We went back to Regent Sound in Soho to make the second record, although we’d spent a few weeks beforehand rehearsing in an old barn at Rockfield Studios in South Wales. Studio time cost a fortune back then, so we didn’t want to fuck around when the meter was running. And once our work was done at Regent Sound we moved to Island Studios in Notting Hill to do the final mix. That was when Rodger Bain realised we needed a few extra minutes of material. I remember him coming down from the control room one lunch break and saying,
‘Look, lads, we need some filler. Can you jam something?’ We all wanted to get started on our sandwiches, but Tony launched into this guitar riff while Bill played around with some drum patterns, I hummed a melody, and Geezer sat in the corner, scribbling down some lyrics.
Twenty minutes later, we had a song called ‘The Paranoid’. By the end of the day, it had become just ‘Paranoid’.
It’s always the way with the best songs: they come out of nowhere, when you’re not even trying. The thing with ‘Paranoid’ is that it doesn’t fit into any category: it was like a punk song years before punk had been invented. Mind you, none of us thought it was anything special when we recorded it. To us, it just seemed a bit half-arsed compared with ‘Hand of Doom’ or
‘Iron Man’ or any of those heavier numbers. But fucking hell, it was catchy; I was humming it all the way home from the studio. ‘Thelma,’ I said, when I got back to Edgbaston. ‘I think we might have written a single.’
She just gave me a look that said, That’ll be the day.
It’s funny, y’know: if you’d told us at the time that people would still be listening to any of those songs forty years into the future—and that the album would sell more than four million copies in America alone—we would have just laughed in your face.
But the fact is Tony Iommi turned out to be one of the greatest heavy rock riff-makers of all time. Whenever we went into the studio we’d challenge him to beat his last riff—and he’d come up with something like ‘Iron Man’ and blow everyone away.
But ‘Paranoid’ was a different class again. About two seconds after the suits at Vertigo heard that song, the name of the whole album became Paranoid. It wasn’t that they thought War Pigs might upset Americans because of Vietnam—at least not as far as I know. No, they were just freaking out about our little three-minute pop song, because they thought it might get played on the radio, and bands like ours never got played on the radio. And it made sense to give the album the same title as the single, to make it easier to promote in the record shops.
The suits were right. ‘Paranoid’ went straight to number four in the British singles chart and got us on Top of the Pops—alongside Cliff Richard, of all people. The only problem was the album cover, which had been done before the name change and now didn’t make any sense at all. What did four pink blokes holding shields and waving swords have to do with paranoia? They were pink because that was supposed to be the colour of the war pigs. But without ‘War Pigs’ written on the front, they just looked like gay fencers.
‘They’re not gay fencers, Ozzy,’ Bill told me. ‘They’re paranoid gay fencers.’
Top of the Pops was probably the biggest thing I’d done in my entire life at that point.
Every week when I was growing up in Aston, the entire Osbourne family would get together around the telly to watch that show. Even my mum loved it. So when my folks heard I was going to be on, they were speechless. In those days, fifteen million people tuned in to Top of the Pops every week, and Pan’s People were still doing those hippy dances between the numbers.
It was fucking awesome, man.
I remember being really impressed by Cliff Richard, ’cos he did his song live, with a full orchestra.
We didn’t take the piss out of him or anything—after all, it hadn’t been that long since I’d been singing ‘Living Doll’ in front of my parents. I think the song he did was ‘I Ain’t Got Time Any More’. I haven’t seen the tape for years—maybe it was wiped so the reels could be re-used, which was the BBC’s policy back then. I’ll tell you one thing, though: I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if Cliff looked older on that 1970 Top of the Pops episode than he does now. He ages in reverse, that bloke. Every time I see him, he’s lost another couple of years.
When it was our turn to go on, my whole body went numb with fear. The other three didn’t have to play a note—they just had to look the part and tap their feet in time to the backing track. But I had to sing live. It was my first time on telly and I was shitting myself like I’d never shit myself before. Pure terror. The inside of my mouth was so dry, it felt like I had a ball of cotton wool in there. But I got through it.
