I Am Ozzy: The classic autobiography from Ozzy Osbourne, the heavy metal music icon and frontman of Black Sabbath

by Ozzy Osbourne

I ain’t gonna pretend I can remember every word of the conversation I had with the strange, velvet-trousered bloke on my doorstep that night, but it I’m pretty sure it went something like: ‘So you got a gig for me then, Terence?’ ‘The lads call me Geezer.’ ‘Geezer?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘You taking the piss?’ ‘No.’ ‘As in “That smelly old geezer just shit his pants”?’ ‘That’s a very funny joke for a man who goes around calling himself “Ozzy Zig”. And what’s up with that bum fluff on yer head, man? It looks like you had an accident with a lawnmower. You can’t go on stage looking like that.’

We became pretty tight, me and Geezer. I’ll always remember when we were walking around the Bull Ring in the spring or early summer of 1968, and all of a sudden this bloke with long, frizzy blond hair and the tightest trousers you’ve ever seen pops out of nowhere and slaps Geezer on the back. ‘Geezer fucking Butler!’ Geezer turned around and said, ‘Rob! How are you, man?’ ‘Oh, y’know . . . could be worse.’ ‘Rob, this is Ozzy Zig,’ said Geezer. ‘Ozzy, this is Robert Plant – he used to sing with the Band of Joy.’ ‘Oh yeah,’ I said, recognising the face. ‘I went to one of your shows. Fucking awesome voice, man.’ ‘Thanks,’ said Plant, flashing me this big, charming smile. ‘So, what you been up to?’ asked Geezer. ‘Well, since you mention it, I’ve been offered a job.’ ‘Nice. What’s the gig?’ ‘The Yardbirds.’ ‘Whoah! Congratulations, man. That’s huge. But didn’t they split up?’

‘Yeah, but Jimmy – y’know the guitarist, Jimmy Page – he’s still around. So is the bass player. And they’ve got contractual obligations in Scandinavia, so they want to put something together.’ ‘That’s great,’ said Geezer. ‘Well, I’m not sure I’m gonna to be taking the gig, to be honest,’ said Plant, shrugging. ‘I’ve got some pretty good stuff going on here, y’know? Matter of fact, I’ve just put a new band together.’ ‘Oh, er . . . cool,’ said Geezer. ‘What’s the name?’ ‘Hobbstweedle,’ said Plant. Later, when Plant was gone, I asked Geezer if the bloke was out of his fucking mind. ‘Is he seriously going to pass up a gig with Jimmy Page for that Hobbsbollocks thing?’ I asked. Geezer shrugged. ‘I think he’s just worried it won’t work out,’ he said. ‘But he’ll do it, as long as they change the name. They can’t go around calling themselves the “New Yardbirds” for long.’

I twisted the latch and pulled. An awkward pause. Then the shorter and scruffier bloke asked, ‘Are you . . . Ozzy Zig?’ Before I could answer, the bigger guy leaned forwards and squinted at me. Now I knew for certain who he was. And he knew me, too. I froze. He groaned. ‘Aw, fucking hell,’ he said. ‘It’s you.’ I couldn’t believe it. The bloke on my doorstep was Tony Iommi: the good-looking kid from the year above me at Birchfield Road, who’d brought his electric guitar to school one Christmas, driving the teachers crazy with the noise. I hadn’t seen him for about five years, but I’d heard about him. He’d become a bit of an Aston legend since leaving school. All the kids knew who he was. If you wanted to be in a band with anyone, it was Tony. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to feel the same way about me. ‘C’mon, Bill,’ he said to the homeless-looking bloke. ‘This is a waste of time. Let’s go.’

Officially, we didn’t have a band leader. Unofficially, we all knew it was Tony. He was the oldest, the tallest, the best fighter, the best-looking, the most experienced, and the most obviously talented. He’d really started to look the part, too. He’d gone out and bought this black suede cowboy jacket with tassels on the arms, which the chicks loved. We all knew that Tony belonged right up there with the likes of Clapton and Hendrix. Pound for pound, he could match any of them. He was our ticket to the big time.

