Have a good show.
...rock 'n' roll's definitive crazy person.
Ozzy Osbourne, who is known for biting the heads off of bats...
Hey, he's twisted, but he's all right, man.
Here's another scientific mystery that's stumping scientists.
How is Ozzy Osbourne still alive after decades of drugs and alcohol?
Fuck... - Happy birthday.
Well, we made it, Bill.
Good to see you, good to see you!
It's nice to see you, too. - It's good to see you, man.
We fucking made it. I never thought that.
You look great, you look great. - I do.
Nice smile. Come on.
Ozzy, smile! It's your birthday, with your family.
I don't feel like fucking smiling. Shut the fuck up!
Come on, smile. It's your birthday. There we go.
Come on.
Looking back, I should've died a thousand times, but I never did.
I never thought I'd make it to fucking 40.
Because by 12:00, in the old days,
I'd have powder up my nose, fucking shit in my veins,
and all kinds of stuff.
All right, one, two, three.
Nice smile, ladies, come with your brother.
There's one or two ways to get in this world,
there's so many fucked up ways to go out.
Once you're dead, you're gone.
I'm just a very fortunate man to be still here,
talking to you about my life.
One, two, three. - He's too short.
Louis, smile. - I am smiling.
I've had a crazy life and it ain't over yet.
I was born John Michael Osbourne, December 3, 1948.
I was raised in Aston,
a working class suburb of Birmingham, England.
A lot of the city was destroyed by the Germans in World War II.
I used to play on a bombed building site,
thinking it was a place that you go and play,
not realising it was a building that had been bombed in the war.
That's my grandma, my mother and Gillian, my sister's there.
I've got three sisters.
My sister Jean, my sister Iris, and my sister Gillian.
We're a working-class family. There wasn't a lot of money about.
We lived in a small, terraced house.
Six children had to share the same bedroom.
We were the poorest kids of the street, there's no doubt about it.
I didn't come from fucking royalty.
I didn't come from a middle-class or upper-class background.
Where I came from was like,
very bottom end of the scale.
We were all from the same area in Birmingham in England.
It's very much a working-class area.
I don't think any of us had hot water
or indoor toilets, or things like that.
My mother and father.
He was a good guy, you know.
He worked hard all his life. Would never miss a day from work.
If he ever missed a day, you knew he was fucked.
He used to work nights at a factory.
John used to go out and have a drink, get in fights and that was it.
From what I saw of John, he was always in and out of trouble.
Dad was always telling him off.
And one day Dad says, "You'll either get killed,
"or die one way or the other," you know what I mean?
A lot of the kids turned to crime and I did for a time as well,
but I wasn't really good at it. I didn't want to do it, really.
"John Michael Osbourne.
"Age, 18.
"Break and enter to the shop of Clara Sharpe
"and steal two coats, 20 pairs of stockings.
"Fined 20 quid. "
To cut a long story short, the police come round,
says to Mr Osbourne, "Does John Osbourne live here?"
And our dad says, "There he is. Take him. "
I got locked up in Winson Green Prison for about six weeks.
When I eventually got out of prison, life still felt hopeless for me.
I'd let my family down for being arrested.
I had no idea what I wanted to do.
Really, there were about three or four choices when we were teenagers.
One was, we would either probably go to prison,
or go in the factories, or go in the army.
I remember being in a factory and one guy,
I'd say to him, "How long have you been working here?"
And he'd go, "Thirty-five years this year,
"and I'm retiring, and I'll get a gold watch. "
I thought, "Fucking gold watch?
"Thirty-five years of your life have been in this fucking factory. "
I just couldn't handle it, you know.
I had job after job after job.
I could never hold a job down, didn't want to.
I used to think, "Fuck this! Is this me for the rest of my life?"
John wanted things which he couldn't have.
There was something inside him that wanted to get out.
Nothing really happened to me in my life until the Beatles happened.
Then it was like someone had turned the world on for me.
They played She Loves You on the radio
and I remember thinking to myself, "Fucking hell, this is incredible!"
From that moment on, when I first heard She Loves You,
I knew I wanted to be a rock star for the rest of my life.
Come on, everybody!
You are number one!
Thank you, good night! God bless you all!
This is adrenalin from the gig.
Hello, is Sharon about?
Just tell her the gig was phenomenal.
And the crowd, fucking unbelievable!
It's fucking undescribable.
It's like a divine experience, you know.
All right, I'll call back. I'll speak to you later, bye.
I'm lucky. I'm 60 years of age.
I'm still travelling all over the world.
I'm still doing gigs and people still want to see me.
Ozzy! Ozzy! - Ozzy! Ozzy!
It's Ozzy night, man. It's night of the living dead.
I've been fucking listening to him since I was nine, 10.
Yeah, man, I got those ones.
I got that one and I got that one.
A big Black Sabbath cross on my leg.
Number one Ozzy fan. - Oh, yeah?
Since Black Sabbath days. Check this out.
Fucking love him, man.
Right here...
Can you bend down? Can you crouch down a little bit?
You all right?
I remember when I was a fan of the Beatles,
I had my fantasies...
And if it's gonna make somebody's day a little bit better to say,
"Wow! I met Ozzy Osbourne today," I mean, that's my job, you know.
Can you get this please? - Sure.
Just right down there.
Sharon goes to me, "You get back there and sign that autograph!"
I go, "What do you mean, my darling?" She says, "Well, one day, if they
"don't ask you for your autograph, that's when we got a problem. "
Just check out my shirt.
And I figure you can't fuck it up no more than President Bush.
I have something for you, here's your own.
Thank you. - Thank you.
I'll go down the road. Now, if I get recognised, I get pissed off,
but at the same time, if I don't get recognised, I get pissed off.
