The Osbournes: Scene One: A Nice Sunday
Lie-in
Act I
In Which Our Hero, the Prince of Darkness
Is Assailed By All & Sundry, Only To
Be Rescued
By the Lady Sharon, Daughter of Don,
Overlord of the Rock Underworld
Scene One: A Nice Sunday Lie In
In the long, hot summer of 1985 I had been
hired to write Ozzy Osbourne's official biography. There was
nothing special about my appointment; it wasn't like they had
gone out and sought the best man for the job. Nor was I the
first man for the job. There had already been at least three
previous attempts made by other writers to get the job done.
The first go at it, bizarre as it seems now, had been by
Alistair Campbell, future New Labour spin doctor and attack
dog, then overseer of the Daily Mirror's pop page. Ozzy's
verdict: “Load of fucking rubbish!” At least,
that's what he told me, though it's doubtful he would have
actually read it, books not being something Ozzy usually
“did”. Second and third versions by various others
had met with similar fates, though why exactly was never made
clear to me. “I can't remember why we didn't like
them,” said Sharon, Ozzy's wife and manager. “I
think they were just boring.” Blimey, I thought, they
must have been bad if they made Ozzy Osbourne's life story
sound boring.
Why they then turned to me, though, was
much easier to fathom. I just happened to be the person
labelled 'writer' standing nearest at the moment they decided
they needed one. Lately, Ozzy and I had become close. That is,
we had gotten drunk together a few times; occasions which I was
then able to turn into stories for various newspapers and
magazines. Hard to imagine now, I suppose, but back then any
journalist willing to hang out with Ozzy and write - mainly
positive - stories about him was rare enough to be regarded as
an official friend of the family.
The other bonus for them in employing me,
I knew, was that I never made any great demands on Ozzy or
Sharon when doing these stories. There might be the occasional
switching on of a tape-recorder, but not so as Ozzy would have
noticed. Mainly, I just needed to share the same oxygen as him
for a few hours and I would have everything any journalist
could want, Ozzy - and Sharon, though she wasn't famous enough
yet to warrant inclusion in the finished articles - being
brilliantly adept at providing funny stories, wacky incidents
and general tales of ordinary madness without the prompt of
some boring writer's even more boring questions. More than any
other rock star - or indeed any other person - I had ever come
across Ozzy was just one of those people that lit up any room
he was in. He may not have been much of a singer, he certainly
never conquered the art of writing an actual song, but as a
frontman he was formidable, by turn uproariously jolly and,
next, bottom-of-the-well melancholy, both onstage and off. And
of course he liked a drink, and taking drugs, though it was
always the drink far more than the drugs he could not do
without. Subsequently, there was always something going on
whenever Ozzy Osbourne hit town. From biting the heads off bats
to shaving off all his hair, retiring, coming back, retiring
again and coming back again, often in the space of a week, to
being fired from his own band, to watching his guitarist die in
a light aircraft accident, to being arrested urinating on the
Alamo while dressed as his wife, to standing there
straight-faced as he told the nice middle-aged lady with the
fixed smile from the TV news crew how the first song he was
going to sing onstage at Live Aid was 'Food Glorious
Food'… you didn't need to interview Ozzy to have
something to put in your story, you just needed to be there to
see what happened next.
Writing a book about him though…
that was going to need something a tad more substantial,
surely? A proper interview, for a start. At least one, in fact.
Probably. The only problem was that every time we
sched¬uled a 'proper' sit down face-to-face interview
something always seemed to go wrong. First Ozzy was out of town
when he was supposed to be in town; then he was in town when he
was supposed to be out but “busy”. One time, I
turned up at his London office for a pre-arranged meeting just
as he was leaving. “Oh, I didn't think you were going to
turn up,” he said, by way of some sort of explanation.
Then jumped in his car and was gone again. Another time, I
turned up at the large mansion house he and Sharon were renting
then in Berkeley Square only to find them both in bed together
with the flu. I sat on the end of the four-poster bed while
Ozzy farted loudly beneath the duvet, blamed Sharon, who turned
round and hit him, then asked me to open a window, but we still
didn't get our interview done. Then there were the times I
turned up somewhere on the road and he was either too drunk to
talk or simply too stunned at being sober. These were the days,
you see, when Ozzy was either very much on the wagon - or
totally off it. There never was any middle ground with Ozzy. It
was one of the big reasons why those of us who put up with the
fucker loved him so. And why he drove us all mad.
Finally, to make up for all the trouble he
had put me to, he said, Ozzy offered to cook us Sunday lunch,
after which he promised we would get down to the business of
putting his precious recollections on tape. I had assumed that
when he said he would cook lunch he meant he would get the cook
to cook lunch but when I dutifully turned up again at the house
in Berkeley Square one sunny Sunday afternoon in August and
Sharon showed me into the kitchen, I was greeted by the surreal
sight of Ozzy actually standing at the sink with his flowery
pinafore on, peeling potatoes.
“Er, can I help?” I asked.
