A STAR IS OSBOURNE
Sharon talks about music, her ‘dodgy’ past and her love for Ozzy
Sharon Osbourne sighs as she updates me on the soap opera that is her 35-year marriage to Ozzy.
Last year, the pair separated and divorce appeared in the cards after it was revealed the 68-year-old heavy-metaller had been having an affair with a hairdresser.
But today Sharon assures me they are still very much together. “Our lives are too intertwined, there’s too much love to walk away,” Osbourne says. “We’ve got our own little empire and done amazingly well together (the couple are estimated to be worth $240 million): he owes me and I owe him.”
The problem they have, she says, is that Ozzy has a wandering eye. “But,” she continues, “if somebody’s got a problem, you help them through it. He’s in therapy (for “sex addiction”). I’m in therapy.” Another sigh. “It’s, ‘Here we jolly well go, another little hurdle to get over.’ ”
Certainly, few couples can claim as eventful a union as the Osbournes, their history punctuated with her cancer, his near-fatal quad bike crash and various stints in rehab (for both of them). Still, Osbourne, now 64, mother-ofthree and grandmother-of-two, knew what she was signing up for. She was still his girlfriend-manager in 1981 when CBS records, with whom he’d just signed a “really crap deal,” threw him a party.
“Ozzy comes as a man of peace with two live doves in his pocket, but when we get there the people from the record company are less than friendly,” she recalls in Rock ’n’ Roll’s Dodgiest Deals, a documentary she’s put together for British TV. “Ozzy goes to sit on a girl’s lap but she freezes and pushes him away and, I don’t know why, he decides to take out the first dove and bite its head off.”
One explanation could have been that Ozzy was steaming drunk or high on drugs, but, as the so-called Prince of Darkness, he also had a reputation to uphold. (The following year, he bit the head off a bat, live onstage.)
“The record label went nuts. They were like: ‘What the f--k have we just signed,’” Osbourne says now. “One of the lawyers called me and said: ‘If you don’t behave, we’ll bury his output and destroy you.’ I said: ‘Do your worst.’ ”
And thus it’s continued, the Osbournes versus the world. Shortly afterward, she head-butted a concert promoter who was ripping them off.
“I grabbed hold of his ear and kept kicking him in the crotch. I was so infuriated at the way he was treating me, like I was some idiot who didn’t know I was being conned.”
Also infamous for sending excrement in the post to anyone who’s slighted her family, Osbourne’s not proud of her behaviour, but she’s not exactly repentant either.
Many of her rages were provoked by sexism.
“In the ’70s and ’80s, there was so much, ‘Oh, make us a cup of tea, darling.’ To get any attention you had to be like, ‘I’ll show you’, and grab somebody.
“They thought I was a nutter, but they would listen and in the end I got respect.”
Both her understanding of the industry and her belligerence were in the blood. Her father was the notoriously thuggish manager Don Arden. In the documentary, Osbourne shows us the office window out of which Arden and his heavies dangled music promoter Robert Stigwood after he tried to poach Arden’s act Small Faces in 1966.
“My dad was very talented, but the way he dealt with people was wrong. I learned from his mistakes that there was another way to do it, but unfortunately when people pushed my buttons, I did behave like him, getting violent and crazy,” she says.
Despite his aggression, Osbourne “adored” her father. She started working for him at the age of 15 and, through him, met Ozzy, who was the frontman of one of his acts, Black Sabbath. When Ozzy was booted out of the band for his excessive drinking and drug taking in 1979, Sharon decided to manage his solo career. Soon, despite the fact that Ozzy had a wife and two children, they were in love. But Arden was furious.
“He had this old-school mentality of, ‘No! You don’t leave me!’
“Most fathers would say: ‘God bless, good luck, come to dinner at the weekend,’ ” Osbourne says. “He went to Ozzy after we’d been married a week and said, ‘Leave her, I can get the marriage annulled.’ ”
Even after the couple bought themselves out of Arden’s stable for $1.5 million (“a fortune in 1981”), the feud continued. But when Arden was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Sharon paid for his care until he died in 2007.
“I wasn’t going to leave my father with no help. I had a great childhood and a great musical education because of him.”
By then, the reality show The Osbournes had made Sharon world famous, as had her association with another industry legend, Simon Cowell, who appointed her an X Factor judge in 2004. She stayed for four seasons, becoming popular for her combination of blunt talk and affectionate mentoring of contestants, and returned last year to revive the flagging format. It didn’t work: the series received the lowest ratings to date.
As a notorious hard woman, one might expect her to have some sympathy with Donald Trump’s blunderbuss approach. But she has mellowed in recent years.
“I find Trump so frightening,” she says. Then she adds: “I find everything frightening now, the uncertainty in the world, nothing seems settled. There’s no calm anywhere.”