‘What d’you mean, you quit?’ asked Geezer, at an emergency meeting down the pub a few days before Christmas. ‘It wasn’t my scene,’ said Tony, with a shrug. The drinks were on him. ‘How can being in Jethro Tull not be your scene?’ said Geezer. ‘You played a gig with John Lennon, man!’ ‘I want to be in my own band. I don’t want to be someone else’s employee.’ ‘So Ian Anderson’s a tosser, then?’ I asked, getting to the point. ‘No – he’s all right,’ said Tony. ‘He just wasn’t . . . We didn’t have a laugh, y’know? It wasn’t like this.’ Bill, already on his third pint of cider, looked like he was about to burst into tears. ‘So are we back together?’ said Geezer, trying not to lose his cool by grinning too much. ‘If you’ll have me.’

Between gigs we started to jam out some ideas for songs. It was Tony who first suggested we do something that sounded evil. There was a cinema called the Orient outside the community centre where we rehearsed in Six Ways, and whenever it showed a horror film the queue would go all the way down the street and around the corner. ‘Isn’t it strange how people will pay money to frighten themselves?’ I remember Tony saying one day. ‘Maybe we should stop doing blues and write scary music instead.’ Me and Bill thought it was a great idea, so off we went and wrote some lyrics that ended up becoming the song ‘Black Sabbath’. It’s basically about a bloke who sees a figure in black coming to take him off to the lake of fire. Then Tony came up with this scary-sounding riff. I moaned out a tune over the top of it, and the end result was fucking awesome – the best thing we’d ever done, by a mile. I’ve since been told that Tony’s riff is based on what’s known as the ‘Devil’s interval’, or the ‘tritone’. Apparently,

churches banned it from being used in religious music during the Middle Ages because it scared the crap out of people. The organist would start to play it and everyone would run away ’cos they thought the Devil was going to pop up from behind the altar. As for the title of the song, it was Geezer who came up with that. He got it from a Boris Karloff film that had been out for a while. I don’t think Geezer had ever seen the film, to be honest with you. I certainly hadn’t – it was years before I even knew there was a film. It’s funny, really, because in spite of our new direction we were still quite a straightforward twelve-bar blues band. If you listened closely, you could also hear a lot of jazz influences in our sound – like Bill’s swing-style intro to one of our other early numbers, ‘Wicked World’. It’s just that we played at eight hundred times the volume of a jazz band.

I couldn’t believe it: the New Yardbirds must have changed their name to Led Zeppelin . . . and they’d made the best record I’d heard in years. In the van on the way home, I remember saying to Tony, ‘Did you hear how heavy that Led Zeppelin album sounded?’ Without missing a beat, he replied, ‘We’ll be heavier.’

On Friday the thirteenth of February 1970, Black Sabbath went on sale. I felt like I’d just been born. But the critics fucking hated it. Still, one of the few good things about being dyslexic is that when I say I don’t read reviews, I mean I don’t read reviews. But that didn’t stop the others from poring over what the press had to say about us. Of all the bad reviews of Black Sabbath, the worst was probably written by Lester Bangs at Rolling Stone. He was the same age as me, but I didn’t know that at the time. In fact, I’d never even heard of him before, and once the others told me what he’d written I wished I still hadn’t. I remember Geezer reading out words like ‘claptrap’, ‘wooden’ and ‘dogged’. The last line was something like, ‘They’re just like Cream, but worse’, which I didn’t understand, because I thought Cream were one of the best bands in the world.

