Rocker Ozzy
“My hell-raising days aren’t over yet!”
Afamiliar high, panto-ish voice crackles through the intercom. “Oh my God, are you just off the f***ing flight?” The intercom is on the iron gate above a sign saying: “Never mind the dog. Beware of the owner.” It squawks again. “You must be f**ing knackered!” I’m not even over the threshold of this multi-million-dollar Los Angeles mansion and already I’ve been Osbourned.
With an electronic buzz and a cackle, lady of the house Sharon Osbourne, in all her pint-sized, potty-mouthed glory, beckons me inside. I pass through perfect gardens, past a gnome flipping the middle finger and into a cavernous reception hall dripping with art, photos and statues.
Scampering down the stairs comes a Pomeranian, what looks like a miniature husky, and another that looks more like a dandelion seed.
The library is the lair of Ozzy Osbourne, the mansion’s most “Ozzified” room, with history books, crucifixes, a bat-shaped chandelier and a portrait of his Pomeranian dressed as Henry VIII.
On his desk, awaiting his signature, are a pile of “Certificates of Ozzthenticity” to accompany a limitededition box set of the albums Ozzy has released in a hugely successful solo career stretching back 40 years, since being ousted from Black Sabbath for conduct unbecoming of a rock star. That is, the singer was drinking too much and taking too many drugs – even for a satanically inclined ‘70s heavy metal band.
Ozzy has sold more than 100 million albums. Still, these are troubled times for the hitherto indomitable Prince of Darkness, the septuagenarian grandfatherof-eight. Over the last two years, the 71-year-old has endured a brutal sequence of medical challenges, including pneumonia (twice), near-fatal staph infections and a horrific fall that required spinal surgery.
Earlier this year, he revealed he’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. When he enters the room, first impressions suggest Ozzy’s walking days, much less his rocking days, might be behind him. He approaches with a shuffle and a wheeze, limping in his slippers, Sabbath T-shirt and jogging bottoms covered in dog hair.
His eyes are rheumy and his nose is runny, meaning he’s constantly wiping at his face. His speaking voice, when it comes, retains a strong Birmingham accent, but is weak and gasping. All of which makes the forceful triumph of this new album, OrdinaryMan, his first in 10 years, all the more remarkable.
“Thank you!” he replies, genuinely pleased.
“It came together because of my daughter Kelly. I was lying about, f***ed because of this surgery on my neck.”
He leans forward, parting his hair and revealing a nastylooking scar at the top of his spine. “It’s really knocked the wind out of my sails. Plus, the fact I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s – but it’s not the Michael J. Fox one. I have a thing called Parkin 2,” he continues. Parkin 2 is a type of early-onset Parkinson’s caused by a genetic mutation, although both share symptoms including leg or arm tremors and a shuffling gait.
Ozzy and Sharon, whose wealth in 2018 was estimated at $280 million, went public with his diagnosis in January. It speaks to the couple’s status as a celebrity powerhouse in the US, where Sharon has a morning TV talk show (she also has regular appearances on UK television), that the announcement came via GoodMorningAmerica.
But he’s known he has the disease since 2003. That was both the year MTV reality show The Osbournes was at its peak and he nearly died after breaking his neck in a quad-bike accident.
Back then, he recalls, “They’d say my ‘gait’ was funny, but I didn’t know what the f*** they were talking about. I had a tremor, but I thought that was the DTs from the booze.”
But he insists the Parkinson’s hasn’t affected him too much. “It only materialises when I get excited and I start to shake,” he says, waggling both his black nail-polished hands and rattling his collection of crucifix-rings
and bejewelled bangles. “I’m not that bad. I only have a little bit of medication a day.”
But he blames the Parkinson’s for the fall in January 2019 that necessitated the neck surgery. Because of the condition, “sometimes my leg goes. And I need to go for a pee in the night, and I can’t sleep with any lights on. So my leg went and I didn’t know where I was. I hit the floor – bang! – and I remember thinking, clearly and calmly, ‘F***ing hell, you’ve done it now.’ And Sharon woke up and came in: ‘Sharon, can you phone an ambulance? I think I’ve broken my neck again.”’
He insists this hasn’t knocked his confidence. “The way I look at it is: I’ve got it. And it ain’t done for me yet.”
The problems arising from his neck surgery – which focused on his spinal column and resulted
‘Sharon, can you phone an ambulance? I think I’ve broken my neck again’
in his shortness of breath because now “the nerves are pressing on my lungs” – are much more of a concern.
So has Sharon become his carer? He nods. “My kids, my wife, I got a nurse 24 hours a day. ’Cause I don’t know when my legs are gonna go.”
