Sharon and Ozzy | Inside the Osbourne Machine - Mick Wall on Chaos, Control and Survival | 4

From Audible Originals, I'm Matt Ford. And I'm Alice Levine. And this is British Scandal. So, Alice, we've made it through bats, breakups, breakdowns, reality tele, reality itself, and a relationship that somehow survived all of it. How are you feeling now that we've reached the end of the Sharon and Office? Honestly, very confused, traumatized, in awe.

One day in the life of Aussie and I would frankly be dead. What surprised me most though was behind this Prince of Darkness branding was a man who was being held together and literally held up By the people around him. Yes, which is why in today's episode we have a very exciting guest. One of those people from Ozzie's Inner Circle. Not a fan, not a family member, but a friend.

What a family to be a fly on the wall of. Never a doll dinner party. No, and he's got some incredible stories about the Osbourne. Today we're speaking to the music journalist that has been described as the world's leading rock and metal writer. He knew Ozzy for over forty years and wrote his official biography. He's seen Ozzie and Sharon up close, and he knows exactly how that relationship kept the whole machine running. We are talking to Mick Wall after this. Vi finns här. Tack för stort!

Hello Mick, thank you so much for joining us. Can you start things by telling us when you first met Ozzie Osborne? The very first time was actually at a stag. It was in I think nineteen eighty, something like that. And uh he'd just been fired from Black Sabbath. It was a stag party for Phil Liner, the singer of Thin Lizzie. I was a PR in And um I was Black Sabbath's PR, and Ozzy had been sacked. And uh he was being sort of wheeled around the room by his roadies to introduce him.

I remember he held out his hand to me and I went to say how high was he and he just went I was fucking sacked ninety thousand dollars and told to fuck off and I went Well I'm Mick and it's lovely to meet you. And then he went on to the next and you could hear it again, ninety thousand dollars you told the fuck off. Just went round and round and ever everybody's like, Ah, Ozzy he's a guy, isn't he? The character he is but then

A couple of years later I was back writing for magazines and I was sent to interview him at a hotel in London. In those days he used to have a little entourage of uh his friends from Birmingham, the sort of guys that they just wouldn't have got a job. anywhere else other than working as Ozzy's sort of official mate. And they were all sat at this big table and he was absolutely paralytic drunk. He could hardly speak.

But when he did speak it was like a scene from the Exorcist, you know, it was just this awful soliloquy, put it that way.

And after about half an hour I thought, I'm not gonna be able to use any of this. This is terrible. So I left and I decided then I would never have anything else To do with And it was only really again a couple of years after that, January nineteen eighty-five, the Rockin Rio Festival in Brazil, there were millions of huge bands there, Aussie, Rod Stewart, Queen, and A friend of mine had gone to work as Sharon Osbourne's personal assistant.

Sharon was managing Oussie by this point. In fact they were a couple by this point. And when I found out she was working for Sharon and Ozzie, I remember saying, Oh God, how awful. How do you deal with that? She said, no, you're joking. They're lovely. And I'm like, lovely. She said, Ozzy's amazing. Oh, you've got to come and meet him. And I said, no, I've done that. I'm not doing it again.

In the end, she organized a lunch and it was fantastic. They were a double act, and he was tremendously funny. So was she. And at that point, I kind of got absorbed into the Osborne universe.

So you saw him sort of on stage and offstage. You know, we we think of that Ozzy Osbourne persona. Was he identical offstage or had he slightly created and curated that image? No, that's exactly what he was like, right back to when I first He was bumbling, he was funny, he didn't have any filters, he was very happy, he was always himself. Ozzie just was Ozzy. He was exactly the same wherever you met him, whenever. The only thing I'd say.

got different was as the years went by and he tried again and again to give up the booze and the drugs. um eventually he kind of smoothed out into the one kind of guy. But the drugs and the booze meant, you know, you'd meet fifty to You were hired to write his biography. Can you just tell us a bit about that? I was the fourth person they'd hired. They'd hired three before me. All of which didn't end well.