My old man wasn’t too impressed with our first album, either. I’ll always remember the day I took it home and said, ‘Look, Dad! I got my voice on a record!’ I can picture him now, fiddling with his reading specs and holding the cover in front of his face. Then he opened the sleeve, went ‘Hmm’ and said, ‘Are you sure they didn’t make a mistake, son?’ ‘What d’you mean?’ ‘This cross is upside down.’ ‘It’s supposed to be like that.’ ‘Oh. Well, don’t just stand there. Put it on. Let’s have a bit of a sing-along, eh?’ So I walked over to the radiogram, lifted the heavy wooden lid, put the record on the turntable – hoping the dodgy speaker that I’d put in there from the PA would work – and cranked up the volume. With the first clap of thunder, my dad flinched. I grinned nervously at him.

My poor old man turned white. I think he’d been expecting something along the lines of ‘Knees up Mother Brown’. But I left the record on anyway. Finally, after six minutes and eighteen seconds of Tony and Geezer thrashing away on their guitars, Bill beating the shit out of his drums, and me howling on about a man in black coming to take me away to the lake of fire, my dad rubbed his eyes, shook his head and looked at the floor. Silence. ‘What d’you think, Dad?’ ‘John,’ he said, ‘are you absolutely sure you’ve only been drinking the occasional beer?’ I went bright red and said something like ‘Oh, er, yeah, Dad, whatever.’ Bless him, he just didn’t get it at all.

When the meeting was over we all stood up and said how great it was to meet him, blah-blah-blah, even though none of us wanted anything more to do with him. Then, as we filed out of his office, he introduced us to the chick he’d spent half the meeting bawling at over the phone. ‘This is Sharon, my daughter,’ he growled. ‘Sharon, take these lads down to the car, will you?’ I grinned at her, but she gave me a wary look. She probably thought I was a lunatic, standing there in my pyjama shirt, with no shoes and a hot-water tap on a piece of string around my neck. But then, when Don huffed back to his office and closed the door behind him, I cracked a joke and made her smile. I just about fell on the floor. It was the most wicked, beautiful smile I’d ever seen in my life. And she had the laugh to go with it, too. It made me feel so good, hearing her laugh. I just wanted to make her do it again and again and again.

It’s always the way with the best songs: they come out of nowhere, when you’re not even trying. The thing with ‘Paranoid’ is that it doesn’t fit into any category: it was like a punk song years before punk had been invented. Mind you, none of us thought it was anything special when we recorded it. To us, it just seemed a bit half-arsed compared with ‘Hand of Doom’ or ‘Iron Man’ or any of those heavier numbers. But fucking hell, it was catchy; I was humming it all the way home from the studio. ‘Thelma,’ I said, when I got back to Edgbaston. ‘I think we might have written a single.’ She just gave me a look that said, That’ll be the day.

And we still really cared about the music. We wanted to impress ourselves before we impressed anyone else. If other people happened to like what we were doing, that was just a bonus. That’s how we ended up doing songs like ‘Changes’, which didn’t sound like anything we’d ever done before. When a lot of people hear the name Black Sabbath, all they think of is the heavy stuff. But there was a lot more to us than that – especially when we started making an effort to get away from all that black magic shit. With ‘Changes’, Tony just sat down at the piano and came up with this beautiful riff, I hummed a melody over the top, and Geezer wrote these heartbreaking lyrics about the break-up Bill was going through with his wife at the time. I thought that song was brilliant from the moment we first recorded it. I had to keep listening to it, over and over again. I’m still like that today: if I put it on my iPod, I’ll drive everyone nuts by singing along to it for the rest of the day.

Every once in a while, the lads from Led Zeppelin would also come over to Bulrush Cottage. Robert Plant didn’t live too far away, actually, and I’d go over to his place, too. I remember one night at Plant’s house – not long after we’d got back from Bel Air – I taught him how to play seven-card stud. That was a big fucking mistake. As I explained the rules, he said he wanted to place bets – ‘just to see how it works, y’know?’ – and then he kept raising the stakes. I was just beginning to think what a fucking idiot he must be when he pulled out a royal flush, and I had to give him fifty quid. He fleeced me, the cheeky bastard. After a few nights out with Zeppelin, I worked out that their drummer, John Bonham, was as fucking nuts as I was, so we’d spend most of the time trying to out-crazy each other. That was always the way with me, y’know? I’d try to win people over with my craziness, like I had in the playground at Birchfield Road. But, of course, behind the mask there was a sad old clown most of the time. Bonham was the same, I think. He would just drink himself to fucking bits. One time, we got his assistant, a guy called Matthew,

