Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

‘Can you treat it?’

‘Yes. But first I have to tell you something, Mr Osbourne. If you keep drinking, and if you keep abusing drugs, you’ll have to find another doctor, because I won’t have you as a patient.

I’m a busy man, I have a very long waiting list, and I can’t afford to have my time wasted.’

I’d never been spoken to like that by a doctor before. And the way he looked at me, I knew he was serious.

‘OK, doc,’ I said. ‘I’ll try my hardest.’

‘Good. I’m going to put you on two pills a day. You should see a vast improvement in your health.’

That was the understatement of the century, that was.

My tremors calmed down almost overnight. I could walk again. My stammer improved. I even managed to get back into the studio and record a new version of ‘Changes’ with Kelly.

I’d been promising to do a song for Kelly ever since I named one of the tracks on Ozzmosis after Aimee. She was always saying, ‘How come Aimee got a song and I didn’t?’ In fact, I’d done a song for Jack, too—‘My Little Man’—which is also on Ozzmosis. So I owed Kelly—and I wanted to help her out, anyway, ’cos she’s my special girl, y’know? I mean, I love all my children the same, but Kelly always seems to end up in the firing line, for some reason.

So we did ‘Changes’, one of my favourite songs of all time, with the lyrics changed slightly for a father and daughter. It was so good, I thought we might have a Christmas number one on our hands. Then we flew back to England in December to promote it. By then, I was off the booze—on Dr Ropper’s orders—but I was still fucking around with all kinds of pills. You don’t just stop being a drug addict overnight. I was Russian Rouletting it every day. At the time, I was into chloral hydrate, which is the world’s oldest sleeping medication or something. But it was still a big improvement on the ridiculous amount of narcotics I’d been taking only a few months earlier, and I got through an appearance with Kelly on Top of the Pops with no problems. Then I drove up to Welders House with my assistant Tony for the weekend.

MTV already had a camera crew up there, because by then a lot of our family routines had become old hat, and they were desperate for some new material. But there wasn’t much to shoot. I had this Yamaha Banshee 350cc quad bike—like a bullet on wheels—and I’d gun it around the fields for hours on end. So I spent most of the weekend doing just that. And on Monday morning, December 8—the day ‘Changes’ went on sale—I took the bike out again.

By this point, the crew were a bit cheesed off, I think. They didn’t even have the cameras rolling. I remember getting off the bike to open a gate, closing it after everyone had gone through, getting back on the bike, racing ahead along this dirt trail, then slamming on the brakes as I went down a steep embankment. But the trouble with that quad bike was that it didn’t have one of those twisty throttles like you get on a motorbike. It just had a little lever that you pushed to go faster. And it was very easy to knock the lever by accident, while you were trying to control the bike, especially when it became unstable. That’s exactly what happened when I got to the bottom of the embankment: the front wheels hit a pothole, my right hand slipped off the handlebar and slammed into the lever, the engine went fucking crazy, and the whole thing shot out from under me and did a backflip in the air, throwing me on to the grass. For about a millionth of a second, I thought, Oh well, that wasn’t so bad.

Then the bike landed on top of me.

Crack.

When I opened my eyes, my lungs were full of blood and my neck was broken—or so my doctors told me later.

OK, now I’m dying, I thought.

It was the Nazis’ fault, believe it or not. The pothole was a little crater, made by a German bomb that had been dropped during the war. I didn’t know it at the time, but the land around Welders is full of them. The German pilots would bottle out before they reached the big cities—where they might get shot down—so they’d dump their bombs over Buckinghamshire, claim they’d carried out their mission, then fuck off home.

I can’t remember much of the next two weeks. For the first few hours, I was slipping in and out of consciousness all the time. I have this vague memory of Sam, my security guard, lifting me on to the back of his bike and driving me back across the field. Then all I can remember are glimpses of the inside of an ambulance, followed by lots of doctors peering down at me.

‘How did you get him to an ambulance?’ one of them said.

‘We put him on the back of a bike,’ replied a voice I didn’t recognise.

‘You could have paralysed him! He’s got a broken neck, for God’s sake. He’ll be lucky to walk again.’

‘Well, how were we supposed to get him out of the forest?’

‘A helicopter was on its way.’

‘We didn’t know that.’

‘Clearly.’

Then everything started to melt away.

Apparently the last thing I did before losing consciousness was to pull on a doctor’s sleeve and whisper in his ear, ‘Whatever you do, don’t fuck up my tattoo.’

Sharon was in LA, so Tony called her and put the chief doc on the line. He told her everything, and they agreed I had to go straight into surgery.

I was very badly injured. As well as breaking my neck, I’d fractured eight of my ribs and punctured my lungs, which was why they were filling up with blood. Meanwhile, when my collar-bone broke it cut through a main artery in my arm, so that there was no blood supply. For a while the docs thought they were gonna have to chop it off. Once they were done operating on me, they put me into a ‘chemical coma’, ’cos it was the only way I was going to be able to handle the pain. If I’d copped it then, it would have been a fitting end for me: I’d spent my whole adult life trying to get into a chemical coma. They kept me under for eight days in the end. Then they started to bring me slowly back to consciousness. It took another six days for me to fully wake up. And during that time I had the most fucking insane dream. It was so vivid, it was more like a hallucination. All I can say is that the NHS must have loaded me up with some top-quality gear, ’cos I can still picture every detail like it was yesterday.

It started off with me in Monmouthshire—where I used to go to rehearse with Black Sabbath and my solo bands. It was raining—pissing it down. Then I was in this corridor at Rockfield Studios, and in front of me was a camouflaged fence, like something they might have had in the trenches during World War Two. To my left was a window. When I looked through it, on the other side was Sharon, having a party. She couldn’t see me, but I could see her. I followed her out of this party and watched as she met up with some handsome, wealthy guy, who had his own plane. In the dream I thought, There’s my wife, and she’s leaving me. It was terribly sad. The guy had a landing strip in his back yard, and at the end of it was a big gun.

Then, all of a sudden, he could see me—so I offered him some telescopic night-vision sights, because I wanted him to like me. He told me to fuck off, and I felt rejected all over again. At that point, all the guests from the party came running on to the lawn. The crowd got bigger and bigger until in the end it became this big music festival.

That was when Marilyn Manson showed up.

It was fucking nuts, man.

Next, I was on the rich guy’s plane going to New Zealand, and they were serving draught Guinness in the cockpit. I suppose that must have had something to do with my son Louis’s wedding in Ireland, which I was missing because I was in hospital. In New Zealand it was New Year’s Eve. Jack was there—he’d bleached his hair completely white and he was letting off fire crackers. Then he got arrested.