years earlier, and someone had wanted a photograph of me and him and Grace Jones, so we posed for this picture, but I was off my nut on booze and coke, and ended up making all these crazy faces. I got the impression Clapton was either scared of me or just didn’t like me, and for some reason I became convinced he’d personally called up the photographer and had the picture destroyed.
So when I saw him at that meeting, I fucked off as fast as I could out of a back door. Then I saw him there again a few days later, and again I tried to avoid him, but this time Clapton went after me.
‘Ozzy!’ he shouted, as I was about to cross the street to my car.
‘Oh, er, hello, Eric,’ I went.
‘You living over here now?’ he asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘How are you finding it?’
And it went on from there. We had a really nice chat, actually. And then a fortnight later I was browsing through a magazine and there was the picture of me and Eric Clapton and Grace Jones, with me pulling a stupid face and Eric smiling. I’d been imagining the whole thing.
I still hated those AA meetings, though. Eventually I stopped going completely. Whenever I fell off the wagon, I’d just get someone to come over and do one of those home detox things to get me back on the right track again. I was really into all that stuff for a while. Potions, massages, organic herbal fruit baths—any bollocks you can imagine, I did it. Then, one day, this bloke came over and gave me a bottle of colon-cleansing solution.
‘Flush yourself out with this stuff every morning,’ he said, ‘and you’ll feel absolutely amazing, I promise.’
I didn’t get around to using it for a long time—I didn’t fancy the thought of it, to be honest with you—but then finally, one morning, I said to myself, ‘Fuck it, I bought the stuff, I might as well give it a go.’ The solution was made from seed husks, and the instructions said you just had to pour yourself a glass of it and down in it one, before it had a chance to expand in your throat. So that’s what I did. It tasted fucking horrendous—like wet sawdust, but worse. Then I went out with Sharon to look at houses, which was actually a rarity for me, because as far as I’m concerned there’s nothing fucking worse than house-hunting. But on this occasion Sharon really wanted me to see a place that was owned by Roger Whittaker, the easy-listening guy, because it had a recording studio in the basement. I had nothing else going on, so I couldn’t say no.
When we get to the house, the estate agent is waiting for us outside. She’s a posh chick in her late thirties, green Barbour jacket, pearls, the whole deal. Then she gets out this big chain of keys and lets us in through the front door. But as soon as I step foot inside the hallway, I begin to feel this apocalyptic rumbling in my arse. I’m thinking, Aye-aye, here we go, the colon cleanser’s kicking in. So I ask the chick where the nearest bog is, shuffle over there as fast as I can without looking conspicuous, slam the door behind me, sit down, and set free this massive torrent of liquid shit. It goes on for so long, it feels like I’m giving birth to the Mississippi River. When it’s finally over, I start looking around for some shit roll. But there isn’t any. I stand up and think, Fuck it, I’ll just have to go unwiped until we get home. Then I realise the shit’s gone all over the back of my legs, so I don’t have any choice—I’ve got to wipe myself down with something. But there isn’t even a flannel.
So I end up just standing there, trousers down, paralysed, trying to work out what to do.
Then Sharon knocks on the door.
Bam! Bam! Bam!
‘Ozzy? Are you OK?’
‘I’m, er, fine, thank you, darling,’ I say.
‘You’re taking an awfully long time.’
‘Won’t be long, darling.’
‘Hurry up.’
Finally, it comes to me: the curtains. I’ll wipe my arse with the curtains! So I rip ’em down and do what needs to be done. But then I’ve got another problem on my hands: what the fuck am I supposed to do with a pair of Roger Whittaker’s shitty curtains? I can hardly bring them out of the bog with me and ask the estate agent for directions to the nearest toxic dump. Then I think, Well, maybe I should leave a note. But what would it say? ‘Dear Roger, sorry for shitting on your curtains. Love the whistling! Cheers, Ozzy.’
