Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

So I took the job in the factory. I told my friend Pat that I’d got a gig in the music business.

‘What do you mean, the music business?’ he said.

‘Tuning stuff,’ I told him, vaguely.

‘What kind of stuff?’

‘Mind your own fucking business.’

On my first day at the Lucas plant the supervisor showed me into this sound-proofed room, where I’d do my shift. My job was to pick up the car horns as they came along a conveyor belt and put them into this helmet-shaped machine. Then you’d hook them up to an electrical current and adjust them with a screwdriver, so they went, ‘BAGH, BOOO, WEEE, URRH, BEEOOP.’ Nine hundred a day—that’s how many car horns they wanted tuned. They kept count, because every time you did one you clicked a button. There were five of us in the room, so that’s five car horns burping and beeping and booping all at the same time, from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon.

You came out of that fucking place with your ears ringing so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think.

This was my day:

Pick up horn.

Attach connectors.

Adjust with screwdriver.

BAGH, BOOO, WEEE, URRH, BEEOOP.

Put horn back on belt.

Click the button.

Pick up horn.

Attach connectors.

Adjust with screwdriver.

BAGH, BOOO, WEEE, URRH, BEEOOP.

Put horn back on belt.

Click the button.

Pick up horn.

Attach connectors.

Adjust with screwdriver.

BAGH, BOOO, WEEE, URRH, BEEOOP.

Put horn back on belt.

Click the button.

While I was doing this, my mum would be watching me proudly through this glass screen.

But after a couple of hours of listening to that fucking din I was starting to go insane. I was ready to murder someone. So I started to click the button twice for every horn I did, thinking I could knock off early. Anything to get out of that fucking booth. When I realised I was getting away with it, I started to click three times. Then four. Then five.

This went on for a few hours until I heard a tap-tap and a squeal of feedback from somewhere above me. The conveyor belt juddered to a halt. Then this angry voice comes over the Tannoy:

‘OSBOURNE. SUPERVISOR’S OFFICE. NOW.’

They wanted to know how come I’d done five hundred car horns in twenty minutes. I told them there was obviously something wrong with the clicker. They told me they weren’t born fucking yesterday and that the only thing wrong with the clicker was the fucking idiot operating it, and that if I did it again, I’d be thrown out on my fucking arse, end of story. Did I understand? I said, ‘Yeah, I understand,’ and sloped back to my little booth.

Pick up horn.

Attach connectors.

Adjust with screwdriver.

BAGH, BOOO, WEEE, URRH, BEEOOP.

Put horn back on belt.

Click the button.

After a few more weeks of this bullshit I decided to strike up a conversation with the old guy next to me, Harry.

‘How long have you be working ’ere?’ I asked him.

‘Eh?’

‘How long you been ’ere?’

‘Stop whispering, son.’

‘HOW LONG HAVE YOU WORKED HERE?’ I shouted. Harry had obviously gone completely deaf from listening to car horns all day.

‘Twenty-nine years and seven months,’ he said with a grin.

‘You’re kidding me.’

‘Eh?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Stop whispering, son.’

‘THAT’S A LONG FUCKING TIME, HARRY.’

‘You know what the best thing is?’

I raised my hands and shook my head.

‘In five months’ time, I’ll get my gold watch. I’ll have been here thirty years!’

The thought of thirty years in that room made me want the Russians to drop the bomb and get it over with.

‘If you wanted a gold watch that badly,’ I said. ‘You should have nicked one from the fucking jeweller’s. Even if you got caught, you’d only do a tenth of the time that you’ve done in this shithole.’

‘Say again, son?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Eh?’

‘NOTHING.’

I’d had enough. I threw down my screwdriver, walked out of the door, past my mum, out of the factory gate, and straight to the nearest pub.That was the end of my first job in the music business.

The idea of getting a real job in the music business was a fucking joke. It was just one of those impossible things, like becoming an astronaut or a stuntman, or shagging Elizabeth Taylor. Still, ever since the time I’d sung ‘Living Doll’ at our family shindig, I’d been thinking about starting a band. I even went around for a while boasting that I was a member of a group called the Black Panthers. Bollocks, I was. My ‘band’ was an empty guitar case with ‘The Black Panthers’ written on the side (I’d used some emulsion paint which I’d found in the garden shed). It was all in my imagination. I used to tell people I had a dog, too: it was a Hush Puppy that I’d found in a dumpster, which I put on the end of a leash. I’d walk around the streets of Aston with my empty guitar case, pulling this old fucking shoe behind me, thinking I was some kind of Mississippi bluesman. Everyone else thought I was fucking insane.

When I wasn’t spending time with my imaginary band and my Hush-Puppy dog, I used to hang around with the Teddy Boys. It was a bit before my time, the Teddy Boy scene, so I never got into the long coats and the brothel creepers and all that shit. But I liked the music they played on the jukebox. I went around singing ‘Hey Paula’ by Paul & Paula for weeks. Those old tunes were great. Then I got into the mod stuff—I used to like the slim-fit mohair suits.

Then I was a rocker, with the leather jackets and the studded belts. I’d switch back and forth all the fucking time. I was just looking for adventure, me. Anything that didn’t involve working in a factory.

Then the Beatles happened.

All of a sudden, these four moptop Liverpudlians were all over the radio and the telly. Using my last pay cheque from the job at the Lucas plant, I bought their second LP, With the Beatles.

The moment I got it home, everything changed.

A light went on in my head when I heard that record. It just sucked me in. Lennon and McCartney’s harmonies were like magic. They took me away from Aston and into this fantasy Beatleworld. I couldn’t stop listening to those fourteen songs (eight were originals, six were covers, including a version of Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’). It might sound over-the-top to say it now, but for the first time I felt as though my life had meaning. I played that record over and over again on my dad’s big, polished radiogram, which was a combination of a valve radio and an old-fashioned phonograph, made to look like a piece of furniture, which took pride of place in our living room. Then I’d go to the Silver Blades ice rink and they’d be playing it on the Tannoy system there. Sometimes I would just walk around with the album under my arm, I was so fucking pleased with it. Soon I began to collect anything with ‘The Beatles’ written on it. Photographs. Posters. Cards. Anything. It would all go up on the bedroom wall. My brothers didn’t mind—they were mad about the Beatles, too.

But not half as mad as me.

Obviously, I had to save up some dough to buy the Beatles’ first album, Please Please Me. Then, when A Hard Day’s Night came out, I was one of the first in the queue at the record shop to buy that. Thanks to Beatlemania, it seemed all right that I didn’t want to work in a factory. John Lennon and Paul McCartney hadn’t wanted to work in a factory either! And they were just like me—working-class kids from the back streets of a run-down, far-from-London industrial town. The only difference was that their town was Liverpool, not Aston. I reckoned if they could be in a band, then maybe I could, too. I was eight years younger than Lennon and six years younger than McCartney, so I still had plenty of time to get my first big break.