Ozzy Osbourne

“We set up our gear for the tune-up and Tony [Iommi] launched into the opening riff of ‘Black Sabbath’ – doh, doh, doooohnnnn – but before I’d got through the first line of lyrics the manager had run on to the stage, red in the face, and was shouting, ‘STOP, STOP, STOP! Are you f**king serious? This isn’t Top-Forty pop covers! Who are you people?’‘Earth,’ said Tony, shrugging. ‘You booked us, remember?’‘I didn’t book this. I thought you were going to play “Mellow Yellow” and “California Dream-in’”.’‘Who – us?’ laughed Tony.‘That’s what your manager told me!’‘Jim Simpson told you that?’‘Who the hell’s Jim Simpson?’‘Ah,’ said Tony, finally working out what had happened. He turned to us and said, ‘Lads, I think we might not be the only band called Earth.’He was right: there was another Earth on the C-list gig circuit. But they didn’t play satanic music. They played pop and Motown covers.”

“Another memorable performance of ‘Black Sabbath’ was in a town hall near Manchester. The manager was there to greet us in a suit and tie when we climbed out of the van. You should have seen the look on his face when he saw us.‘Is that what you’re going to wear on stage?’ he asked me, staring at my bare feet and pyjama top.‘Oh no,’ I said, in this fake-shocked voice. ‘I always perform in gold spandex. Have you ever seen an Elvis gig? Well, I look a bit like him – but of course my tits are much smaller.’”

“I don’t remember where we first played ‘Black Sabbath’, but I can sure as hell remember the audience’s reaction: all the girls ran out of the venue, screaming.”

“As far as we were concerned, we were just a blues band that had decided to write some scary music.”

“Today you hear people saying that we invented heavy metal with the song ‘Black Sabbath’. But I’ve always had a bee up my arse about the term ‘heavy metal’. To me, it doesn’t say anything musically, especially now that you’ve got seventies heavy metal, eighties heavy metal, nineties heavy metal and new - millennium heavy metal – which are all completely different, even though people talk about them like they’re all the same.”

“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 [Iommi] saying one day. ‘Maybe we should stop doing blues and write scary music instead.’”

“Day one, the van broke down. It was so cold the accelerator cable froze, so when Tony [Iommi] put his foot down it snapped in half. Which meant we were stranded in the middle of f**king nowhere, halfway to Copenhagen. There was a blizzard outside, but Tony said it was my job – as the band’s ‘public representative’ – to go and find some help. So out I walked into this field, snow blowing into my face, two icicles of snot hanging out of my nose, until finally I saw the lights of a farmhouse up ahead. Then I fell into a trench. After finally pulling myself out of the f**king thing, I waded through the snow until I reached the front door, then knocked loudly.‘Halløj?’ said the big, red-faced Eskimo bloke who opened the door.‘Oh, thank f**k,’ I said.[...]‘Halløj?’I didn’t know any Danish, so I pointed towards the road, and said, ‘Van. El kaputski. Ya?'”

“I remember taking my entire wardrobe with me on that trip.It consisted of one shirt on a wire hanger, and one pair of underpants in a carrier bag.”

“‘In 1968, John Osbourne was an up-and-coming rock ’n’ roll star,’ I would say in this fake movie-announcer voice as I wandered around the house. ‘In 1969, he was an up-and-coming garbageman.’”

“‘The world doesn’t revolve around Tony [Iommi],’ he said. ‘There’ll be other guitarists.’He was a good guy, my old man. But this time he was wrong. There were no other guitarists.Not like Tony.”

“If you don’t have a sense of humour when you’re in a band, you end up like f**king Emerson, Lake and Palmer, making eight-disc LPs so you can all have your own three-hour f**king solos.And who wants to listen to that bollocks?”

“You never really know what’s going on inside Tony Iommi’s head. He’s the total opposite of me, in other words: no one’s ever in any doubt about what’s going on in the pile of old jelly inside my thick skull.”

