Last Rites, page 26
So off I go to the bog to sort myself out. I find a stall. Lock the door. Sit down on the seat. Take out a little book of matches and start fashioning a coke spoon out of it. Then I scoop a bit of coke out of my ‘snuff box’ – ahhhh, yes, this’ll do the trick – but just as I’m about to take a nice big sniff, I notice a pair of very shiny boots walking into the stall next to me.
I freeze.
Could that be a—
Probably not, I thought.
But let me just check…
I put away the coke spoon. Bend down as far as I can without making it too obvious. And sure enough, under the partition – fuck! – I glimpse the hem of a dark blue pair of cop trousers. Then I almost jump out of my skin as the rest of his trousers, including his belt and keys and gun holster and handcuffs, all clatter to the ground as he sits down to do his thing.
I couldn’t believe it.
I really needed that bump, man. I was shivering. I had sweat running down my face. But I could hardly go SSSHHHRRKK!! in an almost totally silent stall with Captain Crapper sitting four feet away from me. I was just gonna have to give up and come back later. But then another part of me was, like, no, fuck it, I’m here, it’s been a long day, I deserve this coke.
That’s when I heard the familiar sound of pages turning.
The cop was reading a fucking book.
In the end, I decided to just wait him out. He must have got through half of Moby Dick by the time I finally heard the plop. Then suddenly I was sitting bolt upright, spoon at the ready, when – PHHHWWOOOOOOSSSSHH!! – he flushed the bog and I vacuumed up the rest of my coke at the same time, so he couldn’t hear me go SNNNFFF-GAH!!
We both left our stalls at the same time.
I felt like I was about a foot off the ground with a double rainbow shooting out of my arse.
‘Oh, hello officer,’ I said, giving him a nice big friendly smile, knowing that even if he patted me down the evidence was now safely up my left nostril.
He just looked me up and down with a sneer. Cops didn’t like long-haired rockers in those days. They thought we were all drug addicts. Which, to be fair…
Then I got the fuck out of there.
Not long after that, I was flying back to London from the California Jam festival. Glenn Hughes was sitting near me in first class, along with some other guys from Deep Purple.
I must have had four grams of blow down my sock when I got on that plane, man. Those really were… very different times. And of course the second we’re in the air, the sock comes off, the blow comes out and we’re all having a grand old time. Then at some point the head stewardess comes up to me. ‘Can I have a word with you, please?’ she says. ‘At the back.’
I’m like, oh fuck, here we go. My eyeballs are throbbing. My heart’s racing. I can’t stop blabbering on about all the things that keep popping into my head. And she leads me all the way to the back of this 747. A few other stewardesses are all huddled there. And I’m expecting them to bust me, tell me there’ll be cops waiting to arrest me when we land.
‘We know what it is you’re taking,’ she says as my blood runs cold. I thought I was fucked, I really did.
‘What d’you mean?’ I said, trying really hard not to sniff. ‘I’m not taking anyth—’
‘Can we have some?’ she goes.
It was one of the best flights of my life. We were so high, we just about beat the plane to Heathrow. But then of course we had to queue up for immigration, and the comedown was the worst I’d ever had. I was so obviously in a state of catastrophic cocaine withdrawal, Glenn Hughes took me aside before we got to customs, and he said, look, Ozzy, I’ve got two bumps left in my extra-special reserve, I was saving it for myself, but there’s no way you can walk through customs looking like that, you’ll be spending the next month on a table with a rubber glove up your arse. So he gave me the last of his supply, and I floated through the ‘nothing to declare’ door while all these grim-faced customs guys looked on.
That was the trick – you always got rid of whatever shit you had on you before you got to customs. That was especially important for me, ’cos I’d been busted for drugs in England early on, so I had a special code on my passport, flagging me for an extra search. On the way back to LA, I remember, this immigration officer flicked through my passport, saw the code and asked me what I’d been done for. ‘Possession of drugs,’ I had to tell him.
