OZZY OSBOURNE

She doesn’t want to be Charles Dickens, so she’s modelling herself on Barbara Cartland Sharon Osbourne will be two hours late for her interview. A photo shoot is overrunning says her marvellously named assistant, Silvana Arena. As we enter the Osbourne mansion in Hidden Hills, a gated estate off Interstate 101 above Los Angeles, there is a fight going on unchecked in the hall. Two leettle dourgues from Osbourne’s vast collection of over-groomed life forms are doing snarly battle, possibly for mastery of the pile of poo that lies mid-floor. In the living room the world’s largest television is pumping out the All-American Shouting Channel. Ozzy Osbourne is in residence, sprawled on a vast sofa like a negligent emperor with that benign-but-bewildered look that impressionist Jon Culshaw nailed so well. Silvana parks me on a sofa in her office and swivels back to work at her desk. Which local sushi takeout joint, she asks down the phone, is the one that Sharon hates and which is the one she loves? Tough gig. While I wait, the Osbournes’ staff are at my disposal. A nice Geordie assistant brings his compatriot a proper pot of tea and a plate of biscuits. Silvana sweetly supplies bowls of low-fat cheese puffs called Pirate Booty. I start to nod off. Yapping wakes me up. Sharon Osbourne has sidled on to the neighbouring sofa and the leettle dourgues are paying obeisance. Maybe she’s been talking for a while, because we seem to be mid-conversation. “The grinning twat – he needs to be tarred and feathered that motherfucker. And she’s a fucking motherfucker too,” she says. Osbourne proves so implacably foul-mouthed and so gamely broad-ranging in her hatreds during the interview that she could be talking about anybody – Brangelina, Bennifer, SuBo or Simon Cowell. But no, she’s talking about Tony Blair and, quite probably, Cherie Booth. She’s been watching Blair give evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry. “There are no consequences for fuckers like them,” she says. “It’s like ‘I made a mistake. Erm, I’m off now.’ They wouldn’t be so quick to make decisions if they had to live with the consequences. If they had no arms or legs.” Who cares, you might well be thinking, what Osbourne, 57-year-old toxic telly turn-on, one-time rock band manager, a woman who divides her time between Hidden Hills and Jordans in Buckinghamshire, ferocious mother who sends Tiffany boxes of her own poo to journalists who criticise her children, one half of an improbably enduring marriage, and now (if you’ll excuse the loose usage) novelist, thinks about Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq? One reason is that Osbourne claims to have been contacted by all the major British political parties to endorse their election campaigns. Is there a greater symptom of democracy’s decline? It’s a rhetorical question. “They’ve all asked me to do stuff for them but I’m like, ‘No – you wouldn’t want me to be in your party.’” But why would they want your endorsement? “Because I’ve got what they haven’t – balls.” This is an enduring theme in Osbourne’s self-image. Her website argues: “Sharon’s become the most visible representation of balls in the business.” Enough politics. Let’s talk literature. We’re meeting because Osbourne has written a novel. “I was invited by the publishers to write a novel because my two volumes of autobiography [2005's Extreme and 2007's Survivor] were so successful and they wanted more from me.” Osbourne’s publicists claim that Extreme remains the best-selling autobiography written by a woman, having sold 2m copies. Soon Revenge will be vying with her husband’s ghosted autobiography, which, when we meet, is number two in the New York Times bestseller charts. This is one of the world’s most successful literary households. Is there a greater symptom of cultural decline? It’s a rhetorical question. Revenge is about two feuding English sisters called Chelsea and Amber. In the prologue, we get a sense of what these two women – Both so talented! So driven! By the same dream! Of global stardom! – are like. We also get a sneak peek of Osbourne’s literary style: throughout, cliche wrangles with solecism and just about triumphs. At one point she writes: “. . . Amber, commonly known as America’s Sweetheart, even though she was from Weybridge, Surrey. A pretty heart-shaped face, green eyes like her mother’s and amber-coloured hair.” Amber and Chelsea, during the prologue, do dynastic battle in the “vast marbled hall of the Beverly Hills mansion”. “Fuck you, you jealous bitch. You’re trying to destroy my life,” says Amber, formerly the world’s biggest pop star and now “one of the most popular movie stars on the planet”, who has just slapped Chelsea, a child TV star who battled drug and drink addictions before establishing a successful Soho clip joint and then (somehow!) becoming one of Britain’s greatest actresses. “I’m not trying to destroy you,” replies Chelsea softly. “We’re sisters. You know I’d never do that. I love you, Amber.” But Chelsea is disingenuous. She spends much of the ensuing 300 pages trying to destroy Amber, whether it be by taking her sister’s place on a Grange Hill-style kids’ soap or by seducing Amber’s Hollywood sugar daddy in one of the book’s many contenders for this year’s 18th Literary Review Bad Sex Award. Do you have literary pretensions? “I’m never going to go down in history like Charles fucking Dickens. That’s not what this book is about. It’s a good summer read you don’t have to think about too much. Is that going to be a problem for you?” replies Osbourne. You know what? It is a problem for me. The worst thing that can be said about the book is that it doesn’t have the courage of its own cynicism. The book blurb says that both Amber and Chelsea have looks, talents and star quality “but only one has the ruthless ambition to make it to the top . . . Two sisters. One dream. Winner takes it all.” But by the end of the book, both sisters have fulfilled their dreams – neither has ultimately taken revenge on their sister as promised. Revenge, I suggest to Osbourne, is not as she describes it in the book. Revenge is what she did in 2002 when she sent that Tiffany box to an American journalist. The box contained Osbourne’s own shit, along with a note reading: “I heard you’ve got an eating disorder. Eat this.” What was that about? “They said my kids were fat. So fuck them.” Quite so. Sharon says she always seeks revenge on those journalists who slur her or her family. “I sued four newspapers last year. Why? I got pissed off. There’s a lot of juicy shit that’s real without having to make it up. If there’s bad stuff to be said about me, I’ll say it first. I’m truthful that way.” “When it’s my kids, it’s a different story. It was so hurtful what they said about Kelly and Jack, about the way they look. We’re Sharon