On July 5, 1986, Ozzy Osbourne was in Sacramento, California, during a long tour in support of his latest album The Ultimate Sin. This was a few weeks before he headlined the biggest UK event of the year for heavy metal fans – the Monsters Of Rock festival at Donington Park. As a writer for weekly music paper Sounds, I travelled to Sacramento with photographer Peter Anderson to write a cover story on Ozzy. Things did not go exactly to plan.
The show that Ozzy performed in Sacramento began with a joke. Before his big entrance, a roadie stood centre stage holding up a placard with the letter R on one side and the letter Z on the other. The letters were flashed in sequence and eventually the audience was shouting in unison: “Ar! Zee! Ar! Zee!”
In 1986, hair metal was at its zenith, and not even the self-proclaimed Prince of Darkness was immune to this.
The man who had fronted Black Sabbath, the heaviest and darkest band of its time, was now sporting fluffy blond hair and a glittery outfit better suited to a cabaret singer. He was also carrying plenty of excess weight from all the booze he was sinking.
Within a few minutes of the show ending with a final encore of Paranoid, the Sounds duo joined him on his tour bus for a short ride to a five-star hotel, during which he insisted on listening to Peter Gabriel’s track Sledgehammer over and over, at deafening volume.
In the hotel bar we found a quiet corner in which to do the interview. As beers and shots were laid out on the table, Ozzy said: “I’ve had my first drink tonight in nineteen days.” This claim seemed to become less believable as the conversation developed.
He talked about his life as a performer. “I’m not one of these guys who goes around analysing everything. I’m not one of these fucking intellectuals. I just get up there and do it.”
He talked about his role as a father. “I’m a very good parent. Or I try to be. A very loving parent.”
He reminisced about his childhood. “I was a nutcase. A rogue. A rebel. A vagabond. Misunderstood and all that shit.”
But mostly he talked about booze and drugs. “I do try to keep myself sane these days. I don’t take drugs, and I drink as little as I can. But I have benders and I go off for a while.
“It’s still there, the drink problem. I used to be out there all the time. That’s where all the craziness comes from – me being fucked up on cocaine and booze all the time. I used to be a terrible coke freak.”
He went on: “I shouldn’t be drinking at all, but in rock’n’roll what do you do? You come off stage, you’re full of beans, you’ve done a great show, what are you gonna do? Sit there in the back of your limo playing with your dick?”
He concluded: “What I’m saying is, I’m trying to fight this thing, but I cannot see the day when I’ll ever stop totally. You can’t rock’n’roll and not drink.”
After an hour, he departed the Sounds interview with a warning, delivered with a smile: “You’ve got nice eyebrows.”
A favourite trick of his was to shave one eyebrow off anyone he caught asleep or passed out drunk. This left the victim with a terrible dilemma: walk around with one eyebrow until the other grew back, or shave off the other eyebrow as well and look even weirder.
Ozzy had agreed to continue the interview the following day. It never happened.
Later that night he had received a call from his wife Sharon, at home in Los Angeles, telling him that their infant son Jack, just eight months old, was seriously ill.
With that, Ozzy went off the rails once again.
He finally emerged the following evening for the Sounds photo shoot. He was drinking banana brandy – a ghastly concoction – and insisted that we all have one.
He was so plastered that his loyal assistant Tony Dennis had to hold him around the waist to keep him upright while Peter Anderson took his portrait.
By this point Ozzy was rambling incoherently about chartering a flight to LA so we could finish the interview on the beach near his home. When he suggested doing the interview on jet-skis, it wasn’t completely evident that he was joking.
A day later, when I returned to the UK, Sounds editor Tony Stewart called me after he’d seen Peter Anderson’s photos of a glassy-eyed Ozzy. Peter had described Ozzy’s condition during the shoot. Tony told me to report what I had seen – and not to whitewash the story. “If you want to make friends,” he advised, “join a fucking country club.”
So I wrote about Ozzy the alcoholic. The headline on Sounds’ cover read: OZZY OSBOURNE – STILL DEMENTED AFTER ALL THESE YEARS.
There was one last surprise. On the day that the issue of Sounds went on sale, Sharon Osbourne called me. I braced myself for a foul-mouthed rant. Instead, she said she enjoyed the feature and admired my honesty.
Was she joking?
Don’t ask me. I don’t know.
