I Am Ozzy (15 page)

Even though I was pissed all the time in the seventies, the one thing I really wanted to do more than just about anything was get my driving licence. And fucking hell, man, I tried. I took my test more times than I can remember while I lived at Bulrush Cottage - and I failed every time. I'd just get intimidated, y'know? After my first couple of attempts, I started to go down to the Hand & Cleaver beforehand to sort out my nerves, but more often than not I'd end up being shitfaced by the time I got in the car with the examiner, and then I'd drive like a cunt. Then I thought the problem might be the car, so I called Patrick Meehan's office and asked for a Range Rover to replace the Merc. When that didn't work, I asked for a Jag. But it was a V12, so every time I put my foot down, I woke up in a hedge.

Eventually I took the test in a Roller.
That didn't work, either.
Finally I went to the doctor and asked for some pills to calm me down, so he wrote me a prescription

for a sedative. On the box, it said, 'DO NOT MIX WITH ALCOHOL', which was like showing a red rag to a bull as far as I was concerned. Still, I managed to limit myself to only three or four pints that day. Unfortunately, that just meant I smoked twice as much Afghan hash. The good news was that when I got into the car with the examiner, I didn't feel intimated at all. The bad news was that when I stopped for the first traffic light, I nodded off.

I gave up on the tests after that, but I kept driving anyway. Whenever I gave anyone a ride, they'd ask, 'Do you have a licence yet?' and I'd answer, 'Oh yeah, of course.'
Which was sort of true.
I had a TV licence.
But I didn't want to push my luck too far, so I started trying to come up with other ways of getting around.
Which is why I ended up getting a horse.
Now, I'm generally not cool with horses - they don't have brakes and they've got their own brains. But I was bored of going down to the Hand & Cleaver on my lawnmower, so I went to see a dealer and said, 'Look, can you get me a horse that's a bit on the lazy side?'
A few days later, this chick turned up at the cottage with this pure white gelding - a male with its nuts chopped off - called Turpin. 'He's very laid back,' she told me. 'He won't give you any trouble at all. The only things he doesn't like are very loud hissing noises - like the air brakes on a truck. But you won't get anything like that around here.'
'Oh no,' I said, laughing. 'It's very quiet out here in Ranton.'
So I called Patrick Meehan's office to get him to send the breeder some dough, and that was that: I was the proud owner of one lazy horse. I kept him at the farm up the road, because they had a little paddock and someone who could feed him and clean out his stable.
Of course, the second I got Turpin I thought I was John Wayne. I started riding him up and down Butt Lane, wearing a cowboy hat and this leather shirt that I'd bought in LA, singing the theme to
Rawhide
. After a few days of that I started to feel pretty comfortable in the saddle, so one lunchtime I decided to take him past the Hand & Cleaver to show the locals, and maybe stop off for a cheeky one at the same time. Off we went down Butt Lane, clippety-clop, clippety-clop. Now, that summer, the Hand & Cleaver had put these picnic tables outside, so I knew I'd have an audience. And I couldn't wait to see everyone's jaws drop when I turned up.
On I went, clippety-clop, clippety-clop.
Two minutes later, I'd arrived.
Sure enough, all these people were sitting outside with their pints and their bags of pork scratchings, and they started oohing and ahhing when they saw this beautiful white horse. Then I pulled on the reins to get Turpin to stop, and started to dismount. But just as I was about to swing my leg over the saddle, a milk delivery truck came around the bend. At first, I ignored it - that truck used to drive up Butt Lane every week - but then a thought popped into my head: I hope that thing doesn't have air bra--
TTSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHH
went the truck.
The second those air brakes went off, Turpin's ears went back and he took off like a fucking Grand National winner. First he bolted in the direction of the truck, with me hanging on to the saddle for dear life, one foot out of the stirrups, my cowboy hat dangling from my neck by the strap. Then he realised he was going in the wrong direction, so he turned around and started galloping back towards the farm. He charged past the Hand & Cleaver at such a fucking speed, the faces of the people outside were just a blur. Meanwhile, I was screaming at the top of my lungs, 'Staaarghp! You
fucker
! Staaarghp!' Which is exactly what he did, as soon as he got back to his paddock - he stopped dead, sending me flying over his head and a fence.
I landed in a cowpat.
Turpin got a new owner after that.

Then, a few days later, I killed the vicar. Or at least I
thought
I did.
It was an accident.
You see, in those days, out in the countryside, vicars would make house calls. They didn't need a

reason to come and see you. You'd just hear a knock on your door and there would be a bloke in his frock and his dog collar, wanting to talk about the weather.

