Ozzy Osbourne: 'If I'd have gone to church I'd still be there now, confessing all my sins!'
It's been 50 years since Black Sabbath took metal to the masses and, today, with his new album and a world tour-in-waiting, their frontman is still far from ready to retire his solo career. Featuring tales from the abattoir, the time he accidentally drugged his parish priest and the only thing he ever regretted, rock's Prince Of Darkness turns to page one of the anecdote book and takes it from there...
"This year has been the worst year of my life!" mutters an unmistakable Brummie accent by way of an introduction. It's the night before Halloween and the Prince Of Darkness is making a visit, via Zoom, to GQ's living room - fittingly spooky, perhaps, although Ozzy Osbourne has scarier things on his mind than plastic skeletons and trick-or-treaters. "I've got emphysema, so if I get this virus I'm fucked," he says, matter-of-factly.
The man with arguably the strongest constitution in rock has not been a picture of good health of late. Last year, Ozzy underwent spinal surgery, which left him in constant pain and needing daily physiotherapy. In January, he revealed a diagnosis of Parkin 2, a rare form of Parkinson's disease. But some things remain reassuringly intact: his love of a riotous anecdote and genius comic timing. For the next hour, from an office in his LA home, the 72-year-old holds court on a quite astonishing existence, from helping to invent heavy metal with Black Sabbath and embarking on a whirlwind of bad behaviour to reinventing reality television with The Osbournes and showing the world a wonky version of true love with wife and manager Sharon. From the vicars he's drugged to the insects he (might have) snorted, his is a life lived not so much in the fast lane as constantly careering into the central reservation. And he's not ready to stop just yet: in February, 50 years after the first Black Sabbath record, Ozzy released his 12th solo album, Ordinary Man. He's already working on the next record too, a way to fill his time after he was forced to cancel a world tour that was set to kick off again in October. The dates are now rescheduled for 2022, although he's not happy about waiting that long. "I've been going fucking nuts in my house all this time," he says.
"I'm like a caged animal! But I've done a lot of reflecting during this lockdown. I've been thinking of my childhood, thinking about what a fantastic life I've had." Shall we begin, then?
GQ: How's your health at the moment, Ozzy?
Ozzy Osbourne: The surgery I had knocked the crap out of me. But I broke my neck in a quad bike accident [in 2003] and when that healed it squeezed my spinal column, so I was getting all kinds of weird things happening to me. I'd be on stage and I'd suddenly get a sharp shock down one side of my body. Then one night 18 months ago I went to the bathroom in the dark and just hit the ground. I said, "Sharon, I'm on the floor," and she said, "Well, get up then!" But I couldn't. Once you're 70, the floodgates open and everything goes downhill. Mind you, I've got away with it for a long time.
What else has been getting you down in 2020?
I owe my life to America but I've seen the country go crazy. And Trump, he's a compulsive liar. I met him once and all he said to me was, "Ozzzzzy."
Ozzy Osbourne. PhotoCredit: Pamela Littky
Are you staying shielded at the moment?
I try my hardest. If I go out I wear a mask, but I don't like wearing a mask, so I don't go out much. The producer on my album [Andrew Watt] got the virus. I'd phone him up every day and he said he couldn't sleep, because as soon as he went to sleep he'd stop breathing. He's not the same person now... It's like anyone who's had a near-death experience: he's become a bit careful with life. But my two granddaughters caught it and you wouldn't think they had anything wrong with them. It just bounced off them.
Has anyone been checking in on your recovery?
Every single week Elton John calls my wife. I'm not one to hang out with this one and that one but he's become a family friend.
How did Elton end up on your album?
When we did "Ordinary Man", I said to Andrew it reminded me of an Elton song and he said, "Why not get him on it?" I thought, "You can only ask." I only wanted him to play piano on it but he sang as well. The guy's a workaholic. Last time he was at the house I asked him what he'd been doing and he said he'd just played 40 shows in 40 days! How can you do that?! I've not done that kind of work since I was 19!
In the 1990s you were so sick of gigging you called a tour No More Tours. Now you're rescheduling dates for 2022. What happened?
The thing about that is there had been something wrong with my gait and they told Sharon they thought I had a little bit of MS. What the hell is "a little bit of MS"? It's like telling me I was a little bit pregnant. I either am or I ain't! But we'd already announced the tour, so she thought, "Well, he's got MS and he's going to be a cripple, so this is the farewell tour." Anyway, turned out I didn't have MS, but we'd announced the tour already, so I thought, "What the fuck am I gonna do now? I don't feel like I wanna retire!" But if I'm at home I want to be on the road and if I'm on the road I want to be at home. That's me: never satisfied.
How has being in lockdown affected your mental health?
I'm going super nuts now. I bought an air rifle and I'm shooting pellets at the wall every day. I'm getting through 10,000 pellets a week. Bang, bang, bang.
What are you shooting?