drive us to a club in Birmingham in my car. But when it was time to go home, Bonham was so pissed, he thought it was his car, so he locked all the doors from inside and wouldn’t let me in. I ended up standing in the car park shouting, ‘John, this is my car. Open the door!’ ‘Fuck off,’ he said, through the window, as Matthew revved the engine. ‘John, for crying out—’ ‘I said fuck off.’ ‘BUT THIS IS MY CAR!’ Then something finally clicked inside his head. ‘Well, you should fucking get in then, shouldn’t you?’ he said.

I miss my dad a lot, even now. I just wish we could have sat down and had a good old man-to-man conversation about all the stuff I never knew to ask him when I was a kid, or was too pissed and busy being a rock star to ask him when I was in my twenties. But I suppose that’s always the way, isn’t it?

I don’t have anything bad to say about the guy they hired to replace me, Ronnie James Dio, who’d previously been with Rainbow. He’s a great singer. Then again, he ain’t me, and I ain’t him. So I just wish they’d called the band Black Sabbath II. That’s all.

So one night this tiny American bloke came over to Le Parc to introduce himself. The first thing that came into my mind was: he’s either a chick or gay. He had long, wet-looking hair, and this weirdly deep voice, and he was so thin he was almost not there. He reminded me a little of David Bowie’s guitarist, Mick Ronson. ‘How old are you?’ I asked, as soon as he walked through the door. ‘Twenty-two.’ ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Randy Rhoads.’

‘What’s wrong?’ he said, looking up at me with this worried expression on his face. ‘You’re hired.’ You should have heard him play, man. I almost cried, he was so good. Soon we were flying back to England for rehearsals. I quickly found out that although Randy looked like Mr Cool, he was an incredibly sweet, down-to-earth guy. A real gentleman, too – not at all what you’d expect of a flash American rock ’n’ roll guitar hero.

At first, we stayed at Bulrush Cottage with Thelma and the kids. The first thing we wrote was ‘Goodbye to Romance’. Working with Randy was like night and day compared with Black Sabbath. I was just walking around the house one day, singing this melody that had been in my head for months, and Randy asked, ‘Is that your song, or a Beatles song?’ I said, ‘Oh no, it’s nothing, just this thing I’ve got stuck in my head.’ But he made me sit down with him until we’d worked it out.

But as soon as the radio stations got hold of ‘Crazy Train’, it was a done deal. The thing just exploded. When the album came out in Britain in September 1980, it went to number seven in the album charts. When it came out in America six months later, it peaked at number twenty-one, but it eventually sold four million copies, making it one of Billboard’s Top 100 bestselling albums of the decade. Reviews? Didn’t read ’em.

All in all, I have great memories of that first American tour. And it wasn’t just because Blizzard of Ozz had sold a million copies by the time we’d finished. It was because I had such fabulous people around me. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve Randy Rhoads. He was the only musician who’d ever been in my band. He could read music. He could write music. He was so dedicated that he would find a classical guitar instructor in every town we went to and get a lesson. He’d give his own lessons, too. Whenever we were on the West Coast, he’d find time to go to his mother’s school and tutor the kids. He worshipped his mum, Randy did. I remember when we were recording Blizzard of Ozz at Ridge Farm, he asked if he could write a song and name it ‘Dee’ in her honour. I told him to go for it.