So one day, while I was down the pub, the vicar came round to Bulrush Cottage for one of his visits, and Thelma invited him in for a cup of tea. The trouble was, Bulrush Cottage wasn't set up for entertaining vicars - there were beer cans and shotguns and bongs all over the place - and Thelma didn't have a clue what to feed him, either. So she rummaged around in the kitchen until she found this nasty-looking cake in an old tin. With no better option, she gave him a slice, even though it looked and tasted like shit.

What Thelma had forgotten was that the week before, my local dope dealer had given me some dodgy hash. It was stale or something, so it was crap to smoke, but it was still as potent as ever. And rather than letting it go to waste, I'd grated it into a bowl with some cake mix and baked it. The trouble was, the lump of dope was enormous, and I only had half a tin of cake mix in the cupboard, so the cake ended up being about 80 per cent dope and 20 per cent mix. I almost barfed when I tasted it.

'See this tin?' I remember saying to Thelma. 'Don't let
anyone
touch it.'
She mustn't have been listening.
All she knew was that there was a tin with a skull and cross-bones marked on it, with some cake

inside, and that she had a vicar to feed. So she gave him a slice.

He'd just swallowed his last mouthful when I got back from the pub. The second I saw him sitting there on the sofa with the little plate in front of him and crumbs everywhere, I knew it was bad news.
'That really was a delicious slice of cake. Thank you very much, Mrs Osbourne,' the vicar was saying. 'Would you mind if I had another?'
'Oh, not at all!' said Thelma.
'Thelma,' I said, 'I don't think we have any more cake.'
'Yes, we do, John, it's in the kitch--'
'WE. DON'T. HAVE. MORE. CAKE.'
'Oh, I don't want to be any trouble,' said the vicar, standing up. Then he started to dab his brow with a handkerchief. Then he turned a funny colour.
I knew exactly what was coming next. You see, eating dope is very different to smoking it - it affects your
whole body
, not just your head. And it takes only the tiniest bit to send you over the edge.
'Oh
my
,' he said. 'I think I'm feeling a little--'
BOOM!
'Fuck! Vicar down!' I shouted, rushing over to see if he was still breathing. Then I turned to look at Thelma. 'What the
fuck
were you thinking?' I said. '
He's gonna die!
I told you not to touch that cake. He's just eaten enough Afghan hash to knock out a bleedin' elephant!'
'How was I supposed to know the cake was dodgy?'
'Because I told you!'
'No, you didn't.'
'It's in a tin with a skull and crossbones on the top!'
'So what are we going to do?' said Thelma, turning white.
'We're going to have to move the body, that's what we're going to have to do,' I said. 'Here, take his legs.'
'Where are we taking him?'
'Back to wherever he lives.'
So we carried the vicar to his car, put him on the back seat, found his address in the glove compartment, and I drove him home. He was out cold. Part of me honestly thought he was a goner, although I'd been drinking most of the day, so I can't say I was thinking completely straight. All I knew is that for a man of the cloth - or anyone else - that much of my hash in one go could be lethal. But I kept telling myself that he'd just wake up with a really bad hangover, and we'd be OK.
When I got to his house I dragged him out of his car and propped him up on the steps to the front door. If I'd have been cleverer, I would have wiped my fingerprints off the car, but I just felt so terrible about what had happened, and I so badly wanted to believe that he'd be fine, I can honestly say it never even entered my head.
Still, I spent the entire night lying awake, waiting for the sirens. Clearly, I'd be the first person to get a knock on the door in the middle of the night if they did any tests on the vicar's body. Who else in his parish would have given him a lethal slice of hash cake? But there were no sirens that night. And none the next day, either.
Then more days passed. Still nothing.
I was out of my fucking mind with guilt. So was Thelma.
But I didn't want to go anywhere near the vicarage - it might look a bit suspicious - so every time I went to the Hand & Cleaver I'd make subtle enquiries. 'Anyone bumped into the vicar lately?' I'd say, all casual. 'He's a nice bloke, that vicar, isn't he? I wonder what his sermon will be about on Sunday.' Eventually someone mentioned that he must be off sick, 'cos he'd missed church and no one had seen him for a while.
That's it, I thought. I killed him. I wondered if I should turn myself in. 'It was an accident, Your Honour,' I imagined myself saying to the judge. 'A terrible, terrible accident.' This went on for at least a week.
Then, one day, I walked into the pub and there he was, at the bar, in his frock, sipping a cranberry juice.
I almost hugged the bloke and gave him a kiss.
'Oh, er, hello there, Vicar,' I said, going light in the head with relief.
'Ah, Mr Osbourne,' he said, shaking my hand. 'You know the funniest thing? I can't remember how I got home from your house the other day. And the next morning I had this terrible, terrible flu.'
'I'm very sorry to hear that, Vicar.'
'Yes, yes, a
very
nasty business, that flu.'
'I'm sure.'
'I've never had flu like it.'
'Well, I'm glad you're feeling bett--'
'I was having hallucinations for three days, you know? The most curious experience. I convinced myself that Martians had landed on the Vicarage lawn and were trying to organise a tombola.'
'That's terrible, Vicar. I hope you're feeling better now.'
'Oh, much better, thank you. Although I must have put on 40 pounds this week, I've been so incredibly hungry.'
'Listen, Vicar,' I said. 'If there's anything I can do for the church, anything at all, just let me know, OK?'
'Oh, how kind of you. Do you play the organ, by any chance?'
'Er, no.'
'But you are in some kind of pop group, aren't you?'
'Yes, I am.'
'Tell me, what do you call yourselves?'
'Black Sabbath.'
'Oh.' The vicar frowned for a while. Then he looked at me and said, 'That's a rather peculiar name, isn't it?'