My mum and dad watched us at home on the telly—or so my brothers told me a few days later.
If they were proud, they didn’t say so. But I like to think they were.
That song changed everything for us. And I loved playing it. For a week or two we even had screaming girls showing up at our gigs and throwing their knickers at us, which was a nice change, although we were obviously a bit worried about pissing off our regular fans.
Straight after Top of the Pops, we did a gig in Paris, and at the end of the show this beautiful French chick stayed behind. Then she took me back to her place and fucked the shit out of me. I didn’t understand a word she said the entire night.
Which is sometimes the best way with one-night stands.
I thought America was fabulous.
Take pizza, for example. For years, I’d been thinking, I wish someone would invent a new kind of food. In England, it was always egg and chips, sausage and chips, pie and chips…
anything and chips. After a while it just got boring, y’know? But you couldn’t exactly order a shaved Parmesan and rocket salad in Birmingham in the early seventies. If it didn’t come out of a deep-fat fryer, no one knew what the fuck it was. But then, in New York, I discovered pizza. It blew my mind wide fucking open. I would buy ten or twenty slices a day. And then, when I realised you could buy a great big pizza all for yourself, I started ordering them wherever we went. I couldn’t wait to get back home and tell all my mates: ‘There’s this incredible new thing. It’s American and it’s called pizza. It’s like bread, but it’s better than any bread you’ve tasted in your life.’ I even tried to recreate a New York pizza for Thelma one time. I made some dough, then I got all these cans of beans and pilchards and olives and shit and put them on top—it must have been about fifteen quid’s worth of gear —but after ten minutes it just came dribbling out of the oven. It was like somebody had been sick in there. Thelma just looked at it and went, ‘I don’t think I like pizza, John.’ She never called me Ozzy, my first wife. Not once in the entire time I knew her.
Another incredible thing I discovered in America was the Harvey Wallbanger—a cocktail made with vodka, Galliano and orange juice. They knocked your fucking head off, those things. I drank so many Wallbangers that I can’t even stand the smell of them now.
One whiff and I’ll vomit on cue.
And then there were the American chicks, who were nothing like English chicks. I mean, when you pulled a chick in England, you gave her the eye, one thing led to another, you took her out, you bought her this and that, and then about a month later you asked if she fancied a good old game of hide the sausage. In America, the chicks just came right up to you and said,
‘Hey, let’s fuck.’ You didn’t even have to make any effort.
We found that out on our first night, when we stayed at a place called Loew’s Midtown Motor Inn, which was on Eighth Avenue and 48th Street, a sleazy part of town. I couldn’t sleep, ’cos I had jet lag, which was another wild new experience. So I’m lying there, wide awake at three o’clock in the morning, and there’s a knock on the door. I get up to answer it, and there’s this scrawny-looking chick standing there in a trench coat, which she unbuttons in front of me. And she’s completely starkers underneath.
‘Can I come in?’ she whispers, in this throaty, sexy voice.
What was I supposed to say? ‘No thanks, darlin’, I’m a bit busy.’
So, of course, I go to town on this chick until the sun comes up. Then she picks up her coat off the floor, gives me a peck on the cheek, and fucks off.
Later, when we’re all at breakfast, trying to work out where you put the maple syrup—Geezer was pouring it over his hash browns—I go, ‘You’ll never guess what happened to me last night.’
‘Actually,’ said Bill, with a little cough, ‘I think I can.’
Turned out we’d all had a knock on our door that night: it was our tour manager’s
‘Welcome to America’ present. Although, judging by the way my chick looked in daylight—she couldn’t have been a day under forty—he’d got obviously a bulk deal.
During the two months of our American tour, we covered distances that we couldn’t have imagined back in England. We played the Fillmore East in Manhattan. We played the Fillmore West in San Francisco. We even went
