Three encounters with Ozzy Osbourne

I knew Dad was a huge Black Sabbath superfan but I didn’t quite realise how deep the history was until our conversations this week. They really brought home how much those four boys from Aston — including Ozzy — had influenced my Dad, and in turn, me. It’s strange to navigate a big ball of grief having never met the bloke. There’s been plenty of platitudes about Ozzy, his appreciation for Birmingham, and the ritualistic claps of his hands shouting ‘I love you all’ and ‘God bless you’ to all his fans roaring back at him from the pit. 

Dad was one of them. I wanted to know more about the Ozzy, real name John, that he encountered not once, but three times in those early years of global fame. Back then, Ozzy came back to the West Midlands despite the trappings of celebrity, drugs, and rock and roll.

You see when you come from the edges of the West Midlands, a place trampled down so often in the media, to have someone represent our deadpan humour, not wrapped up in a caricature, and just real, is something very special.

Dad said he first met Ozzy Osbourne in our hometown, Aldridge, close to Walsall, during a serendipitous band practice in the mid-1970s He was 15 at the time.

“He pulled up in a Land Rover,” he remembers. “Our band, Magenta Feedback, were practising down the Scout Hut in Middlemore Lane. We had just finished, and were sorting out where we were going next. My friend Neil said he was going back with his girlfriend at the time Jayne, and her ‘Uncle John’.“I remember the door opening and in walks Jayne. ‘Where’s your Uncle John?,’ said Neil.

Jayne walked back through the door and shouted: “Oi, Ozzy. Come here!”

What Neil forgot to tell my Dad was that he was dating Jayne, whose mom was Jean — Ozzy’s older sister, who also lived in Aldridge. In his biography, I Am Ozzy, he said Jean “always made a special effort to look out for me. She was almost like another mum, my big sis.”When Ozzy walked in, Dad said it “didn’t even click” that it was him. “This youngish guy with long hair walked in. You have to remember he was only ten years older than us, around 25. It only started going through my mind as Jayne shouted: ‘Ozzy!’ that it could be him.”

His guitarist knew it was him, however, and immediately started playing the chords to Paranoid.“I remember Ozzy grinning and said: ‘I know that tune.’ We threw a C30 cassette into the recorder and for a brief moment Ozzy Osbourne featured in a new band, Magenta Feedback, playing Paranoid.”

Music was the small talk, Dad said. “We just told him we really liked his music and asked him when the new album was coming out. 

“He was a bit mad. We were all a bunch of young lads, and he was the same. After he’d done his crazy bit with us we spoke to him and it was just like talking to another lad.

Even before Ozzy went stratospheric in the 1980s with his solo career and wild antics, Dad said he was just as rebellious in the late 1970s. “I went to see Black Sabbath at Bingley Hall in Stafford in 1977 during the Technical Ecstasy tour,” he tells me. “During their track Black Sabbath, they had all the crosses, the works, but also some dry ice. So there was mist drifting across the stage, off the stanchions and everything right?”

Ozzy wore a shirt with a curved collar that came down to his chest with tassels all the way down the arms.“He seemed more confident than when I first met him. He was obviously high. Not high as in drugs, but because he just finished the concert. He was hot and sweaty. Maybe he snorted some cocaine though.”

Dad went round the back of the stage which “stunk of Givenchy aftershave. Tony Iommi had been upending bottles of it all over everyone. Then there was a bit of a muffled bang.

Ozzy had got hold of the dry ice, shoving it down the toilets and pulling the chains. The water hit the chemicals.

“Boom. All the cisterns blew off the walls, the toilet bowl [exploded]; there were bits of porcelain flying everywhere. Ozzy was running around flapping his hands up and down like an eagle”. 

His final time meeting him was an encounter in Stafford with his friend Neil and Ozzy’s niece Jayne. “I went to his house – he was still married to [his first wife] Thelma.”

Ozzy was chasing chickens around his back garden, all but naked, wearing just a woman’s dressing gown and red boots with no laces. He was running after the chickens with a shotgun in his arms.

“We were inside thinking: ‘What on earth is going on?’ I remember Ozzy’s next-door neighbour stuck his head over the fence and chippered: “Morning John, what are you up to?”

“Trying to catch one of these fucking chickens for my fucking dinner!” replied Ozzy.

Despite the wild antics, Ozzy had a heart of gold. He bought a house for his Mom and Dad in Aldridge, and their garden backs onto my childhood home. They weren’t there when I was around, but Dad always reminds me. It feels full circle, a sentiment we both experienced as we walked towards Witton station after Black Sabbath’s final Back To The Beginning concert ended in early July.

In the wake of Ozzy’s passing now, Dad says “feels a bit numb. He’s been in my life since I picked up Black Sabbath’s Masters of Reality in 1973. They were just big brothers to me. They were like people we knew. I didn’t know Ozzy really well but I got to know him a little bit from the times I met him.

“It was Black Sabbath that got me into rock, made me my friends, and our family. I’m just happy I got to experience it all and to see him one last time.”He adds, with a typical Birmingham putdown: “I’m not gonna go over-the-top crying like when Princess Diana died though.”

For me, Ozzy represents what everyone around me wanted growing up: the chance to make something of yourself. Geezer wrote the lyrics about rebellion, freedom, and some pretty proto-prog topics, but really it was Ozzy’s attitude about it all that has stuck with me. Live life to the fullest, celebrate your friends, and have a bloody good time doing it.