A weird encounter with Ozzy Osbourne in Monte Carlo
Welcome to Ozzworld.
“I don’t really like television. Sharon keeps going on about including me in the conversation and I go, ‘Sharon, hang on a minute, let’s talk before WE do this television show. I want to know what WE – meaning me, the other part of we – as you being part of we and me being the other part of we – I want to know what this half of the we wants to do, what the f*** I’m getting myself in for because I’m no f****** weatherman. I’ve been working a long time on the road and I want to take a vacation on a boat I can do that…. Then this f****** X-Factor comes on the television and I’m a lonely guy on Saturday nights you know…. My son is a miracle. Three years ago he was on this oxycodone, this hillbilly heroin – it’s a time release painkiller and if you do some weird shit to it, you get stoned. But he went away and got fixed and then he’s on television climbing a mountain. It was really good. I’m so proud of him as I am of all my children. They have lived through this tidal wave when we went into this Beatles-Elvis zone of popularity when we stopped f****** traffic in the street. It was unbelievable.”
I have no shoes on at this point and neither does John Michael “Ozzy” Osbourne. But the big difference between us is that Sharon, his wife, knew he would be shoeless and made him wear some very snazzy socks, each with three embroidered stripes. Mine are very old M & S. We’re not wearing shoes because we are on a yacht – the Lionheart – and you’re not supposed to wear your street shoes lest you damage the pristine decking and thick beige carpets which are de rigeur in this kind of billionaire’s bateau. In Monte Carlo they know this stuff without being told.
Okay, this is an article about Ozzy Osbourne, an example of the genre Interview, sub-genre Old Rocker. The key stylistic aspect of this particular sub-genre is that coherence is not to be expected because a)the old rocker’s brain is not quite what it was and b)pinning old rockers and their people down to times and places and trying to understand what they are saying tends to cause collateral damage to the writer’s brain. You have been warned.
The night before the boat wasn’t called the Lionheart, it was called Top Shop, a fact signified by a large black shed that had been erected at its stern on the quay in Monte Carlo. It was thus temporarily named because of the retail tycoon Philip Green. He was holding a party on board in honour of an event called Fashion Rocks, a dreadfully embarrassing show on the following night in which Jeremy Irons and Jerry Hall were so unfunny that I had to leave at the interval.
This was in aid of The Prince’s Trust. But, if Philip Green had cancelled the party and given what it cost him to the Trust, then the whole Fashion Rocks palaver could have been binned. Having left my shoes in the black shed, I step on board to see great tubs of caviar and God knows what else. The boat is an Essex fooballer’s wife’s bath toy – shiny and plastic looking outside and all black, gold, beige and plasma screens inside. Pure naff, in fact, but, you know, fun.
And huge. Vaguely seeking Ozzy, I keep getting lost amidst the rooms full of cushions and canapes. Abandoning the quest, I fall into a conversation with record industry people. We are interrupted by an angry young man from a very prominent rock band. He’s whining to the girls from Sony about some coverage he got in the Sun. He says something along the lines of, “F***, f****** Sun, f***, f***! Victoria. F***!” I won’t name the band because they’ll all be out of work in a couple of months, but I will ask, why are young rockers so desperately uncool? Can you imagine Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart whining about The Sun?
At some point, I find my way to the top deck and I spot Jon Bon Jovi talking to Cousin It from the Addams Family – the one that’s all hair. He turns round and he’s wearing a pair of round sunglasses over the hair. It’s not It, it’s Ozzy! The hair parts. He looks well. (“Ozzy looks well.” Looks so implausible when I type it out.) We shake hands. Breakfast at the Hotel de Paris at 8 am or something like that the following morning. Great.
Well, not 8 am, in the event, it’s 10.45am and the Hotel de Paris are not ‘appy.
“We ‘ad a nice breakfast for you at eight,” moans the resident comedy Frenchman, spreading his hands. Around us flunkies are moving tables and chairs in the room set aside for the Old Rocker Interview. Finally our table is complete with a small olive tree placed in the centre and, hoping to placate Comedy Frenchman, I ask for just a coffee and croissant.
“I got a croissant stuck in my throat,” he explains.
He’s wearing a black tee-shirt, faded blue jeans, sunglasses and trainers. Round his neck hangs an elaborate gold crucifix on a heay gold chain. He also has gold bracelets and a rather fine Franck Muller watch that is probably worth enough to pay Irons and Hall not to go on stage tomorrow night. He sits down, grabs an orange juice and we’re off.
