When Ozzy Osbourne turned a hotel room into a blood-soaked nightmare
Looking back through the annals of rock and roll, numerous ludicrous stories litter days of extreme excess with borderline obscene tales of debauched behaviour. Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne, however, ripped up the rulebook and started again with their heinous touring lunacy.
The wild level with which they took rock and roll antics is, by and large, the very rulebook they would leave behind following their paper-ripping experiences. Whether it was animal cruelty, general drug-taking wildness or a complete disregard for the etiquette of humanity, Osbourne and his band were the ultimate rebels in ransacking the very world we know.
Add yet another anecdote of mythical proportions to the pile of “things Ozzy did that is downright crazy”, and trust in the fact we have a live one here. Well, if you call a “live one” being the image of Osbourne trying to paint his rented hotel room in the blood of a dismembered shark, of course.
Ozzy Osbourne, the Prince of Darkness, has been involved in many a wild rock and roll story, but this time he took the rock star trope and multiplied it by 1000. To trash a hotel room is one thing, but to do it covered in shark’s blood is perhaps even more unexpected than Osbourne’s reputation would even suggest. Here, we revisit the claims that Mr Osbourne once trashed a hotel room with a bloody, dismembered shark.
The stories of Osbourne’s ‘affinity’ with animals is long and varied. Those of us who grew up with Ozzy as a reality TV star and saw his devotion to his pets may well be a little shocked when the countless mishaps animals faced when in the Prince of Darkness’s close and direct proximity. From biting the head off a bat (he didn’t know it was real until it was too late, apparently) to snorting a moving line of ants, Ozzy, it’s fair to assume, has done it all.
This story comes via Tony Iommi’s 2011 interview with New York Post in what was a bid to promote his book Iron Man: My Journey through Heaven and Hell with Black Sabbath, and it puts his bandmate Ozzy into a brand new realm of rock and roll storytelling. But first, an extra morsel of Black Sabbath fun. In the interview, Iommi shares a story about setting drummer Bill Ward on fire. He claims that because of the band’s incessant drug-taking, they found the time between gigs and taking said drugs remarkably boring. As such, they often liked to pull pranks on one another. However, Iommi maybe doesn’t know what the word “prank” means as he recalls asking to set the percussionist ablaze.
“Bill, can I set fire to you?” he asked, to which Bill responded: “Busy, so not just yet”. After a while, Bill said: “I’m going home now, so if you want, you can set fire to me”. Iommi took his chance recalling and explained: “I threw a bucket (of alcohol) over him, and he went on fire. It soaked third-degree burns into his legs.”
This is the level we’re dealing with. He set the man on fire. So it is to be expected that when we say Black Sabbath trashed their hotel room, they would kick it up a notch. Or maybe seven.
So with the band’s downtime being widely filled with drugs and booze, the reprieve they got from the so-called pranks was likely a welcomed relief. A relaxing moment in an otherwise frenetic scene. However, if you ever see Ozzy Osbourne holding a bleeding, dismembered shark, the chances are that your blood pressure may go up, and the idea of relaxing dissipates as quickly as we imagine the mist following Osbourne does when entering a room.
Iommi recalls: “With drugs, always you get bored, so you must do something to one another. Like Ozzy hauling a shark through a window, dismembering it and soaking our room in blood.”
So, whether it’s dousing their drummer with alcohol and setting him on fire or Ozzy cutting up a deadly sea creature in your hotel room, safe to say that nobody adds a rock and roll edge to pranks quite like Black Sabbath.
