Ozzy Osbourne

“I remember coming to in white room, with white walls, and people all around me covered in white sheets and thinking, F**k, I’m in the morgue. Then I heard a hissing noise next to my bed.Pssst, pssst.I looked down and there was this kid holding up a pen and a copy of „Bark at the Moon“.‘Will you sign this for me?’ he asked.‘F**k off,’ I told him. ‘I’m dead.’”

“‘Someone’s gonna die before this is over,’ I said to Doc McGhee. [...]‘I don’t think someone’s gonna die, Ozzy. I think we’re all gonna die.’”

“Aimee saw more of the world before her first birthday than most people do in a lifetime. I just wish I’d been sober for more of it. I was there physically, but not mentally. So I missed things you can never do over again: the first crawl, the first step, the first word.If I think about it for too long, it breaks my heart.”

“The most unbelievable thing about my behaviour is that I was convinced it was entirely f**king normal.”

“Mind you, it’s all bullshit with wine, isn’t it? It’s just f**king vinegar with a fizz, no matter what the tasters say.”

“I’d always admired The Beatles for starting out as a bubblegum pop group and then getting heavier and heavier as their albums went on, and here was me going in the opposite direction.”

“The funny thing about getting married in America was that we needed to get a blood test before they’d give us a licence. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the bloke from the lab had called back and said, ‘Mr Osbourne, we appear to have found some blood in your alcohol.’”

“‘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 thepeople, and I love people, and that’s what I’m about. I’m going to continue because Randy [Rhoads] would have liked me to, and so would Rachel [Youngblood], and I’m not going to stop, ’cos you can’t kill rock’n’roll.’”

“Shock is a very weird thing.”

“Randy [Rhoads] was laid to rest at a place called Mountain View Cemetery, where his grandparents were buried. I made a vow there and then to honour his death every year by sending flowers. Unlike most of my vows, I kept it. But I’ve never been back to his graveside. I’d like to go there again one day, before I finally join him on the other side.”

“It’s gotta be any parent’s worst nightmare when they lose their child.”

“You learn who your friends are when the shit hits the fan.”

“‘Ozzy, why do you drink so much? What’s the point?’The right answer to that question was: because I’m an alcoholic; because I have an addictive personality; because whatever I do, I do it addictively. But I didn’t know any of that back then.”

“‘Ozzy, is it true you got busted for pissing on the Alamo?’ he asked me.‘Yeah,’ I told him. ‘It’s true.’‘Shit, man,’ he said. ‘We piss on it every night on our way home.’”

“The way I was boozing was a kind of suicide. It was only gonna be a matter of time.”

“Going on stage was like being at a butchers’ convention. And, of course, the animal rights people were going nuts. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals sent people to ‘monitor’ our gigs. The crew would f**k with them all the time. They’d say, ‘Oh, Ozzy’s going to throw eighteen puppies into the audience tonight, and he won’t sing a note until they’ve all been slaughtered.’The ASPCA believed every word of it.”

“After a real snake ended up on stage one night, it was well and truly pissed off about being on stage with Ozzy Osbourne, that snake was.”

“What can go wrong will go wrong.”

“As for the kids, once the damage is done with a divorce, you can’t ever make it right.”

“I’ve said to my kids, ‘I don’t want you to think I jumped away from you and clicked my heels and said bon voyage. It wasn’t like that at all. It just about destroyed me.'”

“The fact that I ever raised my hand against a woman disgusts me. It was a f**king atrocious, unforgivable way to behave, and there’s no excuse for it, ever. And like I said before, it’s something I’ll take to the grave with me.”

“It’s sad, y’know, what money does to people.”

“When you’re in love, it’s not just about the messing around in the sack, it’s about how empty you feel when they’re gone.”

“I didn’t have a clue what love was about until I met Sharon.”

“Reviews?Didn’t read ’em.”

“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.”

“They teach you how to handle life in England, but they don’t teach you a thing about death. There’s no book telling you what to do when your mum or dad dies.”

“We’d recorded Black Sabbath in one day. Sabotage took about four thousand years.”

“You can never take the violence back.”

“Hating people isn’t a productive way of living. So what’s the point in hating anyone? There’s enough hate in the world as it is, without me adding to it.”

“I don’t know whose brilliant idea that was, but it wasn’t mine, that’s for sure.”

“When I slept outside in winter, it wasn’t unusual for me to wake up blue in the face with icicles on my nose. In those days, there was no such thing as hypothermia.”