“I get so bored in the room watching CNN, watching another earthquake in Turkey. If we donated to all these charities we’d all be f****** broke. It’s one disaster after the next and then there’s this chicken thing….”
“Do you think the world is ending?”
The voice is astonishing – a loud, slurred, largely undiluted Brummy emerging from a capacious mouth, that, I soon discover, can despatch a fair-sized Hotel de Paris bun in one go. It comes across, as it did on The Osbournes TV show, as a long bass complaint or expression of incredulity at the perversity of things. The joke of that show was, of course, that Ozzy doesn’t get the world.
But, as a result of that show, the world now gets Ozzy. He’s the supreme brain-fried old rocker, the one time Prince of Darkness who bit the heads of a dove and a bat, who staged meat fights on stage, who OD’ed on just about very drug in the illegal pharmacopeia, who almost killed his wife and was almost killed by her in return, who nearly killed himself falling off a quad bike doing 3 mph, but who survived it all to become the great reality TV star, the bewildered, cack-handed dope wandering helplessly round his Los Angeles home, barely able to turn on a light.
“I couldn’t turn the f****** telly on in that house!” he moans, making the point that it wasn’t just his incompetence, it was also the insane Ozz-unfriendly complexity of the house.
“There was this bank of light buttons – romantic lighting, argument lighting, f****** pissing on the floor lighting, bad breath lighting….!”
It all began to go weird in 1963 when Ozzy, then 15, was walking to a friend’s house in Aston with a sky blue transistor radio glued to his ear. He’d been used to hearing Lonnie Donegan and Cliff Richard, but suddenly he heard The Beatles singing She Loves You.
“It changed my life…It was such an incredible explosion of happiness and hope. It gave me hope….In those days I had job after job and I couldn’t f****** stand working, I couldn’t take it any more… But the I became the biggest Beatles fan in the world. I used to dream – wouldn’t it be great if Paul McCartney married my sister? My bedroom wall was literally covered in Beatles’s pictures.”
It is odd to think that the old bat-biter was inspired by the then loveable moptops. He insists it was the quality of their melodies that stayed with him even in the heaviest of his heavy metal style. But, equally, it was just the taste of freedom. She Loves You was the beginning of the sixties and working class heroism was in the air. Ozzy was echt working class.
His dad was a tookmaker working nightshifts and his mother worked during the day. There were six children – Ozzy had three older sisters and two younger brothers. It was a turbulent househould. Ozzy was to grow up thinking rows followed by drinks was a normal pattern. But life seems to have been basically okay.
“We had our rows, we had our tears. But, you know, we survived, you know….”
He was hopeless at school, suffering from dyslexia and what would now be called Attention Deficit Disorder.
“I was a clown. Basically, to be perfectly honest, I had issues – I’m always not going to win, I’m always going to lose etc…”
This lead to the dead-end jobs. But The Beatles had shown him the way out. He persuaded his dad to get him a PA system and microphone and, on the sole basis that he actually owned such things, he was accepted into a band that rehearsed at 10 am in the morning in a building opposite the Orient cinema in Aston. One day a horror film was playing there and one of the band, which was then called Earth, observed that it was odd that people liked to be frightened so much. Perhaps, they thought, we should do scary music instead of the 12-bar blues numbers they were rehearsing. They adopted the film’s title – Black Sabbath – as their name and proceeded to invent Heavy Metal.
“I didn’t invent that form of music. When I look back now at that song Black Sabbath, I think, ‘How the f*** did I even begin to think of a melody like that?’ I don’t know how t do it any more. I think it was like a combination of my Beatles’ melody thing copmbined with those blus bands at the time- John Myall, Fleetwood Mac and Savoy Brown. People say I invented that music but it wasn’t me. I was part of a band called Black Sabbath, there were four of us and we all had our say.”
He told his dad they’d changed their name to Black Sabbath and then he came home from work with an aluminium crucifix he’d made for Ozzy. Then the whole band wanted one and, at once, heavy metal was associated with religious imagery gone wrong.
Pretty soon they were living the life – “Getting loaded, f****** chicks, smoking dope, what all rock and rollers do…” – and recording their first album. This album, like so much else in this life, seems to have happened to an essentially passive and bewildered Ozzy. The knocked out the tracks in a basement studio in London. A producer then got hold of them, trimmed, edited an added sound effects. Somebody else produced a startling gatefold cover with an inverted cross containing a poem on the back.
“To this day, I’ve never read that poem – I must get round to reading it.”
