credit cards, bank accounts and loans were in her name. Basically Don didn’t exist on paper, so if he didn’t pay his bills, he couldn’t be sued.
And that included his tax bills, which he just fucking ignored—in England and America. Which left Sharon on the hook for everything without her ever knowing it. Then one day, out of the blue, she got a letter from the IRS saying she owed them, big time. By the time they’d added up all the unpaid taxes, interest and penalties, it came to seven figures. Don had taken her to the fucking cleaners.
‘I don’t know what your father’s made of,’ I said to her, ‘because I could never do that to my children.’
It drove Sharon halfway round the bend, that tax bill.
In the end, I said, ‘Look, whatever you’ve got to pay, just pay it, because I don’t want to live another day with this fucking thing hanging over us. You can’t avoid tax, so just get it done, and we’ll cut back on our expenses and work around it.’ That kind of thing happens a lot in the music business. When Sammy Davis Jr died, I heard that he left his wife with a seven-million-dollar tax bill, which took her a fucking eternity to pay off.
And there ain’t nothing you can do about it. You’ve just got to put on a brave face and dig deep.
But it was worth going through all that bullshit with Don to get my freedom. All of a sudden I could do whatever I wanted, no matter what he said. Like when I was in New York one time and I met up with my lawyer, Fred Asis, a great guy, ex-military. He told me that he had a meeting later with another one of his clients, a band called Was (Not Was), who were going crazy because their lead singer hadn’t shown up at the studio for a session.
‘I’ll stand in for him, if you want,’ I said, half joking.
But Fred took it seriously. ‘OK, I’ll ask them,’ he said.
Next thing I know I’m in this studio in New York, doing a rap on this song called ‘Shake Your Head’. I had a right old laugh—especially when I heard the final version, which had all these hot young backing-singer chicks on it. I still love that song today. It’s funny, y’know, because I’d always admired the Beatles for starting out as a bubblegum pop group and then getting heavier and heavier as their albums went on, and here was me going in the opposite direction.
But it wasn’t until years later that I heard the full story. I was at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood, and Don Was was there. By that time he’d become one of the biggest producers in the music business, and Was (Not Was) were huge. I remember him rushing over to me and gasping, ‘Ozzy, I’ve gotta tell you something about that song we did, “Shake Your Head”. This is gonna blow your mind.’
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘Well, remember how we had all those backing singers on there?’
‘Yeah.’
‘One of them ended up going off on her own and making a few albums. You might have heard of her.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Madonna.’
I couldn’t believe it: I’d made a record with Madonna. I told Don to re-release it, but for whatever reason he couldn’t get clearance. So we ended up re-recording it, with Kim Basinger taking Madonna’s place.
I did quite a few duets back in the eighties. One with Lita Ford—‘Close My Eyes Forever’—ended up being a Top-Ten single in America. I even did a version of ‘Born to be Wild’ with Miss Piggy, but I was disappointed when I found out she wouldn’t be in the studio at the same time as me (maybe she’d found out about my job at the Digbeth slaughterhouse). I was just having some fun, y’know? It wasn’t about money. Although, after we bought out Don Arden and the publishers and had paid off our tax bills, the dough finally started to roll in. I remember opening an envelope from Colin Newman one morning, dreading another final demand.
Instead, there was a royalty cheque for $750,000.
It was the most money I’d ever had in my life.
After the divorce with Thelma went through, a part of me wanted to say to her, ‘Fuck you. Look at me—I’m fine.’
So I bought a house called Outlands Cottage in Stafford shire, not far from where she lived. It was a thatched house, and pretty much the first thing I did after moving in was to set the fucking roof on fire. Don’t ask me how I did it. All I remember is a fireman turning up in his truck, whistling through his teeth, and going to me, ‘Some house-warming party, eh?’ And then after he put the fire out, we got shitfaced together. Mind you, he might as well have let the place burn down, ’cos the smell of charred thatch is fucking horrendous, and it never went away after that.