I hung out a lot with Lemmy from Motörhead on that tour, too. He’s a very close friend of the family now. I love that guy. Wherever there’s a beer tent in the world, there’s Lemmy. But I’ve never seen that man fall down drunk, y’know? Even after twenty or thirty pints. I don’t know how he does it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he outlived me and Keith Richards. Motörhead opened a few shows for us on that tour. They had this old hippy bus – it was the cheapest thing they could find – and all Lemmy would carry around with him was this suitcase full of books. That’s all he had in the world, apart from the clothes on his back. He loves reading, Lemmy. He’ll spend days at a time doing it. He came up to stay with us at the Howard Hughes house one time, and he wouldn’t leave the library. Don Arden found him in there and threw a fit. He stormed to the lounge and shouted, ‘Sharon! Who the fuck is that caveman in my library? Get him out! Get him out of my house!’ ‘Relax, Dad. It’s just Lemmy.’ ‘I don’t care who he is. Get him out of here!’ ‘He’s in a band, Dad. They’re supporting Ozzy.’ ‘Well, for Christ’s sake at least get him a deckchair and put him out by the pool. He looks like the undead.’

I’m telling you: something crazy happened on every night of that tour. And then on 20 January 1982 we played the Veterans Auditorium in Des Moines, Iowa. I’ll never forget the name of that place, that’s for sure. Or how to pronounce it: ‘DEE-Moyn’. The gig was going great. The God-like hand was working without any hitches. We’d already hung the midget. Then, from out of the audience came this bat. Obviously a toy, I thought. So I held it up to the lights and bared my teeth while Randy played one of his solos. The crowd went mental. Then I did what I always did when we got a rubber toy on stage. CHOMP. Immediately though, something felt wrong. Very wrong.

Oh, fuck me I thought. I didn’t just go and eat a fucking bat, did I? So I spat out the head, looked over into the wings, and saw Sharon with her eyes bulging, waving her hands, screaming, ‘NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IT’S REAL, OZZY, IT’S REAL!’ Next thing I knew I was in a wheelchair, being rushed into an emergency room. Meanwhile, a doctor was saying to Sharon, ‘Yes, Miss Arden, the bat was alive. It was probably stunned from being at a rock concert, but it was definitely alive. There’s a good chance Mr Osbourne now has rabies. Symptoms? Oh, y’know, malaise, headache, fever, violent twitches, uncontrollable excitement, depression, a pathological fear of liquids . . .’ ‘Not much chance of that,’ muttered Sharon. ‘Mania is usually one of the final symptoms. Then the patient gets very lethargic, falls into a coma, and stops breathing.’ ‘Oh my God.’ ‘That’s why eating a bat is generally a bad idea, from a medical standpoint.’

Randy’s funeral was held at the First Lutheran Church in Burbank. I was one of the pallbearers. They had big pictures of Randy all around the altar. I remember thinking: It’s only been a few days since I was sitting on the bus with him, calling him mad for wanting to go to university. I felt so bad. Randy was one of the greatest guys who’d ever been in my life. And I suppose I felt guilty, too, because if he hadn’t been in my band, he wouldn’t have died.

‘All I can say is that I lost two of the greatest people in my life,’ I said, trying not to choke up. ‘But it ain’t gonna stop me because I’m about rock ’n’ roll, and rock ’n’ roll is for the people, and I love people, and that’s what I’m about. I’m going to continue because Randy would have liked me to, and so would Rachel, and I’m not going to stop, ’cos you can’t kill rock ’n’ roll.’

A few weeks after Randy died, I asked Sharon to marry me. ‘If there’s one good thing that could come out of all the shit we’ve been through on this tour,’ I told her, ‘it would be making you my wife.’ She said yes. So I put a ring on her finger, and we set a date.