Black Sabbath, the album, came out in 1970. Ozzy got £105 and took the record home to show his mum and dad. They played it and his dad said: “Are you sure you’re only on the occasional beer?”
“I suppose they didn’t really understand it. Anyway, I met a girl – Thelma – and got married. I was very young and I shouldn’t have done. It just all happened so quickly the success. I just thought I’d get married, get a house, have kids, that’s what you do. It was just like somebody flicked a coin in the air and that wasmy life and it landed the right way up.”
He had two children with Thelma and the marriage was to last until he fell in love with the now legendary Sharon. Meanwhile Black Sabbath were stuck in a fairly familiar trajectory.
“We didn’t touch hard drugs for a while, we used to drink and smoke pot and do a few pills. Then we discovered cocaine. It was like bullshit powder. You think you are bigger than you are. It amplifies your ego while you’re on it. Then it starts to get hold og you. We got all f***** up on cocaine. I tried heroin a couple of times but it didn’t agree with me.
“When I first snorted cocaine I thought, f****** hell this is what I’ve been waiting for all my life, it’s the best feeling I’ve ever had. But then you’re forever chasing that first feeling and you never get that again.”
Sabbath went into a generic rock band meltdown that led to their break-up in 1978. Ozzy is often blamed.
“Well, that’s kinda like the pot calling the kettle black. I wanted to do a solo record called the Blizzard of Ozz but I found it very difficult to tell them what I wanted. They just thought, ‘Oh he’s just f***** up again.’ But I wasn’t the only one, we were all f***** up as bad as each other.
“We never had a clue what the f*** we were trying to do. Guys were ripping us off so you get a lawyer and the lawyer charges you for every f****** thing he does. If he put a penny in the slot to have a piss, he’d put that down.”
Ozzy’s solo career got off to a characteristically eventful start. His marriage broke up and he hooked up with Sharon. He met the heavy metal guitarist Randy Rhoades who replaced Sabbath’s Tony Iommi as his primary musical partner. Unfortunately in 1981 Rhoades decided to buzz the Blizzard of Ozz tour bus in a light plane. A wing clipped the bus, waking Ozzy, then a tree before smashing into a house, killing Rhoades and the other two on board. At about the same time Ozzy bit the head off a bat. It was on his Night of the Living Dead tour which involved the band hurling 25 pounds or so of pigs’ intestines and calves’ livers at the audience. In Des Moines, somebody responded with a live bat which, stunned by the lights, lay motionless, persuading Ozzy that it was a toy.
“I always used to like custard pie fights so I started to do this thing with the meat…. Then someone threw on this real bat and I put this thing in my mouth and Sharon’s at the side going, ‘No! No! No!’”
“I can’t even remember. I was so full of f******cognac I couldn’t believe it.”
Professionally, it was a master-stroke; medically, it was a touch ill-judged. He had to have rabies shots, one of the nastiest treatments imaginable. It involved two injectons in his hips., two in his buttocks and two in his arms – “Each one felt like they were injecting a f****** golf ball.” He finally checked out of the full course. The experience did not, however, cure him of his penchant for avian decapitation. The next year he bit the head of a dove while signing a deal with Epic Records, who at once pronounced total, irrevocable disgust that lasted as long as it took for his next record to shoot up the US charts. There was also an incident in wich Ozzy urinated on the Alamo, but you probably get the picture.
All of which is but a prelude to the matter of Sharon, Ozzy’s new love and the daughter of pop manager Don Arden. She became Ozzy’s manager. Wasn’t this a problem?
“Well, every other manager hads f***** me, the difference with this one is that she kissed me while she f***** me. Sometimes it wasn’t okay. But I loved her and I still do love her. We’ve been married 23 years – f****** hell, 23 years with the same person…
“….If it wasn’t for Sharon, I’d be long dead. Sharon would go f****** insane at me. The last thing you want is someone yelling at you whe you’re doing coke or drugs. She didn’t do f****** aspirin. She tried to keep up with the drinking but then we were in Monmouthshire where we used to rent a farmhouse to rehearse. We had a f****** heavy night. Next morning she said she was so sick she’d neve touch the stuff again. Now she just has the occasional glass of wine.”
What is extraordinary is that this relationship between sober Sharon and drunk, doped Ozzy persisted. It’s not that she didn’t try to reform him. Soon after they were married, Sharon told him about the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs where, she said, they teach you to drink properly.
