there, like the day they were laid. I just thought, He fucking did it in the end, my old man.
You couldn’t wipe the smile off my face for the rest of the day.
I miss my dad a lot, even now. I just wish we could have sat down and had a good old man-to-man conversation about all the stuff I never knew to ask him when I was a kid, or was too pissed and busy being a rock star to ask him when I was in my twenties.
But I suppose that’s always the way, isn’t it?
The day I left Black Sabbath, we were at Rockfield Studios in South Wales, trying to record a new album. We’d just had another soul-destroying meeting about money and lawyers, and I couldn’t take it any more. So I just walked out of the studio and fucked off back to Bulrush Cottage in Thelma’s Mercedes. I was shitfaced, obviously. And then, like a pissed dickhead, I started to slag off the band in the press, which wasn’t fair. But y’know, when a band splits up, it’s like a marriage ending—for a while, all you want to do is hurt each other. The bloke they found to replace me after I walked out was another Brummie, called Dave Walker, a guy I’d admired for a long time, actually—he’d been with Savoy Brown and then Fleetwood Mac for a while.
But for whatever reason things didn’t work out with Dave, so when I came back a few weeks later, everything was back to normal—on the surface, at least. No one really talked about what happened. I just turned up in the studio one day—I think Bill had been trying to act as peacemaker on the phone—and that was the end of it. But it was obvious things had changed, especially between me and Tony. I don’t think anyone’s heart was in what we were doing any more. Still, as soon as I came back, we picked up where we’d left off with the album, which we decided to call Never Say Die.
By now, we were starting to get our finances sorted out, thanks to Colin Newman, who advised us to make the album as tax exiles in another country, to avoid having to give 80 per cent of all our dough to the Labour government. We chose Canada, even though it was January and would be so cold that we wouldn’t be able to walk outside without our eyeballs freezing over. So we booked ourselves into Sounds Interchange Studios and flew off to Toronto.
But even three thousand miles away from England the old problems soon came up again.
For example, I spent just about every night getting seriously fucked-up at a place called the Gas Works, opposite the apartment block where I was staying. One night I went over there, came back, passed out, and woke up an hour later with this incredible heartburn. I remember opening my eyes and thinking, What the fuck? It was pitch black, but I noticed this red glow in front of me. I had no idea what it was. Meanwhile, the heartburn was getting worse and worse. Then suddenly I realised what had happened: I’d fallen asleep with a cigarette in my hand. I was on fire! So I jumped out of bed, tore off my clothes, bundled them up with the smouldering sheets, ran to the bathroom, dumped the whole lot in the bath, turned on the cold water, and waited for the smoke to clear. By the time I was done, the room was a fucking bomb site, I was stark bollock naked, my sheets were ruined and I was freezing to death.
I was thinking, What the fuck do I do now? Then I had an idea: I ripped down the curtains and used them as sheets instead. It worked great, until the boot-faced maid came in the next morning.
She went mental.
‘WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY APARTMENT?’ she screamed at me. ‘GET OUT! GET OUT! YOU ANIMAL!’
Things weren’t going much better in the studio. When I mentioned in passing that I wanted to do a side project of my own, Tony snapped, ‘If you’ve got any songs, Ozzy, you should give them to us first.’ But then whenever I came up with an idea, nobody would give me the time of day. I’d say, ‘What do you think of this, then?’ and they’d go, ‘Nah. That’s crap.’
Then, one day, Thelma called the studio and said she’d just had a miscarriage, so we all packed up our stuff and went back to England. But going home didn’t improve things between us, to the point where me and Tony weren’t speaking to each other at all. We didn’t argue.
