‘Thelma,’ I said, ‘I don’t think we have any more cake.’
‘Yes, we do, John, it’s in the kitch—’
‘WE. DON’T. HAVE. MORE. CAKE.’
‘Oh, I don’t want to be any trouble,’ said the vicar, standing up. Then he started to dab his brow with a handkerchief. Then he turned a funny colour.
I knew exactly what was coming next. You see, eating dope is very different to smoking it—it affects your whole body, not just your head. And it takes only the tiniest bit to send you over the edge.
‘Oh my,’ he said. ‘I think I’m feeling a little—’
BOOM!
‘Fuck! Vicar down!’ I shouted, rushing over to see if he was still breathing. Then I turned to look at Thelma. ‘What the fuck were you thinking?’ I said. ‘He’s gonna die! I told you not to touch that cake. He’s just eaten enough Afghan hash to knock out a bleedin’ elephant!’
‘How was I supposed to know the cake was dodgy?’
‘Because I told you!’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘It’s in a tin with a skull and crossbones on the top!’
‘So what are we going to do?’ said Thelma, turning white.
‘We’re going to have to move the body, that’s what we’re going to have to do,’ I said.
‘Here, take his legs.’
‘Where are we taking him?’
‘Back to wherever he lives.’
So we carried the vicar to his car, put him on the back seat, found his address in the glove compartment, and I drove him home. He was out cold. Part of me honestly thought he was a goner, although I’d been drinking most of the day, so I can’t say I was thinking completely straight. All I knew is that for a man of the cloth—or anyone else—that much of my hash in one go could be lethal. But I kept telling myself that he’d just wake up with a really bad hangover, and we’d be OK.
When I got to his house I dragged him out of his car and propped him up on the steps to the front door. If I’d have been cleverer, I would have wiped my fingerprints off the car, but I just felt so terrible about what had happened, and I so badly wanted to believe that he’d be fine, I can honestly say it never even entered my head.
Still, I spent the entire night lying awake, waiting for the sirens. Clearly, I’d be the first person to get a knock on the door in the middle of the night if they did any tests on the vicar’s body. Who else in his parish would have given him a lethal slice of hash cake? But there were no sirens that night. And none the next day, either.
Then more days passed. Still nothing.
I was out of my fucking mind with guilt. So was Thelma.
But I didn’t want to go anywhere near the vicarage—it might look a bit suspicious—so every time I went to the Hand & Cleaver I’d make subtle enquiries. ‘Anyone bumped into the vicar lately?’ I’d say, all casual. ‘He’s a nice bloke, that vicar, isn’t he? I wonder what his sermon will be about on Sunday.’ Eventually someone mentioned that he must be off sick, ’cos he’d missed church and no one had seen him for a while.
That’s it, I thought. I killed him. I wondered if I should turn myself in. ‘It was an accident, Your Honour,’ I imagined myself saying to the judge. ‘A terrible, terrible accident.’ This went on for at least a week.
Then, one day, I walked into the pub and there he was, at the bar, in his frock, sipping a cranberry juice.
I almost hugged the bloke and gave him a kiss.
‘Oh, er, hello there, Vicar,’ I said, going light in the head with relief.
‘Ah, Mr Osbourne,’ he said, shaking my hand. ‘You know the funniest thing? I can’t remember how I got home from your house the other day. And the next morning I had this terrible, terrible flu.’
‘I’m very sorry to hear that, Vicar.’
‘Yes, yes, a very nasty business, that flu.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘I’ve never had flu like it.’
‘Well, I’m glad you’re feeling bett—’
‘I was having hallucinations for three days, you know? The most curious experience. I convinced myself that Martians had landed on the Vicarage lawn and were trying to organise a tombola.’
‘That’s terrible, Vicar. I hope you’re feeling better now.’
‘Oh, much better, thank you. Although I must have put on 40 pounds this week, I’ve been so incredibly hungry.’
‘Listen, Vicar,’ I said. ‘If there’s anything I can do for the church, anything at all, just let me know, OK?’
‘Oh, how kind of you. Do you play the organ, by any chance?’
‘Er, no.’
‘But you are in some kind of pop group, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Tell me, what do you call yourselves?’
‘Black Sabbath.’
‘Oh.’ The vicar frowned for a while. Then he looked at me and said, ‘That’s a rather peculiar name, isn’t it?’
6. The End Is Nigh
We recorded the next Black Sabbath album in a haunted house, out in the middle of absolutely fucking nowhere. I don’t know whose brilliant idea that was, but it wasn’t mine, that’s for sure. The name of the place was Clearwell Castle. It was in the Forest of Dean, on the Welsh border, and it scared the crap out of us from day one. It had a moat, a portcullis, four-poster beds in the rooms, big fireplaces everywhere, animal heads on the walls, and a big old dark musty dungeon, which we used as our rehearsal room. It had been built in 1728 on the site of an old Tudor manor house, and the locals told us that a headless figure would roam the corridors at night, moaning and wailing. We just laughed it off, but as soon as we’d unpacked our bags, we all started to get the willies, big time. At least that took the pressure off us, as far as the next album was concerned. We were more worried about sleeping alone in these spooky old rooms with swords and armour on the walls than coming up with another million-selling LP. We weren’t so much the Lords of Darkness as the Lords of Chickenshit when it came to that kind of thing. I remember when we went to see The Exorcist that Christmas in Philadelphia: we were so freaked out, we had to go and watch The Sting afterwards to take our minds off it. Even then, we all ended up sleeping in the same hotel room, because we were scared out of our minds. It’s funny, because years later Linda Blair—who played the satanic kid in that movie—ended up dating my mate Glenn Hughes from Deep Purple. She definitely liked musicians, it turned out. She even went out with Ted Nugent once. But she wouldn’t go near me.
Not a fucking chance.
Clearwell Castle certainly wasn’t our first choice of venue for making the new album. The plan had initially been to go back to the Bel Air mansion to write the next record, but then we found out we wouldn’t be able to do any recording in LA, because Stevie Wonder had installed a giant synthesizer in our favourite room at the Record Plant. So that idea was shelved. Probably a good job, too: we’d almost killed ourselves with cocaine the last time we’d made a record in LA. At Clearwell Castle, meanwhile, the only danger was scaring ourselves to death.
And of course we tried very, very hard to do just that.
We hadn’t been there a day before the practical jokes started. I was the first culprit: I realised that if you put a cartridge in our eight-track machine and turned down the volume all the way, when it reached the end of a song it would make this loud CHA-CHUNK-CHICK noise, which would echo off the stone walls. So I hid the machine under Tony’s bed. Just before he turned in for the night—after we’d spent the evening putting the willies up each other with a seance in the dungeon—I sneaked into his room, pressed ‘play’, and set the volume to zero.
Then I ran out and hid in the room next door.