People recognised me
for a lot of years, and for a lot of different reasons.
And I just want my audience to know that I will not abandon them
to become the fucking weatherman.
Wonder how many signatures you've signed?
Sabbath was monumental.
A huge influence on Metallica.
Black Sabbath was a big deal for me.
Man, we worshipped those records.
They were like pioneers on so many levels, you know.
Doing new things with rhythm, doing new things with musical interaction.
I mean, listening to it now, it doesn't sound that crazy at all,
but then, it was quite off the wall.
My very first memory of Black Sabbath, I just remember doing...
I was like, "Oh, my God! This is insane!"
Thank you very much.
Before Black Sabbath, I was in a band with Tony lommi and Geezer.
What was next needed, really, was a singer.
So we went to this music shop in Birmingham
where all the musicians used to hang out.
Ozzy had put this little calling card
in a music shop called Jones and Crossland,
and he'd written, "Ozzy Zig needs a gig. "
First time I ever met Ozzy was at school.
He was, like, for want of a better word, a nuisance.
And so when Bill and I walked up to Ozzy's door,
I saw him in the back room, walking in.
And I said to Bill, "Forget it. "
I just thought, "This is gonna be a joke. "
Ozzy wrote the magic words, "has his own PA,"
because nobody could afford PAs back then.
If he sang and had a PA, he got the job. We didn't even have to hear him.
Although money was very scarce in the household,
I asked my father to buy me a PA system.
It was the best gift I ever had 'cause had he not got that PA for me,
I don't think I'd have ever got a gig, you know.
The first time we got together went down great and...
No, it was good.
In the early days, it was just fucking guys having a blast.
You know, if we'd never have made anything of ourselves,
it was a good time for me just to be around a bunch of guys
with fuck all to lose and everything to gain. It was great.
We used to rehearse across the street from a movie theatre
and I think it was Tony who said,
"How weird that people go to movies to get scared.
"Why don't we start doing scary music?"
And that's how the beginnings of Sabbath started.
And when we used to play that song live in the early days,
kids would just fucking scream and run out.
And we started getting invites to fucking Black Masses
and fucking Highgate Cemetery at fucking 12:00.
And we go, "Is this for real?" We never thought it was real.
In life, we know about the dark side and the light side,
the good side and the bad side, and I think
that's probably the attraction, is that it hadn't been dealt with
till the Black Sabbath started dealing with it.
And people go, "Oh, yeah. This is great. Well cool. "
It's like the attraction of Dracula or vampires.
It's a rich source for exploration, I would think.
What happened with Sabbath...
For instance, Black Sabbath One, the first album,
we recorded that in 12 hours, believe it or not.
The whole thing was done in 12 hours on an eight-track machine
in a little backstreet studio in London.
It cost, like, 10 bucks to make or something.
It was one of the biggest-selling albums I ever did.
The manager comes up to me and he goes,
"Your album's going in the chart next week at number 17."
I said, "Fuck off! You're joking. You're winding me up. "
"No!"
When I got my first record royalty advance in money,
I got 105 pounds, which is about $220.
I went and bought myself some shoes and some socks,
some patterned trousers, and a bottle of Brut cologne.
I always liked to smell nice. I used to stink.
Coming along from having nothing,
literally fucking zero, no socks on my feet,
walking around in fucking open sandals in the winter,
that's, from that to a pair of fucking socks and shoes, big time.
Then the next one, Paranoid, comes out.
The song Paranoid went up the English charts.
The album went straight in at number one in England.
It was like, "Fucking hell!"
That was our second album, we got a number one album.
And we're going, "Fucking hell, man!"
The real rock star vibe, you know, hit us.
This is the first one I ever got.
Gold disc from...
It fucking spelt my name "O-S-S-I-E", which is fucking great.
But those early days were fucking fantastic.
We all had a laugh, we'd fuck around.
We'd fucking smoke dope, drink beer, you know.
Going around with him was a total adventure.
We never knew what was going to happen.
Ozzy would often walk into a room naked.
In the early days, he was absolute bedlam.
Me and Ozz were like a wrecking crew in the hotel room,
so we'd dismantle the bathroom completely.
Just big sledgehammers, the toilet, sink, all gone.
Put it outside, everything goes outside.
I remember I got a picture early on
of him setting fire to Bill Ward's beard.
And Ozzy would be laughing and Bill would just sit there.
Growing up, Ozzy was a real prankster,
but especially in his 20s with Sabbath,
he was like the band clown.
He got everyone going, laughing.
He did that because that was his shield.
That protected his insecurities.
Ozzy had low self-worth.
He always considered himself less than.
That's how he survived everything, was just being the prankster.
What do you do to relax?
You were joking when you said that, of course?
Yeah, right.
With the success of the albums came more money,
which enabled us to buy a better class of drug, basically.
Which is basically what we were all doing it for, at the time.
Cocaine, acid and stuff like that.
This is a good old cocaine shot, we were all fucked up on these.
If you look at the face, when you do cocaine,
you just lose all expression in your face.
We did the album, Volume 4, and we'd been in Los Angeles
recording that for about three months.
We used to have cereal boxes of cocaine delivered to the house.
We'd just tip it into this big bowl and so we go...
A bit like Scarface kind of thing.
For a while, we used LSD before we played.
And so we would go on stage, you know, tripping.
Come on! Let's have a party!
I was young, I had money, I had cars, I had a fucking house.
I was fucking king of the world at fucking 22.
Thank you very much!
Thank you. We'll see you again soon!
Shortly after we all became successful with Black Sabbath,
I met Thelma in a night club.
Then we got married and we had two children, Jessica and Louis.
And this is a picture of my parents.
That was actually at the Hilton Hotel in Las Vegas.