The funny thing is, I’m actually quite interested in the Bible, and I’ve tried to read it several times. But I’ve only ever got as far as the bit about Moses being 720 years old, and I’m like, ‘What were these people smoking back then?’ The bottom line is I don’t believe in a bloke called God in a white suit who sits on a fluffy cloud any more than I believe in a bloke called the Devil with a three-pronged fork and a couple of horns. But I believe that there’s day, there’s night, there’s good, there’s bad, there’s black, there’s white. If there is a God, it’s nature. If there’s a Devil, it’s nature. I feel the same way when people ask me if songs like ‘Hand of Doom’ and ‘War Pigs’ are anti-war. I think war is just part of human nature. And I’m fascinated by human nature – especially the dark side. I always have been. It doesn’t make me a Devil worshipper,

The only thing I didn’t like about No More Tears was the video for ‘Mama I’m Coming Home’. It was one of those high-tech, million-dollar jobs, but all I wanted was something simple, like the video for Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. So in the end I did a second video for $50,000 using the Nirvana camera guy, and it was perfect. It had a huge impact on me, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ – and I was very proud when I found out that Kurt Cobain was a fan of mine. I thought he was awesome. I thought that whole Nevermind album was awesome. It was such a tragedy the way it ended.

‘Hang on a minute, Sharon,’ I said. ‘What d’you mean, “We’ll do our own festival”?’ ‘We’ll book some venues and we’ll do it ourselves. Screw Lollapafuckinglooza.’ ‘Won’t that be expensive?’ ‘I’m not going to lie to you, Ozzy, it could be very expensive. But life’s all about taking risks, isn’t it?’ ‘OK, but before you start going around booking stadiums left, right and centre, let’s test the ground first, eh? Start off small, like we did with Blizzard of Ozz. Then, if it takes off, we’ll get bigger.’ ‘Well, listen to you, Mr Businessman all of a sudden.’ ‘What are you planning to call this festival?’ ‘Ozzfest.’ As soon as she said the word, I could think of only one thing: ‘Beerfest’. It was fucking perfect. That’s how it started. Our strategy was to take all the undesirables, all the bands that couldn’t find an outlet anywhere else, and put them together, give them an audience. It worked better than we ever could have expected, ’cos nothing existed for those bands at the time. It had got to the point in the music business where if you wanted to play a gig, the venues made you buy all the tickets in advance, so you had to give them away for free or sell them on your own, which is bullshit. Black Sabbath never had to deal with that kind of bollocks in the early days. We’d never have left Aston, if that had been the case. Where would we have found the dough? A year later, in 1996, we were ready.

And we did exactly what we said we’d do. We started out small in just two cities – Phoenix and Los Angeles – as part of my tour to promote the Ozzmosis album (the Retirement Sucks tour, as it was known). It couldn’t have gone better. It was a monster, from day one. As soon as it was over, Sharon turned to me and said, ‘D’you know who would be the perfect band to headline Ozzfest ’97?’ ‘Who?’ ‘Black Sabbath.’ ‘What? Are you kidding? I think Tony’s the only one left. And their last album didn’t even chart, did it?’ ‘No, the real Black Sabbath: you, Tony, Geezer and Bill. Back together after eighteen years.’ ‘Yeah, right.’ ‘It’s time, Ozzy. Hatchets buried. Once and for all.’

Then the First Lady walked into the room, with George W. Bush following her. And the first thing he said when he reached the podium was: ‘Laura and I are honoured to be here tonight. Thanks for the invitation. What a fantastic audience we have tonight: Washington power-brokers, celebrities, Hollywood stars . . . and Ossie Ozz-Burn!’ By that time I was well and truly blasted, so as soon as I heard my name, I jumped up on the table like a drunken arsehole and screamed, ‘Yeeeeeeeehhaaaaaa!!’ It brought the fucking house down. But I was fucked, so I didn’t know when to stop. I just stayed up there, going, ‘Yeeeeeeeehhaaaaaa!!’ until the whole room of eighteen hundred people went silent. Bush looked at me. ‘Yeeeeeeeehhaaaaaa!!’ I screamed again. Silence. ‘Yeeeeee—’ ‘OK, Ozzy,’ snapped Bush. On the tape, you can even hear him say, ‘This might have been a mistake.’ I finally climbed down from the table – actually, I think Greta might have pulled me down. Then Bush started to tell this joke about me: ‘The thing about Ozzy is he’s made a lot of big hit recordings: “Party with the Animals”, “Face in Hell”, “Bloodbath in Paradise” . . .’