In the end, I just rolled them up and hid them in the bath, behind the shower curtain.
If you’re reading this, Roger, I’m terribly, terribly sorry. But how about buying some shit roll in future, eh?
A lot of people think you have to be fucked up to write good material, but I reckon the album I did after coming out of Huntercombe Manor, No More Tears, was my best in years.
Maybe part of that was because I said to the band before we even started, ‘Look, we have to treat every song like it could be a hit single, but without being too hokey or try-hard.’
And it worked, pretty much.
Everything about that album seemed to go right. My new guitarist, Zakk Wylde, was a genius. My producers were amazing. And Sharon got the artwork spot on. She’s very artistic, my wife, which a lot of people don’t realise. The cover is a sepia portrait of me with an angel’s wing on my shoulder. The idea was to give the album more of a mature vibe. I mean, I couldn’t keep doing the blood-out-of-the-mouth thing—it was starting to get hammy. I remember the shoot for the cover in New York very well, actually: normally, it takes about five hundred rolls to get a photograph like that in the can, but for No More Tears it was just click-click-click, ‘OK, we’ve got it, see ya.’
The only thing I didn’t like about No More Tears was the video for ‘Mama I’m Coming Home’. It was one of those high-tech, million-dollar jobs, but all I wanted was something simple, like the video for Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. So in the end I did a second video for $50,000 using the Nirvana camera guy, and it was perfect. It had a huge impact on me, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’—and I was very proud when I found out that Kurt Cobain was a fan of mine. I thought he was awesome. I thought that whole Nevermind album was awesome. It was such a tragedy the way it ended.
Mind you, it’s amazing I didn’t end up the same way as Kurt Cobain. I might have been sober after No More Tears—most of the time, anyway—but whatever I’d cut out in booze I was making up for with pills. I was already an expert at scamming doctors, and I’d go to a different one every day of the week, picking up a new prescription for something each time. For a while, it was enough just to fake symptoms, but when Sharon cottoned on and started calling the doctors in advance to warn them about me, I had to give myself real symptoms. So I’d whack myself over the head with a piece of wood and say, ‘I fell off my bike, can I have some Vicodin, please?’
The doc would go, ‘Are you sure you fell off your bike, Mr Osbourne?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘It’s just that you have a nail sticking out of your head with a splinter attached to it, Mr Osbourne.’
‘Oh, I must have fallen on a piece of wood, then.’
‘Right. OK. Take five of these.’
‘Cheers.’
But I didn’t just go to doctors. I had dealers, too. I remember one time, in Germany I think it was, I visited this guy to buy some sleeping pills—I was more addicted to sleeping pills than just about anything else. He was out of sleeping pills, but he asked if I wanted to try some Rohypnol instead. Now, as it happened, I’d heard all about Rohypnol. The press were going crazy about it at the time, calling it the ‘date-rape drug’, but, to be honest with you, I thought it was all bullshit. A drug that could completely paralyse you while you remained fully awake? I mean, c’mon, it seemed too good to be true. But I bought a couple of doses of the stuff and decided to try it out, as a kind of science experiment.
I gulped down the pills with a bit of cognac as soon as I got back to my hotel room. Then I waited. ‘Well, this is a load of bollocks,’ I said to myself. Two minutes later, while I was lying on the edge of the bed, trying to order a movie on the telly with the remote control, it suddenly kicked in. Fuck me, this stuff is real! I couldn’t move. Totally paralysed. But I was also wide awake. It was the weirdest feeling. The only trouble was that I’d been dangling on the edge of the bed when my muscles had seized up, so I ended up sliding to the floor and banging my head on the coffee table on the way down. It hurt like a motherfucker. Then I was trapped between the bed and the wall, unable to move or talk, for about five hours.
So I can’t say I’d recommend it.
My health took a real dive around that time.
I started to notice a tremor in my hand. My speech was slurred. I was always exhausted. I tried to escape