Some lovely ones, him looking very young and handsome and sultry.
These are nice ones.
Before we had our house decorated, so this must have been very early.
1972. - 1972.
Got a Black Sabbath sticker on the telephone.
My recollection from my childhood with Dad
is that he'd be away for very long periods of time,
and there would always be a period of adjustment when he came home,
and then it would get to normality, and then he'd go again.
So it was a very erratic childhood with Dad.
Dad got into the local newspaper
for the prized green beans that he had grown.
That's a nice picture of the house and of our vegetable garden.
He was always a very big social drinker,
so the pubs in the villages where we all grew up
were a very big part of the social scene, so he would go to the pub.
The only thing in English countryside really back then was pubs.
I'd go, "There's a pub there, the house is just down the road.
"Idea. I haven't got a driving licence.
"For one, I can walk to the pub and back!"
My idea of going for a drink was to go to a pub,
get as much poured down my neck as I could
and stumble out. That was my idea of a drink.
When he was around and he wasn't pissed, he was a great father.
But that was seldom, really.
I just have a lot of memories of him being drunk.
Fucking just random shit, you know. Fucking driving cars across fields,
and crashing them in the middle of the night and stuff like that.
It's not good for family life, really, you know.
When you drink alcohol and someone goes, "Dad, help me do this math. "
You go, "What the fuck you even bothering me for?"
It just gets a big ugly scene, but that's the way your life becomes.
I don't remember being put to bed or a bath or that kind of thing by Dad.
I wouldn't say he was there for us, no.
Never on a sports day, a school trip, a parents' evening.
He wasn't like that, no.
It just pissed me off that Dad never remembered my birthday.
Just a fucking phone call to say, "Happy birthday, Lou. "
Just make me happy. That's all I wanted but he couldn't remember that.
When was Jessica born? - Sorry?
When was Jess born? - I think '71, '72.
Maybe before.
I don't really know. I'll find out for you.
Do you think he was a good parent?
No.
I did the best I could in the situation at home.
I was fucking 22.
I mean, people knew who I was.
I could drive the fucking Mercedes, fly on Concorde to New York,
fucking first class seat, and stay at a nice hotel.
You know, I mean, I was a rock star.
And when you become a successful rock star,
they don't give you a handbook and say,
"You should learn these rules. This is what you got to stick by. "
It's the fucking world. You're young, you got money,
you're successful, chicks want to be seen with you.
What more can you say, you know?
It's just probably stress or anxiety.
I don't know. I'm not anxious. I'm feeling okay.
Well, you've told me before that you get a bit wound up at the gigs.
The last time was great. That's why I'm doing it, you know.
I'm not wound up at all.
Okay, there, Ozzy. Here we go. Now give me... M-U-H-M.
Now, we're gonna give you the...
Slightly hooty... And do the long one, and say...
Now, Ozz, give me a plain old... And same thing, say...
Okay, I'm gonna give you the chance to rest for a little bit,
and then we'll start again.
I love my job, you know. I'm very fucking passionate about it.
When I can't give a good show, I get pissed off about it, you know.
When I can't do my job... I suffer from terminal perfectionism.
I'm just gonna flip-flop Bark At The Moon with Suicide Solution,
Crazy Train, and leave it as the old set.
Yeah, I mean, if you want...
We can do Fire in the Sky, 'cause that's more for you to sing.
Yeah, but I'll know when I get there, you know.
Exactly. You know, right?
I'm not gonna fucking do all this shit, all right, man?
I mean, we're gonna go over everything,
we'll be here till fucking midnight, going over all this shit.
We got here a little while ago.
We'll just keep going till we get it right.
All right.
Not every night I'm great, not every night I'm half great sometimes.
I'm terrible if my voice goes out,
like everybody else is, but the show goes on.
Yes, sir.
If I can't get it to...
Fucking... I'm deaf.
Next year I'll be, like, on fucking Braille, man.
Hey.
You're so tired, that's why.
I first met Ozzy when Black Sabbath asked
if my father was interested in managing them.
Black Sabbath was a phenomenon. It just instantly happened.
And for guys that just came from a poor background,
to suddenly money everywhere being thrown at them,
they were really out of their comfort zone, those guys, they really were.
When you think they were all so young, terribly young.
Towards the late '70s, we were very high, high, high.
There was a lot of cocaine.
I know I was using cocaine regularly, on a daily basis.
I remember doing it every day, like, 24 hours a day, practically.
So, I didn't realise at the time, all the management was interested in
was ripping as much money off us as they possibly could.
I mean, Sabbath was royally fucking ripped off. Royally ripped off.
And then we didn't know anything about royalties.
I didn't even know you got royalties for writing the music.
Circa about 1976, I produced this report, quite a long report,
basically saying how their money wasn't quite as they thought it was.
For example, they all had houses, but they didn't own them.
We had all these million, platinum selling albums and everything,
and nothing to show for it. No money.
We were all out of our brains on dope.
So the band was just, like, split anyway.
It had been broken, really.
Hello, welcome to Top of The Pops, and right now,
here's a rundown on the brand new Top 30.
Right now, Never Say Die,
that's the brand new one from Black Sabbath.
The last album I did with Sabbath was Never Say Die.
It was the worst piece of work that I've ever had anything to do with.
I'm ashamed of that album. It was disgusting.
He puts everything he's got into it. That's Black Sabbath right there.
John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John
have gone straight in at number 23 this week...
When his dad passed away,
and it really knocked the shit out of him. It nearly destroyed him.
We were all devastated. We all loved Jack.
It was Jack that had given us the crosses.
This is the original, original, original Sabbath cross.
My father made that when he was at work,
and then when he'd come back with it,
everyone in the band wanted one and he made another.