“It’s funny, you learn a lot about people when you’re on the road like that. Every morning, for example, Bill would have a cup of coffee, a glass of orange juice, a glass of milk, and a beer. Always in the same order. I asked him why he did it once.‘Well,’ he said, ‘the coffee’s to wake me up, the orange juice is to give me some vitamins to stop me getting sick, the milk’s to coat my stomach for the rest of the day, and the beer’s to put me back to sleep again.’”

“‘Paranoid’ went straight to number four in the British singles chart and got us on Top of the Pops – alongside Cliff Richard, of all people. The only problem was the album cover, which had been done before the name change and now didn’t make any sense at all. What did four pink blokes holding shields and waving swords have to do with paranoia? They were pink because that was supposed to be the colour of the war pigs. But without ‘War Pigs’ written on the front, they just looked like gay fencers.‘They’re not gay fencers, Ozzy,’ Bill told me. ‘They’re paranoid gay fencers.’”

“’Welcome to New York,’ said the sign. [...] We got our luggage from the carousel and went to queue in the taxi rank outside the arrivals hall. [...] As we waited, this massive yellow car drove by. It must have had nineteen or twenty doors on it.‘I knew the cars here were big,’ I slurred, ‘but not that big!’‘It’s a limousine, you idiot,’ said Tony [Iommi].”

“No record mogul had created Black Sabbath, so no record mogul could tell Black Sabbath what to do.”

“The music business is like any other business, y’know? When sales are going well, everything’s hunky-f**king-dory. But the second something goes wrong, it’s all blood and law-suits.”

“But the thing with us was, we didn’t really need anyone to make us world famous – we were already halfway there.”

“It was the first time I’d ever been in a Roller. I sat there in the back seat, like the King of England, thinking, 'Three years ago, you were a puke remover in a slaughterhouse, and before that you were doling out slop to child molesters in Winson Green. Now look where you are.'”

“That night, at God knows what hour, Bill phoned me up and shouted, ‘Ozzy, I think myhouse is haunted!’‘Sell tickets then,’ I told him, and put the phone down.”

“I couldn’t believe it when I learned that people actually ‘practised the occult’. These freaks with white make-up and black robes would come up to us after our gigs and invite us to black masses at Highgate Cemetery in London. I’d say to them, ‘Look, mate, the only evil spirits I’m interested in are called whisky, vodka and gin.’”

“I don’t think we [Black Sabbath] ever got a good review for anything we did. Which is why I never bother with reviews.”

“Meanwhile, we’d been kicked out of school at fifteen and had worked in factories and slaughtered animals for a living, but then we’d made something of ourselves, even though the whole system was against us. So how upset could we be when clever people said we were no good?”

“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.”

“On Friday the thirteenth of February 1970, Black Sabbath went on sale.I felt like I’d just been born.But the critics f**king hated it.”

“Taking five or ten or fifteen years to make an album, like Guns N’ Roses did, is just f**king ridiculous, end of story. By that time, your career’s died, been resurrected, and then died again.”

“Philips was setting up a new ‘underground’ label called Vertigo when we were looking for a deal. We were a perfect fit. But the funny thing was that Vertigo wasn’t even up and running in time for our first single, ‘Evil Woman’, so it was originally released on another Philips label, Fontana, before being reissued on Vertigo a few weeks later.Not that it made any f**king difference: the song went down like a concrete turd both times. But we didn’t care, because the BBC played it on Radio 1.Once.At six o’clock in the morning.I was so nervous, I got up at five and drank about eight cups of tea. ‘They won’t play it,’ I kept telling myself, ‘They won’t play it...’But then:BLAM...BLAM...Dow-doww...BLAM...Dow-dow-d-d-dow, dooooow...D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-dDUH-DA!Do-doo-doDUH-DA!Do-doo-do...It’s impossible to describe what it feels like to hear yourself on Radio 1 for the first time. It was magic, squared. I ran around the house screaming, ‘I’m on the radio! I’m on the f**king radio!’ until my mum stomped downstairs in her nightie and told me to shut up.”

“I remember saying to Tony [Iommi], ‘Did you hear how heavy that Led Zeppelin album sounded?’Without missing a beat, he replied, ‘We’ll be heavier.’”

“I’m no good with business, me. I’m the last person to ask when it comes to contracts and dough and all that.”

“I’m a lunatic by nature, and lunatics don’t need training – they just are.”