Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

All in all, I have great memories of that first American tour.

And it wasn’t just because Blizzard of Ozz had sold a million copies by the time we’d finished. It was because I had such fabulous people around me. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve Randy Rhoads. He was the only musician who’d ever been in my band. He could read music. He could write music. He was so dedicated that he would find a classical guitar instructor in every town we went to and get a lesson. He’d give his own lessons, too. Whenever we were on the West Coast, he’d find time to go to his mother’s school and tutor the kids.

He worshipped his mum, Randy did. I remember when we were recording Blizzard of Ozz at Ridge Farm, he asked if he could write a song and name it ‘Dee’ in her honour. I told him to go for it.

And I was having the greatest nights of my life with Sharon. We’d do stuff together that I’d never done before, like clubbing in New York. It couldn’t have been more different to when I went to New York with Black Sabbath—in those days, I wouldn’t even leave my room, ’cos I was always scared shitless. Coming from England, I thought the place was full of gangsters and villains. But Sharon took me out. We used to go to this bar called PJ’s, do coke, meet all these random people and have crazy adventures. We even hung out with Andy Warhol a few times—he was friends with a chick called Susan Blonde, who worked for CBS. He never said a word. He’d just sit there and take pictures of you with this freaky look on his face. Strange, strange bloke, that Andy Warhol.

I hung out a lot with Lemmy from Motörhead on that tour, too. He’s a very close friend of the family now. I love that guy. Wherever there’s a beer tent in the world, there’s Lemmy. But I’ve never seen that man fall down drunk, y’know? Even after twenty or thirty pints. I don’t know how he does it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he outlived me and Keith Richards.

Motörhead opened a few shows for us on that tour. They had this old hippy bus—it was the cheapest thing they could find—and all Lemmy would carry around with him was this suitcase full of books. That’s all he had in the world, apart from the clothes on his back. He loves reading, Lemmy. He’ll spend days at a time doing it. He came up to stay with us at the Howard Hughes house one time, and he wouldn’t leave the library.

Don Arden found him in there and threw a fit. He stormed to the lounge and shouted,

‘Sharon! Who the fuck is that caveman in my library? Get him out! Get him out of my house!’

‘Relax, Dad. It’s just Lemmy.’

‘I don’t care who he is. Get him out of here!’

‘He’s in a band, Dad. They’re supporting Ozzy.’

‘Well, for Christ’s sake at least get him a deckchair and put him out by the pool. He looks like the undead.’

Then Lemmy came strolling into the room. Don was right: he looked horrendous. We’d been out on the piss the night before, and his eyes were so red, they looked like puddles of blood.

But as soon as he saw me, he stopped dead in his tracks.

‘Fuck me, Ozzy,’ he said. ‘If I look half as bad as you do, I’m going back to bed, right now.’

When I finally got back to Bulrush Cottage at the end of 1981, I made a big effort to sort things out with Thelma. We even booked a holiday to Barbados with the kids.

Trouble is, if you’re a chronic alcoholic, Barbados isn’t the place to go. As soon as we got to the resort, I realised you could drink at the beach twenty-four hours a day. Which I saw as a challenge. We got there at five o’clock and I was legless by six. Thelma was used to seeing me pissed, but I was on another level altogether in Barbados.

All I remember is that at some point we bought tickets for a day trip around the bay on this olde worlde pirate ship. They had music and dancing and a walk-the-plank competition and all that kids’ stuff. Meanwhile, the big attraction for the adults was a barrel of rum punch they had at the ship’s bar. I just about jumped into that thing.

Every two minutes, it was glug-glug-glug.

After a few hours of that, I stripped down to my underpants, danced around the deck, then dived off the ship into these shark-infested waters. Unfortunately, I was too pissed to swim, so this big fucking Barbadian guy had to jump in after me and save my life. The last thing I remember is being hauled back on board and then falling asleep in the middle of the dance floor, still dripping wet. When the ship got back to the harbour, I was still there, dribbling and snoring. Apparently the captain came over and asked the kids, ‘Is that your dad?’ They went,

‘Yeah,’ then burst into tears.

Not exactly Father of the Year.

When we got on the plane to go home, Thelma turned to me and said, ‘This is the end, John. I want a divorce.’

I thought, Ah, she’s just pissed off because of the pirate ship incident. She’ll come to her senses.

But she never did.

When the plane landed at Heathrow, someone from Jet Records had organised a helicopter to pick me up and take me to a meeting about the Diary of a Madman tour. I said goodbye to the kids, kissed them on the heads, then Thelma looked at me for a long time.

‘It’s over, John,’ she said. ‘This time, it’s really over.’

I still didn’t believe her. I’d behaved so badly over the years, I thought she’d put up with anything. So I climbed into the helicopter and off I went to this country hotel, where Sharon was waiting with all these set designers and lighting technicians.

They led me into a conference room with a scale model of the Diary of a Madman stage in the middle of it.

It looked incredible.

‘The beauty of this stage,’ one of the technical guys told me, ‘is that it’s easy to carry, and easy to put together.’

‘It’s brilliant,’ I said. ‘Really brilliant. Now all we need is a midget.’

The idea had come to me in Barbados. Every night on the tour, halfway through ‘Goodbye to Romance’, we’d stage the execution of a midget. I’d shout, ‘Hang the bastard!’ or something like that, and this little guy would be hoisted up with a fake noose around his neck.

It would be magic.

So, before we went out on the road, we held midget auditions.

Now, most people don’t realise that little people who are in the entertainment business are all in competition for the same jobs, so they’re forever backstabbing each other. When you hold auditions, they’ll come walking in and say, ‘Oh, you don’t want to work with that last guy.

I did Snow White and the Seven with him a couple of years ago, and he’s a pain in the arse.’

It always cracked me up when a midget talked about being in Snow White and the Seven.

They’d say it with a completely straight face, too, like they thought it was some hip and cool underground thing to do.

After a few days of searching, we finally found just the right bloke for the job. His name was John Allen, and, funnily enough, he was an alcoholic. He’d get shitfaced after the gigs and start chasing groupies. He was paranoid, too. He carried this little penknife in a holster.

One day I asked him what it was for and he said, ‘Just in case the noose slips.’ I said, ‘You’re three feet tall and you’ll be dangling twenty feet off the ground, so what are you gonna do, cut the rope? You’ll end up like a fucking pancake!’

He was a funny guy, that John Allen. He had a completely normal-sized head, so he’d be sitting opposite you on a bar stool, and you’d forget that his feet couldn’t touch the ground.

But when he got loaded he’d lose his balance, so one moment he’d be there, and the next you’d hear this thump and he’d be on the floor. We used to play jokes on him all the fucking time. When we were on the tour bus, we’d wait until he passed out, then we’d put him on the highest bunk bed, so when he woke up he’d roll over and go, ‘Aarrgh!’ Splat.