Bill Ward wore his right up to relatively recently.
I always wanted a man-to-man conversation with my father,
but I was too into drugs and alcohol before he died.
I miss my father a lot, you know.
But I was young, I was doing...
I was riding the fame game for a long time.
Ozz was in absolute turmoil,
and he put himself right inside the bottle.
He stayed there for a while.
And so we got on with trying to make another record.
And we all came over to LA to do the album after Never Say Die,
and Ozzy didn't turn up for two weeks.
Two weeks later, he rolls through the door, smashed out of his head.
He'd beaten somebody up on the plane coming over from England,
and the Customs had arrested him for beating this person up.
By the time we got to the house, he was obliterated, started rehearsing,
and he just wouldn't sing on anything.
He was like, "That's shit. Crap, that is. "
Ozzy wasn't into it. He really wasn't into it.
And most of the time, he would be on the couch asleep,
he'd have done some Quaaludes or whatever
it might've been at that time, and he wasn't happy, I don't think.
He was doing too much of everything, as we all were,
but some people can handle it better than others. He couldn't handle it.
The conversations began about
the possibility of looking at another singer.
He just didn't want to be there.
We knew it was, like, either the whole band split,
or we'd get somebody else in.
It was me that actually says to him, "You know, Ozz, we're gonna move on.
"We're gonna move on without you. " Broke my heart.
We all cried our eyes out for about a week,
when Ozzy had gone, because we...
I swear to God, if he hadn't have been fired from the band,
he'd have been dead within a month.
It was tough for Ozzy when he first got let go from Sabbath.
He had very low self-esteem, he had no confidence whatsoever.
When I got fired from Sabbath,
I didn't know what to do, I didn't know where to go.
I thought it was the end of the dream.
I'd never ever dreamed that I would do it again on my own.
I just thought, "This is it. " So what money I had,
I just got fucked up and bought drugs
and stayed in an apartment for three months and got loaded.
You'd go into Ozzy's room and he'd be curled up on the floor
covered in piss, beer bottles all around him,
drug paraphernalia everywhere.
And what could be sadder, what could be lower than that?
His dignity had well gone.
Ozzy did feel very alone, lost and broke.
Suddenly he was out of the band, and would he get picked up,
and who was interested in him and was his career over?
For a guy like me who's got self-esteem issues,
the idea of going solo was very, very scary.
I knew he had great talent
and I just felt in my gut that he could make a huge comeback.
It was then that I became his actual manager, properly.
And first thing, we had to find that band.
We auditioned hundreds of guitar players.
Literally, we would turn up at the rehearsal rooms
and there would be lines around the block
of musicians waiting to see Ozzy.
It was a bit of a slow process at first,
until I met someone who put me in touch with Randy Rhoads.
Randy had a deep-ish voice for a little guy, like, "Wow. "
So he goes into the studio and I'm sitting here in this studio window,
like that thing, you know, I'm fucking zonked.
And he goes, "What do you want me to... "
I said, "Play any fucking thing. "
He said, "I have a solo," and he played his fucking solo.
And I was like, "Am I that fucking stoned,
"or am I hallucinating? What the fuck is this?"
So he was very lucky to run into Randy Rhoads.
And the guitar sound really reinvented Ozzy's voice.
And he had a true writing partner, and a friend. They really clicked.
Everybody thought maybe he was gonna be down and out
because of what happened with Sabbath and he just shocked the world.
Especially with Randy Rhoads,
and the magnitude of what this guy was doing.
Here's this guy who's giving Eddie Van Halen a run for his money
and everybody thought that Eddie Van Halen was the king.
I knew instinctively that he was something extra special.
He was like a gift from God.
And having that fucking thing, having a gift from a higher power,
I don't know what the fucking deal was,
but this guy did something to me.
And one thing that he gave to me was hope.
He gave me a reason for carrying on.
Blizzard of Ozz, the first record, was done in six weeks.
It just instantly, instantly blew up everywhere.
He went right on tour through Europe with the band.
Then back into the studio three months later to do Diary of a Madman.
Less than a year after being fired from Black Sabbath,
Ozzy was a rock star again.
Diary of a Madman tour was just massive.
It was the loudest show I've ever been a part of.
That tour was just like a magical time.
I think Randy and Ozzy gelled together
like left and right hand, it was just amazing.
Their friendship was...
It was just like two best mates hanging out
and laughing but yet that passion for music,
everything, the albums that they were writing,
and the gigs, just music talk the whole time.
Randy was able to achieve a lot in a very short period of time.
And a lot of it was due to Ozzy's mentorship.
Randy, on behalf of the over half million readers
of Guitar Player Magazine in the US
and in 70 countries throughout the world
I'd like to present you with the 1981 Best New Talent Award.
Congratulations. - Thank you.
Give him a kiss, Ozzy.
I've got a lot of work to do,
and it makes you realise it's a lot of responsibility.
This tour, I wanna really get myself together and work hard
because I'm really proud and honoured,
and I don't wanna stop here.
Randy Rhoads, the 25-year-old lead guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne's group,
was killed in a plane crash this morning along with two other people,
Andrew Aycock, the pilot of the plane,
also Rachel Youngblood, the group's hairdresser.
Ozzy Osbourne himself was in the van
when one of the plane's wings clipped it,
but Ozzy escaped injury, we understand.
25-year-old Randy Rhoads is dead today.
The morning that Randy was killed, I'll never forget.
We were there for so many hours
because it took so long for the authorities to come down,
the police and the fire department.
We finally went to a nearby hotel and I just couldn't stay in my room.
So I went down the street and I found a church right down the street.
All I wanted to do was just sit there
and just make some sense of what was going on.