and Ozzy: I’m half a Jew, he’s a little bloke from Birmingham. We’re not going to produce 6ft tall, blonde stunners.” Was it her poo? “Yeah, why?” Because that makes revenge so self- defeatingly laborious. Did she squat over the Tiffany box or did her servants rootle in the toilet bowl? “Can’t remember. I don’t do that stuff any more. But,” she says with a sinister, De Niro-ish grin, “I could start again.” Osbourne says she inherited this vengeful streak from her dad, Don Arden, music impresario and self-styled gangster, who reacted to bad news by threatening to kill whomever he considered responsible. Born Harry Levy in 1926, Arden managed the Small Faces, the Electric Light Orchestra and Black Sabbath, as well as granddaughter Kelly. He died three years ago. What does Sharon remember of the man known as the “Al Capone of pop”? “I started working for my dad when I was 15 and he always played hardball. Being around him made me into a strong woman, someone you fuck with at your peril. “Thanks to him and thanks to my efforts, all my ambitions I have more than achieved. Anything I wanted to do I have done. He made me into a doer – someone with a strong work ethic, not a whiner. He made me what I am.” Sharon’s daughter Kelly comes into the room, barefoot and wearing a blonde wig, asking which of three coats she should wear for her looming trip to New York. One drags on the floor and would work only with huge heels that would be madness on New York’s icy avenues. All three of us agree that Sharon’s Valentino coat is the one to take. Just for the record, Kelly is a lovely young woman who looks great in her mum’s coat. What does Kelly think of her mother’s foray into fiction? Kelly tells me she hasn’t read it yet. Nor, I learn, has her dad, her brother or even Silvana. Apart from Sharon, I am the only person in this mansion to have read her novel. And it’s quite possible even Sharon hasn’t: when I press her on whether Marco the gay Scottish makeup artist really did betray Amber to the redtops, she is sketchy. Her coat chosen, Kelly cuddles up with mum on the sofa. Mum and daughter are clearly fond of each other and able to perform that fondness for strangers. The Osbournes won an Emmy in 2002 for Outstanding Reality Programme. There’s an incredible surge of TV noise from the living room. The man whose career was revived thanks to the music biz savvy of Sharon, after being sacked as Black Sabbath’s singer in 1979, is still in residence. Osbourne rolls her eyes. “Running him is the hardest job of all,” she says. “A woman should be paid for that, but of course we’re not. And so we have to work. And I have to work in order to be independent. I would hate to be in a position where I have to say to Ozzy, ‘I need to get my hair done, can you give me some money?’” This is an unlikely scenario: according to last year’s Sunday Times Rich List, Sharon is the 25th richest British woman. “When we got married, mates would take bets about how long it would last. I can’t blame them.” But it has lasted: the couple married in 1982 and seem to be slipping gently into an unscheduled conjugal dotage. “It just works. We fight with each other. It’s not been easy but it’s never meant to be easy.” Husband and wife are, she recognises, very similar. “Ozzy worked in shit jobs from when he was 15. I was the same age when I started work. He never forgets where he came from. I had money around me when I was young, but I never forget that half the world is living in slavery. We’re blessed because we’re doing what we want.” The couple have an estimated joint wealth of £110m. Sixty-year-old Ozzy, she says, is still working hard. “He’s nearly finished his new album and he did a lot of work on his autobiography. He’s worked hard all his life. It’s a work ethic we’ve instilled in our kids. Take Jack [Sharon's 24-year old son]. He’s a reserve cop for Air Sea Rescue in Malibu. It would have been so easy for him to say, ‘I want to be a DJ.’ Every idiot today wants to be a DJ. When I was young, being a DJ meant something. All they have to do now is stand there and have no personality.” I’m no expert on today’s music scene, but surely there’s more to it than that. “There isn’t! They’re queueing up now to get on – what’s that show called – We’ve Got No Fucking Talent At All. It’s like a revolving door for twats.” But isn’t she responsible in part for that? She has,after all, spent much of her recent career as a TV judge on The X Factor, America’s Got Talent, and now The Celebrity Apprentice. “It’s not my fault there’s no talent out there, is it?” No, but she is supporting a system that promotes the talentless. “Listen, I actually walked from X Factor because I couldn’t stand the bullshit any more. I was getting well paid – very well paid – so it was hard to leave, but I did because they didn’t like me speaking the truth. They’d rather have some doll like Dannii Minogue as judge, endorsing this bullshit. Dannii – I couldn’t stand her. She wasn’t so much a dim bulb as a bulb in a power cut. Fucking useless. Did she mind the opprobrium she got when the Osbournes, in which the family’s domestic life became global TV fodder, was broadcast (it was shown in Britain on Channel 4 between 2002 and 2005)? “I can deal with getting slagged off. I’m tough as old boots.” The Osbournes no longer live in the Beverly Hills mansion that featured in the TV show. “We had to move,” says Kelly. “The house was on the tourbus routes and we were getting papped every second of the day.” It must be nice to have relative privacy. “It certainly is,” says Kelly. But the Osbournes are now plotting a return to our screens. Ozzy’s auto- biography is to be adapted into a film. It will tell the story of one man’s journey from the backstreets of Birmingham to that sofa in the other room. The story will include drug-taking, ear-splitting heavy metal, fisticuffs, quadbike upsets and – if it’s authentic – more swearing than a Billingsgate costermonger could manage. Who’ll play Ozzy? “Denzel Washington,” says Osbourne. Be serious. “Johnny Depp.” Come on. “I quite fancy Robert Downey Junior – he’d be great at the accent.” And who could play Sharon Osbourne? “Diana Ross.” What is it with this African-American thing? “Actually, I’d really like to be played by Rachel Weisz. She’s beautiful.” Osbourne now holds dual American and British citizenship. “Eventually, Ozzy and I will come home, which is difficult because Jack and Aimée [the Osbournes' relatively publicity-shy younger daughter] don’t want to live in England.” Why return? “This is no place to grow old. In England they encourage you to live individually. Here everyone wants to live the same. In LA it’s a crime to be fat. If you’re a drug addict people feel sorry for you, but if you’re fat you’re a criminal.” Is that why she had a gastric band operation nine years ago? “That and