Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

The shrink also told me that I have an addictive personality, which means that I do everything addictively. And, on top of that, I have an obsessive-compulsive disorder, which makes it all ten times worse. I’m like a walking dictionary of psychiatric disorders, I am. It blew my mind. And it took me a long time to accept any of it.

My stay in Camp Betty was the longest I’d been without drink or drugs in my adult life, and the comedown was horrendous. Everyone else was going through the same thing, but I can’t say that made me feel any better. At first, they put me in a room with a guy who owned a bowling alley, but he snored like an asthmatic horse, so I moved and ended up with a depressive mortician. I said to him, ‘Look, if you suffer from depression, why the fuck do you work in a mortuary?’

‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘It’s just what I do.’

The mortician snored even louder than the bowling alley guy—he was like a moose with a tracheotomy. The whole room shook. So I ended up spending every night on the sofa in the lobby, shivering and sweating.

Eventually, Sharon came to get me. I’d been in there six weeks. I looked better—I’d lost a bit of weight—but I’d got the whole rehab thing wrong. I thought it was supposed to cure me.

But there ain’t no cure for what I’ve got. All rehab can do is tell you what’s wrong with you and then suggest ways for you to get better. Later, when I realised it wasn’t a solution by itself, I used to go there just to take the heat off myself a bit when things got out of hand. Rehab can work, but you’ve got to want it. If you really want to quit, you can’t say, ‘Well, I want to quit today, but I might have a drink next week at my friend’s wedding.’ You’ve got to commit, then live each day as it comes. Every morning, you’ve got to wake up and say, ‘OK, today’s gonna be one more day without a drink,’ or a cigarette, or a pill, or a joint, or whatever it is that’s been killing you.

That’s as much as you can hope for when you’re an addict.

The first gig I did after Betty Ford was in Rio de Janeiro.

I was legless before I even got on the plane.

By the time we reached Rio, I’d got through a whole bottle of Courvoisier, and was passed out in the aisle. Sharon tried her best to move me—but I was like a dead fucking body. In the end she got so pissed off with me that she grabbed the stainless steel fork from her meal tray and began stabbing me with it. I soon fucking moved after that. But at least I now knew what I was—a full-blown, practising alcoholic. I couldn’t pretend any more that I was just having fun, or that boozing was something everyone did when they got a bit of dough. I had a disease, and it was killing me. I used to think, Even an animal won’t go near something again if it makes it sick, so why do I keep going back to this?

The gig was Rock in Rio, a ten-day festival featuring Queen, Rod Stewart, AC/DC and Yes. One and a half million people bought tickets. But I was disappointed by the place. I’d expected to see the Girl from Ipanema on every corner, but I never saw a single one. There were just all these dirt-poor kids running around like rats. People were either outrageously rich or living on the streets—there didn’t seem to be anything in between.

I’ll always remember meeting Ronnie Biggs, the Great Train Robber, on that trip. In those days he was living in exile in Brazil, and he seemed to be making the best of it—he claimed he shagged two and a half thousand chicks while he was there. But it was still a kind of prison for him, because he was so homesick. He came over to the hotel wearing a T-shirt that said,

‘Rio—a Wonderful Place to Escape to’, but he just kept asking, ‘So, what’s it like in England, Ozzy? Do they still have this shop, or that shop, or this beer, or that beer?’

I felt sorry for the guy. No one in their right mind would give him a job, so he’d get all these English tourists over to his house, charge them fifty quid each, get them to buy him some beers and a bag of dope, then tell them the Great Train Robbery story. He called it ‘The Ronnie Biggs Experience’. I suppose it was better than being in prison. He was all right, Ronnie, y’know. He wasn’t a bad guy, and everyone knew that he wasn’t even on the train when the driver was assaulted, yet he was sent down for thirty years. You can rape a kid and kill a granny and get less than thirty years nowadays. People say, ‘He got away with it in the end, didn’t he?’ But I don’t think he did. I mean, the bloke was so unhappy. I wasn’t surprised when he finally came back to Britain, even though it meant getting arrested at Heathrow and thrown straight in the slammer.

Home’s home, in the end, even if it’s behind bars. At least he got his freedom at the finish, although it was only ’cos the guy was on his deathbed. Ronnie always said his last wish was ‘to walk into a Margate pub as an Englishman and buy a pint’. But from what I’ve heard, he’s going to have to wait until the next life for that pleasure.

The summer after Rock in Rio, I agreed to do Live Aid with Black Sabbath. Sharon was already pregnant again, and we didn’t want to fly to Philadelphia, so we decided to take the QE2 to New York instead, then drive the rest of the way.

After the first hour at sea, we regretted it. In those days we were used to getting to New York in three hours on Concorde. The QE2 took five fucking days, which felt more like five billion years. I mean, what the fuck are you supposed to do on a ship, apart from puke your guts out ’cos you’re feeling sea sick? By the end of day one, I was hoping we might hit an iceberg, just to liven things up a bit. And the boredom only got worse from there. In the end I went to see the ship’s doctor and begged him for sedatives to put me out for the rest of the way. I woke up forty-eight hours later, just as we were pulling into port. Sharon was so pissed off—she’d had to entertain herself while I was out cold—it’s a miracle she didn’t throw me over-board. ‘Remember me? You arsehole,’ was the first thing she said when I opened my eyes.

To be honest with you, I was stressed out about doing Live Aid. I hadn’t talked to Tony for years, so it wasn’t exactly the most comfortable of situations. Then the organisers put us between Billy Ocean and the Four fucking Tops… at ten o’clock in the morning. I don’t know what they were thinking. People kept telling us that they needed more black acts in the show, so maybe they thought we were black—like when we played Philadelphia on our first American tour.

It didn’t get off to a good start.

When I was in the lobby of the hotel, checking in before the gig, this bloke comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, Ozzy, can I have a photograph?’ and I go, ‘Sure, yeah.’ Then the bloke goes, ‘Sorry, I have to do this,’ and hands me a lawsuit. It was from my father-in-law. He’d served me—before a fucking charity gig.

When everyone backstage heard about the writ—don’t ask me what it was about, or what happened to it, ’cos I left it all to Sharon—one of the roadies came up to me and said, ‘He’s quite a character, your father-in-law, isn’t he?’

‘What d’you mean?’ I asked him.

‘He said the cover of Born Again reminded him of his grand-children.’

If you haven’t seen that cover—Born Again was Black Sabbath’s third album after I left—it’s of an aborted demon baby with fangs and claws. What an unbelievable thing to say!

On the one hand, doing Live Aid was brilliant: it was for a great cause, and no one can play those old Black Sabbath songs like me, Tony, Geezer and Bill. But on the other hand, it was all a bit embarrassing. For a start, I was still grossly overweight—on the video, I’m the size of a planet. Also, in the six years since I’d left the band, I’d become a celebrity in America, whereas Black Sabbath had been going in the other direction. So I got preferential treatment, even though I hadn’t asked for it. It was just stupid little things, like I got a Live Aid jacket and they didn’t. But it still felt awkward. And I didn’t handle it with much grace, because my coked-up rock star ego was out of control. Deep down, a part of me wanted to say to them,