I didn't even look up and I'm sitting there
and I hear this sobbing and this crying...
And I thought, "Wow, this person has got to be in more pain than I am. "
And I look up and it's Ozzy sitting there.
The craziest day of my life was the day that Randy Rhoads died.
And I couldn't believe that. You got to deal with that.
People tend to forget people in this business so quickly.
That guy was my brother, man.
That guy was a part of my life, and he's dead.
Why don't people start talking to me about the death of Randy Rhoads
instead of asking me the craziest prank that I've ever done?
That's the craziest prank that I've ever witnessed,
was seeing that guy burn.
And the day that Randy Rhoads died, that was the day a part of me died.
And Rachel Youngblood, my seamstress.
Can't forget that. It just gets kind of weird.
It's Friday or Saturday, yeah?
Today is Saturday, yes.
I don't know what country I'm in half the time.
I don't know what time it is. - Tell me about it.
After the Diary of a Madman tour, I went to Barbados with my family.
My ex-wife told me on the plane, coming back, "I want a divorce. "
But that was very ugly for a while.
My children still wanted their father, their dad,
and that's a fucking dreadful feeling that you have to go through.
I remember going to my house one day and Louis, my son, was a little kid
and he got me...
I can remember him sticking his fingernails in,
and tears were streaming down his face and he says,
"Daddy, please come home. We can work this out. "
That one incident tore my heart out. Tore my fucking heart out.
It just fucked me up. And I don't know really...
It devastated me.
Ozzy and I were friends. We worked together and that was it.
But it wasn't until August of 1980
that we actually had a relationship going.
The first night that we were actually together in Shepperton in 1980,
and then the next day I thought, "Oh, well. It just happened.
"Drunk. We were in the moment. It'll all be over. "
And each night after the show... - It happened again...
It happened again and again and again.
And it was either we were in the pub, in bed or on stage.
That was it? Yeah. - That's about it, isn't it?
I didn't know they had a relationship or anything.
I'm shooting Ozzy in the bed,
and then all of a sudden, Sharon goes under the covers.
All of a sudden, Sharon's down there like she's doing the deed.
And Ozzy's just like freaking.
Ozzy and I got married in 1982 in Maui.
And we wanted to start a family, that's why we got married.
We both wanted our own family.
Dad was there for me when I was growing up.
There were times, there were, like, chunks.
But then again, there were loads of times where he wasn't a great father,
and he wasn't there when I needed him.
Meaning the fact that he was messed up a lot of the time.
When he was drunk, he was mostly tearful,
and sometimes he'd get a bit angry.
And a bit, like, "I work hard. I should be able to do what I want. "
But mostly tearful.
I don't honestly think that Ozzy knew how to be a father.
The drinking, the huge success that was going on in his life,
the turmoil of leaving one family and starting another family...
He was treading water.
And that caused the behaviour to get even worse.
So his pranks that he used to play
would get bigger and larger and crazier,
and his whole behaviour, on and off stage, was over the top.
And it was like insanity,
just going around and around and around, complete insanity.
Rock star Ozzy Osbourne,
who is known for biting the heads off of bats at his concerts...
Osbourne was arrested for urinating on the Alamo...
The Union Arena was filled with the anticipation
of a cat slaughter tonight. Rumour was that punk rocker Ozzy Osbourne
was going to release hundreds of cats here
and expected the audience to kill them before his appearance onstage.
The lyrics from one of his songs
encouraged a young man to commit suicide.
His father claims John was listening to Ozzy Osbourne music at the time.
He gained reputation for being
rock 'n' roll's definitive crazy person.
Well, I suppose you could say that.
Can we talk about you being crazy? - I'm not crazy...
In the '80s, I was the craziest guy of rock 'n' roll.
If you wanted me to do something, tell me not to.
That was about the order of the fucking day.
I was drunk and fucked up on a daily basis.
So, when you get drunk and fucked up, they hardly expect you
to fucking tiptoe through the tulips or whatever the fuck.
When you're loaded, you do crazy things.
It was the first time that Ozzy met the A&R staff,
promotional staff, at CBS in Los Angeles.
Ozzy's deal was a cheap deal. They didn't want Ozzy.
It was a favour that they signed Ozzy. It was just a favour.
Sixty-five grand they paid for the album.
So he wasn't on their "high list of priorities. "
They had fucking Michael Jackson.
And it was like, "Okay, they've got to remember you. "
So, then we said, "Doves of peace. That'll be nice.
"Go in and let the birds go and then it'll be lovely," you know.
"They'll remember, maybe it'll shit on somebody's desk
"and that'll be funny, and then we leave. "
She wanted me to go in there with two doves, a peace offering.
She says, "You blow this and we are completely fucked. "
We go into the meeting and there's the big conference table
and there must've been, I don't know, 20, 30 people in there.
And he sat there and he lets this bird go
and everybody's, "Oh, magic trick. Oh, is that real?"
I threw the one up in the air, it sat on this girl's lap,
snapped the other one in my mouth and bit its head off.
There's a photo somewhere of the actual event happening.
He just picked it up and ripped its head off
and spat it out on the girl.
And she went absolutely fucking insane.
They suddenly called the security
and we were yanked out of the conference room.
It was not a publicity stunt.
I was just out of my fucking face on drugs and alcohol.
What is the truth behind Ozzy biting the head off a bat?
The bat started because of the dove.
Kids kept hearing these stories,
so they would bring him animals to the gigs,
thinking that he would want to eat them.
And somebody threw a bat and I don't know...
To find someone who goes to a concert with a bat,
a real bat... You always get the joke ones, you know.
You get like the rubber ones you buy from the corner joke shop.
And I picked it up, I thought, "This should be good. "
Bit into this bat... - You bit it.
