‘I SUSPECTED SHARON WAS THERE MORE TO PROTECT ME THAN LOOK OUT FOR OZZY.’

Mick Wall on Ozzy, Sharon and all manner of goings-on.

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He was the most zonked out rock star I’d ever met, and I had already met plenty – Phil Lynott, Lemmy, Pete Way, Bon Scott... I was 21 and still young but in rock years I was an old man. It was 1979. I was PR to the stars, living large, nuthin’s gonna change my world, when in Ozzy walked. Or rather, shuffled, helped by roadie handlers, pausing here and there to talk to people.

“Ninety thousand dollars I got and told to fuck off!” Ozzy wailed when it was my turn. Before I could respond, he was off to the next gurning well-wisher. “Ninety thousand dollars,” I heard him repeat, “...told to fuck off!”

That had been at a stag party for former Rainbow and future Dio bassist Jimmy Bain. Freaks everywhere, wigging out, but none so forlorn as the now ex-Black Sabbath singer. You really thought that would be it for him.

The next time we met it was three years later and Ozzy was now a bigger rock star than he’d ever been in Sabbath. But again he acted like the unluckiest man in the world. He was brutally drunk and surrounded by hangers-on who brayed like donkeys at his shitfaced mumblings. UFO bassist Pete Way, a legendary party animal who’d just joined Ozzy’s band, was there too, and even he looked embarrassed.

Cut to January 1985 and the first Rock In Rio festival, in Brazil, where Ozzy was making his first live appearances since leaving the Betty Ford Clinic some weeks before. I was there covering the event, and a mutual friend who now worked directly for Ozzy asked if I’d like to interview him for the piece. No thanks, I said. I’d rather boil my own balls. “Oh no,” she said. “You didn’t meet the real Ozzy. The real Ozzy is absolutely lovely!”