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Canwest News Service
It’s 40 degrees outside Ozzy Osbourne’s mansion in the Hollywood Hills and, at the pool, where he’s invited me to join him, paving stones are cracking in the heat. "Look at that!" puffs the heavy metal singer-turned-reality TV star, pointing to a 10-foot Buddha, burnished by the sun, standing guard outside the Cape Cod-style house. "It’s turning f—ing green."
Every other sentence Osbourne utters is loaded with the F-word — used sometimes in genuine outrage, at other times to send himself up, but mostly as its own form of profane punctuation. By the end of the day, my ears are zinging with expletives.
This is all part of Osbourne’s brand, "the whole likable loony thing," as he describes the exaggerated comic persona which gave the Black Sabbath frontman a second shot at fame in 2002, when his music career was petering out. The Osbournes, a TV docu-soap following the lives of his dysfunctional family as they faced everything from missing socks to his wife Sharon’s battle with cancer, turned Osbourne, his wife, son, Jack, and daughter Kelly into stars on both sides of the Atlantic (the couple’s eldest daughter, Aimee, chose not to appear in the show). It reignited the singer’s music career in the process.
Now, with an estimated wealth of $182 million Cdn, an annual festival tour of the United States, Ozzfest, in its thirteenth year, and a new album in the making, Osbourne is baffled by his enduring success.
"I’m 61 next birthday, and for some reason people keep wanting to hear me and see me," he shrugs, a slim, aubergine-haired, slightly bowed figure in a black T-shirt, shorts and a pair of skull-and-crossbone slippers. "I don’t know what happened to the years."
This is not the cliche it would be coming from anyone else. Osbourne lost decades (30 years, he estimates, between 1968 to 1998) to drugs and alcohol, during which time he famously bit the head off a bat and two live doves in concert, tried to strangle his wife, threw himself off a cliff and urinated into one record executive’s pint glass. It was only when he began to work on his autobiography, I Am Ozzy, that whole periods of his life started to come back.
"I wasn’t always a happy-go-lucky guy," he says in his pleading Brummie (Birmingham) tones. "I was bad for a very long time: I beat my wife and the rest of it — but the autobiography was cathartic — it helped me get rid of some of the guilt."
Now a teetotaller, drug- and alcohol-free, whose only addiction is the gym, Osbourne talks about the excesses of those years in a tone not that far removed from pride. "The first time I tried cocaine, I remember thinking, ‘I’ve found the meaning of life!’ But then I loved morphine and everything else, too. At my worst, I was buying kilos of the stuff every week.
Despite the idyllic surroundings, talk of England still brings on a twitch of nostalgia in Osbourne. "I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in California. There’s so much bull—- out here, and the reality is, I’m English." Still a British taxpayer, he won’t be voting at the election "because it’s the lesser of two f—ing evils. Is it just me who thinks of the Kray twins when I see Gordon Brown?" It was an encounter with Tony Blair, years ago, which put him off politics for good. "He came up to me at an awards ceremony and said: ‘I used to be in a rock and roll band, you know, but I could never get the chords to Iron Man right.’ And I thought to myself: there are kids dying in Africa and our own boys are going off to war and you’re talking to me about Iron Man?"
As someone who regularly visits maimed soldiers in military hospitals, this is a subject close to Osbourne’s heart. "It’s an unwinnable war," he shrugs. "But a kid who gets injured fighting for the country they live in should never want for anything."
After a dip in the pool, tea in Osbourne’s study — where he shows me the series of pointillist felt-tip sketches he has been working on — and a tour of his state-of-the-art recording studio in the basement, I can’t help but wonder out loud what he could possibly have left to wish for.
"A No. 1 album would be good," he grins greedily, "and to have a movie made of the book, maybe with Johnny Depp playing me — I’d like that. But really I’d like to go back in time and make better choices."
He shakes his shaggy head sadly. "Still, I now know that there is no such place as Utopia. Hell, even if I do make it to heaven, you can bet your life that the toilet will stink."
