The bat-beheading Brummie boozehound who dined with Presidents and played for The Queen: How love for wife Sharon (eventually) helped tame rock’s ultimate wildman… after some legendary nights to remember

The night Ozzy Osbourne went to dinner with the US president nearly turned into the biggest disaster of his career.

Yet somehow, thanks to the mix of goofy charm and outrageous good luck that had protected him throughout his career, he turned it into a triumph. As always Ozzy, who has died aged 76 after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease, was reckless, self-destructive… and got away with it.

His invitation to attend the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2002 was predictably improbable. The heavy metal superstar was being honoured for his animal welfare work.

Ozzy couldn’t quite believe it himself. True, he and wife Sharon were famous for their menagerie of pets, seen on their pioneering reality TV show The Osbournes. And he’d recently joined animal activists Peta to campaign against the fur trade.

But if the former Black Sabbath frontman was famous for one thing above all, it was for biting the head off a bat during a concert in Iowa, in 1982. He always insisted it was a drunken mistake – a fan threw the bat at him and, thinking it was a rubber toy, he ripped it apart with his teeth. When he realised what he’d done, he cut short the gig to get a rabies jab.

‘Whatever else I do,’ he used to lament, ‘my epitaph will be, “Born December 3, 1948. Died, whenever. And he bit the head off a bat”.’

So his presence at the dinner as a guest of President George W. Bush and wife Laura was unlikely to say the least. And although American news reports of the night described Ozzy as a ‘recovering alcoholic’, there wasn’t much recovery going on: as he sat down with Fox News journalists, he grabbed a bottle of red and downed it in three long draughts.

By the time the compere announced his presence, Ozzy was in party mood. He leapt up and greeted the 1,800 guests with a scream of ‘Yeeehaaa!’ – then climbed on the table and did it again.

Footage of the night picks up Bush’s response: ‘OK Ozzy.’ And then the president muttered: ‘This might have been a mistake.’

As the boozed-up star collapsed back into his seat, the president began to pay tribute. ‘The thing about Ozzy is, he’s made a lot of big hit recordings – Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Face In Hell, Black Skies and Bloodbath In Paradise,’ Bush said. And then came the punchline: ‘Ozzy, Mom loves your stuff.’

The room erupted. The night was saved. Ozzy, who nearly got himself thrown out by security moments earlier, emerged the hero of the event.

A few months later, he was one of the opening acts at the Queen’s Golden Jubilee celebrations. That was the night Brian May played a solo on the roof of Buckingham Palace. Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys were headliners.

But the biggest surprise of the night was hearing Black Sabbath’s Paranoid booming down the Mall, and a bellow like an injured bullock: ‘Finished with my woman cos she couldn’t help me with my mind! People think I’m insane because I am frowning all the time!’

That was Ozzy. He was the wildest man of rock, a working-class Brummie boozehound and ex-jailbird, whose speech was so slurred and foul-mouthed that half of what he said on TV got bleeped out and the rest needed subtitles.

And he remained a showman to the very end, performing his final gig less than three weeks ago from a black throne carved with giant bats’ wings to a delirious audience of hard-rock faithful at his beloved Villa Park.

Born in Aston, Birmingham, he was one of six children in a house with no inside toilet.

At school, unable to read (he was later diagnosed with severe dyslexia), he was regularly beaten by teachers with shoes or lengths of wood. He responded by causing mayhem: in a metalwork class, he once heated a copper penny with a blowtorch and placed it with tongs on the teacher’s desk, waiting to see him pick it up. 

At 15, he left with no qualifications, only to be sacked from a series of dead-end jobs for stealing, skiving or doing drugs.

The only one he enjoyed was working a dawn shift in an abattoir, because that meant he could get to the pub in time for lunchtime opening. Always a practical joker, he liked to fill his pockets with cows’ eyeballs and drop them into people’s pints. An afternoon’s drinking was followed by a night in a club, dancing to soul music till 5am, and then – fuelled by amphetamines – heading back to the slaughterhouse.

Sacked from the abattoir for attacking a fellow worker with an iron pole and putting him in hospital, Ozzy turned to burglary, stealing clothes and a TV set from a shop. He knew enough about fingerprints to wear gloves… but chose a pair with one thumb missing. ‘Not exactly Einstein, are we?’ said the copper who arrested him.

Unable to pay his £40 fine, he was sentenced to three months in jail, serving his time in Birmingham’s notorious Winson Green.

When he got out in 1966, he bought an amplifier on hire purchase and put an advert in a guitar shop window: vocalist seeks band for gigs. He couldn’t play an instrument, but he didn’t want to go back to jail and he couldn’t think of anything else to do.

That’s when his luck changed – and never left him. A former schoolmate, Tony Iommi, was putting together a group with a couple of mates, and needed a singer. Tony, it turned out, was a brilliant rock guitarist, despite an accident in a sheet metal factory that lopped off two fingertips.

The other guys, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward, made a rhythm section as thunderously heavy as the other hard rock group to emerge from 1960s Birmingham, Led Zeppelin. 

Ozzy was a screamer, not a warbler. He detested the flower-power and hippie ditties of the decade. But he had bellowing lungs and a demented stage presence, and that suited Iommi’s dark, satanic blues riffs.

Calling themselves Earth, they got their first gigs by turning up uninvited at live music clubs and offering to play if a band failed to turn up.