The End is Nigh

W
e recorded the next Black Sabbath album in a haunted house, out in the middle of absolutely fucking nowhere. I don't know whose brilliant idea that was, but it wasn't mine, that's for sure. The name of the place was Clearwell Castle. It was in the Forest of Dean, on the Welsh border, and it scared the crap out of

us from day one. It had a moat, a portcullis, four-poster beds in the rooms, big fireplaces everywhere, animal heads on the walls, and a big old dark musty dungeon, which we used as our rehearsal room. It had been built in 1728 on the site of an old Tudor manor house, and the locals told us that a headless figure would roam the corridors at night, moaning and wailing. We just laughed it off, but as soon as we'd unpacked our bags, we all started to get the willies, big time. At least that took the pressure off us, as far as the next album was concerned. We were more worried about sleeping alone in these spooky old rooms with swords and armour on the walls than coming up with another million-selling LP. We weren't so much the Lords of Darkness as the Lords of Chickenshit when it came to that kind of thing. I remember when we went to see
The Exorcist
that Christmas in Philadelphia: we were so freaked out, we had to go and watch
The Sting
afterwards to take our minds off it. Even then, we all ended up sleeping in the same hotel room, because we were scared out of our minds. It's funny, because years later Linda Blair - who played the satanic kid in that movie - ended up dating my mate Glenn Hughes from Deep Purple. She definitely liked musicians, it turned out. She even went out with Ted Nugent once. But she wouldn't go near me.