And then I came into the picture and I kept turning up to interview him. They had a house in Barclays Square at the end. I remember once I turned up and it was like Oh Ozzy's not well he's in bed But he says go on up you know so I go up and there he is in bed with Sharon and they both got flu. And I was in there for about half an hour just chatting to them. We didn't do any work, we just had a laugh and then I left.

This went on for I think maybe three or four times, different bizarre things would happen and we never got any work done. And then finally it was well, look, to make up for it, Ozzy is going to cook you Sunday lunch. This is the summer of eighty-five. And I turned up at the house. And he was in the kitchen peeling the potatoes. He's got his penny on.

He's got all the stuff on the stove cooking away. He's got the joint in the oven. And uh Sharon and the kids, kids are very young, he said, Right, Ozzy, I'm going uh we're taking the kids to the park. We'll be back in a in an hour. And that's when dinner will be ready, right? And he's like, Yep, yep, yep, yep. So I'm standing there in the kitchen with all

In his penny, sweating as he's making all this food, as you can hear the steps going to the front gate, he kind of freezes like a freeze frame. And I'm like, Ozzy, okay. And he's like, psh. Shh, shh! And you hear the gate go, you hear them get in the car, and you hear the cra car drive off. And as the car drives off, he goes. Thank fuck. Would you like a drink?

And I said, Sure, I'll have a drink and he goes, Wine I went, Wine would be lovely Then he grabbed the bottle and he got two pint glasses and it just went go gounk go gunk go gounk go gounk into one and then go gounk go gunk go gunk into the other. It wouldn't fill the two pint glasses, so he got the other bottle, thumbed that and then go goon go. We've now got two pints of wine. He gives me one, he goes, Cheers. And he literally downs it in wine. I'm having a little sip and I'm just thinking.

gonna happen when Sharon gets back, you know, it's gonna be this look bad, you know. So he finishes his pint and he goes Fancy another and all the time he's boiling the potatoes, he's grilling cheese onto the mash, he's getting it all together. By the time she comes back I'm still on my first pint of wine, and he must be on to his fourth, maybe his fifth. And I'm shitting it, thinking she's gonna walk in here and think that fucking McWall's got him drinking it.

And she walked in took one look and went, Okay, I'll set the table. Finally we've all got food and gravy and everything on our plates. And I'm looking at Ozzie and he's looking and I can tell his eyes have gone. And he's looking at me and his head starts to descend slowly slowly sl and then straight into the plate. Mashed potato in his head, gravy bubbling where he's breathing. And they're sort of passing the peas over his head, you know.

And I looked at Shah and I said, Um, is Ozzy all right? And she goes, Fuck him. And I went, Absolutely, absolutely. So anyway, he starts to recover and she goes, Right, I'm taking you upstairs. And she literally carries I later found out this was a regular occurrence, she was often carrying him. She came back and she said This interview is never gonna fucking That's you and me go into the drawing room and you ask me everything you want to know and I'll tell you and you just say it was off.

And it's an official book, it's their book, so I'm cool. I said, Yeah, okay. And we did. That's what we did. We spent two or three hours. It was a fan book, so it's like forty thousand words. It wasn't one of these, you know, deep dive biographies that I did years later. And that's how we did the book. It was Sharon telling me the stories that made up that book, uh, while Ozzie was snoring off another drunken Sunday lunch, when she had cooked in fence.

Mick, you really can't understand Ozzie without understanding Sharon. When did you first realize she wasn't just part of the story, but in fact shaping? From the very first time I met her, rock and heavy metal managers, particularly in those days, many, many characters did that gig. But she absolutely outshone them all. She was clearly ver very intelligent.

What I didn't know at the time was she had a vast showbiz background. Her father was Don Arden, he managed Little Richard, Gene Vincent, and then in the seventies Black Sabbath, the electric light orchestra, many She had been a bit of a wild child. Uh her brother David used to describe Sharon to me as Don in a skirt. And Don was known as the Mr Big of the music business. All those stories about people being hung outside windows literally go back to things that Don Arden did in the sixties.

