Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

But it wasn’t until years later that I heard the full story. I was at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood, and Don Was was there. By that time he’d become one of the biggest producers in the music business, and Was (Not Was) were huge. I remember him rushing over to me and gasping, ‘Ozzy, I’ve gotta tell you something about that song we did, “Shake Your Head”. This is gonna blow your mind.’

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘Well, remember how we had all those backing singers on there?’

‘Yeah.’

‘One of them ended up going off on her own and making a few albums. You might have heard of her.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Madonna.’

I couldn’t believe it: I’d made a record with Madonna. I told Don to re-release it, but for whatever reason he couldn’t get clearance. So we ended up re-recording it, with Kim Basinger taking Madonna’s place.

I did quite a few duets back in the eighties. One with Lita Ford—‘Close My Eyes Forever’—ended up being a Top-Ten single in America. I even did a version of ‘Born to be Wild’ with Miss Piggy, but I was disappointed when I found out she wouldn’t be in the studio at the same time as me (maybe she’d found out about my job at the Digbeth slaughterhouse). I was just having some fun, y’know? It wasn’t about money. Although, after we bought out Don Arden and the publishers and had paid off our tax bills, the dough finally started to roll in. I remember opening an envelope from Colin Newman one morning, dreading another final demand.

Instead, there was a royalty cheque for $750,000.

It was the most money I’d ever had in my life.

After the divorce with Thelma went through, a part of me wanted to say to her, ‘Fuck you. Look at me—I’m fine.’

So I bought a house called Outlands Cottage in Stafford shire, not far from where she lived. It was a thatched house, and pretty much the first thing I did after moving in was to set the fucking roof on fire. Don’t ask me how I did it. All I remember is a fireman turning up in his truck, whistling through his teeth, and going to me, ‘Some house-warming party, eh?’ And then after he put the fire out, we got shitfaced together. Mind you, he might as well have let the place burn down, ’cos the smell of charred thatch is fucking horrendous, and it never went away after that.

Sharon hated Outlands Cottage from the get-go. She’d fuck off to London and wouldn’t want to come home. I suppose I’d half expected or wanted Thelma to call me up in tears and beg me to come back to her. She never did. Although she did call me once to say, ‘So, I see you got married again, YOU FUCKING ARSEHOLE,’ before slamming the phone down.

Eventually, I began to realise that as much as I loved being close to Jess and Louis, it was bad news, living around the corner from my ex-wife. At one point I even tried to buy back Bulrush Cottage. Then I made the mistake of taking Sharon with me when I went to see the kids.

It was fine until we dropped them off and went for a drink at a hotel. Then I got all pissed and sentimental. I told Sharon I never wanted to go back to America, that I missed my kids, that I missed living next to the Hand & Cleaver, that I wanted to retire. Then, when I refused to get in the car to go home—it was actually our accountant Colin Newman’s BMW, which we’d borrowed for the day—she went over the edge. She climbed into the driver’s seat, put it in gear, and floored the accelerator. It was fucking terrifying. I remember jumping out of the way and then legging it on to the lawn in front of the hotel. But Sharon just crashed the car through this flower bed and kept coming at me, with the wheels churning up all the grass and sending lumps of turf flying all over the place.

And it wasn’t just me she nearly killed.

I had this guy called Pete Mertens working for me at the time. He was an old schoolfriend—very skinny, very funny, used to wear these outrageous checked jackets all the time. Anyway, when Sharon drove through the flower bed, Pete had to throw himself into a rose bush to get out of the way. All I remember is him standing up, brushing off his jacket, and going,

‘Fuck this—this ain’t worth two hundred quid a week. I’m off.’ (Later, he changed his mind and came back. Working for us might have been dangerous, but at least it was interesting, I suppose.)

In the end, the hotel manager came out and someone called the police. By then, I was hiding in a hedge. So Sharon got out of the car, came over to the hedge, and threw all her rings and jewellery into it. Then she turned around, stomped away, and called for a taxi.

I was there the next day, smelly and hung over, sifting through the soil for a fifty-grand Tiffany’s rock.

There were some other wild times at Outlands Cottage, before I finally realised that Sharon was right, and that we should move. One night I met this very straitlaced bloke down the pub—an accountant, I think he was—but he came back to the cottage for a joint afterwards, and then passed out on the sofa. So while he was asleep I pulled off his clothes and threw them on the fire. The poor bloke woke up at six in the morning, stark bollock naked. Then I sent him home to his wife in one of my chain-mail suits. It still makes me laugh to this day, the thought of him clanking off towards his car, wondering how the fuck he’s gonna explain himself.

Another one of my favourite tricks at Outlands Cottage was to shave off people’s eyebrows while they were asleep. Believe me, there’s nothing funnier than a bloke with no eyebrows. People don’t realise that your eyebrows provide most of your facial expressions, so when they’re gone, it’s hard to show concern or surprise or any of those other basic human emotions. But it takes people a while to realise what’s wrong. At first, they just look in the mirror and think, Christ, I look like shit today. One guy I did it to ended up going to see his doctor, ’cos he couldn’t work out what the fuck was up.

I went through a period of giving the eyebrow treatment to everyone: agents, managers, roadies, assistants, friends, friends-of-friends. Whenever someone turned up to a management meeting with a face that didn’t look quite right, you knew they’d spent the weekend at my house.

Pete Mertens often ended up being an unwilling accomplice in my drunken practical jokes.

For example, one Christmas, I began to wonder what it would be like to get a dog pissed. So me and Pete got a piece of raw meat and put it at the bottom of a bowl of sherry, then we called over Sharon’s Yorkshire terrier—Bubbles, this one was called—and waited to see what would happen. Sure enough, Bubbles lapped up the bowl of sherry to get to the meat. Then about five minutes later he went cross-eyed and started to stumble around all over the place while howling along to the music we were playing. We’d done it: Bubbles was absolutely shitfaced. It was brilliant—until poor old Bubbles passed out in the middle of the living room. I was terrified that I’d killed him, so I pulled the fairy lights off the tree and wrapped them around his body, so I could tell Sharon he’d electrocuted himself by accident. But he was all right, thank God—although he had a nasty hangover the next morning, and he kept giving me these dirty looks, as if to say, ‘I know what you did, you bastard.’

Bubbles wasn’t the only animal who lived with us at Outlands Cottage. We also had a donkey called Sally—who used to sit in the living room with me and watch Match of the Day—and a Great Dane and a German shepherd. The thing I remember most about those dogs is the time I came home from the butchers’ with some pigs hooves. I put them in a jar on the kitchen table, thinking I could use them in a good old fry up, but when Sharon walked into the room, she gagged and went, ‘Ozzy, what the fuck is that smell? And what are those disgusting-looking things on the table?’ When I told her, she literally retched. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ozzy,’ she said, ‘I can’t eat that, feed them to the dogs.’ So I gave the hooves to the dogs, and they both started to look very unwell immediately. Then one puked while the other one hosed down the walls with shit.