BOOK OF THE DAY: KEVIN COURTNEYreviews I Am OzzyBy Ozzy Osbourne with Chris Ayres Sphere, 391pp. £20
OZZY OSBOURNE is probably the last person you’d rely on for an accurate account of his life. He’s spent much of the past 60 years either drunk, drugged-up or in the bewildered morning-after daze that’s become his trademark this past decade. But, with some help from his friends, family and writer Chris Ayres, the man known as the Prince of Darkness has managed to piece together enough fuzzy fragments of his life to make for an entertaining, expletive-filled account.
We know Ozzy as the doddery, clapped-out star of The Osbournes, MTV's hugely successful reality TV series. But it's worth reminding ourselves how he got to be that walking, wibbling rock 'n' roll cliche we've all come to love.
John “Ozzy” Osbourne was not spawned in some fetid Satanic pit, but born into a working-class family in Aston, Birmingham, in 1948. For him it was a hellhole, and he dreamed of salvation through rock ‘n’ roll.
He got a job in a slaughterhouse – where he killed animals without making the front pages – and he tried his hand at burglary, but decided after serving a short prison sentence that a job in pop music might be safer. As subsequent events show, his choice of career nearly killed him – several times.
He survived a collision between his tourbus and a light aircraft that killed his guitarist Randy Rhoads; years later, he survived a quad bike crash – at two miles per hour.
With his band, Black Sabbath, Ozzy rode the crest of a rock ‘n’ roll wave in the 1970s that became known as heavy metal. Sabbath were the original doom-metallers, purveying a sludgy, cod-Satanic rock sound that influenced generations of young metalheads.
It wasn't until he started his solo career in 1980 that he really played up the lager-swilling Lucifer image. He donned spangly capes and sported fake fangs for the benefit of MTV viewers – it was Spinal Tapto the power of darkness.
Ozzy really did bite the head off a bat at a concert in Des Moines, Iowa, in January 1982, earning a painful course of rabies shots for his trouble. But, he maintains, he didn’t know it was a live bat – he thought it was a rubber toy thrown onstage. He did knowingly bite the head off a dove in front of an assembled crowd of record executives, but that was less widely reported. Let’s face it, bats make better copy.
His volatile relationship with Sharon, the daughter of legendary manager Don Arden, who managed both Black Sabbath and Ozzy for a time, is lovingly detailed, their every row, bust-up and punching match remembered fondly. He met Sharon during Sabbath’s early days, and began an affair with her while still married to his first wife, Thelma. When he was fired by the band and kicked out of his house by Thelma, Sharon took him under her motherly wing, helped him build up a massive solo career and – invariably – dragged his lifeless form back to the hotel after each night on the tear.
Eventually, Ozzy became a bloated, irrelevant shadow of his former inglory. When he was turned down for a slot at Lollapalooza in the mid-1990s for being a “dinosaur”, Sharon organised Ozzfest, a hugely successful travelling extravaganza with Ozzy as figurehead.
When MTV came knocking to do a behind-the-picket-fence documentary on the Osbournes, it gave Ozzy a chance to rehabilitate his rock god status. Good thing he’s managed to get his story down while he still has a few brain cells left to burn.
Kevin Courtney is an Irish Timesjournalist