Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne has courted controversy after revealing that the aftermath of the Twin Tower attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people, made him feel “excited”.
In perhaps the most misguided statement regarding 9/11 since Blue’s Lee Ryan declared “this New York thing is being blown out of proportion,” Osbourne has explained how he was in New York when the World Trade Centre’s twin towers were attacked. When asked if he was frightened, he told Shortlist: “I wasn’t scared, I was excited! It was my kind of craziness, y’know.”
He said of the day after the attacks: “I remember standing on the steps of the hotel, and – you know when you see an old cowboy film and that tumbleweed rolls past on the ground? There was newspapers just floating around on the streets. It was so fucking weird. Everybody just backed off Manhattan because they didn’t know if it was an all-out thing or what.”
On subject of his meeting with Bush, Osbourne said he drank three bottles of wine before meeting the president, but “never quite got” the former US leader. He said: “I was fucking faced at that dinner. I’d had three bottles of wine before I went in there. Sharon was going fucking nuts at me.”
While the atrocities of 9/11 left the metal frontman excited, Osbourne did admit to his fears regarding the current threat of ISIS: “I think sooner or later one of these crazy fuckers is going to get a nuclear weapon and fuck a lot of people up.”
Throughout his career, Osbourne has caused outrage with his music and actions: Christian groups have stated that his music has been used to glorify Satanism, he’s alleged to have bitten the head off both a dove and a bat, and in the 1980s was accused of promoting suicide with his song Suicide Solution.
- This story was taken down on 9 October 2014, then relaunched in amended form on 10 October. The amendment to the first paragraph clarifies that Ozzy Osbourne felt excited in the aftermath of the attacks. The headline has also been amended to clarify that he was referring to the atmosphere in New York rather than the attacks themselves.