‘Let me tell you something, son,’ he said. ‘Don’t you even think of bringing any of that stuff into this country. We’ll lock you up and throw away the key.’
All I could think was, what are you talking about? Bringing cocaine to LA in 1975 would have been like bringing coal to Newcastle in 1913.
‘No, officer,’ I said, ‘of course not, officer, I wouldn’t dream of doing that, officer.’
THUMP. He stamped my passport extra hard.
‘Have a nice day.’
It was an incredible feeling, landing in England for the first time in eight or nine years, knowing that I was gonna be representing my country and my home town.
The old stage fright was coming back with a vengeance, though. Especially ’cos the closing ceremony of the games was gonna be broadcast live on BBC One.
Even without the cameras there, when it’s a special event like that it’s very different to being on tour. You only get one shot. If you make a mistake, that’s it. Add the cameras, and it takes the fear to a whole new level. Nine times out of ten when there’s cameras there, I fuck it up. Meanwhile, there’s absolutely nothing worse than watching yourself back later on. When I see myself performing, I can remember exactly where my head was at every single moment. And if I yodel a line – meaning my voice cracks and I warble – I cringe so hard, man. It’s like when I listen to myself talking in interviews. I can’t stand it. I have to switch it off.
I wasn’t all that worried about the jet lag, though. I have a tried and tested way for dealing with that – the second I land, I switch to the local time, no matter how hard it is for the first twenty-four hours. If I catch it straight away, I’m fine. It’s when you try and stay on your own time that you up end falling asleep at random times of the day.
What I couldn’t get over was the weather. When I was growing up, the one thing you could guarantee in August was fucking rain. But it was all cloudless blue skies and sunshine, with the kind of heat you’d normally get in the South of France. It was so hot we had to use a hotel as a dressing room, ’cos there was no AC at the stadium. I remember saying to Sharon, ‘We’ve got to get AC at Welders House, or we’ll never be able to stay there in the summer.’ In my mind, I was like, global warming must be making England hotter, this must be normal now. But ever since then, every time I’ve asked someone from England how their summer was, the answer’s always been the same: ‘We didn’t have one.’
My family was there to meet me before the show. It was great to see ’em. But it was also very strange, ’cos my brother Tony had died in 2014, and my sister Iris two years after that. My sister Jean had also lost her husband Norman – he was like the older brother I’d never had – just before the start of No More Tours II. So it was just me and Jean, my other sister Gillian and my remaining brother Paul. It was the most peculiar feeling, because it had always been the six of us at family get-togethers over the years, and now there we were, down to four. Meanwhile, most of my old friends from Aston were no longer around.
The drive to Alexander Stadium was also weird. I used to know Perry Barr like the back of my hand. Same with Birchfield and Newtown, my other old stamping grounds. But so many streets and buildings have been rebuilt since the seventies, I couldn’t get my bearings. None of the streets I was seeing had been there in my day. I was hoping some of the old memories would come back… but it was all so different, I could have been anywhere. I was also nervous, I suppose, which made it hard to focus on anything for very long.
The funny thing is, I didn’t get to see much of the stadium itself, even though we did a run-through and sound check a few hours before the show. The backstage area was basically under the main stage. It was a whole world down there. There were jugglers and gymnasts and dancers stretching out. All totally enclosed, so they were invisible to the audience.
The first thing we did was go and talk to the stage manager.
All I had to do, he said, was stand on a mechanical platform that would rise up through an opening on the stage floor. That’s how I’d make my entrance. It would look like I was standing up – and I would be, technically – but I’d have a curved seat back to lean on, attached to a pole. And no one would see it ’cos I’d be wearing this long, flowing black coat. Underneath the coat would also be a special harness, just to make sure.
I wasn’t gonna be doing any stage-dives, that was for sure.
Sharon was still terrified I was gonna fall over as half the world watched. I kept telling her, ‘I’ll be fine! I’ll be fine!’
It took the longest time for Tony to arrive. He’s moved away from Birmingham now, so he had a long drive. By the time he got there it was all very rushed, very businesslike. Not unfriendly or anything. We had a job to do – and Tony was probably as nervous as I was. And of course there were cameras everywhere, recording our every word.