So she was a fierce, fierce competitor and Ozzy at that time was very much a joke. He'd been fired from Black Sabbath because they thought he was a joke. The business thought he was a joke and he behaved like a joke. He was just drunk and out of his head all the time. He was always pissing himself. It was embarrassed. But she took him and she molded him.

She always saw completely what was going on in music, where the edge was. And she always positioned Ozzy there. So in the mid eighties, when it was all big hair and shoulder, He had big blond hair, big silver jackets with enormous shoulder pads. He used to say to me, I look like a fucking fat Joan Collins and because he had no

thoughts of his own about where he should go or what he should do. It was all left to her. And you think she was especially perceptive about understanding where the industry was always going to go next? Absolutely. I mean we would have lunch and she would grill me about where I'd been lately, what I was doing, who's selling records and tickets. So commercially astute? One hundred.

I mean from Sharon's point of view, there is no other way to be. You can either be artistic and amazing and no one's heard of you and you're poor. Or you can be, as you put it, commercially astute and have huge mansions in England, America And she's remained that way to this day. I mean her absolutely unerring sense of where things were going and what would get the eyeballs and what would get people buying tickets.

She obviously had another job as well, right? Which was to protect him so that he could do what he did best, which was to be this charismatic performer. She definitely understood how to handle

I mean, Aussie has a creative force. You know, his third album, Bark at the Moon, another huge hit in America. Uh this is the days of vinyl. And on the back of the sleeve it actually says Written, produced and arranged by Ozzie Ozzy. And I was sitting with him one day and he goes, Look at that. I couldn't produce a fucking fat. He goes, that's He goes, that's all Sharon. That is all Sharon.

And it's true. I mean, Ozzy was the first one to tell you he couldn't write a tune, he couldn't play an instrument. And his lyrics were nearly all written for him by Bob Daisley, who'd started out as his bass player. In Black Sabbath, it was the bassist Geezer Butler. So Ozzy had no pretense as to I'm a great songwriter, this is my music. He was able to come up with melodies and a line here or there.

But everybody else would fill in the blanks. She got that, so she surrounded him with incredibly talented people. the best producers, the best musicians. And from that comes this huge career. And was there anyone else in the music industry at that time like Sharon Oscar? No, she set the tone and and a lot of people tried to emulate. I've met all of the big and great rock and metal managers, im including Don Arden, whose memoir I ghosted, including Peter Grant, the notorious Led Zeppelin.

manager and none of them, none of them had the full package like Sharon because she was very witty and very funny and she could see through you in a second. So she knew who was faking, she knew where the bullshit was, but she didn't call it. She didn't deliberately make a scene, but she clocked everything. Here's the other thing I think is great about her, she pivoted. She has no problem whatsoever, and I've seen her do it, tell people to fuck off and die in many different ways.

And two weeks later hire them to do a job. She didn't hold things as a personal grudge. There were some, but they were epic and and went through the decades. But in terms of business, it was all business. If it was bad on a Monday and good on a Tuesday, that was all fine by her. That's so interesting. So I'm wondering then if

history has been a bit unfair to her role. Does she get enough credit?'Cause you've listed some men there heralded as, you know, m manager greats, some legends, but she feels erased from that picture. I don't know. I I I mean the thing is people are terrified. I've seen grown men reduced to trembling wrecks because when she put the knife in, it went all the way and then you got a few twists.

Even those guys were very male, you know, once they'd kind of beaten you over the head, they never let you forget it. Sharon was more of an assassin or is, you know, go in, do what needs to be done, and then bum bum bum, hands clean, uh fresh page, all good.

