day. At the time, I was into chloral hydrate, which is the world’s oldest sleeping medication or something. But it was still a big improvement on the ridiculous amount of narcotics I’d been taking only a few months earlier, and I got through an appearance with Kelly on Top of the Pops with no problems. Then I drove up to Welders House with my assistant Tony for the weekend.
MTV already had a camera crew up there, because by then a lot of our family routines had become old hat, and they were desperate for some new material. But there wasn’t much to shoot. I had this Yamaha Banshee 350cc quad bike—like a bullet on wheels—and I’d gun it around the fields for hours on end. So I spent most of the weekend doing just that. And on Monday morning, December 8—the day ‘Changes’ went on sale—I took the bike out again.
By this point, the crew were a bit cheesed off, I think. They didn’t even have the cameras rolling. I remember getting off the bike to open a gate, closing it after everyone had gone through, getting back on the bike, racing ahead along this dirt trail, then slamming on the brakes as I went down a steep embankment. But the trouble with that quad bike was that it didn’t have one of those twisty throttles like you get on a motorbike. It just had a little lever that you pushed to go faster. And it was very easy to knock the lever by accident, while you were trying to control the bike, especially when it became unstable. That’s exactly what happened when I got to the bottom of the embankment: the front wheels hit a pothole, my right hand slipped off the handlebar and slammed into the lever, the engine went fucking crazy, and the whole thing shot out from under me and did a backflip in the air, throwing me on to the grass. For about a millionth of a second, I thought, Oh well, that wasn’t so bad.
Then the bike landed on top of me.
Crack.
When I opened my eyes, my lungs were full of blood and my neck was broken—or so my doctors told me later.
OK, now I’m dying, I thought.
It was the Nazis’ fault, believe it or not. The pothole was a little crater, made by a German bomb that had been dropped during the war. I didn’t know it at the time, but the land around Welders is full of them. The German pilots would bottle out before they reached the big cities—where they might get shot down—so they’d dump their bombs over Buckinghamshire, claim they’d carried out their mission, then fuck off home.
I can’t remember much of the next two weeks. For the first few hours, I was slipping in and out of consciousness all the time. I have this vague memory of Sam, my security guard, lifting me on to the back of his bike and driving me back across the field. Then all I can remember are glimpses of the inside of an ambulance, followed by lots of doctors peering down at me.
‘How did you get him to an ambulance?’ one of them said.
‘We put him on the back of a bike,’ replied a voice I didn’t recognise.
‘You could have paralysed him! He’s got a broken neck, for God’s sake. He’ll be lucky to walk again.’
‘Well, how were we supposed to get him out of the forest?’
‘A helicopter was on its way.’
‘We didn’t know that.’
‘Clearly.’
Then everything started to melt away.
Apparently the last thing I did before losing consciousness was to pull on a doctor’s sleeve and whisper in his ear, ‘Whatever you do, don’t fuck up my tattoo.’
Sharon was in LA, so Tony called her and put the chief doc on the line. He told her everything, and they agreed I had to go straight into surgery.
I was very badly injured. As well as breaking my neck, I’d fractured eight of my ribs and punctured my lungs, which was why they were filling up with blood. Meanwhile, when my collar-bone broke it cut through a main artery in my arm, so that there was no blood supply. For a while the docs thought they were gonna have to chop it off. Once they were done operating on me, they put me into a ‘chemical coma’, ’cos it was the only way I was going to be able to handle the pain. If I’d copped it then, it would have been a fitting end for me: I’d spent my whole adult life trying to get into a chemical coma. They kept me under for eight days in the end. Then they started to bring me slowly back to consciousness. It took another six days for me to fully wake up. And during that time I had the most fucking insane dream. It was so vivid, it was more like a hallucination. All I can say is that the NHS must have loaded me up with some top-quality gear, ’cos I can still picture every detail like it was yesterday.
It started off with me in Monmouthshire—where I used to go to rehearse with Black Sabbath and my solo bands. It was raining—pissing it down. Then I was in this corridor at Rockfield Studios, and in front of me was a camouflaged fence, like something they might have had in the trenches during World War Two. To my left was a window. When I looked through it, on the other side was Sharon, having a party. She couldn’t see me, but I could see her. I followed her out of this party and watched as she met up with some handsome, wealthy guy, who had his own plane. In the dream I thought, There’s my wife, and she’s leaving me. It was terribly sad. The guy had a landing strip in his back yard, and at the end of it was a big gun.
Then, all of a sudden, he could see me—so I offered him some telescopic night-vision sights, because I wanted him to like me. He told me to fuck off, and I felt rejected all over again. At that point, all the guests from the party came running on to the lawn. The crowd got bigger and bigger until in the end it became this big music festival.
That was when Marilyn Manson showed up.
It was fucking nuts, man.
Next, I was on the rich guy’s plane going to New Zealand, and they were serving draught Guinness in the cockpit. I suppose that must have had something to do with my son Louis’s wedding in Ireland, which I was missing because I was in hospital. In New Zealand it was New Year’s Eve. Jack was there—he’d bleached his hair completely white and he was letting off fire crackers. Then he got arrested.
At that point, Donovan strolled into the dream and started to play ‘Mellow Yellow’.
What made all this even freakier was that I kept coming around, so some aspects of the dream were real. For example, I thought I was living in a fish ’n’ chip shop, but in fact my bed was right next to the hospital kitchen, so I could smell them cooking. Then I saw my guitarist Zakk Wylde—which in the dream I thought was impossible, because he lived in America—but I later learned that he’d flown over to see me, so he was really there.
I also saw him wearing a frilly dress, dancing with a mop and a bucket.
But that wasn’t real.
Or at least I hope it wasn’t.
‘Ozzy, Ozzy, can you hear me?’
It was Sharon.
After almost two weeks, they’d finally brought me out of the coma.
I opened my eyes.
Sharon smiled and dabbed at her face with a tissue.
‘I’ve got news for you,’ she said, squeezing my hand.
‘I had a dream,’ I told her, before she could say anything more. ‘You left me for a rich guy with an aeroplane.’
‘What are you talking about, Ozzy? Don’t be silly. No one’s leaving anyone. Everyone loves you. You should see the flowers that your fans have left outside. You’ll be touched.
They’re beautiful.’ She squeezed my hand again and said, ‘Do you want to hear the news?’
‘What is it? Are the kids OK?’
‘You and Kelly are at number one. You finally fucking did it.’
‘With “Changes”?’
‘Yes! You even broke a record, Ozzy. It’s never taken anyone thirty-three years from having their first song in the charts to getting a number one. Only Lulu has even come close.’
I managed a smile. ‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’ I said. Then I laughed.
Not a good idea, with eight broken ribs.
Normally, I hate Christmas. I mean, if you’re an alcoholic and you’re drinking, Christmas is the best thing in the world. But if you ain’t drinking, it’s fucking agony. And I hate the fact that you have to buy everyone a gift. Not because I’m tight—it’s just that you do it out of obligation, not because you want to.
It’s always seemed like total bullshit to me.