“I thought, ‘F****** hell, that’s it! I’ve been doing it wrong!’… I envisaged a bar with people in bow ties and evening jackets with f****** glasses of Martini with olives standing there lik this….” He gets up to demonstrate. “…’Now stir the olive, now take a sip.’ I walk in and there’s Betty Ford and I ask when we start with the lessons?” Ford looks baffled and eventually tells him: “You’re definitely in the right place.”
It didn’t work, nothing did until 18 months ago. But that was after the TV show and that’s big topic so it’s time to leave the Hotel de Paris for Essex Afloat, Lionheart, Top Shop or whatever it’s called today.
Ozzy arrives at the boat shoeless at but displaying all the signs of Sharon’s attention. He cleans up good; he’s now wearing sharp, dark pants and top, three-quarter-length coat and those socks. I ask him why he let the MTV cameras in his house to make The Osbournes. After a long preamble, he says, “It seemed like the good idea at the time.” This, I muse to myself, is the best use of that line since Steve McQueen said it in The Magnificent Seven about a man who stripped off all his clothes and ran through a field of cactuses.
The cactuses into which the Osbourne family ran on camera were many and varied. For a start, Ozzy was out of it – on dope and alcohol but also on staggering doses of prescription drugs prescribed by a cavalier doctor in an attempt to suppress his anxieties and tremor. Ozzy now sees this doctor as yet one more addition to the long line of peopl who have ripped him off – “He wouldn’t give you a bucket of water if you’re f****** head was on fire.” - but, at the time, he did what he was told with the results you see on screen.
“I was,” he explains, “a f****** zombie.”
The tremor is autosomal recessive juvenile parkinsonism or ARJP (Ozzy didn’t seem to know this but I looked it up), which is inherited as opposed to acquired Parkinsons. The anxiety is …. well, being Ozzy. Both now seem to be reasonably well-controlled thanks to more judicious prescribing by a doctor who regards Ozzy’s previous drug regime as moving testament to the body’s powers of survival. It was yet one more thing that should have killed him.
On top of that his children – Jack and Kelly – had their own drugs problems. Only Aimee, the eldest, who had declined to take part, seemed on top of things. Then Sharon got colon cancer and went through the hell of chemotherapy. Ozzy took to Sharon health bulletins at his concerts. The fans went wild. It was no that Sharon had become a bigger star than Ozzy, rather than Ozzy ‘n’ Sharon had become a double act - she the straight man, he the clown. Did he mind this?
“I am a clown. You’re asking me a serious question and I’m answering you in a civilised manner if you can make out what I’m saying…. I only watched one show, it touched a bad nerev in me …All they were doing was wait for me to trip up o tread in dog shit. People loved me as a likeable fool, as f****** Norman Wisdom, but I’m not like that all the time.”
At this point, I’m staring at Ozzy and realising he has become hard to read. There’s a sudden sadness about him brought in, I think, because of his ambivalence about the show; it relaunched his career, but as domestic clown rather than Prince of Darkness. Yet you will never catch him saying he regrets anything – not the show, not the drugs, not the Sabbath break-up, not the first marriage, nothing. Ozzy accepts his life as a kind of spectacle. He talks about it as if I all happened to somebody else or as if it were a dream; either way, something beyond rational judgment or assessment.
But now he’s got a new album out – Under Cover- and he’s written a musical, Rasputin the Mad Monk. He works out every morning for 90 minutes on what, judging by his miming, is a cross-trainer. He does charity work, notably visiting US soldiers shot up in Iraq. He’s clean, no cigarettes, no drugs, no alcohol and only sane levels of medication. He makes no big claims for this. I ask him if he’ll stay off the booze.
“That’s like asking me if I’ll die tomorrow at 3pm. All I know is that I got up this morning and got on my knees and prayed, ‘Oh God, don’t let me drink today,’ I believe in a power greater than myself, call it God, call it the ocean, call it nature, the moon or even the group. You’ve got to get out of yourself by getting out of yourself….
“I think we all have regrets, but you can’t say, ‘Yeah, I should have f****** done that.’ You know the definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice but expecting a different result… I’m proud of what I’ve achieved in my life. I’m a very very lucky man. You couldn’t have written my life story if you’d been the best writer in the world.”
At the stern of the boat he poses with the crew for snaps, slips on a pair of Sharon-approved ostrich loafers and then staggers across the swaying gangplank to the waiting car. MTV would have filmed him doing his 100 times until he fell off. But he doesn’t. He’s okay. Against all the odds, Ozzy Osbourne is okay. He made it to the other side. It’s not big news, it’s just good news. You see he’s only rock ‘n’ roll, but we like him.