Believe me, if I'd have known it was a real live bat,
I would never have picked it up.
But I'll tell what, you know,
afterwards, the rabies shots were horrendous.
It went out on the wire that Ozzy had bitten the head off a bat
and had to have these rabies shots.
And then suddenly, Ozzy is this larger-than-life character.
When we were on tour with Ozzy,
we would always have these crazy parties backstage.
He would come onto our bus and say,
"I'm riding with you guys to the next city. "
And he'd fucking reach into his
coat pocket or his pants and pull out, he goes...
He'd pull out, like, two huge bags of cocaine,
and he goes, "I've got bags of this shit. " And we would fucking...
All of us would go back to the back of the bus
and we would fucking snort cocaine
for fucking, you know, 10-hour bus rides.
And we're walking into the hotels like the Four Seasons
or the Ritz-Carltons where, you know, Mom and Dad...
"We're a happy family, we're out by the pool,"
and everybody's like... Their little resort.
And here comes Mötley Crüe and Ozzy, just fucking blasted.
And it was this who-can-out-gross contest,
which Nikki kind of started.
And all of a sudden, we're sitting out by the pool having drinks,
and Nikki pisses on the ground
and goes to lick up his own piss to freak Ozzy out.
Ozzy beats him to the punch and starts licking up Nikki's piss.
And we're like, "Oh, fuck!
"This is fucked up. What is wrong with you two?"
And the hotel was freaking out.
Security's kicking us out of the pool.
They're doing the out-gross contest.
Snorting ants, fucking licking up each other's piss.
And I'm like, "Dude, let's just go to the fucking room.
"Let's just chill out. Come on. " "And the fucking... Fucking... "
And he's just going... I'm like, "Dude, please. "
I just fucking grab him, "Come on!" Take him to the elevator,
I find his room, put the key in. I'm like, "Okay, bud. "
I push the door, like, "Okay, bud, you're in your room. Hey, bye. "
He's like, "No, fucking come here, mate. "
And I'm like, "Fuck, I almost got out of here. "
And he pulls me into his room, pulls his pants down,
and just shits on the fucking floor.
A fucking big shit on the floor. And I'm like...
I'm like, "Okay, dude, I gotta go. " "No, fucking come... "
And he fucking drags me back in,
and now he picks up the shit, and he's got it in his hands,
and he's just smearing it all over the walls of his fucking hotel room.
I'm like, "Dude, I gotta go. This is fucked up. "
I just remember turning around and I just saw his back,
and he was just painting with his shit on the walls,
and I just fucking was like, "Now is my chance. "
And I fucking pinned it out of there, dude.
I was like, "This is on some other next level shit.
"Like, I'm not really ready to compete at this level.
"I'm cool with taking a shit in the toilet. "
I think that Ozzy's behaviour in the '80s,
I think it's a fact of everything Ozzy had always lost.
You know, he lost Sabbath,
he lost his first wife, he lost his first kids.
Everything would come and go.
So, he was fucking everything that fucking had a pulse,
sniffing everything he could sniff.
Because he thought that it was all going to end,
so he was going to go out with a... You know, on a high.
I hated this video.
So fucking lame.
I don't like it. Fucking...
Everybody was fucked up and drunk and everything.
When I look at it, I don't even remember
what drugs I was addicted to at the fucking time.
So, next! Come on.
It's a clichéd fucking '80s video.
I can't remember doing this fucking thing.
I was a mess in the '80s. I was doing fucking morphine,
Vicodin, fucking booze. All kinds of shit, really.
I can't remember. I just can't remember it at all.
Never happened.
Next.
Hokey.
"Whose idea was this?" How the fuck do I know?
It's just boring. I find it hard to go back there and look at it.
I don't want to go back there, you know.
Where are you going?
Have a walk around, than fucking watch this shit.
Let's get on with this.
Yes. What does it feel like tonight? - Come on.
You have a tour starting tomorrow.
Is it always like this or is this an exception?
Yeah. Yeah, it is. Come on, come on.
Yeah.
No... It's like we do...
Sixteen days ago, we got over from Japan.
When Ozzy was drunk, he was fucked up beyond belief.
I mean, to the point where
he would drink until he couldn't drink any more.
Where he would be unconscious...
That's the only thing that would stop him drinking.
He'd be unconscious or asleep.
He was blacking out, he was drinking and going unconscious on the floor.
He couldn't move. His eyes would be open.
But he would be, like, unconscious. It was weird.
I passed out with a bottle of fucking Vicodin in my mouth.
Mainly, I was concerned about him choking on his vomit,
falling asleep when he was drunk, and choking on his vomit.
This is me at my stag night, I'm fucking blasted.
I think it was in Memphis, Ozzy disappeared.
He got found in the middle of a freeway.
He crossed over half of a freeway and stopped in the middle
and he was in the central reservation.
And he was sleeping and he woke up
and he had to get across the other half.
I mean, how he didn't get knocked over,
'cause he was absolutely shit-faced.
That's when I clocked Sharon, I think.
Really? - I think so.
We were always fucking fighting with each other.
That's when I smacked Sharon in the eye.
Over what, I don't know.
It had been coming for a while. Ozzy was on a bender.
You know, he was really on a roll.
He'd been very bad for the last couple of weeks.
And we'd had a couple of fights where
we'd beaten each other and it was nasty.
But you kind of get...
When, anyone who knows, who lives with an addict,
that there are times when it's worse than others,
and it was just building to something.
You could just feel it in the atmosphere between us.
And my God, it did.
I put the kids to bed, was sat down, I was reading.
And he came in. He'd been lying down.
He'd actually drunk himself into one of those
coma-zone things on the bed.
