“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.”

“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.”

“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 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?’”

“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.'”

“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 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.”