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

by Ozzy Osbourne

‘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.