Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

They said I would never write this book.

Well, fuck ’em—’cos here it is.

All I have to do now is remember something…

Bollocks. I can’t remember anything.

Oh, apart from this… [1] ‘Other people’s memories of the stuff in this book might not be the same as mine. I ain’t gonna argue with ’em. Over the past forty years I’ve been loaded on booze, coke, acid, Quaaludes, glue, cough mixture, heroin, Rohypnol, Klonopin, Vicodin, and too many other heavy-duty substances to list in this footnote. On more than a few occasions I was on all of those at the same time. I’m not the fucking Encyclopaedia Britannica, put it that way. What you read here is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story. Nothing more, nothing less…

My father always said I would do something big one day.

‘I’ve got a feeling about you, John Osbourne,’ he’d tell me, after he’d had a few beers. ‘You’re either going to do something very special, or you’re going to go to prison.’

And he was right, my old man.

I was in prison before my eighteenth birthday.

Burglary—that’s what they sent me down for in the end. Or, as the charge sheet said,

‘Breaking and entering and stealing goods to the value of £25.’ That’s about three hundred quid in today’s dough. It wasn’t exactly the Great Train Robbery, put it that way. I was a fucking crap burglar. I kept going back and doing the same job, over and over. I’d scoped out this clothes shop called Sarah Clarke’s, on the street behind my house in Aston. During the first break-in I grabbed a load of hangers and thought, Magic, I’ll be able to sell this stuff down the pub. But I’d forgotten to take a flashlight with me, and it turned out that the clothes I’d nicked were a bunch of babies’ bibs and toddlers’ underpants.

I might as well have tried to sell a turd.

So I went back. This time I nicked a 24-inch telly. But the fucking thing was too heavy for me to carry, and when I was climbing over the back wall it fell on my chest and I couldn’t move for about an hour. I was just lying there in this ditch full of nettles, feeling like a twat. I was like Mr Magoo on drugs, I was. Eventually I got the telly off me but I had to leave it behind.

On my third attempt I managed to nick some shirts. I even had the bright idea to wear a pair of gloves, like a true professional. The only problem was that one of the gloves was missing a thumb, so I left perfect prints all over the place. The cops came to my house a few days later and found the gloves and my pile of swag. ‘A thumbless glove, eh?’ the copper goes to me, as he slaps on the cuffs. ‘Not exactly Einstein, are we?’

About a week later I went to court and was fined forty quid by the judge. That was more dough than I’d ever had in my life. There was no way I could pay it, unless I robbed a bank… or borrowed it from my dad. But my old man wouldn’t help me out. ‘I earn an honest wage,’ he said. ‘Why should I give any of it to you? You need to be taught a fucking lesson.’

‘But Dad—’

‘For your own good, son.’

End of discussion.

The judge sentenced me to three months in Winson Green for ‘non-payment of fines’.

I almost shit my pants when they told me I was going to prison, to be honest with you.

Winson Green was an old Victorian slammer that had been built in 1849. The guards in there were notorious bastards. In fact, the chief inspector of prisons for the entire country later said that Winson Green was the most violent, piss-reeking, lawless fucking hole he’d ever set eyes on. I pleaded with my dad to pay the fine, but he just kept saying that it might finally knock some sense into me, being inside.

Like most kids who get into crime, I’d only ever wanted to be accepted by my mates. I thought it would be cool to be a bad guy, so I tried to be a bad guy. But I soon changed my mind when I got to Winson Green. In the admissions room my heart was pounding so loud and fast I thought it was gonna fly out of my chest and land on the concrete floor. The guards emptied my pockets and put all my stuff in this little plastic bag—wallet, keys, fags—and they had a good old laugh about my long, flowing brown hair.

‘The boys in Block H are gonna love you,’ one of ’em whispered to me. ‘Enjoy the showers, sweetie pie.’

I had no idea what he meant.

But I found out soon enough.

Unless your life’s ambition was to work in a factory, killing yourself with all-night shifts on an assembly line, there wasn’t much to look forward to, growing up in Aston. The only jobs to be had were in the factories. And the houses people lived in had no indoor shitters and were falling down. Because a lot of tanks and trucks and planes had been made in the Midlands during the war, Aston had taken a pounding during the Blitz. On every other street corner when I was a kid there were ‘bomb building sites’—houses that had been flattened by the Germans when they were trying to hit the Castle Bromwich Spitfire factory. For years I thought that’s what playgrounds were called.

I was born in 1948 and grew up at number 14 in the middle of a row of terraced houses on Lodge Road. My father, John Thomas, was a toolmaker and worked nights at the GEC plant on Witton Lane. Everyone called him Jack, which for some reason was a common nickname for John back then. He’d often tell me about the war—like the time he was working in King’s Stanley, Gloucestershire, in the early 1940s. Every night, the Germans were bombing the fuck out of Coventry, which was about fifty miles away. They’d drop high-explosives and parachute mines, and the light from the fires was so bright my dad could read the newspaper during the blackout. When I was a kid I never really understood how heavy-duty that must have been. Imagine it: people went to bed at night not knowing if their houses would still be standing the next morning.

Life after the war wasn’t that much easier, mind you. When my dad got home in the morning after a night’s work at GEC, my mum, Lillian, would start her shift at the Lucas factory. It was a grinding fucking routine, day in, day out. But you didn’t hear them complaining about it.

She was a Catholic, my mum, but she wasn’t religious. None of the Osbournes went to church—although for a while I went to a Church of England Sunday school, ’cos there was fuck-all else to do, and they gave you free tea and biscuits. Didn’t do me much good, all those mornings spent learning Bible stories and drawing pictures of the baby Jesus. I don’t think the vicar would be proud of his ex-pupil, put it that way.

Sunday was the worst day of the week for me. I was the kind of kid who always wanted to have fun, and there wasn’t much of that to be had in Aston. There were just grey skies and corner pubs and sickly looking people who worked like animals on assembly lines. There was a lot of working-class pride, though. People even put those fake stone bricks on the outside of their council houses, to make it look like they were living in fucking Windsor Castle. All they were missing were the moats and the drawbridges. Most of the houses were terraced, like ours, so the stone cladding on one would end where the pebbledash on the next began. It looked so bad.