On December 4 and 5, 1997, Black Sabbath’s original line-up reunited for a pair of hometown shows at Birmingham’s NEC Arena. There had been a handful of fleeting reunions in the 18 years since Ozzy Osbourne had been booted out of the band, including a sluggish appearance at the US leg of Live Aid in which they had the air of a band who had drunk their hotel bar dry the night before (it turned out they had), and a four-song set in Costa Mesa, California in 1992 to mark Ozzy’s farewell show (we all know how that turned out).
But those two nights in Birmingham were the first proper shows Aston’s own Four Horseman Of The Apocalypse had played together since 1979. To this day, they’re hands-down the two most joyous gigs I’ve ever seen – hometown heroes bringing it, well, back to the beginning.
So when the magazine I was working for at the time asked if I wanted to travel to the remote Monnow Valley studio in Wales to interview the whole band ahead of their appearance at the inaugural UK Ozzfest the following summer, the answer was clearly “Yes”. All four members would be there, and I’d be interviewing them in pairs: Tony and Bill, Geezer and Ozzy.
Full disclosure: I was slightly nervous. Not of the Double O, but of Tony Iommi and his air of glowering, moustachio’d malevolence. But then, as now, the guitarist turned out to be the model of friendliness. If only the same could be said of the singer.
There’s no other way of putting this: Ozzy was very, very grumpy. He’d recently given up smoking, so not only were his arms plastered with several nicotine patches, he was also chain-sucking on a nicotine inhalator in an attempt to get something resembling a fix.
A lack of fags combined with having to sit down with a young(ish) journalist asking questions he’d probably been asked a million times before didn’t help his mood any. It sounds intimidating, and it was a little, but it was also hilarious. Because the only thing funnier than Regular Ozzy Osbourne is Narky Ozzy Osbourne.
The exact conversation has been lost to time, but two things stick in my mind. The first was an admittedly pretty dumb question about what it felt like to be a legend. He peered over the top of his round John Lennon glasses, and his mouth fell open in that way it does when he’s thinking about what he’d just been asked.
“What does it feel like to be a legend?” he said, repeating it back like it was the most idiotic question that had ever been asked in the history of humanity. “I don’t feel like a fucking legend. I don’t wake up in the morning and go: ‘Sharon, I’m feeling particularly legendly today!’”
I remember laughing at both his exasperation and the fact he’d made up an entirely new word on the spot.
The other vivid memory from that interview is of Ozzy getting genuinely shirty when I asked him about Bill Ward, who was in the next room. At those NEC gigs a few months earlier, Dio-era Sabbath drummer Vinny Appice was backstage. The rumour was he was present in case Ward (a lovely man, by the way) was suddenly indisposed due to, say, a medical emergency. When I asked Ozzy if that was the case, he almost leapt out of his chair.
“Fuck off!” he erupted. “Vinny Appice was there because he’s a friend of ours. Him being there to replace Bill is bollocks. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Bill. Bill’s the picture of health. Fuck’s sake.”
That flash of annoyance lasted a few seconds, then Ozzy was back to being his entertainingly cranky self.
When the interview was done, he stood up and shook my hand. The grumpiness was gone. “Everything alright?” he asked, almost paternally, before shuffling off in his slippers.
There’s a funny postscript. The record company PR’s car I was taken in broke down on the motorway on the way back to London. By the time we got back, the sun was coming up, so I got a few hours’ sleep. When I woke up it was to the news that Bill Ward – the picture of health, according to Ozzy – had suffered a heart attack not long after we left (thankfully, Bill is still here).
I spoke to Ozzy a number of times in subsequent years. I got Hilarious Ozzy, Baffled Ozzy, Introspective Ozzy, but never Grumpy, Nicotine-Craving Ozzy again. In retrospect, I feel honoured to have met that particular guy.