The opposite, really: just a complete lack of communication. And during the last sessions for the album in England, I’d given up. Tony, Bill and Geezer decided they wanted to do a song called ‘Breakout’, with a jazz band going da-dah-da-dah, DAH, and I just went, Fuck this, I’m off. That’s why Bill sang the vocals on ‘Swinging the Chain’. The bottom line was that
‘Breakout’ was stretching it too far for me. With tracks like that on the album, I thought, we might as well have been called Slack Haddock, not Black Sabbath. The only impressive thing about that jazz band as far as I was concerned was how much they could drink. It was incredible. If you didn’t get the takes done by midday, you were fucked, ’cos they were all too pissed.
Never Say Die bombed like none of our albums had ever done before in America, but it did OK in Britain, where it went to number twelve in the album charts, and got us a slot on Top of the Pops. Which was good fun, actually, ’cos we got to meet Bob Marley. I’ll always remember the moment he came out of his dressing room—it was next to ours—and you literally couldn’t see his head through the cloud of dope smoke. He was smoking the biggest, fattest joint I’d ever seen—and believe me, I’d seen a few. I kept thinking, He’s gonna have to lip-synch, he’s gonna have to lip-synch, no one can do a live show when they’re that high. But no—he did it live. Flawlessly, too.
There were other good things happening for Black Sabbath around that time, too. For example, after sorting out our finances, we’d decided to hire Don Arden as our manager, mainly because we’d been impressed by what he’d done for the Electric Light Orchestra. And for me, the best thing about being managed by Don Arden was getting to see his daughter Sharon on a regular basis. Almost immediately, I began falling in love with her from a distance. It was that wicked laugh that got me. And the fact that she was so beautiful and glamorous—she wore fur coats, and had diamonds dripping from everywhere. I’d never seen anything like it.
And she was as loud and crazy as I was. By then, Sharon was helping to run the business with Don, and whenever she came over to see the band, we’d end up having a laugh. She was great company, was Sharon—the best. But nothing happened between us for a long time.
But I knew it was all over with Black Sabbath, and it was clear they’d had enough of my insane behaviour. One of my last memories of being with the band was missing a gig at the Municipal Auditorium in Nashville during our last US tour. I’d been doing so much coke with Bill while driving between shows in his GMC mobile home that I hadn’t slept for three days straight. I looked like the walking dead. My eyeballs felt like someone had injected them with caffeine, my skin was all red and prickly, and I could hardly feel my legs. But at five o’clock in the morning on the day of the gig, after we pulled into town, I finally hit the sack at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. It was the best fucking sleep I’d ever had in my life. It was like being six feet under, it was so good. And when I woke up, I felt almost normal again.
But I didn’t know that the key I’d used to get into my room was from one of the other Hyatt hotels we’d stayed at earlier in the tour, in another city. So while my bags had been sent to the right room by the tour manager, I’d gone to the wrong room. Which wouldn’t normally have been a problem: the key I had in my pocket just wouldn’t have worked and I would have gone down to reception and realised the mistake. But when I got to the room, the maid was still in there, plumping the pillows and checking that the minibar was full. So the door was open and I walked straight in. I just showed her the key—which had the right number and the Hyatt logo on it—and she smiled and told me to enjoy my stay. Then she closed the door behind her while I got into the wrong bed in the wrong room and fell asleep.
For twenty-four hours.
In the meantime, the gig came and went. Of course, the hotel sent someone up to my room to look for me, but all they found was my luggage. They had no idea I was zonked out on a different floor, in another wing of the hotel. The lads panicked, my ugly mug was plastered all over the local TV stations, the cops set up a special missing persons unit, the fans began to plan a candlelit vigil, the insurance company was on the phone, venues across America were preparing for the tour to be cancelled, the record company went apeshit, and Thelma thought she’d become a widow.
Then I woke up.
The first thing I did was call down to the front desk and ask them what time it was. ‘Six o’clock,’ the woman told me. Perfect timing, I thought. The gig was at eight. So I got out of bed and started looking for my suitcase. Then I realised that everything seeemed very quiet.
So I called back down to the front desk.
‘Morning or evening?’ I asked.
