Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

At that point, Donovan strolled into the dream and started to play ‘Mellow Yellow’.

What made all this even freakier was that I kept coming around, so some aspects of the dream were real. For example, I thought I was living in a fish ’n’ chip shop, but in fact my bed was right next to the hospital kitchen, so I could smell them cooking. Then I saw my guitarist Zakk Wylde—which in the dream I thought was impossible, because he lived in America—but I later learned that he’d flown over to see me, so he was really there.

I also saw him wearing a frilly dress, dancing with a mop and a bucket.

But that wasn’t real.

Or at least I hope it wasn’t.

‘Ozzy, Ozzy, can you hear me?’

It was Sharon.

After almost two weeks, they’d finally brought me out of the coma.

I opened my eyes.

Sharon smiled and dabbed at her face with a tissue.

‘I’ve got news for you,’ she said, squeezing my hand.

‘I had a dream,’ I told her, before she could say anything more. ‘You left me for a rich guy with an aeroplane.’

‘What are you talking about, Ozzy? Don’t be silly. No one’s leaving anyone. Everyone loves you. You should see the flowers that your fans have left outside. You’ll be touched.

They’re beautiful.’ She squeezed my hand again and said, ‘Do you want to hear the news?’

‘What is it? Are the kids OK?’

‘You and Kelly are at number one. You finally fucking did it.’

‘With “Changes”?’

‘Yes! You even broke a record, Ozzy. It’s never taken anyone thirty-three years from having their first song in the charts to getting a number one. Only Lulu has even come close.’

I managed a smile. ‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’ I said. Then I laughed.

Not a good idea, with eight broken ribs.

Normally, I hate Christmas. I mean, if you’re an alcoholic and you’re drinking, Christmas is the best thing in the world. But if you ain’t drinking, it’s fucking agony. And I hate the fact that you have to buy everyone a gift. Not because I’m tight—it’s just that you do it out of obligation, not because you want to.

It’s always seemed like total bullshit to me.

But Christmas 2003 was the exception. Me and Kelly might not have got the Christmas number one—we were outsold in the last week by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules, with their cover version of ‘Mad World’—but I got to live another day. Which is pretty unbelievable, when you think about it. The only sadness I have from that time is that none of my old Black Sabbath bandmates called to say they liked ‘Changes’, or to say, ‘Well done on getting to number one.’ Even if they’d called to say they thought it was a piece of shit, it would have been better than silence. No wonder it was raining so hard in Monmouthshire when I was there in the dream.

But whatever, man. It ain’t a big deal.

The hospital where I’d been in the coma, Wexham Park, couldn’t have been better. But I pissed them off in the end. I wanted to go home, ’cos I’d had enough, but they told me there was no way I could leave. I mean, at that point I couldn’t walk; I had a neck brace on; my arm still hadn’t come back to life; and I was in excruciating fucking pain. But my dream had fucked me up. I was convinced that Sharon was flying around the world in a private jet with a hot tub in the back, while being shagged senseless by some billionaire. If I was in hospital, I thought, I had no chance of getting her back. But by the time Sharon had raced over to the hospital with the kids to tell me for the millionth time that everything was OK, that it was all just a dream, it was too late: I’d managed to sign myself out. So Sharon had to get a hospital bed for me at Welders House and a home-help nurse to wipe my arse and shake my dick. For weeks, the only way I could get from room to room was in a wheelchair, and every night I had to be carried upstairs to go to bed.

But eventually I made a full recovery. Or as full as anyone could expect. My short-term memory seemed worse, but maybe that was just age, or the sleeping pills. And my ribcage is still full of screws and bolts and metal rods. When I walk through an airport metal detector these days, a klaxon goes off in the Pentagon.

But I can’t complain, y’know? I remember when I first went back to America after the crash, and I had to go to the doc for a check-up. He took all these X-rays of my chest, put them up on the viewing box, and started to whistle through his teeth. ‘Nice work,’ he said.

‘Must have been a bit pricey, though. What did it cost ya? Seven figures? Eight?’

‘Nothing, actually,’ I said.

He couldn’t believe it. ‘What d’you mean?’

‘National Health Service,’ I said, and shrugged.

‘Holy crap,’ he went. ‘No wonder you guys put up with the weather.’

Once I was out of the wheelchair and the neck brace, it was time to renegotiate our contract with MTV—again. But I couldn’t face another season of The Osbournes .

Enough was enough.

Anyway, by then MTV had killed the show by trying to wring every last ounce of dough out of it. It seemed to be on twenty-four hours a day. And when you overdo a show like that, people get bored. You want the folks at home to be saying, ‘Oh, it’s nine o’clock. Time for The Osbournes .’ You want them to be jacked up for it. But when it’s on every night, they just say,

‘Meh, it’ll be on tomorrow.’ They did the exact same thing with Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

It was brilliant for five minutes, then you couldn’t get away from it.

Another problem was that after three years of doing the show, we’d filmed just about everything we could ever film. So, for the last season, we had to come up with all these gimmicks—and we were so famous that we were mobbed whenever we left the house. It started to feel a bit fake, which was the exact opposite of what The Osbournes was all about.

So that was the end of it. By 2005 the show was over, Fort Apache was taken down, and the crew moved out. Not long after, Jack and Kelly moved out too. But I like to think we made our mark on TV. And especially on MTV. They love reality shows now, that lot. You have to stay up until three in the morning just to catch a music video these days. And, of course, a lot of people have tried to take credit for The Osbournes now that it’s over. But I’ve never been in any doubt about who were the true creators of The Osbournes .

They’re called The Osbournes .

One of the great things about the show was that it allowed Sharon to go off and have a successful career in TV. After she got through her chemotherapy, all I wanted was for Sharon to be happy, and when she got the gig as a judge on The X Factor, she loved it. When Sharon wanted to leave after the fourth season, I said to her, ‘Look, are you absolutely sure this is what you want to do, because if it is then I’m completely behind you.’ And in the end, it worked out very well for her, because now she’s having the time of her life doing America’s Got Talent.

I must say I thought my life would become a bit more normal after The Osbournes ended.

Fat fucking chance. Welders House almost burned down three times, for a start. Then I nearly murdered a cat burglar in the middle of the night in my own bathroom.

I swear this kind of crazy shit only ever happens to me.

If it hadn’t been for my dodgy bladder, I wouldn’t even have seen the guy. But I’m up and down during the night like a fiddler’s elbow, I am. It’s because I drink so much liquid, even when I’m not boozing. The cups of tea I make are the size of soup bowls. And I can get through a dozen of them a day. Whatever I do, it’s always to excess.