of a band. But if I was just the singer and we were all at the same level, how come I auditioned them? And how come I was talking about Blizzard of Ozz for years before I met them? And where the fuck are all their hit records, before and after the two albums with me?
People ask me why we didn’t just settle. But that’s what Michael Jackson did, and look what happened to him. If you’ve got a bit of hard-earned dough in the bank and you say to someone who’s suing you, ‘OK, how much will it cost to make this go away?’ that opens the door for every loony and arsehole in the world to try to get the next load off you. You have to stand up for yourself, ’cos it can be a nasty game, this business—especially when people think you go to bed at night on a big mountain of cash.
In the end Bob and Lee’s lawsuit got thrown out of every court in America. What really pisses me off is that Bob and Lee never said to me, ‘Ozzy, we’ve gotta sit down. We wanna have a talk to you.’ They just kept blasting off in all fucking directions. The first I knew about it was when I got served. They’d been creeping around behind my back, calling up other people who’d played on my albums and trying to get them involved. I’d done fuck-all wrong, but they made me feel like the criminal of the century, and it really got up my arse after a while.
Sharon protected me from a lot of the details, ’cos she knows how much I worry. In the end she just snapped and re-recorded Bob and Lee’s parts on those two albums. When they were re-released, a sticker was put on the covers telling people all about it. I didn’t have anything to do with that decision, and I can’t say I feel good about it. I told Sharon that I was uncomfortable with it, but I get it, y’know? I understand why she felt she had to do it. Every time we got past one hurdle, another one would come up. It never stopped. The case went on for twenty-five years after Blizzard of Ozz was recorded. All I wanted to do was get on with being a rock ’n’ roller, and instead I ended up being Perry fucking Mason, giving depositions here, there and everywhere.
What really kills me is that I worked with Bob for years, and I was very fond of him and his family. He’s a very talented bloke. We were good friends. I certainly didn’t turn around and sue him when they put my balls to the fire for ‘Suicide Solution’, even though he wrote some of the lyrics. But sometimes in life you’ve gotta move on. Eventually, I had to stop talking to him or seeing him, ’cos I was frightened I might say the wrong thing—and then it would be lawsuit time again. Also, I just hate fucking confrontations. It’s one of my biggest failings.
I never want to go through any of that bullshit again. Before I work with anyone now, I tell them to get themselves a lawyer, have their lawyer write up a contract with my lawyer, then read it, think about it, make sure they’re happy with it, make double and triple sure they’re happy with it, and then never say that anyone ripped them off.
Because I don’t do that—no matter what Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake might say.
My last good memory of the eighties, before everything went dark, was being sent to Wormwood Scrubs. Not because I’d broken the law again—amazingly—but because I was asked to play a gig there.
What a crazy experience that was. I might have been in a few police station lock-ups over the years, but I hadn’t set foot in a proper slammer since I’d walked out of Winson Green in 1966. The iron bars, the balconies, even the guards all looked the same as they had twenty years before, but it was the smell that really brought it all back to me: like a public shitter, times ten. Bad enough to make your eyes water. I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would want to work in one of those places. I suppose they’re all ex-army, so they’re used to it.
Maybe that’s what I would have done in the end if the army hadn’t told me to fuck off.
I was invited to do the gig because the prison had its own band, called the Scrubs, which had both guards and inmates in it. They’d written a song and donated the royalties to charity.
Then they wrote to me and asked if I fancied doing a gig with them. The deal was that they’d play a set, then I’d play my set, then we’d do a jam of ‘Jailhouse Rock’.
So we get to the prison and they let me through all the fences and gates and doors, then they show me into this back room where there’s a big fat guy making a pot of tea. He’s a nice jolly chap, very friendly, and offers me a cup of tea.
I ask him, ‘How long are you in here for, then?’
‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I’ll never get out of here.’
We keep chatting for a while and I’m drinking this cup of tea, but then curiosity gets the better of me and I say, ‘So, how come you’re in here for such a long stretch?’
‘I murdered eight people.’
That’s a bit heavy duty, I think, but we carry on talking. Then curiosity gets the better of me again. ‘So, how did you do it?’ I ask, taking another sip of my tea. ‘I mean, how did you kill all those people?’
‘Oh, I poisoned them,’ he says.
I just about threw the mug of tea at the wall. And whatever had been in my mouth came out of my nose. It’s funny, when you think of a murderer, you always picture some tall, dark, evil-looking monster. But it can be just a nice, normal, jolly fat bloke, with a loose wire somewhere.
The gig itself was surreal.
The smell of dope in the hall where we played almost knocked me off my feet. It was like a Jamaican wedding in there. Another thing that amazed me was that they had a bar right outside, where all the guards went. As for the members of the Scrubs, the bass player was a Vietnamese guy who’d burned thirty-seven people to death a few years earlier by pouring petrol through the letterbox of an underground club in Soho and putting a match to it (the biggest mass killing in British history at the time); the guitarist was a kid who’d murdered a drug dealer by beating him to death with an iron bar; and then there were a couple of guards who sang and played the drums.
I’ll never forget the moment when it was our turn to go on stage. Jake E. Lee had just left the band and Zakk Wylde had taken over as lead guitarist. He was young, with ripped muscles and long blond hair, and the second he walked out from the wings, the entire place started to wolf-whistle and scream, ‘Bend over, little boy, bend over, little boy!’ Then they all started to jump around, stoned out of their minds, while the riot-guards stood guard. It was insane. I’d said to Sharon before we went on, ‘At least if we’re crap, no one will walk out.’ Now I was thinking, No, they’ll just kill me.
At one point, I looked down and there in the front row was Jeremy Bamber, the bloke who murdered his entire family with a rifle at a farmhouse in Essex and then tried to make it look like his mentally ill sister had done it. His face had been on the front page of every tabloid in Britain for months. He gave me a big smile, did the old Bambinator.
At the end, when we were playing ‘Jailhouse Rock’, there was a full-on stage invasion, led by one of the kids who had tried to cut the head off that police officer, Keith Blakelock, during the Broadwater Farm riot. I knew it was him ’cos one of the guards on stage told me. The last thing I saw was this kid taking off a shoe and hitting himself on the head with it.
Fuck this for a game of soldiers, I thought. Nice seeing ya, I’m off now.
And I didn’t look back.
One morning, not long after that gig, Sharon asked me, ‘Did you have a good night last night, Ozzy?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘At Kelly’s birthday party. Did you have a good time?’
‘Yeah, I suppose.’
All I could remember was playing with the kids in the garden, making Jack laugh by tickling his tummy, telling a few funny jokes, and eating one too many slices of Kelly’s birthday cake. We’d even hired a clown for the occasion—a bloke called Ally Doolally—who’d put on a little puppet show. The rest was a bit of a blur, ’cos I’d also had one or two drinks.
‘You should have seen yourself,’ said Sharon.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘I mean you should have seen yourself.’
‘I don’t understand, Sharon. I was a bit tipsy, yes, but it was a birthday party. Everyone was a bit tipsy.’
‘No, honestly, Ozzy, you should have seen yourself. Actually, would you like to see yourself? I have a video.’
Oh crap, I thought.
Sharon had filmed the whole thing. She put the tape in the machine, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. In my mind, I’d been the fun dad that everyone wants to have around. Then I saw the reality. Jack was terrified and in