When you look at Ozzie and Sharon together as a partnership, it feels extraordinary that it lasted. What do you think kept that relationship functioning when so many others collapsed? Well, I mean it nearly didn't, you know. I mean um my friend that worked for Sharon for so many years

told me that when they were first together it was a very physical relationship. You know, she'd walk into the office and find them fuck it and it'd be like, Oh oh sorry, sorry or she'd walk in and find them literally hitting each other with bottles. I mean they would fight, there'd be blood, things would be smashed. And the next thing they're having wild sex. And then there were those times Ozzy in his crazy days, put it that way, too much coke, too much everything.

Uh, she told me he brought a fucking groupie back and put her in the bed because he'd forgotten I was there, you know. So they they had their ups and their downs. I mean the a famous occasion of course is when he tried to kill her in uh nineteen eighty nine. She said to me It was like his eyes went out, even when Ozzy's been completely out of his brain. I'd never seen that before. He was arrested, he was arraigned on bail. Part of the bail was that he should go into rehab.

And she rang me and said, Will you go in with him? And I said, Okay, uh why? And she said, Well it for companies he's terrified. No one understands what his life is like. You go in there and keep him company and also while you're at it, get his story. Because she knew that story would be gold. That's such a good example of that blurred line. So was their relationship closer to a marriage or a business? If Sharon is saying, Go get the story, go follow this, not just purely out of concern? Yeah.

It was all things all times. I've got a better story which will illustrate this very nice In Los Angeles a few years after this, early ninety. Sharon's in London, which means, you know, the the cat's away, the mice will play. And Ozzy rang me, what are you doing? I'm bored. So I went over to his place. I remember he brought out this bong and it had a plastic bin line.

full of grass. And he goes, Do you want to try it? It's my new bong. Shall we try it? And I'm like, yeah, you know. Anyway, cut to five in the morning. Because by now our old friend cocaine has also made an appearance. And Brandy and whatever whatever. And we are just laughing and laughing. I mean he was a very, very funny man. But this point everything is a blur. I d you know, I I'm now in the dead zone. I don't know what

And he's rabbiting away to me and I'm just sort of nodding, you know. And then suddenly he goes, Do you know what? You're absolutely right. I'm gonna call her right now. I said, what do you what um what? What am I right about? He said, What you said about Sharon? I went, What? What did I say about Sharon? No, he goes, No, you're right. And he picks up the phone. I'm going, Don't fucking call Sharon. Don't call Sharon. He rings her. Sharon?

And I I'm only hearing his end of the conversation as I'm sitting here with Mick Wall, I'm Oh sitting there with middle and he agrees with me that, you know, I love you, my darling, but you shouldn't be my manager. You're no good to me as my manager. And then he's like, uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Oh, all right. Okay. Okay. Bye. I went, what did she say? He said she says I'm divorcing.

I said, for fuck's sake, ring her back. Say that that none of that was Mick's idea. It was just a joke. Just ring her back. He goes, No, it's too late. I can tell she's on the war. But I saw her a couple weeks later and'cause she just laughed the whole thing off. But when he said you can't manage me anymore, she was like, Okay, well then we're getting a divorce. I think this is common actually for many, many, many.

Where the wife has much more control than the man would like to admit, perhaps. But she was always ready to press the nuclear button when ready. And uh she did it that time and of course it brought him to heel and as we now know they didn't get divorced and she did carry on managing him and he was bloody lucky to have her.

Were you surprised when you heard they were gonna let the cameras into their life on the TV show The Osbornes? Well, not really, because by that point it was very much in Sharon We Trust. You know, she'd never been wrong. from the early eighties when she got this amazing guitar virtuoso Randy Rose to come in and write the music for Ozzy.

to get in Motley crew to open for them, which meant they sell most of the tickets, Metallica, so on. She was always positioning Ozzy in the place he needed to be. Another trailblazing move from Sharon. So What do you think it was about that show that cemented them in cultural history? Was it just that they were chaotic or was there something more? I think the same reason why everybody that got close to them like I did, I've never met anybody like them.