Not a fucking chance.
Clearwell Castle certainly wasn't our first choice of venue for making the new album. The plan had initially been to go back to the Bel Air mansion to write the next record, but then we found out we wouldn't be able to do any recording in LA, because Stevie Wonder had installed a giant synthesizer in our favourite room at the Record Plant. So that idea was shelved. Probably a good job, too: we'd almost killed ourselves with cocaine the last time we'd made a record in LA. At Clearwell Castle, meanwhile, the only danger was scaring ourselves to death.
And of course we tried very,
very
hard to do just that.
We hadn't been there a day before the practical jokes started. I was the first culprit: I realised that if you put a cartridge in our eight-track machine and turned down the volume all the way, when it reached the end of a song it would make this loud
CHA-CHUNK-CHICK
noise, which would echo off the stone walls. So I hid the machine under Tony's bed. Just before he turned in for the night - after we'd spent the evening putting the willies up each other with a seance in the dungeon - I sneaked into his room, pressed 'play', and set the volume to zero. Then I ran out and hid in the room next door.
Eventually I heard Tony get into bed.
I waited.
Then, one by one, the lights in the castle went out, until it was pitch black. Apart from the occasional creak from the rafters, and the wind rattling the windows, there was just this eerie silence.
I waited.
And waited.
Then, out of the darkness:
CHA-CHUNK-CHICK.
All I heard from Tony's room was '
AAAAGGGGGGHHH-HHH!
' and then a thump as he fell out of bed. Then the door burst open and Tony came charging out in his underpants, screaming, 'There's something in my fucking room! There's something in my fucking room!'
I didn't stop laughing for days.
But as much as the castle might have taken our minds off things, it didn't help with the songwriting. The problem was that
Vol. 4
had been a classic - by Black Sabbath's standards, anyway. Which meant we wanted the follow-up to be another classic. But you can't control that. To a certain extent, you've just got to be in the right place at the right time. I mean, I don't think Michael Jackson sat down one day and said to himself, 'Y'know what? Next year I'm gonna write an album called
Thriller
, and every song will be a corker, and then I'll sell a million copies of it every week.' You can't plan that kind of thing.
Then again, we were terrified of becoming one of those bands who started off with a few albums that people thought were amazing, only to follow them up with one turd after another. None of us could really believe how our lives had changed since coming back from the Star Club in 1969. I think we all expected to wake up one day and find that it was all over, that our little scam had been exposed.
Personally, one of my biggest worries was about us moving too far away from what our fans wanted. I mean, I knew we couldn't keep on doing 'Iron Man' for ever - we had to challenge ourselves - but we couldn't put brass bands on every track or start doing abstract jazz bollocks, either. The name of the band was Black Sabbath - and as long as we were called Black Sabbath, it was gonna be hard to be accepted as anything else.
It's like the guy who plays Batman in the movies. He might be a great actor, but if he goes off and plays a gay waiter in his next role, people will spend the entire movie wondering when he's gonna rip off his tuxedo, put on a rubber suit, and jump out of the window.
So we had to be very careful.
To be honest with you, for a few days at Clearwell Castle, it felt like we didn't know how to move on. For the first time ever, Tony seemed to be having a hard time coming up with new material. Which meant no riffs. And without riffs, we had no songs. It was that Dutch band, Golden Earring, that saved us in the end. We were listening to their latest album,
Moontan
, and something just clicked in Tony's head. A couple of days later, he came down to the dungeon and started playing the riff to 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath'
.
Like I said: every time we thought Tony couldn't do it again, he did it again -
and better
. From that moment on, there was no more writer's block.
Which was a huge relief.
But we still couldn't concentrate in that bloody castle. We wound each other up so much none of us got any sleep. You'd just lie there with your eyes wide open, expecting an empty suit of armour to walk into your bedroom at any second and shove a dagger up your arse.
And the fucking seances we kept holding didn't help. I dunno what we were thinking, 'cos they're really dodgy, those things. You've got no idea who's pushing the glass, and then you end up convincing yourself that your great aunt Sally is standing behind you with a sheet over her head. And when you're doing it in a dungeon, it's even worse.
Tony was the one who pulled the most pranks. One day he found an old dressmaker's dummy in a cupboard, put a frock and a wig on it, then threw it out of a third-floor window just as Bill and Geezer were coming back from the pub. They almost shit their pants. Bill legged it so fast back up the drive-way, he must have broken the land speed record. Another time - I wasn't around to witness this, but someone told me about it - Tony tied a piece of white thread to an old model sailing ship that was in one of the roadies' bedrooms, and he fed the thread under the door and into another room. Then he waited until the roadie was in there alone and he gave it a little tug. The roadie looked up, and there on this dusty mantel-piece - which was supported by two gargoyles - the ship was 'sailing' all by itself. He ran out of that room and refused ever to go back in.
Bill got the worst of it, though. One night he'd been on the cider and had passed out on the sofa. We got this full-length mirror and lifted it over him, so it was only a few inches from his face. Then we poked him until he woke up. The second he opened his eyes, all he could see was himself staring back. To this day, I've never heard a grown man scream so loud. He must have thought he'd woken up in hell.
Bill started going to bed with a dagger after that.
The jokes got out of hand eventually. People started driving home at night instead of sleeping in their rooms. The funny thing is, the only genuinely dangerous thing that happened during our time at Clearwell Castle was when I got loaded and feel asleep with my boot in the fire. All I can remember is waking up at three o'clock in the morning with a funny feeling at the end of my leg, then jumping up, screaming, and hopping around the room with this flaming boot, looking for something wet to put it in. Everyone else thought it was hilarious.
Geezer just looked at me and said, 'Got a light, Ozzy?'
But the smile was soon wiped off his face when an ember flew off my boot and set the carpet on fire. All I can say is: thank God for the vat of cider that Bill kept behind his drum kit, which we used to douse the flames. I'm amazed it put the fire out, to be honest with you. I'd tasted Bill's cider, so I half expected it to go up like a Molotov cocktail.

By the time we left Clearwell Castle, we at least had most of the new album written. So we moved on to Morgan Studios, just off Willesden High Road in north London, to finish it off.