all the other surgery, darling. Living out here you get very self-conscious about body image and ageing. I’ve battled my weight all my life. I got bigger to take up space and stand up to my dad. In the end I had to do something about my eating problem.” Does she plan to grow old gracefully? “I’d love to spend the rest of my life writing novels, eating Pirate Booty and living with my dogs. I’m modelling myself on Barbara Cartland– I bet she’s writing from the grave.” So she plans to carry on with the fiction? “I’ve already written another novel. It’s called Superstar – with an exclamation mark.” It’s time to go. Hello! magazine is coming early tomorrow to shoot Osbourne in four different domestic locations and she needs a break from the media whirl. We walk through the living room, where Ozzy is prone in front of the TV. I’m honoured that he mutes the telly in order to say hello. Sharon Osbourne escorts me round the poo in the hall. I hope I’ve done nothing to warrant receiving that as a gift from you, I say. “Let’s see,” she says, kissing me on one cheek, and then the other. “Let’s see.” • Revenge is published by Sphere on 4 March, price £12.99. Sharon Osbourne Ozzy Osbourne Kelly Osbourne Stuart Jeffries guardian.co.uk

BBC4 documentary Heavy Metal Britannia offers an affectionate look back to a time when the leather-clad likes of Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Saxon became Top Of The Pops regulars. But what forces forged the unique alloy that is British metal? “Metal lives in a world of its own creation. It is its own World Of Warcraft.” As the octave-leaping frontman of Iron Maiden, Bruce Dickinson is well qualified to talk about these things. He’s attempting to explain the enduring popularity of British heavy metal at the start of BBC4’s Metal Britannia, the channel’s latest deconstruction of a musical genre, following Soul, Pop, and Synth Britannia . British metal – a movement bookended by Black Sabbath’s detuned grinding and Iron Maiden’s globe-spanning late-80s imperial phase – is a neglected, unlovable beast. Sonically, it’s too abrasive to have been subsumed into the pop canon in the way that much American metal has been; culturally, the music has never enjoyed a post-ironic reappraisal (unless you count the Darkness, and Maiden T-shirts being sold in Urban Outfitters). Whereas everyone from Kiss to Van Halen has become cultural shorthand for the good times of 80s excess, if the likes of Saxon and Diamond Head are shorthand for anything, it’s “blokes with dreadful teeth throwing round bottles of piss”. Perhaps mindful of this, on their new soundtrack album, the cast of Glee covered Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’, and steered well clear of Venom’s Welcome To Hell . Despite this, what emerges from the doc is an affectionate portrait of a grassroots movement that succeeded completely on its own terms and left behind a series of brilliant, life-changing records. But what created this music? Join us as we urinate in an empty bottle of Bulmers and identify the forces that formed Heavy Metal Britannia. The 1960s On the face of it, the 60s (man) has little bearing on HMB; there’s a veritable gulf between the hippy strumming of Donovan and the twin-guitar meltdown of UFO’s Doctor Doctor . However, several of Metal Britannia’s protagonists see their music as both an outgrowth of, and an ultra-realist reaction against, the 1960s. Bruce Dickinson identifies Arthur (Fire!) Brown’s “Wagnerian tenor range” as the template for later metal vocalists. Others suggest metal was a sonic evolution of the Kinks’ riffing on You Really Got Me as well as the point where Cream had taken psychedelia. Black Sabbath’s bassist Bill Ward neatly sums up what the 1960s was really like for anyone who wasn’t parading dandyishly round Carnaby Street: “We came from Aston. There weren’t a lot of flowers being handed out.” Actual metal This period was also marked by the last hurrah of British heavy industry and, in the Midlands, this meant steelworks. Judas Priest’s Glenn Tipton recalls sitting through English lessons, his desk vibrating in time with the nearby drop forge. Bandmate Rob Halford talks nostalgically of walking home, “and there was metal in the air. You literally breathed in metal.” Rocking hard seems predetermined for men from these areas. “If you grow up in Mecca,” explains Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan helpfully, “it’s unlikely you’ll become a Catholic.” Vietnam … and war generally On first touring America, British metal bands found huge audiences that propelled the scene out of a domestic ghetto and prevented it being a shortlived, parochial phenomenon. America had its own “heavy” bands like Blue Cheer and Vanilla Fudge, but these all had an air of glamour and acceptability. By contrast, Black Sabbath arrived in an America beset by civil unrest and found crowds primed for the band’s missing fingers, criminal records and discordant anti-authoritarianism. At one point, a visibly moved Bill Ward describes playing War Pigs to an audience full of wheelchair-using, anti-Vietnam war veterans. This air of pervasive gloom would remain a common feature of British metal (see also: Deep Purple’s Child In Time , Iron Maiden’s Hallowed Be Thy Name). The absurd Heavy Metal Britannia is rich in hilarity: Uriah Heep mooning in their press shots and recounting how “it got a bit silly when we had wizards turning up at our dressing room”; Jon Lord’s taste in nick-nacks (a bust of Beethoven wearing shades); Geezer Butler claiming to have been visited in his bedroom by a black apparition; Judas Priest robbing a bank with Flying Vs instead of guns in their Breaking The Law video … Sadly, Metal Britannia doesn’t include the famous clip of scene DJ Neal Kay exasperatedly telling Danny Baker: “I despise the term heavy metal, it’s been obsolete for 10 years”, while wearing a T-shirt bearing the legend “HEAVY METAL SOUND HOUSE”. Classical influences Brian Tatler of Diamond Head draws a parallel between the “orchestral range” of symphonic music and heavy metal, while Ian Gillan’s ability to “scream in a top A note” and Rob Halford’s four-octave vocal range made them potential Royal Opera House material. “You’ve got to be able to balance out that intensity, though,” says a pensive Halford. “I’ve got to be able to come off stage, go to Morrisons and do my shopping.” The Soundhouse We’re also taken to Neal Kay’s epochal metal club in north London. Immortalised in Iron Maiden’s early Soundhouse Tapes demo, this was the spot where one Rob Loonhouse took air guitar to new levels by turning up one weekend with a balsa wood Flying V (it didn’t have frets, though, because “that would be taking it too far”.) Testosterone “It’s fair to say it’s a primarily male world,” concedes Bruce Dickinson. And while Brit metal is “unreconstructed” rather than “sexist”, it’s true that most women were and remain impervious to its sweaty charms. In matters of sex and gender, special mention should go to the heroic Rob Halford, who in 1998 on MTV became the first high-profile metaller to come out publicly. All very admirable, but the real genius lay in the new spin Priest’s entire back catalogue (Ram It Down, Hard As Iron, etc) suddenly assumed. Immense popularity British metal’s guilty secret is that the ultimate outsider’s music was actually enormously popular. Even with a lot of metal records being sold through specialist non-chart return shops, Iron Maiden regularly showed up in the top 10, with even relatively lesser lights like Saxon making it on to Top Of The Pops. Quarantined away from the mainstream in Radio 1’s Friday Rock Show and the pages of Kerrang!, British metallers managed to maintain the illusion of renegade insurgency while shifting records by the million and selling out the none-more-metal Hammersmith Odeon five nights straight. “We’ll always be the weirdos to an extent,” chortles Halford. Lemmy and the new wave of British heavy metal Just as Cream and Arthur Brown bridged the gap between 60s rock and metal, Motörhead are credited with stripping it down, pumping it full of mucky speed and allying it to the spirit of punk to ensure its survival into the next decade. Lemmy offers a spirited defence of his music over a vintage clip of him machine-gunning the crowd with his Rickenbacker. “I worked in a factory and I know what it’s like. It’s fucking awful, to submerge your intellect every day of your life. At the weekend you want to hear something that tears your heart out and gives it back to you better.” Ace graphic design Even when the music was truly dreadful – Grim Reaper’s See You In Hell , for example – metal cover art would usually be superb. British metal left behind a rich, self-referential visual tradition, and its riotous full-colour depictions of apocalyptic warfare, and crude sexual metaphors were a powerful stimulus to young male minds. If you know a bloke in his mid-30s who’s into graphic design, he’ll try and convince you he was inspired by the entire output of Factory Records. More likely, he cut his teeth copying Derek Riggs ’s pointy Iron Maiden font and crazed sleeve art. After all, Peter Saville might have had that post-industrial minimalism thing sewn up, but he never drew a mohicaned zombie stabbing Margaret Thatcher to death on a deserted street corner, did he? Television Black Sabbath Ozzy Osbourne Justin Quirk guardian.co.uk

Celebrity memoirs I Am Ozzy , by Ozzy Osbourne, read by Frank Skinner (3hrs abridged, Hachette, £13.99) Celebrity autobiographies by ageing rock stars don’t often feature on my recommended books list, but Ozzy Osbourne isn’t your average ageing rock star. He’s a one-off. His transformation over three decades, from prince-of-darkness lead singer of Black Sabbath, whose stage routines included hurling bucketfuls of raw meat into the audience, to the bumbling, lovable household pet of a mega-successful American TV reality show, is so packed with outrageous, hilarious, disgusting and wholly improbable incidents I kept having to hit replay to check I hadn’t misheard. Did he really pull out the dove representing peace and love that his then agent, now wife, Sharon had instructed him to let fly round the room where they were finalising a multimillion-dollar music contract with Columbia in LA? Correct. He certainly pulled it out from his pocket, but guess what? He was so loaded (Ozzy’s word for being either paralytically drunk or off his head on cocaine – usually both) that he forgot his brief. So instead he wandered round the table, sat on the arm of the PR lady’s chair, bit off the dove’s head and spat it warm, bleeding and possibly still cooing into her lap. Everyone knows that rock stars spend their offstage lives shagging, snorting and trashing hotel rooms. Ozzy does too. He also gets thrown into jail in San Antonio for pissing against the wall of the Alamo while wearing one of Sharon’s shimmery ballgowns. And when reminded by his first wife Thelma to feed the hens, he massacres the occupants of the henhouse with a semi-automatic shotgun, sets it on fire and pursues the last survivor with a Samurai sword yelling “Die, chicken bastard, die”. But for some reason you like him. His brains may have been addled by all that overloading, but his heart’s still in good shape. Call Me Ted , written and read by Ted Turner (14½hrs unabridged, Hachette, £18.99) All I knew about Ted Turner before listening to this memoir was that he was once married to Jane Fonda and was vice chairman of Time Warner, one of the biggest corporations in the world. Either of these achievements make him interesting, so why, 13 CDs later, wasn’t I more fascinated? Because he sounds so damn smug, that’s why. The author, curiously, isn’t always the best person to read his own book, and if he has the humourless “I told you so” tone of Ted Turner, he’s probably the worst. Never mind, you get used to it. He idolised his father, whose business advice “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise” stayed with him long after Edward Sr, founder of Honest Ed’s Used Cars, shot himself. Young Ted, now 71, took over dad’s burgeoning billboard empire in Atlanta, expanded into broadcasting (WTCG, he said, stood for “Watch This Channel Grow”), bought the Atlanta Braves baseball team, started cable TV and CNN, and won the America’s Cup as well as the disastrous 1979 Fastnet race in which 15 competitors drowned. When asked by reporters what he thought of the race after the last survivors had limped into Cowes, he said the British should be grateful for storms at sea. “Remember the Armada – if it wasn’t for this kind of weather you’d all be speaking Spanish,” he chuckled, and wondered why no one else laughed. Have a Little Faith , written and read by Mitch Albom (5hrs abridged, Hachette, £15.99) But for Albom’s pleasantly soothing voice, which got me through his schmaltzy bestseller Tuesdays With Morrie , heathen that I am, I wouldn’t have bothered with a book about faith.Who’s closer to God – his gentle old rabbi Albert Lewis in suburban New Jersey, or the charismatic black drug-dealing gangster turned happy-clappy pastor Henry Covington in down-and-out Detroit? You’d better listen and make up your own minds. Audiobooks Ozzy Osbourne Sue Arnold guardian.co.uk

