More tea vicar? The moment Ozzy Osbourne drugged a priest
What are the main elements that make up a lead singer? They have to have an excellent voice; that’s a given. This doesn’t mean technically proficient, but good enough to fit with the style of music the band is making. They also need to have excellent charisma, which makes them likeable and fun to watch. Ozzy Osbourne has both of these qualities in spades.
When it comes to singing, nobody could have gotten Black Sabbath to the heights he did. While the band might have had a few excellent singers take centre stage even after he left, Ozzy Osbourne’s voice personified the pain, anger and horror of Sabbath’s heavy metal sound. He sang like a man possessed by the most soulful of demons; when he sang tracks like ‘Black Sabbath’, ‘Paranoid’ and ‘Iron Man’, no one else could work those themes so earnestly.
When it came to charisma, even though Ozzy Osbourne’s battles with drugs and alcohol have landed him in hard places in the past, there is no escaping the fact that his mannerisms were somewhat alluring. People were interested in the anomaly behind the voice to the extent that Osbourne was given his own TV programme that granted people a look into his life.
A lot of stories came from Osbourne, allowing cameras into his life; however, that doesn’t mean that there weren’t a lot of other interesting stories that came before he was a superstar. For instance, there was the day when he accidentally drugged a vicar. While Osbourne might have been considered the Prince of Darkness, nobody actually expected him to wage war on religion so directly.
Before you jump to conclusions and assume that Osbourne wanted to hurt a vicar, it’s worth noting that this drugging was completely unintentional. If you still don’t believe that, ask yourself what sounds more likely: Ozzy Osbourne spiking a servant of God? Or Ozzy Osbourne wasting drugs? Exactly.
Despite his appearance and ethos, Osbourne was a member of the Church of England, so it wasn’t uncommon for a vicar to come round to his property and visit both him and his wife at the time, Thelma. One day, the vicar came to their home while Osbourne was out at the pub. Thelma, ever the host, offered the vicar some cake which was sitting in the fridge. The vicar accepted.
What Thelma didn’t know was that the cake she had offered was one that Osbourne had made and which was laced with Afghan Hash. After overindulging, it didn’t take long for the vicar to pass out and for Thelma to start panicking. As if on cue, Osbourne returned home, and when his wife told him what she had done, she recalled that his “Eyeballs nearly flew out their sockets.”
Osbourne and Thelma took the vicar to their car and drove him back to the church. He eventually came around with no memory of what had happened, and Osbourne managed to avoid any stories in the press about him trying to drug a man of God.