Sharon hated Outlands Cottage from the get-go. She’d fuck off to London and wouldn’t want to come home. I suppose I’d half expected or wanted Thelma to call me up in tears and beg me to come back to her. She never did. Although she did call me once to say, ‘So, I see you got married again, YOU FUCKING ARSEHOLE,’ before slamming the phone down.
Eventually, I began to realise that as much as I loved being close to Jess and Louis, it was bad news, living around the corner from my ex-wife. At one point I even tried to buy back Bulrush Cottage. Then I made the mistake of taking Sharon with me when I went to see the kids.
It was fine until we dropped them off and went for a drink at a hotel. Then I got all pissed and sentimental. I told Sharon I never wanted to go back to America, that I missed my kids, that I missed living next to the Hand & Cleaver, that I wanted to retire. Then, when I refused to get in the car to go home—it was actually our accountant Colin Newman’s BMW, which we’d borrowed for the day—she went over the edge. She climbed into the driver’s seat, put it in gear, and floored the accelerator. It was fucking terrifying. I remember jumping out of the way and then legging it on to the lawn in front of the hotel. But Sharon just crashed the car through this flower bed and kept coming at me, with the wheels churning up all the grass and sending lumps of turf flying all over the place.
And it wasn’t just me she nearly killed.
I had this guy called Pete Mertens working for me at the time. He was an old schoolfriend—very skinny, very funny, used to wear these outrageous checked jackets all the time. Anyway, when Sharon drove through the flower bed, Pete had to throw himself into a rose bush to get out of the way. All I remember is him standing up, brushing off his jacket, and going,
‘Fuck this—this ain’t worth two hundred quid a week. I’m off.’ (Later, he changed his mind and came back. Working for us might have been dangerous, but at least it was interesting, I suppose.)
In the end, the hotel manager came out and someone called the police. By then, I was hiding in a hedge. So Sharon got out of the car, came over to the hedge, and threw all her rings and jewellery into it. Then she turned around, stomped away, and called for a taxi.
I was there the next day, smelly and hung over, sifting through the soil for a fifty-grand Tiffany’s rock.
There were some other wild times at Outlands Cottage, before I finally realised that Sharon was right, and that we should move. One night I met this very straitlaced bloke down the pub—an accountant, I think he was—but he came back to the cottage for a joint afterwards, and then passed out on the sofa. So while he was asleep I pulled off his clothes and threw them on the fire. The poor bloke woke up at six in the morning, stark bollock naked. Then I sent him home to his wife in one of my chain-mail suits. It still makes me laugh to this day, the thought of him clanking off towards his car, wondering how the fuck he’s gonna explain himself.
Another one of my favourite tricks at Outlands Cottage was to shave off people’s eyebrows while they were asleep. Believe me, there’s nothing funnier than a bloke with no eyebrows. People don’t realise that your eyebrows provide most of your facial expressions, so when they’re gone, it’s hard to show concern or surprise or any of those other basic human emotions. But it takes people a while to realise what’s wrong. At first, they just look in the mirror and think, Christ, I look like shit today. One guy I did it to ended up going to see his doctor, ’cos he couldn’t work out what the fuck was up.
I went through a period of giving the eyebrow treatment to everyone: agents, managers, roadies, assistants, friends, friends-of-friends. Whenever someone turned up to a management meeting with a face that didn’t look quite right, you knew they’d spent the weekend at my house.
Pete Mertens often ended up being an unwilling accomplice in my drunken practical jokes.
For example, one Christmas, I began to wonder what it would be like to get a dog pissed. So me and Pete got a piece of raw meat and put it at the bottom of a bowl of sherry, then we called over Sharon’s Yorkshire terrier—Bubbles, this one was called—and waited to see what would happen. Sure enough, Bubbles lapped up the bowl of sherry to get to the meat. Then about five minutes later he went cross-eyed and started to stumble around
