we’ve never talked about it since, which means it was probably quite a big deal.

I had a few bad acid trips around that time, actually. Another night we were at Fields Farm, Bill’s old rented house, which a couple of roadies had taken over, and we were getting badly fucked up for some reason. There was a terrible vibe that night, because a kid had just drowned in the lake on the property while pissing around in a canoe, and the cops had torn the place apart, dredging the lake for the body, and searching for drugs. Not exactly the best time to be doing acid, in other words. But that didn’t stop us. All I can remember is wandering off into a field and meeting these two horses. Then one of them said to the other, ‘Fuck me, that bloke can talk,’ and I freaked out, big time.

I hit Thelma, too, which is probably the worst thing I ever did in my life. I started to get overpowering with her, and the poor woman must have been frightened to death. What made it even worse was that we’d just had our second kid—little Louis. Thelma really suffered with me, y’know, and I really regret that. If there’s one thing I wish for in my life, it’s that I could take it all back. But of course you never can never take violence back—of any kind—and I’ll take it to the grave with me. My own parents used to fight a lot, so maybe I thought that’s just what you do. But there’s no excuse. One night, when I was out of my tree on booze and pills, I hit Thelma so hard I gave her a black eye. We were meeting her father the next day, and I thought, Fucking hell, he’s gonna beat the crap out of me now. But all he said was, ‘So which one of you won, eh?’

The saddest thing is, it wasn’t until I became sober that I truly realised how disgusting my behaviour was. But I do now, trust me.

While all that fucked-up stuff was going on, we decided to make another album—this time hauling all our gear and crew to America and booking into Criteria Studios in Miami. The title we’d decided on was Technical Ecstasy, although I can’t say I was 100 per cent enthusiastic.

By now, our albums were getting ridiculously expensive to make. We’d recorded Black Sabbath in one day. Sabotage took about four thousand years. Technical Ecstasy didn’t take quite as long, but the cost of doing it in Florida was astronomical.

At the same time as our sales were falling, the record company wasn’t as interested as it used to be, we’d just got a million-dollar tax bill from the IRS in America, we couldn’t afford to pay our legal bills, and we didn’t have a manager. At one point, Bill was the one manning the phones. Worse than all that, though, we’d lost our direction. It wasn’t the experimentation with the music. It was more that we didn’t seem to know who we were any more. One minute you had an album cover like Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, with the bloke being attacked by demons on it, and the next you had two robots having sex while they’re going up a fucking escalator, which was the artwork for Technical Ecstasy.

I’m not saying the album was all bad—it wasn’t. For example, Bill wrote a song called ‘It’s Alright’, which I loved. He sang it, too. He’s got a great voice, Bill, and I was more than happy for him to do the honours. But I’d started to lose interest, and I kept thinking about what it would be like to have a solo career. I’d even had a T-shirt made with ‘Blizzard of Ozz’ written on the front. Meanwhile, in the studio, Tony was always saying, ‘We’ve gotta sound like Foreigner,’ or, ‘We’ve gotta sound like Queen.’ But I thought it was strange that the bands that we’d once influenced were now influencing us. Then again, I’d lost the plot with the booze and the drugs, and I was saying a lot of bad things, making trouble, being a dick-head.

In fact, my boozing was so bad during the Technical Ecstasy sessions in Florida, I checked myself into a loony bin called St George’s when I got back home. It’s real name was the Stafford County Asylum, but they changed it to make people feel better about being insane. It was a big old Victorian place. Dark and dingy, like the set of a science-fiction movie.

The first thing the doctor said to me when I went in there was, ‘Do you masturbate, Mr Osbourne?’ I told him, ‘I’m in here for my head, not my dick.’

I didn’t last long in that place. I’m telling you, the docs in those funny farms are more bonkers than the patients.

Then Thelma bought me some chickens.

She probably thought it would help bring me down to earth. And it did, for about five minutes. But then the novelty wore off—especially when I realised that Thelma expected me to feed the fucking things and clean out their shit. So I started trying to find a reason to get rid of them.

‘Thelma,’ I said to her, one morning, after I’d finally had enough. ‘Where did you get those chickens from? They’re broken.’

‘What do you mean, they’re broken?’

‘They’re not laying any eggs.’

‘Well, it would help if you fed them, John. Besides, they’re probably stressed out, poor things.’

‘Why d’you say that?’

‘Come on, John. You put up a sign beside their coop that says, “Oflag 14”. I know they can’t read, but still.’

‘It’s just a joke.’

‘Firing warning shots over their heads every morning probably isn’t helping much, either.’

‘Everyone needs a bit of encouragement.’

‘You’re scaring the living daylights out of them. You’ll give one of them a heart attack if you keep it up.’

Here’s hoping, I thought.

As the weeks and months went by, I kept forgetting to feed the chickens, and they kept forgetting to lay any eggs. All I would hear from Thelma was: ‘John, feed the chickens.’ Or: