No rock star had funnier stories, or was better at telling them, than Ozzy Osbourne.
In the early 2000s, in an interview with Q magazine, the legendary singer began the conversation by reminiscing about his boozy wedding to Sharon in 1982, and finished with a lovely story about meeting his hero Paul McCartney.
In between, he recalled his encounters with chimpanzees and elephants, with David Lee Roth and Van Halen, and with one of America’s daftest law enforcement officers.
Osbourne married Sharon (nee Arden) on 4 July 1982 in Maui, Hawaii.
“I was legless that day,” he said, unsurprisingly. “There were seven bottles of Hennessy [cognac] in the wedding cake. Nobody would eat it. I had a slice and was pissed for a week!”
In that period in the early ’80s, Osbourne’s theatrical stage show featured an actor with dwarfism who would be subjected to a mock hanging during the performance.
![Ozzy Osbourne (Irvine Meadows 1982) [08]. Goodbye to Romance - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/jjxiW9DOXDw/maxresdefault.jpg)
“His name was John Edward Allen,” Osbourne recalled. “And every night, we used to hang him on stage. After we played Goodbye To Romance, a ballad, I’d say, ‘Hang the bastard!’
“He had a harness that we hanged him from, but he carried a Swiss Army knife. I said, ‘What the fuck have you got that for?’ He said, ‘Sometimes the harness slips’. I said, ‘If you cut the fucking rope, you’ll fall to your death anyway!’
“After one show in some fucking Bible belt part of America, this cop came into the dressing room. He comes in like Robocop – the crash helmet, the goggles, the gun, the handcuffs. He says to me, ‘Those little fellas – do you hang one of those guys every night?’ I said yeah. He goes, ‘Where do you get them all from?’
“I pissed myself! I thought, ‘You gotta be fucking stoned! I had this vision of a truck filled with all these dwarves screaming, ‘No! No!’ This fucking guy honestly thought I collected them and hung one every night!”
The cover for Osbourne’s 1983 album Bark At The Moon – and the video for its title track – portrayed the singer as a werewolf.
“We filmed it in an old disused Victorian mental hospital,” he said. “It was fucking weird, man. The quality of the video was fucking two-bob, but the make-up was incredible. It was all human hair, and it took eight hours to do. I hated it. I’ve got as much patience as fucking fly. Believe me, it didn’t take eight hours to fucking rip it off!
“We shot the album cover at Shepperton studios, and I went to a restaurant looking like that. These two kids saw me and freaked out. It looked so real. The photographer wanted me to go outside and stand by a bus-stop, and I said, ‘If I do that I’ll give some old dear a fucking heart attack!’”
Another photo shoot from that period saw Osbourne posing with an elephant and a chimpanzee. Inevitably, this shoot did not progress without incident.
He explained: “We were on tour in California, and at the back of the venue there was a safari park. Sharon had this idea for me to do a photo session with this elephant and a monkey.
“So I get on this elephant’s shoulders and it walks over this bridge made of railway sleepers. Then its fucking foot goes through a rotten beam. This 9000-ton thing is leaning over, and when you’re up on there it’s like being on the roof of a house.
“Sharon’s going, ‘Smile!’ I go, ‘Sharon, the fucking thing’s falling over!’
“So I get off the elephant and they bring over this fucking chimpanzee and it freaks out when all the flashbulbs go off. It gets my thumb and bites into it. Sharon’s going, ‘Just fucking smile!’ And the fucking thing’s biting my thumb off!
“The woman trainer punched the chimp to get him off me. It was one of those fucking disaster days.”
Later in the ’80s, Osbourne adopted the big hair image popularised by the decade’s younger stars such as Mötley Crüe.
“I don’t know what the fuck I was smoking, or sniffing, but that image was outrageous! That fucking hairdo – I looked like I’d been cleaning fucking chimneys.
“It was very colourful in the ’80s. Back then, everybody looked like that. It was like Liberace meets metal.”
It was during this era that the Osbournes bought a home in rural Buckinghamshire, after an eventful period of house-hunting that included a viewing of a mansion owned by folk singer Roger Whittaker.
Osbourne recalled: “When we looked at Roger Whittaker’s house, I’d taken some colon cleanser the day before and I had to take a massive shit. I went into his toilet and by the time I was done the bowl was full. But there was no toilet paper, so I got up on tip-toe and wiped my arse on his curtains!”
Near the end of the Q interview, he talked briefly about his days in Black Sabbath and a disastrous 1978 tour that precipitated his departure from the band.
“It was the last tour,” he said. “Never Say Die. I quit but came back.
“We had Van Halen opening for us. Their singer David Lee Roth would watch me do my moves and then go on stage the next night and do what I’d done, so it looked like I was copying him!
“Sabbath was coming to an end. We were tired. We were fighting the world. The management were ripping us off and we were touring to pay our lawyers’ fees.”
He ended on a brighter note, recalling the first time he met a Beatle.
“Paul McCartney was great with me,” he smiled. “We were on the Howard Stern show. I was booked for 8.30 and my personal assistant Tony asked me, ‘Would you mind switching places with someone? I said, ‘Fuck off!’ He said, ‘Let me tell you who it is first. It’s Paul McCartney.’ I said, ‘It’s done!’
"That was the first time I ever met him. He was just a gentlemen, fucking great to meet. I told him, ‘I owe my life to you – if it wasn’t for you I don’t think I’d be here.’
“The Beatles era was electrifying. I came from Aston in Birmingham and I used to think, ‘How the fuck am I ever going to get out of this shit-hole?’ Then I heard She Loves You, and it took me on a journey. I have the photo of me with Paul at home. It’s signed by Paul. The frame it’s in is solid gold. Cost me $42,000.”
