OZZY OSBOURNE is the “Prince Of Darkness” who, for decades, has shone a bright light into our lives.
When he takes to the stage in his hometown on July 5, it will be a last hurrah for the lovable Brummie — rock’s greatest hellraiser.
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Despite contending with enough ailments to fill a medical dictionary, he will go down fighting with that broad grin on his comical face.
I’ve met Ozzy many times over the past 20 years and have always left his company thinking he could have had a successful alternative career as a stand-up comedian.
Never be fooled into thinking he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer — spend a bit of time with the “Godfather Of Heavy Metal” and he’ll have you in stitches with his quick wit.
The announcement that Black Sabbath are reuniting for a mega heavy metal fest at Villa Park alongside Metallica and a host of great bands reminded me of this classic Ozzy anecdote.
It was about Sabbath’s bassist and chief lyricist Geezer Butler.
He said: “Geezer is a vegetarian. When he walked off stage, I asked him, ‘Does Your wife eat meat?’
“And he replied, ‘Yeah.’ So I said, ‘What, do you have a f***ing funeral every time she has a bacon sandwich?’”
This brought us on to his most infamous incident — the moment he bit the head off a bat, thinking it was made of rubber.
It happened on January 20, 1982, at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Des Moines, Iowa, during the Diary Of A Madman solo tour when a member of the audience threw the poor creature onto the stage.
Ozzy later claimed that the bat was still alive and he thought it had managed to bite him first, hence he needed treatment to prevent rabies.
‘Bucket on my head’
He told me how his audiences had never let him forget the incident across the decades since it happened.
“At one of my gigs, someone let a dog go with a sign on its leg, saying, ‘Please don’t eat me!’ ”
Ozzy also talked about how he loved to clown around, a bit like the late great Tommy Cooper in his pomp, but that his antics didn’t always go down too well with his bandmates.
At one of my gigs, someone let a dog go with a sign on its leg, saying, ‘Please don’t eat me!’
Of one particular tour, he said: “Most nights, I slipped over on the stage. I nearly fell into the f***ing orchestra pit.
“I mean it’s tough on the other guys. When they’re getting all serious, I make them laugh and they get p***ed off.
“Nothing’s rehearsed with me. One day, I’ll just put a bucket on my head.”
It’s sad to think that Ozzy, 76, can no longer prance around like a loon, that he “can’t walk” any more because of his worsening Parkinson’s disease.
He even made a quip to me about that: “I wish I could get my balance back.
“I was looking into these bionic legs which you can get now — then I really would be Iron Man!” (A reference to one of Black Sabbath’s biggest, most bone-crunching tracks).
When I spoke to him last October, just before he was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame for a second time, Ozzy managed to put a positive spin on his situation.
“I’m nearly f***ing dead!” he cried. “But [wife] Sharon said to me recently, ‘If you had to do it all over again, would you change anything?’
“I answered, ‘No, I’ve had a f***ing great time’.”
He even broke into the immortal song from his favourite film, Monty Python’s Life Of Brian.
“Always look on the bright side of life… life’s a piece of s**t, when you look at it.”
Then he launched into another typically funny anecdote: “I used to sing that to my kids when they were babies. I love that movie!
“The other day I went to my chiropractor in Beverly Hills. Who should be sitting in the waiting room but John ‘f***ing’ Cleese. It was like meeting the Pope!”
The fact that his final gig is in Birmingham promises to make it one of the most emotional days of Ozzy’s life less ordinary.
‘People freaked out’
When he appeared at the Commonwealth Games closing ceremony there in 2022 alongside Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi dressed like a Christopher Lee-style vampire, Ozzy told me: “It doesn’t get any better than playing Birmingham — just to stand on stage in my hometown, playing live.”
This prompted me to look back at some of our older interviews when he talked about the early days of Sabbath, before “getting successful and having your ego ‘f***ing oiled up”.
In 2009, I flew to Los Angeles and took a cab out to the mansion he shared with his “rock” Sharon and countless dogs.
Sharon was away filming America’s Got Talent and Ozzy had the run of the place, which included a swish new basement studio.
It was just outside the door to this that I had my picture taken with the eternal prankster pretending to strangle me.
Later, we sat in his library, or perhaps “man cave” is a better description, surrounded by his collection of World War II memorabilia, including the opera glasses of Eva Braun, Hitler’s muse.
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There, Ozzy sifted through the mists of time to when Sabbath started out in the late Sixties.