The heavy-metal monoliths used their doom-laden dirges and horror-rock riffs to supplant the softer side of 60s counterculture Some days I find myself genuinely shocked by the music press. Since May, I’ve noticed a complete lack of excitement regarding the Black Sabbath remasters. How can you ignore the Sabbath? Do critics begrudge them for pissing on and killing the hippy dream? I think they might. After all, the band introduced working-class anger, stoner sludge grooves and witchy horror-rock to flower power. Black Sabbath confronted the empty platitudes of the 1960s and, along with Altamont and Charles Manson, almost certainly helped kill off the hippy counterculture. Not every one was happy with the doomy arrival of Black Sabbath and critics would often cringe at their records – Rolling Stone described their debut as “just like Cream, but worse”. Yet the discordant power in their songs had a weird draw and the tones were incredible. Their debut – which took just 12 hours to record, on a budget of £900 – perfectly encapsulates the Sabbath sound. Guitarist Tommy Iommi worked in a Birmingham factory and became fascinated with the sounds and rhythms of the machinery. Eventually he used those industrial influences in the music of Black Sabbath and, along with other pioneers such as Blue Cheer and Led Zeppelin, Iommi helped create a noise that would be known as heavy metal. Black Sabbath, for me, always stood out from other metal bands because they wrote the heaviest guitar dirges on the block. But not all of their music was heaviest-of-the-heavy, and I’ve always had a soft spot for Sleeping Village (which was more akin to English folk music). Their initial run of classic albums revealed a band that were more than a little prolific: Black Sabbath (1970), Paranoid (1970), Masters of Reality (1971), and (my favourite) Black Sabbath Volume 4 (1972). You can argue that Volume 4 was the last in the classic run of Sabbath albums. Having just got off the road and received orders to write the follow-up to Masters of Reality, the band were initially stuck. So they rented a Bel Air mansion and turned to cocaine for inspiration (the album was originally called Snowblind in tribute to their habit). Traditional wisdom aligns coke rock with endless guitar solos and other muso dullness, but this simply does not apply to Volume 4. Instead, Sabbath committed to tape the sound of drug psychosis. The stimulants at this point still held inspiration, and were not, as they were to become, their eventual downfall. Volume 4 caught the band just as they were falling apart, but not before they delivered an album of utterly deranged menace. Just check the classic riff on Supernaut . Super-charged and paranoid, you feel out of your head just listening to it. Elsewhere, they swapped the stoner dirge of previous efforts with the druggy daydream balladry of Changes and the more experimental FX , which finds them moving into into weird new territories. The album marked an epitaph on their classic sound. After this, Black Sabbath would never be as hard, paranoid or strange to know again. Black Sabbath Ozzy Osbourne Pop and rock Alan McGee guardian.co.uk

Even if you think you know all about Ozzy, he can still spring a surprise, says Simon Garfield The world left John Ozzy Osbourne behind a long time ago - possibly at birth. The man has been trying to catch up ever since, first in his band Black Sabbath, then with his family’s television show The Osbournes, in which even his attempts to “crack one out” in a room he thought was sealed from cameras ended up on TV. Any Prince of Darkness worthy of the title might expect a life of mild struggle, and much of it he has already shared with us. Anything left for an autobiography? Happily, yes, some of it pathetic and maudlin, much grimly entertaining. We laugh at him, but he doesn’t mind; Osbourne abandoned any attempt at dignity long ago, plumping for what-me-worry survival in the face of diversity. His life was soap years before MTV began documenting it, a place where biting the heads off animals and quad bike calamities seem a gentle diversion in an everyday saga of raising erratic children (seven in all) and four decades of rasping his satanic metal. His ghostwriter has faithfully captured his voice (Osbourne has many talents, prose stylist probably not among them), and some of his anecdotes you will want to recite to anyone passing. It is hard not to enjoy the many, many times Osbourne gets plastered (”It wasn’t like being drunk, it was like having a head injury”) or his remorse when sober. Then there is his charming naivety over the impact The Osbournes would have on family life. “Our first big mistake was letting them do all the filming at our real house,” King Solomon reckons. If you had taken him aside in the first few weeks of filming in 2001 and told him the cameras would still be recording each meltdown three years later, “I’d have shot myself in the balls.” The shadow of an over-primped Sharon Osbourne is everywhere, her ambition smouldering backstage at OzzFest until it burnt through on television. Or as Ozzy puts it: “She’d be the next fucking test card if she had her way.” Throughout, Osbourne treats his music seriously, which doubles our pleasure. The survival of Black Sabbath is regarded as celestially ordained, while there is much bile directed at miscreant band members and managers, not least Don Arden, Sharon’s dad. The singer acknowledges that he was not entirely blameless in these contretemps, and cannily pinpoints the moment when his relationship with Arden began to go wrong. “It wasn’t long after I almost pissed in my new father-in-law’s face that he stopped calling me Ozzy.” Arden is dead now, but John Osbourne from Aston has somehow pulled through. Divine intervention. Music Biography Ozzy Osbourne Pop and rock Simon Garfield guardian.co.uk

Her teenage years were played out on MTV, her exploits exposed in the tabloid press. Now the one-time wild child has written a book to help other girls cope with adolescence. The publicist takes me aside as we are about to enter a suite at London’s Soho Hotel and, in a stage whisper, briefs me: Kelly isn’t well; she didn’t sleep a wink last night; she has been vomiting all morning; she had to leave the last interview six or seven times to go to the loo; no, she doesn’t want to reschedule; not swine flu, a dodgy prawn curry, apparently; she’s really lovely, but she may be a bit subdued. Once inside, there’s Kelly Osbourne looking tiny and frail, curled up in a ball in the corner of an oversize, puffy sofa. She is wearing a white towelling bathrobe, her shock of peroxide blonde hair slightly askew, a glass of bitter lemon on the table in front of her. Her famously pale complexion – she was nicknamed Casper the Ghost at school – is looking ominously green and, on this evidence, it may not be long before she’s off to the bathroom again. “I feel better now than I did,” she says with a groan. “I just wish that instead of throwing up, I got the shits, then maybe I can lose some weight out of my misfortune. It’s not fair, but beggars can’t be choosers.” So much for subdued. And so much for the idea of Ozzy and Sharon’s daughter as a spoilt brat, a trust-fund celebrity scion who