Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

‘Oh, I see you made the Earth in seven days. What was that like?’ We were at Elton John’s birthday party: Paul on one side of me, Sting on the other, and Elton opposite. It was like I’d died and gone to rock star heaven. But I’m useless when it comes to making conversation with people I admire. I’m a big believer in just leaving them alone, generally. In that way, I’m very shy. There were some rumours going around in the press for a while that me and Paul were gonna do a duet, but I can honestly say I never heard a word about it from the man himself. And I’m glad I didn’t, ’cos I would have shit my pants, big time.

He played at the Brits when me and Sharon were hosting, though. I remember Sharon turning to me halfway through his set and whispering, ‘Did you ever think you’d be standing on stage with a Beatle?’

‘Never in a million years’ was the answer.

It didn’t even seem so long since I’d been looking up at his picture on the wall of 14 Lodge Road.

We e-mail each other from time to time now, me and Paul. (Which means I speak and Tony taps what I’ve said into the computer, ’cos I don’t have the patience for all that internet bollocks.) It started when I heard a song called ‘Fine Line’ on a Lexus commercial. I thought, Fucking hell, that’s not a bad tune, I think I’ll nick it. So I mentioned it—just in passing—to a guy who used to work with me called John Roden, who also happened to work with Paul.

John said, ‘Y’know who wrote that, don’t you?’

I told him I didn’t have a clue.

‘My other boss,’ he said.

Obviously I left the song well alone after that.

Then, out of the blue, came this letter saying, ‘Thanks for not nicking “Fine Line”, Ozzy.’

You couldn’t get the smile off my face for days. And it just went on from there. We don’t e-mail very often, but if he’s got an album coming out, or if he’s getting some flak in the press, I’ll drop him a line. The last one I sent was to congratulate him on that Fireman album he did. If you haven’t heard it, you should, ’cos it’s fucking phenomenal.

Not everyone loved The Osbournes .

Bill Cosby, for example.

He got a right old bee up his arse about it.

I suppose he got offended ’cos the press kept comparing our show to his: one of the newspapers even said I was ‘America’s New Favourite Dad’. So he wrote us a letter. It was along the lines of ‘I saw you on the telly, and your foul language sets a bad example.’

Fair enough, I thought.

But, y’know, swearing is just part of who we are—we’re forever effing and blinding. And the whole point of The Osbournes was to be real. But I have to say I always thought that bleeping out the swearing actually improved the show. In Canada, they didn’t have any bleeps, and I reckoned it wasn’t anywhere near as funny. It’s just human nature—isn’t it?—to be more attracted to something that’s taboo. If someone tells you not to smoke, you wanna smoke. If they say, ‘Don’t do drugs,’ you wanna do drugs. That’s why I’ve always thought that the best way to stop people taking drugs is to legalise the fucking things. It would take people about five seconds to realise that being an addict is a terribly unattractive and pathetic way to be, whereas at the moment it still has that kind of rebel cool vibe to it, y’know?

Anyway, Sharon replied to Bill Cosby.

‘Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, Mr Cosby,’ she wrote, ‘but people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and we all know about your little affair, which has been all over the newspapers, so how about you put your own house in order before having a go at ours?’

She also pointed out that when you switch on the telly in America, there’s always a guy being shot or chopped up or scraped off the tarmac, and no one bats an eyelid. But if you say ‘fuck’, everyone freaks out. It’s insane when you think about it.

Killing’s fine, but swearing isn’t.

To be fair to Bill, we got a very nice reply from him, saying, ‘Hands up, you got me, I’m sorry.’

So he was very cool about it in the end.

MTV shit themselves when The Osbournes got so big, so quickly, ’cos they hadn’t signed a long-term deal with us. So then all the games started—and you know me, I can’t stand all that bullshit.

But it didn’t stop them trying to drag me into it.

Not long after the ratings went crazy, I remember me and Sharon were in New York to do the Total Request Live show at the MTV building in Times Square. As soon as we went off air, this exec in a suit came up to us and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a surprise for you guys.’

‘What kind of surprise?’ I said.

‘Follow me, and I’ll show you.’

So this guy took us up to a boardroom on one of the highest floors in the building. There was a big conference table in the middle with telephones on it and chairs all around, and these huge windows looking out over the New York skyline.

‘Are you ready?’ he asked us.

I looked at Sharon, and she looked back at me. Neither of us knew what the fuck was going on. Then the bloke hit the speakerphone button, and this Charlie’s Angels voice came on the line.

‘Have you got the gift?’ it said.

‘Yep,’ said the bloke.

‘OK, give them the gift.’

The bloke reached into his jacket pocket, took out this gold-embossed envelope, and handed it to me.

I opened it and saw a cheque for $250,000.

‘What is this?’ I said.

‘A gift,’ the guy told me. ‘From MTV.’

Now, I might not be much of a businessman, but even I knew that cashing a cheque for $250,000 could be seen as some kind of contract. If that thing had landed in my bank account, the negotiations for the next few seasons would have been a whole different ball game.

I mean, maybe it was just a gift. Maybe they weren’t trying to pull any funny stuff. But it still creeped me out. Even Sharon was speechless, for once.

‘Thanks very much,’ I said. ‘Would you mind sending it to my lawyer’s office? He deals with all that.’

Talk about swimming with fucking sharks.

By the summer of 2002, it seemed like The Osbournes was the biggest thing on the planet. And the stress of it was killing me. After falling off the wagon at the Correspondents’ Dinner, I’d been getting pissed every day. And I was still necking as much prescription medication as I could get my hands on—which was a lot. At one point I was on forty-two different pills a day: sedatives, sleeping medication, anti-depressants, amphetamines, anti-seizure medication, anti-psychotics. You fucking name it, I was on it. I was taking an unbelievable quantity of drugs. Half the pills were just to cancel out the side-effects of the others.

And none of them seemed to be making me any better. My tremor was so bad that I was shaking like an epileptic. My speech was terrible. I’d even started to develop a stammer, which I’d never had before—although stammers run in my family. If someone asked me a question, I would panic, and by the time the words reached my mouth from my brain, they would be all jumbled. And that just made me even more stressed, ’cos I thought it was the beginning of the end for me. Any day now, I thought to myself, a doctor was gonna take me aside and say to me, ‘I’m very sorry, Mr Osbourne, but the tests have come back, and you have MS.’ Or Parkinson’s disease. Or something equally horrific.

I started to get very self-conscious about it. I remember watching some clips from The Osbournes —and even I didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. I mean, I’ve never had a problem playing the clown, but when it became a national joke that no one could understand a fucking word I said, it was a bit different. I began to feel like I had when I was at school and I couldn’t read out a page from a book, and everyone laughed and called me an idiot. So I just got more pissed and more stoned. But the drink and the drugs made my tremor worse—which was the exact opposite of what I’d expected, because alcoholics get the DTs when they come off the booze, not when they’re on it. And the pills my docs were giving me were supposed to make the shaking go away.