It was hard to believe I was back in action again. I felt like Douglas Bader, the famous pilot who lost his legs in a plane crash but was allowed to come out of retirement to fly in the Battle of Britain. Bader was incredibly strong, apparently, so he could lift himself up into the cockpit using just his arms.
He got shot down and captured eventually. But even the Germans were like, holy fuck, this guy’s been flying a plane with no legs, he deserves some respect…
The hours between the run-through and the show were some of the longest of my life.
Just absolute torture, man.
I went and sat in a corner, focusing on my breathing, trying to keep myself steady.
‘Remember,’ said Tony, just before we went on, ‘we’ll do the opening of “Iron Man”, no verse, just the riff – then “Paranoid”, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘Break a leg, Ozzy.’
‘You too, Tony.’
Other than the run-through and sound check, there’d been no rehearsal. It hadn’t even come up when we’d been planning the whole thing. I mean, we’d played those two songs just about every night for the best part of fifty years.
If we didn’t know ’em by now, we never would.
Total darkness. Turning slowly to red.
Smoke.
THUD. THUD. THUD. THUD…
A deafening roar goes up as the crowd recognises the song.
Chanting.
Clapping.
Cheering.
An ocean of pinprick lights from thirty thousand phones.
THUD. THUD. THUD. THUD…
Every thump of Tommy’s right foot on his bass drum feels like an incoming mortar.
Here it comes…
DDNNNNNEEEEEEEOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW…
That first note of ‘Iron Man’ gets me every time, man. You feel it in your bowels. Your teeth. Your bones. It’s like the gates of hell grinding open. Like the groan of the Heinkel bombers as they dipped below the clouds to try take out the Castle Bromwich Spitfire factory, night after night. Like the thunder of the heavy machinery our fathers used to operate. And their fathers before them.
DDNNNNNEEEEEEEOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW…
THUD. THUD. THUD. THUD…
DDNNNNNEEEEEEEOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW…
‘I… AM… IRON… MAN.’ I’m on the platform, rising up into the glowing red mist. I don’t just feel part of the crowd… I AM the fucking crowd.
Video projections flicker on the fifty-foot-high speaker columns to either side of me.
DUUHG-NUUUUUGH, DUH-NUH-HUH…
D-N-D-N-D-N-DUH, DUH-NUH-NUH!!
Columns of fire erupt from the stage as Tony tears into the riff. I’m looking out over Perry Barr… over Aston. Over the place I grew up, sixty, seventy years ago. Over a crowd that seems to stretch halfway to Wolverhampton. We’re live on BBC One. Prince Charles is here. All I can think is, what an honour. What a life. What were the chances it would turn out like this?
‘LET’S GO CRAZY!!’ I’m screaming.
Explosions everywhere. Hundreds of rockets blasting up from every corner of the stadium into the night sky. They flare so brightly it feels like day.
And we’re into ‘Paranoid’.
Muscle memory at this point. I’m bouncing up and down. Grinning my face off. Raising my arms up. Clapping along with the crowd. I’m hitting the notes. No yodelling. Blinding flashes of red, orange, white and blue all around and above me. We’re belting out the song like we’re twenty-three years old. Then Tony’s into the solo. The guy’s as cool as the day I met him. Leather blazer. Shades on. Ripping through the notes, hands barely moving, making it seem like the easiest thing in the world, even though the tips of his fingers are still made out of Fairy Liquid bottle tops.
We’re into the last verse. It’s over almost before it’s even begun. I’m buzzing, man. As high as a kite. And all without the help of a single drug or drop of booze.
‘BIRMINGHAM FOREVER!’ I’m screaming between the booms and thuds of the rockets, as the skyline of the city where I was born glows and vibrates.
Then we’re done.
One last burst of light.
Then darkness again.
DING.
The lift doors opened at the car park level.
This was maybe twenty, thirty minutes after the show.