Morgan Studios was a very popular place at the time, so whenever you did any work there, you'd run into other bands, and usually you'd end up going over to the little caff they had in there - it had a dartboard and served booze - and having a bit of a laugh. This time, though, when I went over to say hello to the band working next door to us, my heart sank. It was Yes. While we were working on our album in Studio 4, they were making
Tales from Topographic Oceans
in Studio 3. They were hippies, so they'd brought in all of these cut-out cows to make their recording space look 'earthy'. I later found out that the cows even had electrically powered udders. No fucking kidding. They also had bales of hay all over the place, a white picket fence, and a little barn in the corner - like a kid's plaything. I just said to myself, 'And I thought Geezer was weird.'

During the whole time we were at Morgan Studios, the only member of Yes I ever saw in the caff was Rick Wakeman, their superstar keyboard player. He was famous for doing warp-speed Moog solos while dressed in a wizard's cape, and it turned out he was the only regular bloke in Yes. In fact, he was
always
in the caff - usually drinking heavily - and he wasn't into any of that cut-out-cow, hippy bullshit. He'd rather get out of his box and play darts with me.

We used to have a right few laughs, me and Rick - and we've remained friends to this day. The bloke's a born storyteller. Hanging out with him is like
An Evening with
... He once told me that he'd legally changed his name to Michael Schumacher in case the cops ever pulled him over for speeding and asked for his name. Then, when PC Plod told him to fuck off and demanded to see his driving licence, there it would be, in black and white. You've got to admire that kind of dedication to winding up the boys in blue.
He had a collection of about thirty Rollers and Bentleys back then - although I don't know when he ever drove 'em, because whenever I saw him he was shitfaced. He was almost as bad as me. Then, a few years later, he had a bunch of heart attacks in a row and had to give it up.
You could tell that Rick was bored out of his mind with
Tales from Topographic Oceans
. One of the funniest stories I ever heard about him was from the time when Yes went on tour with that album. He got so fed up that halfway through one of the eight-hour twiddly bits, he got his roadie to order a curry and bring it to him on stage. Then he sat there at his keyboards, eating a chicken vindaloo under his cape while smoking a fag.
He didn't last much longer in Yes after that.
Anyway, one day at Morgan Studios, when Rick seemed even more bored than usual, I asked him if he'd like to come over to Studio 4 and hear some of our new tracks. I remember playing the melody of 'Sabbra Cadabra' to him on my ARP 2600 synthesizer. There I was, murdering this riff with one grubby finger, going duh-duh
duh
, duh-duh-duh
duh
, with Rick watching me. And when I finally stopped, Rick just went, '
Hmm
, maybe it would sound better like this...' leaned over the keyboard, and went diddly-diddlydiddly-diddly-dud-diddly
duh
. His fingers moved so fast, I swear you couldn't see the fucking things.
I asked him right then if he'd play on the album, and he said he'd love to, as long as we paid him his usual fee.
'How much?' I asked.
'Two pints of Director's best bitter.'
Apart from Rick, though, Yes lived like monks. They didn't eat meat. They looked like they had yoga classes every day. And you'd never see them getting boozed up. The only rock 'n' roll thing they did was smoke dope - and, as it happened, I'd just got another shipment of hash in from Afghanistan, and it was phenomenal. Really heavy-duty shit. Now I considered myself a bit of dope connoisseur in those days, and I was interested to see what Yes thought of this stuff. So one morning I took my brick of hash to the studio, went over to see Yes, and gave them a big lump of it. For some reason, the only one of them who was missing that day was Rick.
'Here, lads,' I said. 'Stick a bit of
this
in your rollies.'
They said they'd try it immediately.
I went back to Studio 4, had a couple of joints myself, did some double-tracking for the vocals, nipped over to the caff for a cheeky five or six at lunchtime, came back, had another joint, then decided to check how Yes were doing.
But when I went into Studio 3, it was empty.
I found the chick from the reception desk and said, 'Have you seen Yes anywhere?'
'Oh, they all started to feel very unwell around lunchtime. They had to go home.'

By now, our album had a title -
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
, after the track that had broken Tony's writer's block - and it was another stonker. Our last truly great album, I think. Even the artwork was spot on: it showed a bloke lying on his bed being attacked by demons in his sleep, with a skull and the number 666 above his head. I fucking loved that cover. And with the music we'd managed to strike just the right balance between our old heaviness and our new, 'experimental' side. On the one hand, you had tracks like 'Spiral Architect', which featured a full orchestra, and 'Fluff', which sounded almost like the Shadows (it was named in honour of Alan 'Fluff' Freeman, the DJ who always played our records on Radio 1). On the other, there was 'A National Acrobat', which was so heavy it was like being hit over the head with a lump of concrete. I even got one of my own songs on the album: 'Who Are You?' I'd written it one night at Bulrush Cottage while I was loaded and fiddling around with a Revox tape machine and my ARP 2600.