“Officially, we didn’t have a band leader.Unofficially, we all knew it was Tony [Iommi].”

“‘And what about a [band] name?’ said Tony [Iommi]. The three of us looked at each other.‘We should all take a couple of days to think about it,’ I said. ‘I dunno about you two, but I’ve got a special place where I go to get ideas for important stuff like this. It’s never failed me yet.’Forty-eight hours later I blurted out: ‘I’ve got it!’‘Must have been that dodgy bird you poked the other night,’ said Geezer. ‘Has your whelk turned green yet?’ Tony and Bill snickered into their plates of egg and chips. We were sitting in a greasy spoon caff in Aston. So far, everyone was getting along famously.‘Very funny, Geezer,’ I said, waving an eggy fork at him. ‘I mean the name for our band.’The snickering died down.‘Go on then,’ said Tony [Iommi].‘Well, I was on the shitter last night, and...'‘That’s your special place?’ spluttered Bill, blobs of mushed-up egg and HP sauce flying out of his mouth.‘Where the f**k did you think it was, Bill?’ I said. ‘The hanging gardens of f**king Babylon?”

“I was twenty now, and had given up all hope of being a singer or ever getting out of Aston. PA system or no PA system, it wasn’t going to happen. I’d convinced myself that there was no point in even trying, because I was just going to fail, like I had at school, at work, and at everything else I’d ever tried. ‘You ain’t no good as a singer,’ I told myself. ‘You can’t even play an instrument, so what hope d’you have?’”

“The only gig I can remember playing in those very early days — and I think it was with Rare Breed, but it could have been under a different name, with different band members, ’cos line-ups changed so often back then — was the Birmingham Fire Station’s Christmas party. The audience consisted of two firemen, a bucket and a ladder.We made enough dough for half a shandy (beer mixed with lemonade), split six ways.”

“Pink Floyd was music for rich college kids, and we were the exact f**king opposite of that.”

“The funny thing is, I was never much of a fighter. Better a live coward than a dead hero, that was my motto.”

“All these polo-necked wankers from grammar schools were going out and buying songs like ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)’. Flowers in your hair? Do me a f**king favour.[...]Who gave a dog’s arse about what people were doing in San Francisco, anyway? The only flowers anyone saw in Aston were the ones they threw in the hole after you when you croaked it at the age of fifty-three ’cos you’d worked yourself to death.I hated those hippy-dippy songs, man.Really hated them.”

“Bands like The Move, Traffic and The Moody Blues were proving that you didn’t have to be from Liverpool to be successful.”

“I stomped down the hallway, twisted the latch on the front door, and yanked it open.‘Are you… “Ozzy Zig”?’ said Guy Fawkes, in a thick Brummie accent.‘Who wants to know?’ I said, folding my arms.‘Terry Butler,’ he said. ‘I saw your ad.’That was exactly what I’d hoped he was going to say. Truth was, I’d been waiting a long time for this moment. I’d dreamed about it. I’d fantasised about it. I’d had conversations with myself on the shitter about it. One day, I thought, people might write newspaper articles about my ad in the window of Ringway Music, saying it was the turning point in the life of John Michael Osbourne, ex-car horn tuner. ‘Tell me, Mr Osbourne,’ I’d be asked by Robin Day on the BBC, ‘when you were growing up in Aston, did you ever think that a simple advert in a music shop window would lead to you becoming the fifth member of the Beatles, and your sister Iris getting married to Paul McCartney?’And I’d answer, ‘Never in a million years, Robin, never in a million years.’It was a f**king awesome ad.”

“I was a free man, and I’d survived prison without being arse raped or beaten to a pulp.So how come I felt so f**king sad?”

“I think that anyone who eats meat should visit a slaughterhouse at least once in their life, just to see what goes on. It’s a bloody, filthy, putrid f**king business.”

“In 1964 something totally unexpected happened.I got a job I enjoyed.”