Just targets I've made. In the past I shot everything you could shoot, though. Cows, sheep, calves, pigs, all kinds of things, dogs...
Dogs?
Not many. A dog. One dog. Not on purpose. It was in a lot of pain and I put it out of its misery. It's not like I go dog hunting at night.
You used to work in an abattoir. Did that experience feed into the Black Sabbath sound?
No, not at all. The only reason I worked there was because it started early and when you'd finished your killing you could go home. If you had five cows you could do your five cows and leave. My first job there was emptying sheep's stomachs of all the fucking food and shit. For the first six weeks I was throwing up all the time. The smell takes a while for you to get used to it. But it was all right, that work. I liked the craic, we had a laugh. The animals didn't see the joke...
You also spent a short time in jail. How did you find that?
It was an experience I'm glad I did. I didn't have money to pay a fine [for burglary] and my father refused to pay it for me, so I ended up in jail for three or four weeks. Jail was OK for a couple of days but then I got homesick. When I watch these crime things on TV and people get sentenced to forever and a day... I don't know how they do it. I heard a brilliant story in New York. This guy knew he was going to get done for a long time so he packed up his butthole with a load of peanut butter. While he's sat in the dock, he puts his hand down his pants and eats this peanut butter. He wanted to get off on insanity.
Ozzy Osbourne. PhotoCredit: Pamela Littky
Did it make a difference?
Yeah, it did... He got five times as much!
I've heard the person who lives in your childhood home charges people to sleep in your old bedroom...
He charges £400 a night. The fucking house weren't worth £300! They must be doing an expensive extension on the bathroom. I tell you what was really weird: I went back to that house many years after I left. When you're little everything seems massive. But that house was me, my mum and dad and my five sisters and brothers - eight of us in this house. It's so tiny, I'm going, "How the hell did we do this?"
You were a massive Beatles fan as a kid. Do you subscribe to the theory that "Helter Skelter" was the first heavy metal record?
Nah. It's not heavy. It's just a fast song about a helter-skelter. Maybe you could say "You Really Got Me" by The Kinks or a song by The Who. But I don't even consider myself as heavy metal. I did a few heavy things but I've done melodic things too, ballady things.
It's 50 years since the first Sabbath record. Did you realise you were making something groundbreaking at the time?
We were just having fun and if it felt like a good idea we did it. Tony Iommi is an incredible guitar player. There's no one who can come up with those demonic riffs like him. He's the king. At the time I'd go, "He ain't gonna beat that one," and he would every time.
Lester Bangs once called your music "naive, simplistic, repetitive, absolute doggerel".
Black Sabbath always got bad reviews - bad concert reviews, bad album reviews. But it was like punk: the more you hated us the more the fans loved us. People who didn't understand it would say, "It's shit." But I've got platinum discs all over my walls. It can't have been that bad!
You left the band just as punk had arrived. What did the punks make of you?
Punk was a spinoff of Sabbath. It was anti-Establishment. The only band of them I liked was the Sex Pistols; that one album was great, it captured something. But Johnny Lydon, whatever his name is, wants to stop talking and make some fucking music.
Talking of anti-Establishment, did it feel conflicting to meet the Queen?
When I met her [at Party At The Palace for her Golden Jubilee in 2002] she looked at me and said [adopts posh voice], "Hello. So this is what they call variety, is it?"
And what did you say?
I just stared at her. You see her on stamps, you see her in the paper every day, see her on the telly... but it's such a weird feeling when you're actually in front of her for the first time. But I wouldn't have her job for anything. They're not from planet earth, are they?
Everyone talks about you biting the head off the bat [on stage in Des Moines in 1982], but way before that you'd bitten the head off a live dove, which seems even more brutal to me...
That was just a thing at the record company where I was drunk at 7am in the morning. Sharon said, "I want you to go into that office and throw these doves in the air." So I threw one and then bit the head off the other one. It freaked everybody out. They banned me from the building after that. They nearly dropped me too!
Ozzy Osbourne. PhotoCredit: Pamela Littky
Tell me about your fight with a piano...
That was in Le Parker Meridien hotel in New York. They used to have a piano player right by the bar. I was sitting there when a machine started fucking playing songs on the piano. Every ten songs it would do the theme from The Sting [sings "The Entertainer"]. I'd been drinking in there all day and so when it came on for the 50th time I got up and put my foot through the machine. I ended up writing a letter of complaint to the Musicians' Union: "How dare you do this, giving them a machine instead of a musician to play." It would be cheaper to get a musician. I know because I had to pay for a new machine.
Is the story from Mötley Crüe's The Dirt about you snorting a line of ants by the side of the pool true?
That's very possible, but I can't remember.
It must be weird to star in such wild stories that you don't personally have any recollection of...
Yeah, but it's good for my image!
I was surprised reading an old interview with you from the 1980s in which you talk about having a jogging regime. Even during your peak hell-raising days you were keeping fit.
