“‘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.”

“‘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.’”

“I remember one time, back in the day, I was at his [Bill Ward] house and he said, ‘Oh, ’ello Ozzy. You’ll never guess what? I’ve just come out of a coma.’‘What d’you mean, a coma? That’s one stage removed from being dead. You know that, don’t you, Bill?’‘All I know is I went to bed on Friday, and now it’s Tuesday, and I only just woke up. That’s a coma, isn’t it?’‘No, that’s taking too many drugs and drinking too much cider and sleeping for three days in a row, you d**k.’”

“I’m telling you, the ingenuity of alcoholics is something else. If only it could be put to some kind of good use. I mean, if you said to an alcoholic, ‘Look, the only way for you to get another drink is to cure cancer,’ the disease would be history in five seconds.”

“And if it wasn’t as good as before, what was the point of doing it? There wasn’t a point, as far as I was concerned.”

“‘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.’”

“It would be fair to say that the coppers in Amersham jail didn’t take much of a shine to me. My little dance, my little ego, it didn’t do me any favours in there. I wasn’t the bat-biting, Alamo-pissing, ‘Crazy Train’-singing rock’n’roll hero. All that celebrity shit counts for nothing with the Thames Valley Police.”