But he’s looking after himself: he’s been sober from drugs and alcohol for seven years, gave up smoking during a Black Sabbath reunion, and eats carefully. “And I’m working on physical therapy to get my strength back. You have to exercise. You gotta keep going because as soon as you sit down, you’re f***ed. Your body just doesn’t work. I walk round the block a few times, I get on the elliptical machine,
I do Pilates. I got everything going here.”
Sharon and Ozzy wed in 1982 – she’s the daughter of Black Sabbath’s legendarily fearsome manager, the late Don Arden – and she’s the managerial and business brains behind much of her husband’s success, and that of the whole Osbourne clan.
In many regards, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree because Sharon is as tough as they come.
Still, she must have been tested by Ozzy and his “ways” over the years, including addiction and a reported four-year affair between 2012 and 2016, not to mention that time he tried to strangle her in a drunken rage.
“Well, to be perfectly honest with you, we’ve gotten closer,” Ozzy says, a clearly loving look spreading across a face that’s as smooth as that of his wife. “I’m 71 now, she’s 66 or something [67, actually], and at this time of my life, I’d like to have got out OK. But there’s always something, always a spanner thrown in the works.”
Ozzy grew up with five siblings in post-war poverty in working-class Birmingham. “But you try telling your kids that. I remember when Kelly was little, I said to her, ‘Look, you can’t keep taking these big pound notes out of my box.’ She was taking £50 notes and putting
them in her purse! ‘It’s all right, Dad, just go to the bank man.’ ‘Well, I have to make it to give it to that man.’ ‘Why?”’
With a weary shake of the head, he says that Kelly, 35, and Jack, 34, who are both TV presenters (Jack was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2012) and musician daughter Aimee, 36, have no real sense of the challenges of his childhood.
“At 12, I was delivering coal, I had a paper round and a grocery round. I made a quid a week! Because I come from a family of six kids, three sisters and two brothers, two of them are gone, a two-bedroom house in Aston. How the f*** did we live in that place? It was tiny! You could fit our house and yard in this room.”
When he started making money with Black Sabbath in the early ’70s, “it was like I’d won the lottery... But the manager was ripping us off royally. But since then, I’ve said to Sharon, if we’d have had what was justifiably ours, I’d have been dead years ago,” he admits. Meaning he’d have partied himself to death.
“I’d have had the wildest time! But if I’d had a m million dollars w when I was 23,
I’d have been out of my m depth. I was fright frightened of having that mu much money. And your ego – that much dough when you’re a kid would blow your mind!”
Still, they did all right in the end. The house that featured in
The Osbournes was bought by Christina Aguilera. They’ve been in this one for five years. How much did it cost? “Ninety. Or 70, I can’t remember.” To be clear, that’s $70 or $90 million. Is he happy here? He shrugs, he’s asked whether he’d ever move back to the UK.
“This has always only been my temporary home. I loved England, I love Britain. You ain’t gonna get shot!” he laughs.
Ozzy wants to get back on his feet and back on the road. Speaking before tightening of international travel, he and Sharon planned to visit Switzerland in April for treatment with a doctor known for rebooting seriously ill patients’ immune systems.
“Then he has these things for pain that aren’t opioids,” Sharon says. “So your body is strong, so it can deal with whatever it’s fighting – cancer or Parkinson’s or whatever. Your body can endure so much more. So this guy will hopefully take away the pain from Ozzy’s accident and build up his immune system so he can say, ‘Yeah, I can f***ing tour. Sure I can.”’
The album’s title track, a duet with Sir Elton John, features the lyrics, “I don’t wanna die an ordinary man.”
Ozzy says, “I still am an ordinary man. I’ve got wealth, I’ve got success, I can afford things I couldn’t afford before. But I don’t think I’ve changed that much as a person.
“You know, we’re dying from the moment we’re born. You don’t know when you’re gonna go. So, I’m alive now. I don’t plan on going any time soon. But I’m 71 now. If you’d asked me when I was 25: ‘Do you think you’ll make it to 71?’, I’d have said, ‘You must be f***ing joking, the way I’m going!’ I shouldn’t be alive!”’ So why is he?
“God only knows. I haven’t got a clue. But I’m glad. All the s*** I’ve put myself through, and the Parkinson’s, broken neck – I ain’t done so bad. At the end of the day, I’ve had a great life.”
Before he heaves himself from the sofa and limps from the room, he says there’s nothing really left to achieve. He’s done more, gone further, than he ever expected.
A knighthood? He shrugs. “I can take it or leave it.”
Would Sharon like to be Lady Osbourne? “Well, the f***ing shopping trolleys would get bigger!” he snorts.