The many beheadings of Ozzy Osbourne
Read More
Credit: Alamy
The day that Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a bat
“I can say Ozzy was the first one to have to go, but it was hard,” Tony Iommi once recalled. “We had to do something. … Everything was coming to a head, and we had to say, ‘Well, what are we gonna do? We’re either gonna call it a day or break up, or we’ve gotta try and find another singer.’ We’d already had this problem slightly before. … And Ozzy left for a short while and came back. But in L.A., it just came to a crunch and it all came to an end.”
Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward was the one who asked Ozzy Osbourne to leave the band. Naturally, the singer was devastated. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel betrayed by what happened with Black Sabbath,” he wrote in I Am Ozzy. “We were four blokes who’d grown up together a few streets apart. We were like family, like brothers. And firing me for being fucked up was hypocritical bullshit. We were all fucked up. If you’re stoned and I’m stoned and you’re telling me that I’m fired because I’m stoned how can that be? Because I’m slightly more stoned than you are?”
Osbourne continued drinking heavily until Sharon Arden stepped in to sober himself up and record a solo album. Osbourne prevaricated and tentatively agreed, although he was bolstered by the guitar riffs Randy Rhoads offered him. And fuelled by his anger at his dismissal from Black Sabbath, Osbourne summoned his energy to record some of the most detailed vocal performances of his career on ‘Crazy Train’. It was a fiery metal number and one that helped cement his fortunes. In a delicious twist of fate, Osbourne’s Blizzard of Oz album outsold Black Sabbath’s Heaven and Hell on the UK album charts.
He was also proving popular in America, and was enjoying the attention that had eluded him with the Birmingham outfit. Attending a CBS Records executive meeting in Los Angeles, Osbourne brought two white doves with him, hoping to release them at a celebratory moment. However, boredom was starting to kick in, and the singer thought it would be best to liven up the proceedings by eating the two birds. Indeed, he bit their heads off, much to the embarrassment and shock of the executives.
Audiences found themselves in for a tasty treat when the singer tore into the hand of a wandering bat. Osbourne was touring with his second album, Diary of a Madman, catapulting himself, quite literally, into the stagecraft. Audiences had grown accustomed to throwing objects, often raw meat, onto the stage, and ever the entertainer, Osbourne would pounce on each object with panther-like precision.
On January 20th, 1982, Osbourne was performing to an audience at Des Moines, IA, when he noticed a bat that had been thrown on the stage. Mistaking it for rubber, Osbourne bit into it, only to realise the mistake at hand. As the singer recalled: “Immediately, though, something felt wrong. Very wrong. For a start, my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid, with the worst aftertaste you could ever imagine. I could feel it staining my teeth and running down my chin”.
The memory proved even more painful than the injections shot into him for rabies. Footage from the event can still be found on YouTube. Osbourne says the bat was alive, but Mark Neal, who threw the creature onstage, confirms that it had been dead long before bringing it to the concert. Osbourne might have wanted to forget about this incident, but like many rock posturings, it only grew more salacious with every repeated telling and viewing.
But Osbourne has never shied away from notoriety, and his stint on The Osbournes would have shocked some of the more liberal members of his fanbase, much as the animal torture upset many of the more conservative. “Some days it’s alright and some days it’s not, you know,” Osbourne told Hot Press. “Some days I’d just go: ‘Will you get that fucking camera out of my fucking face!’ But what I’m trying to do now is persuade MTV to film some of it over here in England. I mean, we’re being advertised as America’s favourite family at the moment and I’m not even fucking American. I’m British! I’m from fucking Birmingham!”.