has never done a hard day’s work in her life. She is many things, she avers, but she’s not a flake. “If you look around at girls who are older than me who are children of celebrities, hardly any of them have matured, hardly any of them have grown up to be… I wouldn’t say decent human beings, but productive human beings,” she says. “They are not bad people; they just don’t do anything and I don’t want to have a life where I don’t have a reason to get out of bed every morning. And a reason to me isn’t who I’m having lunch with at Fred Segal.” For someone who is not 25 until next month, Kelly has certainly rattled through an impressive selection of “careers”: reality TV star, pop singer, talk-show host, fashion designer, West End showgirl, model and muse and radio DJ. Her latest reason for getting up in the morning, however, may just be the one for which she’s most suited. She has just completed a book called Fierce, which is part autobiography but is primarily being billed as a self-help guide for teenage girls (on the title page, she writes: “I would like to dedicate this book to every young woman who’s ever felt lost”). Kelly’s reinvention as a role model for impressionable teens has, it must be noted, been met with a few raised eyebrows. She was a regular in LA nightclubs from the age of 15; she has lost count of the number of tattoos she has had; she’s friends with Kate Moss and Amy Winehouse; and she has just emerged from her third stint in rehab. And she’s not exactly had the most representative of upbringings. Take, as just one example, an episode described in the book as “home waxing a la Sharon”, which involved Ma Osbourne straddling her 14-year-old daughter, heating the wax too long and yanking off half her top lip with the congealed yellow guck. Kelly picks up the story: “To make it worse, while I was wriggling around, my mum had pissed on me. She was laughing so hard she couldn’t keep the wee in. So as well as burning and scarring me, she also pissed on me.” Come on, that’s a bit weird, isn’t it? “I remember my first boyfriend; she gave me a police file from the private investigator she had hired to tell me everything he’d been up to. That was my mum, it’s just what she does.” But, in the book’s defence, Kelly is certainly not short of life experience. She has been diagnosed with dyslexia and attention deficit disorder, and has dealt with two decades of gibes about her weight. She has experienced fame, global acclaim and a pretty hefty backlash. Her mother is addicted to plastic surgery (Kelly’s words) and her father has been addicted to just about everything else. Sharon also had colon cancer and Ozzy almost died after a quad bike crash. When you put it like that, is there anything that Kelly Osbourne has not experienced and come through? The day after Kelly was born in a London hospital in 1984, Ozzy checked himself into rehab for the first time. He held her for a few moments before Sharon told him he needed to go away and learn to “drink like a gentleman”. Ozzy turned up for a three-month stint at the Betty Ford Clinic in Palm Springs and, misunderstanding the terms of his admission, asked for a glass of wine. Kelly was spared the most violent stage of his addiction – the one time he approached her, Sharon intervened and hit him over the head with a candlestick – but it still cast a shadow over her formative years. At the age of eight, he sat her down with younger brother Jack and older sister Aimee (who decided not to appear on The Osbournes) and told them: “One of you, if not all of you, will have ‘the gene’.” At the time, Kelly had no idea what he was talking about, but it did not take long for her to find out. She could always drink friends under the table, but it emerged that her primary vice would be painkillers – at its worst, she was taking 60 Vicodin tablets a day, “enough to kill any human being”. Three rehabs in, she accepted that drugs and alcohol would always be a problem she had to deal with. “They will always be an issue for me until the day I die,” she writes in Fierce. “It’s all or nothing for me, I’m afraid.” Kelly has been clean since February after leaving the Hazelden clinic – outpatients are called Hazelnuts – and is now cautiously optimistic she can stay that way. “It’s probably been the hardest year of my life, this last year,” she says. “Every day you get a little bit stronger, but then in some ways you get weaker. Somebody can smoke a joint in front of me and I won’t want to do it. Somebody can have a drink and I won’t want to do it. But if I see somebody on a plane take a Valium because they want to sleep? I want it. It’s like you are grieving it, but at the same time you still find it a bit romantic. “But they say, ‘Play the tape forwards,’” she continues. “If I had one drink, it would turn into 20 and it would turn into drugs, which would turn into puking, which would turn into fighting, which would turn into me being on the front cover of one of the London papers, having to spend the next three months apologising for it. That would be all from me having just one drink.” Her new-found sobriety has led to some fairly hefty changes. Being in America has been fine – no one ever asks why she does not have a drink in her hand; London, however, has been trickier. How does her fiance, 19-year-old Luke Worrall, the so-called “male Agyness Deyn”, feel about it? “Luke comes home from work and I’m on the couch into my third book of the day and he’s like, ‘What happened to you? Is this the same girl I met a year and a half ago?’” she says. “I won’t lie and say, ‘It’s been great!’ It’s been hard for him because I’ve been really lost and I depended on him so much that he came home and was like, ‘What are you doing? You don’t even have anything to bring to the conversation any more, you are just waiting for me to get back.’ And he made me realise that I was giving myself my own little pity party – like, ‘Boo-hoo, I haven’t got any friends anymore because I don’t do drugs.’” Writing the book has at least allowed her, in her mind, some measure of absolution. Ozzy was right: it is in the genes. “You sit there and blame yourself, but it’s not my fault. If I had cancer, people would be by my bed going, ‘Oh poor thing.’ But because it’s drugs, it’s not socially acceptable. But to me, it’s a sickness, it’s an illness, a disease; it’s not enjoyable by any means. What bugs me the most is that people think I was a party girl and I went around having a great time. I did drugs because I hated myself and I was fucking miserable and I didn’t want to think about it any more. “I think if people understood that, they would start to think of addiction in a different way. Do you really think that Amy Winehouse was in her house smoking crack because it was fun? It was because it was the only thing in her life at that time that she had control over whether she did it or didn’t do it. Everyone else told her, ‘Get dressed. Go here. Sing this. Do that.’ She had no control over anything else except when she did drugs.” By this stage, Kelly is showing few of the ill-effects of last night’s prawn curry. She was always the most outspoken of Ozzy and Sharon’s kids and there are few dull moments in Fierce. One particularly eye-catching comment comes when she is discussing her weight: “What I’ve learned through the media is that they look down on someone for being fat far more than for being a junkie,” she writes. “It’s true!” she shouts, sitting up and adjusting her dressing gown. “A lot of kids still walk around thinking Pete Doherty is the coolest thing ever. I personally don’t get it. Meanwhile, they are writing about how Charlotte Church is disgusting and fat – she’s just had a baby! She’s not fat!” She’s basically screaming now. “But to them it’s worse. And it’s like, ‘Why are you praising Pete Doherty for being a lyrical genius when he’s a junkie smackhead and dissing this poor girl who’s just had a fucking baby?’” When The Osbournes was first broadcast in 2002, Kelly was a size 10, but she recalls that attention immediately focused on her weight. Early on, a photograph of her in gossip-rag US Weekly ran with the caption “FAT”; one reviewer made reference to the kids carrying a few pounds – he received a box with shit in it from Sharon with the message: “I’ve heard you’ve got an eating disorder? Eat this.” In the meantime, Kelly’s weight fluctuated between size 6 and size 14, usually depending on what drugs she was taking. Her lowest moment, however, came during an appearance on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross in May 2005 when she was promoting her second album, Sleeping in the Nothing. “He took a picture of me from my album cover and then another picture of me and goes, ‘That’s not you, you’re fat! Look how much they airbrushed it.’ And I just didn’t know what to say. You know that feeling where your heart just goes ‘BOOM!’ in your chest? I wanted to crawl in a hole and die; it got really uncomfortable. The band that was performing was New Order and they refused to play until he apologised. A lot of it wasn’t shown on TV because if they saw what he really said to me, I don’t think any parent in the world would ever watch his show again. What he said to me destroyed me for two years.” The interview, Kelly says, caused her to sabotage her record deal. “I felt so ugly and fat that I destroyed it,” she says. “I thought, ‘What the fuck is the point in me doing this shit when a grown man insults me in this way? I’m not strong enough to do this. I’d rather be the trust-fund kid that everyone thinks I am than work my arse off to get insulted.’” Kelly has no ill-will towards Ross – “I don’t feel anything towards him. I don’t dislike him in any way, I still watch his show” – but she does regret the demise of her singing. “My music career is, for me, a regret,” she says. “I’d never sung in front of anyone when I sang ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ at the MTV movie awards in 2002; it wasn’t even something I thought about. But through doing it, I realise that I definitely do have a passion for it: I love singing, I love performing, but I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to be the next Avril Lavigne. It’s like, fuck off, that’s not me. I want to sing cheesy, gay pop songs, that’s what I love.” So there might be a return to singing, but Kelly is also investigating opportunities in TV (”I have about five different production companies telling me that I can invent my own show. What 24-year-old girl is in that position?”) and acting (”I got signed to William Morris and they called me in to their acting division and told me, ‘You really should do this, trust us’”). Enough anyway to keep her from too many lunches at Fred Segal. Not that she is going to take anything too seriously. “I’m not one of those people that’s like, ‘I’m a triple threat: I’m a singer, actor and a dancer!’ That’s not me, I just enjoy it.” For now, Kelly seems content to stay at home and bake Victoria sponges and go to hip-hop/ballet/tap/jazz classes at the gym. She is also, she thinks, probably the only girl her age who still enjoys spending time with her parents. Maybe she is not such a bad role model after all. “When I was 18, I thought I knew everything and I’ve started to realise that I don’t know shit,” she says. “But I’ve been given so many opportunities, I’ve worked so hard throughout the 10 years I’ve been doing this now, I will be damned if I fuck it up because of my bad attitude.” Kelly Osbourne: the life Born Kelly Michelle Lee Osbourne in London, 1984, the middle child of Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne. Grows up between the UK and US as her father tours with Black Sabbath. 2002 Thrust into the limelight on MTV’s reality TV series The Osbournes, which runs for three years. Releases debut album Shut Up! 2003 Dropped by Epic Records, signs to Sanctuary and achieves a number one hit covering Black Sabbath’s “Changes” with her father. 2004 Launches rock-inspired fashion line Stiletto Killers. It closes in 2006. Goes into rehab for the first time. 2005 Her second album, Sleeping in the Nothing, is generally well reviewed. 2007 Begins hosting reality TV show Project Catwalk for Sky 1. Performs in Chicago in the West End and starts presenting Radio 1’s Sunday evening advice show The Surgery. 2008 Becomes engaged to model Luke Worrall. 2009 Third stint in rehab. Releases her teen advice memoir Fierce. They say “[Kelly is] a wickedly funny, brutally honest, pint-size, potty-mouthed spitfire.” Rolling Stone She says “I’m an addict. There isn’t some fucking magical pill you can take to stop you being that addict.” Pop and rock Ozzy Osbourne Tim Lewis guardian.co.uk

