all over the place while howling along to the music we were playing. We’d done it: Bubbles was absolutely shitfaced. It was brilliant—until poor old Bubbles passed out in the middle of the living room. I was terrified that I’d killed him, so I pulled the fairy lights off the tree and wrapped them around his body, so I could tell Sharon he’d electrocuted himself by accident. But he was all right, thank God—although he had a nasty hangover the next morning, and he kept giving me these dirty looks, as if to say, ‘I know what you did, you bastard.’
Bubbles wasn’t the only animal who lived with us at Outlands Cottage. We also had a donkey called Sally— who used to sit in the living room with me and watch Match of the Day—and a Great Dane and a German shepherd. The thing I remember most about those dogs is the time I came home from the butchers’ with some pigs hooves. I put them in a jar on the kitchen table, thinking I could use them in a good old fry up, but when Sharon walked into the room, she gagged and went, ‘Ozzy, what the fuck is that smell? And what are those disgusting-looking things on the table?’ When I told her, she literally retched. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ozzy,’ she said, ‘I can’t eat that, feed them to the dogs.’ So I gave the hooves to the dogs, and they both started to look very unwell immediately. Then one puked while the other one hosed down the walls with shit.
Poor old Pete Mertons got to the point where he just couldn’t take it any more. He was living with us at the time, and the craziness was never-ending. The last straw for him was when I downed one too many sleeping pills after an all-night drinking session and had to be taken to hospital to get my stomach pumped. When the doc asked my name, I just went, ‘Pete Mertens,’ then never thought any more of it. But when Pete went for a check-up a couple of months later, his doctor took him into his office, closed the door, and said to him, ‘Now then Mr Mertens, we can’t be having that behaviour, can we?’ Pete didn’t know what the fuck the doc was on about, and the doc just thought Pete was trying to pretend like it never happened.
I think the doc might even have sent him off for some counselling. And then eventually Pete found his file, with ‘sleeping pill overdose’ written at the top, and he went fucking mental with me.
Good bloke, Pete Mertens. Good bloke.
We moved so many times after we left Outlands Cottage that I can’t even remember half of the places. It was around this time that I learned my wife loves nothing more than buying and doing up houses. And because it takes so long to do them up, we always end up renting somewhere else while we’re waiting for the work to be done. Then, about three seconds after we’ve moved in, Sharon gets bored, so we sell up and buy another house— and we have to rent again while we’re doing that one up. It’s gone on like that for decades. Sometimes it feels like all we do with our money is renovate the Western fucking hemisphere. I got Sharon to count up all the houses once, and it turned out that in the twenty-seven years we’d been married, we’d lived in twenty-eight different places.
As I said, Sharon didn’t mind my drinking at first. She thought I was funny when I was drunk—probably ’cos she was usually drunk, too. But before long she changed her mind, and started to see the booze as being almost as bad as the coke. She said I’d gone from being a funny drunk to being an angry drunk. But one of the many problems with being an alcoholic is that when people tell you how bad you are when you’re drunk, you’re usually drunk. So you just keep getting drunk.
The funny thing is, I don’t even like the taste of booze. Not unless it’s drowned in fruit juice or some other sugary bullshit. It was always the feeling I was after. I mean, every now and again I enjoyed a good pint. But I never went to the pub to drink, I went to get fucking blasted.
I tried for a long time to drink like normal people do. When I was still married to Thelma, for example, I went to this wine-tasting at the Birmingham NEC. It was a food market or something around Christmas time. I thought, Fuck me, a wine tasting, that sounds like something a civilised, grown-up person might do. The next morning, Thelma said to me,
‘What did you buy?’ I said, ‘Oh, nothing.’ And she said, ‘Really? You must have bought something.’ I said, ‘Oh well, yeah—I guess I bought a couple of cases.’
Turned out I’d bought 144 cases.
I was so shitfaced, I’d thought I was buying 144 bottles. Then a delivery truck the size of the Exxon Valdez pulled up outside Bulrush Cottage and started unloading enough crates of wine to fill every room to the ceiling. It took months for me and the roadies to polish it all off.