When punters complained that their music was too loud, too aggressive and too demonic, they changed their name to something more ominous: Black Sabbath. Their first single, in 1970, was called Evil Woman. An LP followed and was panned: Rolling Stone magazine called it ‘dogged wooden claptrap’. That set the tone for Ozzy’s career – critics always hated his music.

But Black Sabbath weren’t making music for critics, they were making it for young men like them: frustrated, rebellious, working class and bursting with energy. The album sold a million, and earned them a reputation for devil worship. When fans urged him to join them for black masses and satanic rituals, Ozzy told them: ‘Look, mate, the only evil spirits I’m interested in are whisky, vodka and gin.’

Despite growing fame in America and world tours, boosted by a top-five hit with Paranoid that saw them appear on Top Of The Pops alongside Cliff Richard and Pan’s People, Sabbath remained a Brummie band. Ozzy still drank in the same pubs, and he met his first wife Thelma at Birmingham’s Rum Runner nightclub. American tours followed. Ozzy discovered pizza, Harvey Wallbangers, groupies and cocaine.

At a Holiday Inn in California, he ended a phone call to Thelma – who was pregnant with the first of their two children – and went to the bar.

Finding it empty, ‘I took the lift up to the pool on the roof, and when the doors opened, it was like Caligula up there. Dozens of the most amazing chicks you could ever imagine, all stark naked, and blowj**s and threesomes going on left, right and centre.

‘I lit up a joint, sat down on a recliner between two lesbian chicks, and began to sing God Bless America.’

At a rented house in Bel Air, the band did so much coke that they called their next LP Snowblind (a title the record company rejected: the album was eventually called Vol. 4). Ozzy claimed he had to smoke a bag of dope a day, just to stop the coke from giving him a heart attack. When the weed stopped working, he switched to Valium and then heroin.

In an effort to clean himself up, he moved back to England and bought a country house. The detox didn’t work out, and the rural retreat became known as Atrocity Cottage.

Obsessed with shotguns, he blasted stuffed animals, shop mannequins, chickens and stray cats. His marriage did not survive, and neither did his Black Sabbath career: in 1979 the band fired him.

He was rescued by Sharon Arden, the daughter of his ex-manager Don – a brutal thug, who was furious at losing Ozzy to his own daughter. He later set his dogs on her, causing her to have a miscarriage.

Sharon believed Ozzy could be a superstar in his own right, something he’d never imagined. At first she matched him drink for drink and blow for blow.

‘Our fights were legendary,’ she said. ‘At a gig, Ozzy would run off stage during a guitar solo to fight with me, then run back on to finish the song. I realised that if we both carried on, we’d wind up a washed-up pair of old drunks living in a hovel somewhere. So I stopped drinking.’

Ozzy did not. His comeback album, Blizzard Of Ozz, was a global hit, and on tour he partied as hard as ever. In Tokyo, after a gig, Sharon was woken up in their hotel room by Ozzy as he climbed into the bed with a groupie. He’d forgotten his wife was there. ‘It’s funny now,’ she remarked 20 years later. ‘It wasn’t then.’

In San Antonio, he got so drunk that Sharon hid his clothes to stop him from leaving the hotel. He stole one of her dresses, went on a bar crawl and was arrested for relieving himself on the cenotaph at the Alamo, the most sacred spot in Texas.

In 1986 he went AWOL, forcing Sharon to issue a newspaper appeal: ‘God knows where he is. He could be in Brazil for all I know. I’d just like to say – Ozzy, darling, please call me. You know where to find me. I miss you.’

After a silence that lasted months, he sent a peace offering: all his hair, in a shoe box. She tracked him down to a drug dependency unit in Minneapolis, where he had shaved his head.

The debauchery came to a crashing halt in 1989 when, after drinking four bottles of vodka, Ozzy tried to strangle Sharon during an argument. She called the police and he was arrested for attempted murder.

With her husband facing 20 years in prison, Sharon agreed to drop the charges. ‘These things happen,’ she said. But she insisted he went into rehab for three months, partly for the sake of their three children, Aimee, Kelly and Jack.

For the rest of his life, despite frequent relapses, he moderated his excesses – not always on the wagon but at least within sight of it.

A series of health scares in the 1990s, including a misdiagnosis of multiple sclerosis, forced him to cut back on touring. Instead, Sharon encouraged him to launch OzzFest, a heavy metal festival, and to continue recording.

They went on to star in a ground-breaking TV show, the first of the reality formats, with cameras following them round their home for months on end.

The series was a colossal hit, earning them $20million for the first two seasons. Half the time, Ozzy seemed barely aware that he was being filmed, which added to the hilarity. His wailing cry of ‘Sha-rrrron?’ became an international catchphrase.

When Sharon was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2002, he started drinking again, and two years later had a near-fatal accident on a quad bike. His bodyguard saved him, giving him the kiss of life.

‘My heart stopped twice,’ he said. ‘I was in a coma and I remember having a terrible dream – I was no longer with Sharon. She’s met another guy who had his own aeroplane.’

He recovered and so did Sharon. Against the odds, so did their marriage. The fear of losing her to cancer made Ozzy understand at last how lucky he was to be alive and to have his wife.

‘She’s not a Pamela Anderson or a Bo Derek,’ he once said, with typical clumsiness. ‘She was fat when I fell in love with her. But I’d love Sharon if she was the size of ten houses or as skinny as three twigs. I love her, the soul, the person.’