The Prince of Darkness is suing fellow Sabbath founding member Tony Iommi for rights and royalties to the legendary metal moniker Like two titans warring over the same country, singer Ozzy Osbourne is suing guitarist Tony Iommi for rights and royalties associated with the name Black Sabbath. Osbourne accuses Iommi of falsely claiming to have sole rights to the band name, resulting in lost royalties. Iommi, the band’s only constant member, registered the US trademark for Black Sabbath in 2000. Osbourne has quit the band several times – notably from 1985 to 1997 – and Iommi has claimed he relinquished his legal rights to the legendary metal moniker. “Please do the right thing,” Osbourne asked his bandmate in a statement this week. “After three years of trying to resolve this issue amicably, I feel I have no other recourse [but to sue].” According to the BBC, Osbourne seeks unspecified damages, lost profits and official recognition as co-owner of the trademark. He also asked that rights to the Black Sabbath name be shared among the band’s members. “Tony, I am so sorry it’s had to get to this point by me having to take this action against you,” Osbourne wrote. “I don’t have the right to speak for [bassist] Geezer [Butler] and [drummer] Bill [Ward], but I feel that morally and ethically the trademark should be owned by the four of us equally. I hope that by me taking this first step that it will ultimately end up that way.” While Osbourne acknowledged Iommi as the sole Black Sabbath flag-waver in the 90s, he argued that the band’s – and brand’s – commercial resurrection was a shared accomplishment. “As of the mid-90s … the brand of Black Sabbath was literally in the toilet,” he wrote, remaining mercifully vague on the details of the “literal” toilet. “Since 1997 when Geezer, Bill and myself rejoined the band, Black Sabbath has returned to its former glory … We worked collectively to restore credibility and bring dignity back to the name Black Sabbath … [and] it was my management representatives who oversaw the marketing and quality control of the Black Sabbath brand.” Black Sabbath were formed in Birmingham in 1968. The heavy-metal band have sold more than 100m albums worldwide and are members of both the UK Music Hall of Fame and the US Rock’n'Roll Hall of Fame. Ozzy Osbourne Black Sabbath Pop and rock guardian.co.uk

Chilling news. Ozzy Osbourne has had a premonition of his own death. “You know the way I’ll go?” the Black Sabbath frontman declared this week. “Some bird with some very rare virus is going to fly over my head. It’s going to shit on me and I’m going to melt on the floor.” Mm. In a strange instance of synchronicity, Ozzy died in TV terms this week, along with his entire family (except for the elder daughter, Aimee, who has always declined to be involved with her mother’s serially base money-making schemes). The occasion was the network premiere of Osbournes Reloaded, the NBC show that Lost in Showbiz recently cited as the most compelling argument against the existence of a benevolent deity. Against even a malevolent designing intelligence, come to that. The teaser footage marked it out as little more sophisticated than the spectacle of harmful bacteria multiplying in a petri dish - and you could say that the America television critics have duly tended toward the unimpressed. “Shows like this make you feel sad for the human condition,” runs a typical reaction, with one of the kinder alternatives describing it as “a revolting debacle”. Osbournes Reloaded was clearly dreamed up by “cretinous sub-primates”, according to someone else, with the Washington Post suggesting it could be “the first TV show ever to be recalled for poisoning the atmosphere”. Well. Should materfamilias Sharon opt for her traditional rejoinder to unkind notices - the dispatch of a Tiffany box of her own excrement to the critic in question - she will certainly need to avail herself of a year’s supply of All-Bran. In the meantime, perhaps a Freudian psychiatrist might care to analyse the likely subconscious trigger of poor Ozzy’s bird dream? Ozzy Osbourne guardian.co.uk

Former Black Sabbath frontman will be given the Lifetime Achievement Award at the heavy-metal award show. By James Montgomery Ozzy Osbourne Photo: Frazer Harrison/ Getty Images Ozzy Osbourne will be given the Lifetime Achievement Award at Epiphone’s Revolver Golden Gods Awards, the country’s first-ever hard-rock and heavy-metal awards show. The Golden Gods, presented by metal mag Revolver, will be handed out Tuesday, April 7 at the Club Nokia in Los Angeles. MTV2 and “Headbangers Ball” will offer exclusive coverage of the awards, both on air and online. Hosted by stand-up comedian and avowed metalhead Brian Posehn, the awards will honor Osbourne’s contributions to hard rock (something the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame forgot to do until 2006, when he got in as a member of Black Sabbath), and will feature performances by Hatebreed, Killswitch Engage, All That Remains, Suicide Silence and a special guest to be announced shortly. Icons like Glenn Danzig and Tool’s Maynard James Keenan are also scheduled to appear, along with Chuck Billy and Eric Peterson of Testament, Protest The Hero, Marta Peterson from Bleeding Through, Isis, Brendon Small from Dethklok, WWE Wrestler CM Punk, plus many more. Starting on the week of April 20, fans will be able to check out behind-the-scenes info on the awards at the Headbangers Ball blog and MTV2.com. On April 25, MTV2 will air a one-hour Revolver Golden Gods Awards nominee special and on Saturday, May 2, the channel will broadcast the ceremony. For more information on the awards — including nominees and how you can score tickets to the show at Club Nokia — check out GoldenGodsAwards.com . Related Artists Ozzy Osbourne Black Sabbath

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Ozzy Osbourne To Be Honored At Golden Gods Awards, Airing On MTV2 In April

Mrs Ozzy has allegedly been involved in a catfight with a former Playboy model on US reality show Rock of Love, though you could be forgiven for thinking it was Jerry Springer Sharon Osbourne is being investigated by police after an alleged attack on a woman who insulted her husband, Black Sabbath’s Ozzy Osbourne. According to reports, Osbourne became enraged while filming of Rock of Love: Charm School, an American reality TV show. During recording on Sunday, Osbourne – who is the host of the series – allegedly ran across the stage and grabbed a contestant, pulling her hair and scratching her until security pulled them apart. The victim, Megan Hauserman, told celebrity website TMZ she was attacked after saying Osbourne was only famous for managing a “brain-dead rock star”. Whether Sharon Osbourne was enraged by the professional slight or the criticism of her husband, Hauserman hardly seems like she ought to be casting stones. The former Playboy model is best known for her reality show appearances, on Beauty and the Geek, Rock of Love and I Love Money. TMZ showed Hauserman leaving the hospital after the assault, holding her left arm in a sling. She was later interviewed by Los Angeles police. LAPD spokeswoman Kate Lopez confirmed that an alleged battery incident had occurred and that officers would be investigating. “We can’t verify Osbourne’s involvement,” she said yesterday. “An investigative report was taken … and detectives will conduct interviews to determine if charges should be filed.” Osbourne is known for her impulsive behaviour. Besides feuds with Iron Maiden and Smashing Pumpkins, she walked out of the recording of an X Factor show in October 2007 and this year quit the show, scarcely giving an explanation . Insiders blamed Osbourne’s X Factor departure on a stormy relationship with her fellow judges. Pop and rock Ozzy Osbourne guardian.co.uk