I cannot sit still. If I'm not pumping sweat every day I get depressed. But the most I ever ran was six miles and I felt like I was going to die. God knows how people run 27 miles on the marathon... Isn't that why we invented cars?
When you didThe Osbourneswere you worried about damaging your Prince Of Darkness image?
I just did MTV Cribs and it came from that. I don't understand what people saw in it. It wasn't scripted. Not like [Keeping Up With The] Kardashians. I find it hard to believe that's not scripted. But we just had a camera crew in our house 24/7, 365 days a year, and you end up going fucking nuts! You can't turn off. And after three years of filming it the kids were all on drugs, Sharon was battling cancer and so I said to the family, "Do you want to carry on?" and they said, "No," so we pulled it.
Ozzy Osbourne. PhotoCredit: Pamela Littky
You blame the show for your children getting into drugs?
They were kids getting led into bars and clubs and getting pills and whatever. By the end Jack was trying to get sober. I was trying to get sober.
Do you regret doing the series?
I'm glad we did it because we reached a different level of fame. But it was like Beatlemania. It wasn't fun. I remember going to a McDonald's to use the bathroom and everyone started chasing me around the car park. I was freaked out.
People lovedThe Osbournesbecause you were all very emotionally open in it.
I think it's important to say to your kids that you love them. I try to tell my kids that I love them every day - with a text or on the phone or in person.
Was there much emotion in your childhood? Could you tell your parents you loved them?
No, never. My parents never told me they loved me. That wasn't a thing you did in our house. If I'd told my sister I loved her I'd have had the piss taken out of me. Even now I say to my older sister that I love her and she won't say she loves me back. When I was a kid it was a sign of weakness to tell your parents that you loved them.
How did you cope when Sharon got ill with colon cancer?
I said, "I'm not doing any more shows," and she said, "Get the fuck out of here," because I was driving her nuts. But when she had her chemo it fucking knocked the shit out of her. She would be so ill; the chemo effect was worse than the cancer.
Were you in charge of her recovery?
No, no. I got Robin Williams to come round to the house to cheer her up instead. He had that film Patch Adams, where he was treating terminally ill people with laughter, so I thought he could come around to make her laugh when I was on tour. She loved it. And she was very upset when he killed himself.
Ozzy Osbourne. PhotoCredit: Pamela Littky
What do you look back on with regret?
I've done some pretty outrageous things in my life. I regret cheating on my wife. I don't do it any more. I got my reality check and I'm lucky she didn't leave me. I'm not proud of that. I was pissed off with myself. But I broke her heart.
How did it affect you when your guitarist Randy Rhoads died? [In 1982, Osbourne's tour driver, Andrew Aycock, took the 25-year-old guitarist up in a private plane along with make-up artist Rachel Youngblood; the plane clipped the tour bus and crashed.] I read somewhere that you've been on anti-depressants ever since.
No, that's not true. But it was a very depressing time in my life. Every time I talk about that the tape starts to run in my head of that day when he died. It was awful. It was like a bad fucking horror movie. The house was on fire. The bus had been hit by the plane. There was glass and gasoline everywhere. The fucking house was engulfed. And he was such a nice guy. A very gentle man, a very tiny man... but so powerful with his instrument.
Are you a religious man?
I've tried reading the Bible but it's in a fucking language that I don't understand. Someone should do a version in my language: "And so Jesus said, 'Fuck off!' And lo, they all fucked off."
Didn't you once get a vicar stoned?
Fucking hell... I'd bought some hash and I'd made a cake with it. I put it in a tin and went to the pub and I said to my ex-wife [Thelma Riley, whom he married in 1971], "Don't let anybody eat this fucking cake. It will be bad." Anyway, I came back from the pub a few days later...
A few days?
...and I did a double-take, because the vicar was in our house, having a cup of tea in the kitchen with a piece of this cake. I hadn't got a driving licence, but he was slumped in my kitchen, so I had to drag him out by his hair, push him in the back of his car, drive him to his door and then walk home. I didn't see him for two weeks after that and I thought I'd killed him! Then I saw him in a pub on a Sunday morning and he said, "I must have caught such a dreadful flu at yours. I hallucinated for three days and had to miss church." I was just relieved to see him. Fucking hell, he's alive! Because that was a big chunk of hash.
I'm more surprised you had a vicar round at your house.
When you move into the countryside they try to get you into the congregation and welcome you to the community. They invite you for a chat, see if you want to confess a few things.
You didn't fancy it?
If I'd have gone I'd still be there now, fucking confessing all my sins!
Tell me about the time scientists sequenced your genome to understand your constitution...
I think they found I've got a big hole in it. I can't remember what they found, to be honest with you. I always say that I didn't do any more or less than anybody else. But I was lucky, really. Every day I was overdosing.
What do you think happens after you die?
[A pause.] I'll let you know. Tell me where you live and I'll send you a card when I get there.