‘See you, then, Tony,’ I said.
‘See you, Ozzy.’
He went one way, I went the other. There wasn’t much to say. We were both in a daze. What I didn’t realise at the time – but Sharon pointed out to me later – was that I’d left my cane behind in the backstage area. I had so much adrenaline in my system, I was walking on my own, without thinking about it.
Later, as we were getting into the limo-van that was taking us to the airport, Sharon told me Brian May of Queen had posted on Instagram that he was in tears watching the performance. I’d shed a few tears myself as all those fireworks went off. Tony probably had too, but he was wearing his shades, so you couldn’t tell. It was totally, utterly overwhelming. There are no words that could do any justice to what it felt like being up there. I was home. I’d made it. All the shit I’d been through in the last few years… it just melted away. I just wished we’d done more songs. We were on such a roll up there, we could have done half a set.
As we drove out of the car park, Sharon kept telling me about the part of the stadium we couldn’t see from the stage. The centrepiece of the whole thing, she said, was this giant mechanical bull, about thirty-three feet high, made out of what looked like scorched metal. It had been created by a movie special effects company, Artem, based in London.
She couldn’t stop raving about this bull. ‘You should have seen it, Ozzy, it could walk, it would rear upon its hind legs, even blow steam out of its nose!!’
The bull was made out of metal to represent Birmingham’s heavy industry, she said. And the reason it was a bull was ’cos of the bull-baiting that used to happen on the green where the Bullring & Grand Central shopping centre is now. It was a horrible bloodsport, bull-baiting. The poor bulls were tied to a stake, then attacked by dogs until they were either killed or badly fucked up. Even if they survived the baiting, they were slaughtered afterwards. That’s what the original British bulldogs were bred for – to go ten rounds with a bull. It’s why they were so tough. I suppose it’s all people had for entertainment in them days.
I was finding it hard to pay attention to what Sharon was saying, though, ’cos we exited the stadium a different way than we went in, and the second we made a left, I was like, fucking hell, I know exactly where we are!
We were just a block or two from my old school, Birchfield Road Secondary Modern.
Now I had my bearings, I asked the driver to take a few detours. Suddenly I was looking at the old Methodist Mission Hall where we used to rehearse, passing the Church Tavern just around the corner. It’s one of the few old pubs still around. Most of ’em are gone, which makes sense ’cos Aston’s a Muslim area now. Then we were at Villa Park. Then around the corner from there – just off Witton Road – we were at my old street, Lodge Road. Meanwhile, the street where Tony used to live – Park Lane – has been wiped off the face of the earth, including his parents’ old corner shop, Iommi’s. It’s all new buildings there now.
Meanwhile, the driver said the façade of the old GEC factory where my dad worked is still there – it’s a listed building, apparently – but the factory itself is long gone. It’s some kind of online shopping warehouse now. The last places we drove by were Lizzie’s, where I used buy a cigarette and match, and the launderette, where my mum used to wash our clothes. There’s a Chinese takeaway and a mobile phone shop there now.
Then we were off to Heathrow, to catch our flight back to LA. Meanwhile, back at the stadium, they were already starting to take out the extra seats and wheel away the mechanical bull, ready to take him apart and throw him on the scrapheap.
On the plane, me and Sharon agreed to move forward with something we’d been planning for a very long time. We wanted to give back to Birmingham in a meaningful way. Sharon had this dream of setting up a music school in a converted warehouse, in keeping with Sabbath’s roots. They wouldn’t just teach music there, but also theatre, set design, recording. There’d be guest lectures by well-known people. A permanent collection of my tour memorabilia. An interactive museum. A coffee shop.
‘It sounds amazing,’ I said to her, ‘but that’ll take ten years. I don’t have ten years.’
‘Give me three,’ she said. ‘And y’know what, Ozzy,’ she went on, ‘since you’re officially performing again, why not do one last gig with Sabbath for the opening?’
I just laughed. At my age, with my injury and my Parkinson’s, it was hard enough to plan for next month, never mind 2025.