“It was all about ‘If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair’.
“But we were living in f***ing Birmingham, something I’m not ashamed of.
“When we first toured America, people really freaked out!” Of the four members, Ozzy had the straightest, neatest hair and was the most baby-faced. The others had, shall we say, a more primeval look.
Ozzy had hated school (“I couldn’t hold a ruler”) but he loved music, and he credited one band in particular.
“The Beatles were everything to me,” he said. “They were the reason I started singing. They blew my brains out.”
Getting Sabbath up and running was hard . . . Ozzy remembered choosing to spend what little cash he had “on a bag of chips or a packet of Players No.6 fags.”
With their thunderously heavy sound, the controversial references to Satanism crept in early on.
When you come from Aston and you fall in love with cocaine, you think it’s like your first f***! The world went a bit fuzzy after that
Ozzy said: “I think it was Tony [Iommi] who said to us, ‘Isn’t it strange that people pay money to get the s**t scared out of them?’.
“So we decided to make scary music. Plus Tony’s always been a f***ing great riff guy.”
Another key factor was the wild, nightmarish imagination of Geezer Butler.
“He wrote great lyrics,” said Ozzy. “I used to phone him up and go, ‘Are you f***ing reading this out of a book?’.”
Sabbath’s journey to the dark side came at a price, though — a backlash from religious types trying to save their souls.
Ozzy said: “We got these Jesus freaks following us around. One time, I’d done a gig, got on a bus and I was travelling for seven or eight hours.
‘Black masses’
“We were in the middle of nowhere, early hours of the morning, and this guy walks up and hands me a passage from the Bible.
“I’m like, ‘Where did you come from?’. He said, ‘Oh, I was at the gig’.
“We also started getting invites to black masses in cemeteries. What the f*** was all that about!”
As Sabbath grew, Ozzy got sucked into wild excesses of the rock star lifestyle. That meant oceans of booze, mountains of drugs and endless madcap antics.
He once said: “When you come from Aston and you fall in love with cocaine, you think it’s like your first f***! The world went a bit fuzzy after that.”
In his autobiography, Ozzy described how, in 1981, he was invited to a meeting with his record label head in Germany, “p***ed out of my head”.
So, to lighten the mood, he performed a striptease on the table, before kissing the executive on the lips.
Sharon later revealed that he goose-stepped up and down the table and urinated in the executive’s wine, but was too drunk to remember that gory detail.
Not long ago, he said to me: “I can’t complain because I’ve done some f***ing stupid things in my life.”
He remembered one hair-brained event in particular: “Once, I was out in Albuquerque, where they have this cable car 1,000ft up, going to a restaurant at the top of a small mountain.”
The day after the night before, after an industrial intake of booze and illegal substances (well, it was in Breaking Bad country), Ozzy was asked: “What about when we went up to that restaurant?”
“What restaurant?” he replied. “Well, you climbed through the roof of the cable car and stood on the roof belting out Black Sabbath songs,” came the answer.
Ozzy sighed: “I looked up at it and a cold shiver went through my body. I had no clue I’d just done that!”
In 2022, I asked him if he missed the hellraising and he answered: “On the 4th of July, my wife and I celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary and I said to Sharon, ‘What the f*** happened to 40 years?’
When I first found out I had Parkinson’s I thought, ‘F***!’, but then I thought, ‘It could be worse, I could be dead’
“I mean, I can remember the early Black Sabbath years quite well but I honestly don’t remember a lot of it since.”
He was at pains to point out: “It’s seven years since I had a drink, seven years clean and sober. Don’t smoke tobacco, don’t drink, don’t do drugs. It’s quite boring actually.”
So, what could he still do to give him a hit, I asked. “The only thing left is masturbation,” laughed Ozzy.
On a more serious note, the great survivor added: “Nearly all the friends I used to drink and do drugs with are dead.
“I must still be here for a reason!”
That reason is his loving family – wife Sharon, his children and grandchildren – and his eternal desire to entertain.
“The only thing I can do in life is entertain people, I love it,” he said. “I’ll only stop when a pine lid is being nailed to my box.
“When I first found out I had Parkinson’s I thought, ‘F***!’, but then I thought, ‘It could be worse, I could be dead’.
“The fact is, what am I going to do about it? With the time I’ve got left, I don’t want to sit around being miserable.
“Everybody would like to be me for a weekend. I’ve had a f**ing great life.”
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