“No, no,” he shook his head, “All under
control.” I grabbed a seat at the table and watched him
fussing over the roast beef in the oven. In the hallway outside
I could hear Sharon and the nanny busying themselves with the
children, Aimee and Kelly - Jack was on the way but hadn't been
born yet - getting ready to go out to play in Hyde Park while
Daddy fin¬ished making them all lunch. As the front door
closed behind them, Ozzy froze in his tracks - literally,
turned into a statue. I thought he might be hav¬ing a
seizure or something.
“Everything all right, Ozzy?”
I asked.
“Shut up…”
I did as I was told, watching him standing
there, his eyes as big as a deer's, nose twitching, antlers
raised, ears alerted by the snap of a twig beneath the hunter's
boot. I listened with him to the sound of footsteps retreating
up the garden path, the swinging open and closed again of the
squeaky front gate. We carried on silently listening as the
sound of car-doors slamming shut came to us, followed by the
noise of an ignition being turned over. We carried on
lis¬tening in absolute silence - I wasn't sure to what
exactly - as the car slowly drove off, Ozzy still not moving a
muscle, his whole be¬ing tuned to the sounds of Sharon's
retreat. As the sounds of the car finally faded, to be replaced
by the sound of the now boiling spuds bubbling over, he exhaled
hugely.
“Thank fuck for that,” he
sighed. “Do you wanna drink?”
I didn't know what to say. Ozzy was then
supposed to be 'on' the wagon and I didn't want to get the
blame from Sharon for being the one that had caused him to fall
off - again. Before I could say anything though, he had yanked
open the large refrigerator door and pulled out a cold bottle
of white wine, of which there appeared to be a stack on the top
shelf; something French and expensive-looking. He looked in the
drawer for a corkscrew, couldn't find one - or not quickly
enough - lost patience and just pushed his thumb down on the
cork until it slid with an inverted pop into the wine. Then he
grabbed two pint beer glasses and emptied the contents of the
bottle into them. He shoved one of the pint-glasses in my hand,
two-thirds full of white wine and tiny bits of cork.
“Cheers!” he cried, downing
his own pint-glass of wine in one long, ungraceful haul, the
wine spilling down his chin onto his pinny. “Fucking
hell, I needed that!” he gasped as he set down the empty
glass with a loud thud. “Do you fancy another?” I
had barely started on my own pint of wine but Ozzy yanked
another bottle from the refrigera¬tor, applied the clearly
practised thumb and poured most of the contents into his glass
and a little top-up into mine. Down in one it went again. I
began to fret. What would Sharon say when she got back and
found him - us - like this? I had a glug from my own pint glass
and thought about it.
“What's Sharon going to say when she
sees you've - we've - been drinking?” I asked gingerly.
“Fuck it,” he said.
“I'll tell her it you made me.”
I chuckled nervously. A joke, it must be.
But he wasn't laughing. Instead he was working the cork down
into another bottle, the sweat of concentration dripping from
his nose…
The meal itself was a memorable affair.
Ozzy had laden the table with roast beef, Yorkshire pudding,
gravy, cabbage, carrots and peas, and a large bowl of
mashed-potato smothered with melted cheese and garnished with
parsley and thin slices of tomato. We filled our plates -
Sharon, the nanny, the kids and I. Sharon filled Ozzy's plate
for him as he didn't seem able to manage it. I don't know how
many pint-glasses of wine he had put down by the time Sharon
and the kids arrived home but I was onto my second which meant
he was probably onto his sixth or seventh.
To my astonishment, Sharon hadn't batted
an eye, just taken one look at her husband, then at me, clocked
what was going on and without a word went back to getting the
children ready for lunch. We all sat at the large table in the
dining room, bedecked with fresh flowers, sparkling silver
cutlery and large, pleasingly clunky cream-coloured crockery
sitting on a crisp white tablecloth. Sunlight streamed through
the tall bay windows looking out onto the pretty back garden.
Despite the fact that Ozzy, whose annunciation - the result of
a braying Brummy accent flecked with Los Angelino and sanded
down by years of drugs and alcohol - was slurred even at the
best of times, was now apparently beyond speech, lunch had
begun pleasantly, everyone chatting at once, the children all
smiles and silly jokes, Sharon very much the proud indulgent
mother sitting at the head of the table doing her best to
deflect attention away from the disaster seated next to her.
Then, about five minutes into the meal,
the light in Ozzy's eyes blinked out and his head very gently
lowered itself onto his plate until it came to rest in the peas
and potatoes. Ozzy began to snore, the gravy bubbling noisily
around his nose, his long blonde hair - as it still was then -
nestling onto the plate.
Nobody said anything. We just carried on
as normal, passing the peas over his head and making small
talk. As I was sitting opposite I couldn't help but stare
directly at him, face down in his food, and felt it rude not to
at least pass some comment.
“Um… I think Ozzy's fallen
asleep,” I said.
Sharon glanced over at him, as if noticing
her unconscious husband for the first time, then went back to
her meal, saying something pleasant to one of the children.
“Um… is he all right?” I
wondered out loud to no one in particular.
“Fuck him!” Sharon barked at
me. Then, smiling sweetly, “Pass the gravy please,
darling…” continue reading
