It’s October 2009 and I’m drinking tea with Ozzy Osbourne in his LA study, as he shows me a series of (really rather good) pointillist felt-tip sketches he’s been working on.
Everything about this seems hilariously unlikely, and when I make a “funny how life turns out” quip, the conversation naturally turns to bucket lists, to regrets, to death and whatever happens afterwards. “Hell,” Osbourne grumbles, “even if I do make it to heaven, you can bet your life that the toilet will stink.”
That was just one of many unforgettable lines that came back to me on Tuesday, as I read about the Black Sabbath frontman’s death. I’d met the heavy metal singer-turned-TV star on a number of occasions after moving to LA and getting to know his wife, Sharon, but that day I’d driven over to the couple’s home in the Hollywood Hills to interview him about his forthcoming autobiography, I Am Ozzy. The visit included a dip in the Osbournes’ infinity pool and a tour of Ozzy’s state-of-the-art recording studio in the basement.
Osbourne – then 60 and sober, with a tremor I’d put down to decades of drug and alcohol addiction – said he quite fancied a number one album before he died. (He went on to achieve this in 2022, with Patient No 9). He wanted a movie made of his life, too, “maybe with Johnny Depp playing me,” he told me. But more than anything, he said, shaking his shaggy, aubergine-coloured head sadly: “I’d like to go back in time and make better choices.”
For a moment, the atmosphere in that study threatened to become maudlin, and I struggled to think of a suitable mood elevator. “Oh, your choices weren’t so bad!” wouldn’t do, on account, you know, of the estimated 30 years lost to drugs and alcohol, of the time he threw himself off a 40-foot cliff because it seemed like “a good day to fly!”, the day he bit the head off a bat and threw it back into the crowd at a 1982 concert, the moment he snorted a line of ants and, of course, when he thought it might be a good idea to try and strangle Sharon. So, instead, I went with: “Seems like you’ve got pretty much everything you could wish for.”
I didn’t just mean the enduring career, the estimated £110m fortune and the incredible Hollywood mansion (complete with a 10ft poolside Buddha, burnished by the sun), but the wife who still clearly adored him and the kids who were forever calling or dropping by. Eight years later, as I watched Osbourne talking sweet gobbledygook to one of his baby grandsons by the pool, I remember thinking how curiously functional this supposedly dysfunctional family was.
Osbourne didn’t miss the booze or the drugs, he insisted on that 107-degree October day, when the velvet skull-and-crossbones slippers he was wearing were probably the most rebellious thing about him, and the gym was his last remaining addiction. “I got bored of always being f—ed up on something or other,” he explained, adding that “by far the most addictive thing I’ve ever put in my body is tobacco. By the end, I was chewing the gum, smoking the fake cigarettes, wearing the patches and smoking 20 a day. I tried cigars, but within a week I was smoking 30 Cohibas a day, and inhaling.”
For him – one of six children born in Aston, Birmingham, to a toolmaker father and a mother who worked for a firm specialising in car parts – money was always the most corruptive force, by far. “I was 18 when Sony offered us a deal for Black Sabbath. £105 they gave me – and I’d never seen so much cash in my f—ing life. From then onwards,” he told me, peering up at me through his tinted glasses, “I could get drunk morning, noon and night, and nobody would care. There isn’t another job in the world where you can turn up p—ed as a wheel and not get fired.”
One of the things that first attracted him to Sharon – the whip-smart daughter of his then manager, Don Arden – was that she suffered from the same “extreme personality” issues. I’ve rarely seen a couple more besotted – or dependent – on one another. I remember Osbourne looking over at his wife while she was feeding one of her 16 dogs grilled chicken breast from the lunch table, and saying: “If it weren’t for her, without a shadow of a doubt, I would be dead. My lady’s the greatest; I love her. For some reason, the shoe still fits, you know?”
Their bickering was legendary, of course. No wonder The Osbournes was such a hit. But when Sharon complained a little too loudly, her husband liked to come back with: “Sharon, it could be worse. You could be married to Sting.”
Despite their idyllic LA life, Osbourne admitted that he didn’t “want to spend the rest of my life in California. There’s so much bulls— out here, and the reality is, I’m English.” I’m glad he got to die in the country he loved surrounded by his family. I’m glad he got to play one last concert in Birmingham’s Villa Park, packed out by 45,000 fans and watched online by more than five million more metalheads. And Ozzy, if St Peter did wave you through those gates, I really hope you were wrong about that toilet.
