labour. The first thing I did was look for jobs in the back of the Birmingham Evening Mail. That week they happened to be running a special feature on occupations for people who’d just left school. I looked at them all—milkman, bin man, assembly-line worker, brickie, street cleaner, bus driver, that kind of thing—and decided on plumbing, because at least it was a trade. And I’d been told that I wouldn’t get anywhere in life without a trade. By the time I got the job I wanted it was late in the year and starting to get cold. I didn’t realise that plumbers work their arses off in the middle of winter, when all the pipes burst. So you spend most of your time bending over a manhole when it’s minus five degrees, freezing your fucking nut sack off. I didn’t last a week. It wasn’t the cold that did me in, though. I got fired for scrumping apples during my lunch break.
Old habits die hard.
My next job was less ambitious. It was at an industrial plant outside Aston. This place made car parts, and I was in charge of a big fucking degreasing machine. You’d get baskets full of bits—rods, springs, levers, whatever— and you dropped them into this vat of bubbling chemicals which cleaned them. The chemicals were toxic and there was a sign on top of the machine which said, ‘EXTREME HAZARD! PROTECTIVE MASKS MUST BE WORN AT ALL TIMES. NEVER LEAN OVER THE TANK.’
I remember asking what was in the vat and someone told me it was methylene chloride. I thought to myself, Hmm, I wonder if you can get a buzz off that stuff? So one day I pull down my mask and lean over the tank, just for a second. And I go, ‘Whooooooaaaah!’ It was like sniffing glue… times a fucking hundred. So every morning I started taking a whiff of the old degreasing machine. It was a lot cheaper than going down the pub. Then I started doing it twice a day. Then three times a day. Then every five fucking minutes. Trouble was, every time I leant over the vat I got a big black greasy face. So it didn’t take long for the other guys in the plant to work out what was going on. I’d be taking a tea break and they’d see my face covered in all this black stuff and they’d go, ‘You’ve been at that fucking degreasing machine again, haven’t you? You’ll fucking kill yourself, man.’
‘What do you mean?’ I’d say, all innocent.
‘It’s fucking toxic, Ozzy.’
‘That’s why I wear a protective mask at all times and never lean over the tank, just like the sign says.’
‘Bollocks. Stop doing it, Ozzy. You’ll kill yourself.’
After a few weeks it got to the point where I was just out of my brains all the time, wobbling around the place, singing songs. I even started to have hallucinations. But I kept doing it—I couldn’t stop myself. Then, one day I went missing for a while. They found me slumped over the tank, passed out. ‘Get ’im an ambulance,’ said the supervisor. ‘And don’t ever let that idiot back in this place again.’
My parents went nuts when they found out I’d been fired again. I was still living at 14
Lodge Road, and they expected me to chip in for the rent, even though I tried to spend as little time at home as possible. So my mum talked to her bosses and sorted me out with a job at the Lucas factory, where she could keep an eye on me. ‘It’s an apprenticeship, John,’ she said. ‘Most people your age would give their right arm for this kind of opportunity. You’ll have a skill. You’re going to be a trained car horn tuner.’
My heart sank.
A car horn tuner?
In those days, the working person’s mentality went like this: you got what little education you could, you found an apprenticeship, they gave you a shit job, and then you took pride in it, even though it was a shit job. And then you did that same shit job for the rest of your life.
Your shit job was everything. A lot of people in Birmingham never even made it to retirement.
They just dropped down dead on the factory floor.
I needed to get the fuck out before I got stuck in the same trap. But I had no idea how to leave Aston. I tried to do this ‘emigrate to Australia’ thing, but I couldn’t afford the ten-quid fare. I even tried to join the army, but they wouldn’t have me. The bloke in the uniform took one look at my ugly mug and said, ‘Sorry, we want subjects, not objects.’
So I took the job in the factory. I told my friend Pat that I’d got a gig in the music business.
‘What do you mean, the music business?’ he said.
‘Tuning stuff,’ I told him, vaguely.
‘What kind of stuff?’
‘Mind your own fucking business.’
On my first day at the Lucas plant the supervisor showed me into this sound-proofed room, where I’d do my shift. My job was to pick up the car horns as they came along a conveyor belt and put them into this helmet-shaped machine. Then you’d hook them up to an electrical current and adjust them with a screwdriver, so they went, ‘BAGH, BOOO, WEEE, URRH, BEEOOP.’ Nine hundred a day—that’s how many car horns they wanted tuned. They kept count, because every time you did one you clicked a button. There were five of us in the room, so that’s five car horns burping and beeping and booping all at the same time, from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon.
You came out of that fucking place with your ears ringing so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think.
This was my day:
Pick up horn.
Attach connectors.
Adjust with screwdriver.
BAGH, BOOO, WEEE, URRH, BEEOOP.
Put horn back on belt.
Click the button.
Pick up horn.
Attach connectors.
Adjust with screwdriver.
BAGH, BOOO, WEEE, URRH, BEEOOP.
Put horn back on belt.
Click the button.
Pick up horn.
Attach connectors.
Adjust with screwdriver.
BAGH, BOOO, WEEE, URRH, BEEOOP.
Put horn back on belt.
Click the button.
While I was doing this, my mum would be watching me proudly through this glass screen.
But after a couple of hours of listening to that fucking din I was starting to go insane. I was ready to murder someone. So I started to click the button twice for every horn I did, thinking I could knock off early. Anything to get out of that fucking booth. When I realised I was getting away with it, I started to click three times. Then four. Then five.
This went on for a few hours until I heard a tap-tap and a squeal of feedback from somewhere above me. The conveyor belt juddered to a halt. Then this angry voice comes over the Tannoy:
‘OSBOURNE. SUPERVISOR’S OFFICE. NOW.’
They wanted to know how come I’d done five hundred car horns in twenty minutes. I told them there was obviously something wrong with the clicker. They told me they weren’t born fucking yesterday and that the only thing wrong with the clicker was the fucking idiot operating it, and that if I did it again, I’d be thrown out on my fucking arse, end of story. Did I understand? I said, ‘Yeah, I understand,’ and sloped back to my little booth.
Pick up horn.
Attach connectors.
Adjust with screwdriver.
BAGH, BOOO, WEEE, URRH, BEEOOP.
Put horn back on belt.
Click the button.
After a few more weeks of this bullshit I decided to strike up a conversation with the old guy next to me, Harry.
‘How long have you be working ’ere?’ I asked him.