He'd passed out. And woke up, came downstairs,
and I knew when he came in that he was looking for trouble.
And Ozzy is very rarely calm.
Very calm in his eyes,
a kind of shutter had gone down on his eyes,
you couldn't really...
I had no idea who was sat across from me on the sofa,
but it wasn't my husband.
And then he just said that he'd made a... They had come.
He said they've made a decision that I had to die. And I'm like, "They?"
"Yes, they've made the decision. We've made the decision.
"You're gonna have to die. "
And then he just
got up from the sofa and just dived on me
and started to choke me.
Fabulous!
All I remember was waking up in Amersham jail.
And I asked the cop why I was there.
"Excuse me," I asked him, "Why am I here?"
He says, "You want me to read your charge?"
So he read, "John Michael has been arrested
"for attempted murder of Sharon Osbourne. "
I'm like, "Is this a joke?"
He says, "I'm not joking. You'll go to court in a minute. "
That hit me like a fucking hammer in between the eyes.
I remember getting this dull feeling in my heart.
I didn't know whether she was in hospital or what I had done.
I know where we are. That's where we used to rehearse.
That's where we used to rehearse, there.
That's the pub I used to go to, right over there.
Down there is Witton Road. I used to walk all the way up here
to Lucas car factory every day to go to work with my mum.
Fucking hell!
We are just coming up to Lodge Road now.
Fucking hell, man!
It's so small, it's unbelievable. I can't believe how small it is.
Fucking Jesus Christ!
When I was a kid, it used to be like the longest road in the world.
When you are a young kid and you get successful like I did,
you get very arrogant, and your ego runs away.
You think it's you, you know. You forget your upbringing...
Took me till now to kind of realise that, you know.
Wow!
This is...
Wow, this is unbelievable.
It is amazing. Wow!
That was Mrs Clarke's shop I broke into.
That was my bedroom up there.
As my sisters... Most of my family...
My sisters would get old and get married.
You're allowed to go into the back room. You have it to yourself.
And this is about right here.
I lived in here for a while, and this is unbelievable.
I hated school. I fucking hated it.
I have dreadful, dreadfully bad dyslexia.
When I was at school, nobody knew what it was about.
When somebody goes, "Look, one plus one equals two. "
And you look at him, you go, "What the fuck does 'one' mean?"
I couldn't retain any information.
My attention deficit was so bad, still is.
I go rambling on, you know.
I don't know what I'm talking about half the time. I just talk.
I was very low on self-esteem.
I used to get picked on by bullies.
It just pushed me further inside myself.
Where you came from, did everyone drink?
Coming from the background that I come from,
I thought that was what you do.
You get successful, you get married, you have kids, you go to the pub.
I used to think everybody,
as they get older, gets fucking pissed.
The first time I got drunk was... I was about 14.
I drank it and I got the feeling...
I drank till I pissed my pants in this fucking pub.
And then that's the way I... From the first drink,
I didn't drink for the drink, I drank to get the effect.
How many rehabs? - I've been in a bunch of...
Between detoxes and rehab, this would be at 10 or 12.
Ozzy tried to get sober, I would say, between 40 to 50 times.
But he had been in and out of rehabs about...
I can think of 10 different rehabs he went to, over the period of time.
I used to go 90 days.
I'd go, "Fuck this, it's crap!" And go out and get fucked up again.
One minute he'd be sitting here sober,
the next minute you'd see him, he'd be fucked up.
He would disappear somewhere, or he would go to the fridge and get a beer
or he'd go for a walk up the drive to the pub.
I just knew the cycle. It would be my dad would go to treatment,
he'd stay sober for maybe 60 days, tops.
And then he would start messing around with pills.
And then he would do that for a while,
and then he would just go right to the drink.
And then it would get really bad, then he'd go back to treatment.
I don't actually believe that he was ever fully sober.
He was just drunk. He was just not a dad.
He was drunk and he was fucked up all the time.
I came home from school every single day
to see him lying on a couch,
drooling with a pill bottle on the floor
or a vodka bottle on the floor, or, you know...
Opening up the oven to make a cake with my friends
to find that that's where my dad hid the bottles of alcohol.
One thing about drugs and alcohol, they make you lie.
You start lying and covering up your tracks,
and hiding things and fucking...
I used to wait for the guy to drop my drugs off,
and I'd be running in and out of the fucking house all day long,
thinking that nobody would suspect I was waiting for dope to be delivered.
When The Osbournes first started,
he was probably at his worst peak of drinking.
I mean, like, pretty much going through the worst times.
That you pick up the fucking phone and call in.
That was the worst thing I'd ever do. They were never off the phone.
Sometimes, you know, he'd be popping pills from numerous, different
disgusting doctors that would give him whatever he wanted.
I don't know, sometimes he'd be on downers,
sometimes he'd be on uppers. So, that obviously
will make anyone behave a little bit off and scary sometimes.
Why do we have three brown fingers?
Three brown...
Because I put brown dye in my hair.
I think it was affecting... Well, it was affecting his speech.
It was affecting the way he walked.
It was affecting the way he stood. It was just... Everything.
Part of his fame came from how he looked.
People thought it was funny, thought it was cute.
What the fuck's this shit?
This is not allowed. What's happened to it?
How do you get this fucking thing on?
What they thought was funny was kind of sad, because
he was actually destroying himself and also destroying the family.
There's hours and hours of footage of stuff that just couldn't show.
It was too real.
Granted, yes, The Osbournes was not scripted,
but people don't wanna sit home on MTV
and watch alcoholism tear apart a family.
When we first started filming The Osbournes,
it was no secret my dad did drugs.
He was an addict, but he was kind of a functioning addict.
But when my mum was diagnosed with cancer,
it very quickly...
