Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

When we get to the house, the estate agent is waiting for us outside. She’s a posh chick in her late thirties, green Barbour jacket, pearls, the whole deal. Then she gets out this big chain of keys and lets us in through the front door. But as soon as I step foot inside the hallway, I begin to feel this apocalyptic rumbling in my arse. I’m thinking, Aye-aye, here we go, the colon cleanser’s kicking in. So I ask the chick where the nearest bog is, shuffle over there as fast as I can without looking conspicuous, slam the door behind me, sit down, and set free this massive torrent of liquid shit. It goes on for so long, it feels like I’m giving birth to the Mississippi River. When it’s finally over, I start looking around for some shit roll. But there isn’t any. I stand up and think, Fuck it, I’ll just have to go unwiped until we get home. Then I realise the shit’s gone all over the back of my legs, so I don’t have any choice—I’ve got to wipe myself down with something. But there isn’t even a flannel.

So I end up just standing there, trousers down, paralysed, trying to work out what to do.

Then Sharon knocks on the door.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

‘Ozzy? Are you OK?’

‘I’m, er, fine, thank you, darling,’ I say.

‘You’re taking an awfully long time.’

‘Won’t be long, darling.’

‘Hurry up.’

Finally, it comes to me: the curtains. I’ll wipe my arse with the curtains! So I rip ’em down and do what needs to be done. But then I’ve got another problem on my hands: what the fuck am I supposed to do with a pair of Roger Whittaker’s shitty curtains? I can hardly bring them out of the bog with me and ask the estate agent for directions to the nearest toxic dump. Then I think, Well, maybe I should leave a note. But what would it say? ‘Dear Roger, sorry for shitting on your curtains. Love the whistling! Cheers, Ozzy.’

In the end, I just rolled them up and hid them in the bath, behind the shower curtain.

If you’re reading this, Roger, I’m terribly, terribly sorry. But how about buying some shit roll in future, eh?

A lot of people think you have to be fucked up to write good material, but I reckon the album I did after coming out of Huntercombe Manor, No More Tears, was my best in years.

Maybe part of that was because I said to the band before we even started, ‘Look, we have to treat every song like it could be a hit single, but without being too hokey or try-hard.’

And it worked, pretty much.

Everything about that album seemed to go right. My new guitarist, Zakk Wylde, was a genius. My producers were amazing. And Sharon got the artwork spot on. She’s very artistic, my wife, which a lot of people don’t realise. The cover is a sepia portrait of me with an angel’s wing on my shoulder. The idea was to give the album more of a mature vibe. I mean, I couldn’t keep doing the blood-out-of-the-mouth thing—it was starting to get hammy. I remember the shoot for the cover in New York very well, actually: normally, it takes about five hundred rolls to get a photograph like that in the can, but for No More Tears it was just click-click-click, ‘OK, we’ve got it, see ya.’

The only thing I didn’t like about No More Tears was the video for ‘Mama I’m Coming Home’. It was one of those high-tech, million-dollar jobs, but all I wanted was something simple, like the video for Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. So in the end I did a second video for $50,000 using the Nirvana camera guy, and it was perfect. It had a huge impact on me, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’—and I was very proud when I found out that Kurt Cobain was a fan of mine. I thought he was awesome. I thought that whole Nevermind album was awesome. It was such a tragedy the way it ended.

Mind you, it’s amazing I didn’t end up the same way as Kurt Cobain. I might have been sober after No More Tears—most of the time, anyway—but whatever I’d cut out in booze I was making up for with pills. I was already an expert at scamming doctors, and I’d go to a different one every day of the week, picking up a new prescription for something each time. For a while, it was enough just to fake symptoms, but when Sharon cottoned on and started calling the doctors in advance to warn them about me, I had to give myself real symptoms. So I’d whack myself over the head with a piece of wood and say, ‘I fell off my bike, can I have some Vicodin, please?’

The doc would go, ‘Are you sure you fell off your bike, Mr Osbourne?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘It’s just that you have a nail sticking out of your head with a splinter attached to it, Mr Osbourne.’

‘Oh, I must have fallen on a piece of wood, then.’

‘Right. OK. Take five of these.’

‘Cheers.’

But I didn’t just go to doctors. I had dealers, too. I remember one time, in Germany I think it was, I visited this guy to buy some sleeping pills—I was more addicted to sleeping pills than just about anything else. He was out of sleeping pills, but he asked if I wanted to try some Rohypnol instead. Now, as it happened, I’d heard all about Rohypnol. The press were going crazy about it at the time, calling it the ‘date-rape drug’, but, to be honest with you, I thought it was all bullshit. A drug that could completely paralyse you while you remained fully awake? I mean, c’mon, it seemed too good to be true. But I bought a couple of doses of the stuff and decided to try it out, as a kind of science experiment.

I gulped down the pills with a bit of cognac as soon as I got back to my hotel room. Then I waited. ‘Well, this is a load of bollocks,’ I said to myself. Two minutes later, while I was lying on the edge of the bed, trying to order a movie on the telly with the remote control, it suddenly kicked in. Fuck me, this stuff is real! I couldn’t move. Totally paralysed. But I was also wide awake. It was the weirdest feeling. The only trouble was that I’d been dangling on the edge of the bed when my muscles had seized up, so I ended up sliding to the floor and banging my head on the coffee table on the way down. It hurt like a motherfucker. Then I was trapped between the bed and the wall, unable to move or talk, for about five hours.

So I can’t say I’d recommend it.

My health took a real dive around that time.

I started to notice a tremor in my hand. My speech was slurred. I was always exhausted. I tried to escape from it all by getting loaded, but I’d developed such a tolerance to all the drugs I was taking, I had to overdose to get high. It reached the point where I was getting my stomach pumped every other week. I had a few very close calls. One time, I scammed a bottle of codeine off a doctor in New York and downed the whole fucking lot. I nearly went into respiratory arrest. All I remember is lying in this hotel bed, sweating and feeling like I was suffocating, and the doc telling me over the phone that if you take too much codeine, your brain stops telling your lungs to work. I was very lucky to survive. Although, the way I was feeling, I would have been happy never to wake up again.

The worse I got, the more I worried that Sharon would leave me. And the more I worried, the worse I got. In fact, I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t already left me. I’ve heard people say, ‘Oh, your wife only wants to spend your money.’ But it’s only because of her that I’m alive to make any money. And people forget that when we met, she was the one with the money, not me. I was halfway to the bankruptcy court.

The bottom line is: Sharon saved my life, Sharon is my life, and I love her. And I was terrified that I was going to lose her. But as much as I wanted everything to be normal and right, I was terribly sick, physically and mentally. I couldn’t even face being on stage any more.

So I tried to kill myself a few times to get out of gigs. I mean, I wasn’t really trying to kill myself. If you’re determined to commit suicide, you’ll blow your brains out or you’ll jump off a tall building. You’ll do something that you can’t take back, in other words. When you ‘try to kill yourself’ by taking too many pills—like I did—you know you’re probably gonna get found by someone. So all you’re doing is sending a message. But it’s a deadly fucking game to play.