“Apart from Tony Iommi – who I’d never seen again since leaving school – I didn’t even know anyone who could play a musical instrument. So, instead, I decided to grow my hair long and get some tattoos. At least I’d look the part.The hair was easy. The tattoos stung like a f**king bastard.”

“I even tried to join the army, but they wouldn’t have me. The bloke in the uniform took one look at my ugly mug and said, ‘Sorry, we want subjects, not objects'.”

“I was fifteen when I left school. And what did I get to show for my ten years in the British education system? A piece of paper which said:John Osbourne attended Birchfield Road Secondary Modern.Signed, Mr Oldham (Headmaster)That was f**king it. Not a single qualification. Nothing. I had two career choices: manual labour or manual labour.”

“'OSBOURNE!’ he shouted. ‘YOU’RE A DISGRACE TO YOURSELF AND TO THIS SCHOOL. BRING ME A SHOE.’The room went so quiet you could have heard a mouse fart.”

“I’d always wanted to play an instrument myself, but my folks didn’t have the dough to buy me one, and I didn’t have the patience to learn anyway.My attention span was five seconds.”

“My favourite prank in heavy metalwork was to get a penny and spend three or four minutes making it really hot with a blowtorch, and then leave it on Mr Lane’s desk, so that he’d see it and pick it up out of curiosity.First you’d hear: ‘Waaaaahhhhhh!’Then: ‘Osbourne, you little bastard!’Heh-heh-heh.The old hot-penny trick. Priceless, man.”

“The only good thing about having dyslexia is that dyslexics are usually very creative people, or so I’ve been told. We think in unusual ways. But it’s a very bad stigma to have, not being able to read like normal people can. To this day I wish I’d had a proper education. I think books are great, I do. To be able to lose yourself in a book is f**king phenomenal. Everyone should be able to do it. But I’ve been able to get through an entire book only a few times in my life. Every blue moon this thing in my head will release, and I’ll try to read as many books as I can, because when it closes up it goes straight back to the way it was, and I end up just sitting there, staring at Chinese.”

“I hated school. Hated it.”

“Never in a million years did I think I’d end up making a career out of singing. I didn’t think it was possible. As far as I knew, the only way I could make any dough was to go and work in a factory, like everyone else in Aston.Or rob a f**king bank.”

“He [dad] always had some kind of trouble with his leg. He’d have bandages wrapped around it all the time but he’d never go and see a doctor. He’d rather have dropped dead than go to a doctor. He was terrified of them, like a lot of people his age were. And he’d never take a day off work. If he ever stayed at home feeling ill, it was time to call the undertaker.”

“He was a good guy, my old man: simple, old-fashioned. Physically, he was built like a feather-weight, and he wore these thick, black Ronnie Barker glasses. He would say to me,‘You might not have a good education, but good manners don’t cost you anything.’ And he practised what he preached: he’d always give up his seat on the bus for a woman or help an old lady across the road.A good man. I really miss him.”

“Mind you, no one who lives in the real world spends the whole time going around saying, ‘Oh yes,darling, I understand, let’s talk about our “feelings”, lah-dee-f**king-dah.’ People who say they’ve never had a cross word are living on another f**king planet.”

“During the first break-in I grabbed a load of hangers and thought, 'Magic', I’ll be able to sell this stuff down the pub. But I’d forgotten to take a flashlight with me, and it turned out that the clothes I’d nicked were a bunch of babies’ bibs and toddlers’ underpants.I might as well have tried to sell a turd.”

“My father always said I would do something big one day.‘I’ve got a feeling about you, John Osbourne,’ he’d tell me, after he’d had a few beers.‘You’re either going to do something very special, or you’re going to go to prison.’And he was right, my old man.I was in prison before my eighteenth birthday.”

“They said I would never write this book.Well, f**k ’em – ’cos here it is.All I have to do now is remember something...Bollocks. I can’t remember anything.”

“Out of everything I've lost, I miss my mind the most!”