He was out of control.
Out of control.
He never came out of his room, that we called the bunker.
He couldn't stand up straight. He couldn't walk properly.
He couldn't hear. He shook, he stuttered.
Everything that you could imagine. I mean, he was a zombie.
I was taking drugs, too.
During that time when my mum had cancer, I was using, too.
I got through that experience
by hiding my emotions through using drugs.
I'll get you a bottle of water, just sip on the water.
I've got that interview on the phone.
On the phone? - She's holding on.
I had to hang up 'cause I was throwing up.
Let me get a bottle of water.
Jack and Kelly started using
and doing drugs and alcohol and whatever at a very early age.
Things started happening in my family.
I mean, it was my son Jack who got sober first.
When I'd got sober, we sat at a table and he's like,
"I threw away all my pain medication the other day. "
And I was like, "Well, why did you have them in the first place?"
And this whole argument erupted.
And one excuse my dad always went to when he was getting messed up was,
"You guys never needed for anything.
"Whatever you wanted, I gave you. "
I said to him, "What the fuck are you always pissed off at me for?
"You've never, ever wanted for a fucking thing
"from the moment you took your first breath. "
And he went, "Oh, yeah? What about a father?"
And that hit me straight between the eyes,
like fucking David and Goliath, when he gets that slingshot.
It knocked me on my eyes. I'm just, "Fucking hell!"
I honestly think that
the turning point for Ozzy was Jack's sobriety.
Jack learned how to deal with life sober.
And I think it shamed Ozzy that he couldn't do it.
He could never get it, and that's what was
his big turning point in life.
That was the start of the journey of him being sober.
The evidence proves the fact, 'cause he hasn't drunk
or abused for over five years now.
I'm clean, I'm sober. I don't smoke. I don't do drugs.
I don't do alcohol any more. I haven't done for a long while
but I like being sober, I like being straight.
I don't want to smoke tobacco any more.
He blew us all away. I mean, we didn't...
None of us ever thought he'd maintain it for as long as he has now.
And it really seems like he has come through the other side.
When you really let go, it's like
somebody takes a chain off you and you just go...
When you're involved in it, you don't realise
how much hard work it is to be a fucking alcoholic.
But it's when you get fed up with you behaving the way you do.
I mean, there's sometimes when I go, "Is this what it's all about?
"I want to get fucked up," but I don't.
His face is alive.
And he stands up straight and he walks tall and with confidence,
and he's not ashamed of himself any more.
He has nothing to hide any more and he has nothing to lie about any more.
Which makes him...
I think he's really proud of himself.
I think it's the first time he's proud of himself.
Do you like it, being clean? - I like it, yeah.
With a bit of time, you start to go,
"What did I ever think about that was fun?
"What was fucking fun about waking up in a police station
"or in the back of a fucking police car?"
I have a laugh now. I mean, naturally.
If I could sprinkle this on the fucking world,
it would be a much better place.
I spent 19 years of my life praying that I would wake up one day
and have the father I have today.
And most people can't turn around and say that that has happened for them,
and it happened for me and I love...
I am so proud of him, because I know how hard it is.
I think it's fucking fantastic. Our relationship has improved a lot
over the last few years since he has been sober.
I'm actually quite amazed at how fit he is
and how more astute he is than he was.
He has changed a lot.
He's lost a lot of weight.
He's very health conscious, he works out nearly every day.
Ozzy's grown up, you know.
It took him longer than most people, but he's got there. He's here.
He works really hard for his sobriety and he deserves it.
Sobriety's totally changed him as a person.
He just seems like he's a lot more at ease with himself.
You know, whereas before, he was just all over the place.
Now he'll just sit with his headphones on quietly, just drawing.
It's not art. I do it for therapeutic reasons.
I just find it stops my head of hand grenades going off, you know,
because it slows my head down. I've always worried...
Sometimes, I worry 'cause I got nothing to worry about.
That's how bad it is, sometimes.
I don't go to bed at night thinking, "I shouldn't have painted that,
"because people are going to get pissed off at me
"and they ain't going to buy another painting. "
Out of all this chaos and all this anxiety I live in, all this fear,
it stops everything in its tracks, and it's mine.
And so when you ask me a question about it, I have no answer
because I don't think of anything more than it's mine.
He really talked for years about wanting to have his driving licence
and never thought he could do it.
He wouldn't have been able to do it in his drinking days, obviously,
but since he had become sober he had talked about it quite a lot,
about getting his driving licence.
I'm getting my licence so I don't feel like a terminal prisoner,
meaning that when everybody leaves the house, I'm stuck.
I can't go anywhere.
It's a way of feeling free.
I'm dependent on everybody to drive me wherever I want to go,
that's the reason why I want to get a driving licence right there.
I'm not intoxicated, I don't want people to say...
I want a part of my life where I can say, "I'm in the car,
"driving my car where I want to go. "
Not sitting and going...
Having an argument with someone over some shit.
I just want to get the freedom of being able to drive with my head.
When I first got successful, right,
I bought the guns, the fucking knives,
the fucking archery sets, the motorcycles,
all the things that I felt I couldn't afford to have
when I was younger, right?
So, I got all of that out of my system.
Now, I've always really wanted to drive,
but I've been too fucked up to get that way.
So, I'm fulfilling all the things that I wanted to do.
I've had a one-of-a-kind life, you know.
I've had a lot of ups and downs in my life.
People say if I could change any one thing, what would I change?
I don't know. I think everything's there for a reason.
And life's a learning process.
I don't know what the fucking secret of life is,
I don't know what the thing is. I've had a good run, you know.
I love my wife, I love my family.
I'm beginning to love me a lot more than I ever used to.
First person you should always learn to love is yourself.