I was about to get back up on the table and tell him that none of those were big hits, but then he delivered the punchline. ‘Ozzy,’ he said, ‘Mom loves your stuff.’ The whole room went crazy.

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.

After that, I got a team of nurses to live with us at Doheny Road, ’cos I never wanted Sharon to go through that again. I also got my agent to call Robin Williams to ask him if he would come over and cheer up Sharon. I’ve always believed that if you can get someone to laugh when they’re sick, it’s the best way of helping them to get better – and I got the feeling that Robin felt the same way after seeing that movie he did, Patch Adams. So he came over one day when I’d gone off to the studio, and apparently Sharon was crying with laughter the whole afternoon. To this day I think that’s the greatest gift I’ve ever given my wife, and I’m for ever in Robin’s debt for it. I mean, ‘thanks’ is nowhere near enough, is it? The guy is just a really wonderful human being. But in spite of Robin’s comedy show, Sharon had another seizure that night and she ended up in hospital again.

In fact, Sharon’s dog Minnie didn’t leave her side for one second during the chemo. I never saw that dog eat. I never saw it piss. By the end of the treatment, the dog was as dehydrated as Sharon was. One time I went to the hospital and they were both lying there, side by side, with matching drips. Minnie was like a guardian angel for Sharon.

I rejoined the tour on 22 August in Denver. I was so uptight, I wouldn’t let anyone talk about cancer. If I heard the c-word, I freaked out. But a few nights later, when we were in another city – don’t ask me where – I was halfway through the set and I just thought, Fuck this, I can’t keep denying that this is happening. So I said to the crowd, ‘I want to tell you about Sharon’s progress. She’s doing well, and she’s going to beat this cancer. She’s going to kick it up the fucking arse!’ The crowd went mental. I swear to God, they lifted me up. It was magical. The power of people, when they focus on something positive, never fails to amaze me.

person any more. It reached the point where I just thought, What are you gonna do, Ozzy? Are you gonna carry on being that one-foot-in-the-grave, one-foot-out-of-the-grave type of person, until you end up like so many other tragic rock ’n’ roll cases? Or are you gonna climb out of the hole for good? I’d hit rock bottom, in other words. It had taken me four decades to get there, but I’d finally arrived. I disliked everything about myself. I was terrified of living, but I was afraid to die. Which is no kind of existence, take it from me. So I cleaned myself up.

I also bumped into Keith Richards recently, at an awards show. ‘How are you doing, Keith?’ I asked him. He replied, ‘Oh, not bad for a living legend.’ I almost said, ‘Living? Keith, you and me are the walking fucking dead.’

I mean, I’m so grateful that I’m me, that I’m here, that I can still enjoy the life that I have. If I don’t live a day longer, I’ll have had more than my fair share. The only thing I ask is that if I end up brain-dead in a hospital somewhere, just pull the plug, please. But I doubt it’ll get to that. Knowing me, I’ll go out in some stupid way. I’ll trip on the doorstep and break my neck. Or I’ll choke on a throat lozenge. Or a bird will shit on me and give me some weird virus from another planet. Look what happened with the quad bike: I’d been taking lethal combinations of booze and drugs for decades but it was riding over a pothole in my back garden at two miles an hour that nearly killed me. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t worry about that kind of heavy-duty stuff on a daily basis. I’ve come to believe that everything in life is worked out in advance. So whenever bad shit happens, there ain’t nothing you can do about it. You’ve just gotta ride it out. And eventually death will come, like it comes to everyone. I’ve said to Sharon: ‘Don’t cremate me, whatever you do.’ I want to be put in the ground, in a nice garden somewhere, with a tree planted over my head. A crabapple tree, preferably, so the kids can make wine out of me and get pissed out of their heads. As for what they’ll put on my headstone, I ain’t under any illusions. If I close my eyes, I can already see it: Ozzy Osbourne, born 1948.

Died, whenever. He bit the head off a bat.