When we finally emptied the last bottle, we all went down the Hand & Cleaver to celebrate.
Mind you, it’s all bullshit with wine, isn’t it? It’s just fucking vinegar with a fizz, no matter what the tasters say. I should know, I owned a wine bar once: Osbourne’s, we called it. What a crock of shit that place was. I remember saying to one of the merchants, ‘Look, tell me, what’s a good wine?’ And she says to me, ‘Well, Mr Osbourne, if you like Blue Nun at two quid a bottle, then that’s a good wine. And if you like Chateau du Wankeur at ninety-nine quid a bottle, then that’s a good wine.’ I didn’t listen. In those days, it was my ego that ordered the wine. The most expensive bottle on the whole list, just to be big-headed. Then I’d wake up the next morning with a two-hundred-quid hangover. But eventually I came to realise something about two-hundred-quid hangovers: they’re exactly the fucking same as two-quid hangovers.
It wasn’t until Sharon found out that she was pregnant that she really started to try and change the way I was living.
We were on tour in Germany at the time. ‘I think something’s going on,’ she said. ‘I’ve been feeling so sick lately.’ So I staggered out to buy one of those pregnancy dip-stick things—and it turned the colour it goes when your missus is expecting. I couldn’t believe it, because only a few months before Sharon had gone through a miscarriage after being attacked by one of her mother’s dogs. I got a right old bollocking for that, because I was standing right behind her when it happened. I heard the low growl of that Dobermann and just froze on the spot, completely stiff, instead of running over and biting its head off, or whatever the fuck I was supposed to do. I’m a chickenshit when it comes to stuff like that. And I had no idea she was pregnant. It was only when we went to the hospital afterwards that the docs told us.
So it was a big deal when the test was positive in Germany.
‘Let’s do one more test, just to make sure,’ I said.
It went the same colour as the first one.
‘I tell you what,’ I said, holding the little strip of paper to the light. ‘Let’s do one more, just to make really sure.’
We must have done five tests in the end. When we were finally convinced it was true, I remember Sharon saying to me, ‘Right, Ozzy, I’m going to tell you this once, so you’d better listen. If you ever, ever bring any cocaine into this house, I’m going to call the police and have you sent to prison. Do you understand me?’
I had absolutely no doubt whatsoever that she meant it.
‘I understand,’ I said.
‘And what about the shotguns, Ozzy?’
‘I’ll get rid of them.’
They were sold the next day. I knew I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to Aimee. So that was it: goodbye to the Benelli semi-automatic that I’d used to kill the chickens at Bulrush Cottage, along with all my other guns.
I carried on boozing, though. Even more so, without any coke in the house. I couldn’t stop.
But Sharon had lost all patience with that too, by then. The second I walked through the door, she’d be on my case.
You wouldn’t believe the things I’d do—the time and effort I would dedicate to sneaking a drink behind her back. I’d ‘pop to the supermarket’ next door, then walk straight through to the back of the grocery section, through the door to the store-room, climb out of the window at the back, jump over a wall, crawl through a hedge, and go to the pub on the other side. And then, after necking six pints in a row, I’d do the same in reverse.
The most unbelievable thing about my behaviour is that I was convinced it was entirely fucking normal.
Then I started trying to sneak booze into the house. One time, I got this big four-gallon bottle of vodka—the kind of bottle they put on display at a bar—but I couldn’t work out where to hide it. I ran around the house for ages, looking for the perfect place. Then it came to me: the oven! Sharon had never cooked a meal in her life, I said to myself, so she’d never look in there. And I was right: I got away with it for weeks. I’d say to Sharon, ‘I’ve just had an idea for a song. I think I’ll pop downstairs to the studio and get it down on tape.’ Then I’d pour myself a mug of vodka in the kitchen, neck it as fast as I could, and pretend like nothing had happened.
Then, one day, she twigged.
‘Sharon,’ I said, ‘I’ve just had an idea for a song. I think I’ll just—’