They really were just like that. And it was just incredible that this context, the format had never existed before to film a whole day in the life of the Osborne, let alone weeks and months. The vast majority of people are going, Fucking hell, have you seen this? Have you seen him throwing dog shit over the garden wall? You know. Sharon told me at the time, she said Or he's over at this point, he's finished. This is our parting shot. So we're gonna let it all hang out.

We're just gonna let all the crazy stuff be seen. They were gonna get a hundred and seventy five thousand dollars and they thought and they were like laughing, going, a hundred and seventy five thousand dollars for old rope. But it took off in a way that I don't think any other reality show has taken off. I mean even something like The Kardashians is niche compared to what the Osborne

They were getting such a huge audience share in America. It was beyond the terrestrial channels. It was a true television phenomenon.

Obviously Ozzy's health in time declined. Um when did you find out he had Parkinson's? It must have been very hard for you to to witness him fade in the way. I think again this is maybe Sharon being able to engineer reality into a useful commercial proposition because I did an interview with Aussie for Mojo back in two thousand and five, so that's literally over twenty years.

And he talked very freely at the time about his recent diagnosis for Parkins disease, which he said ran in his family, his aunt had had it, various other people had had it. And of course, if you'd spent time in his company, uh his hands always shook very badly. Uh that stutter, that kind of speech impediment which which got steadily worse and worse and worse.

That had kind of been there all along, except i i i originally it was more like uh just Aussie. You know, just oh I dunno, I don't know, fuck off. And then, you know, over the years it turned into something much, much more notable. It was slow. I mean when he told me about the parkings I wasn't remotely shocked because

The man yeah used to walk all hunched up, he used to his hands used to shake terribly. He used to shuffle when he walked, and this was when he was still, you know, relatively young man in his early forties. So I wasn't uh that shot. The bit that surprised me was that twenty years later It would be this headline news. But I guess by then it had progressed.

Much, much further down the line than than when he first spoke to me about it. How did Sharon cope? The same way she always copes, which is magnificent. I mean of course, you know, she had a lot of help. There'd be nannies, personal assistants. I mean if you worked for Sharon, you virtually lived in the house. There would have been lots of people that weren't photographed or filmed, and they would have been on hand. So she would have had a great deal of help.

Nevertheless, the personal investment, the personal coping, no amount of help. Carers can help you with that. And because Sharon had always babied Ozzie, this was now the next step along the road. If Ozzie and Sharon hadn't found each other, what do you think would have happened to them? Well, Ozzy used to say to me, and we're going back a few years now, but he told me that his original plan after Sabbath sacked him and gave him ninety thousand dollars and told me to fuck off

He said his idea was he was gonna go back to Birmingham and with his first wife Thelma, they were gonna open a wine bar. Serving it in pints. Well well. See, that's a good idea. Come on, that's a USP. Can you imagine going to Aussie's wine bar? I wonder, and this is going to be a tricky question, I'm sure, but what do you think Aussie's legacy is? In terms of music it will be all about Black Sabbath.

And it will be all about the first two Aussie's solo albums because they're still regarded as the untouchable classics. But there l'learly be a another demographic which doesn't own any of that. But simply loves Ozzy. He's gonna mean different things to different people. He's kinda transcended reality now, and uh he'll certainly not be forgotten any time soon.

Huge thanks to McWall for illuminating us there about the increasing. Now, because I've done, if I may say so, a superb job with the voices and accents in this series, the producers have said that I deserve to do two in a row. So did someone mess up the scheduling. How dare you suggest that that's the reason. Fine, I won't dwell on it anymore. What do you have for me? Okay. Who provides the juiciest sibling rivalry gossip in Britain?

Ooh, the Milibands? I would love to do a series on the Milibands. I'm not sure it would have wider commercial merit. Think richer. Topical, the Beckhams? Okay, more royal. Surely they are related. Surely. That would be a big twist. No, it is Harry and Wills. Oh, actual royalty. Okay, not TV royalty, got you. We are telling the story of two princes and one impossible family.

That sounds like a viral YouTube clip. It does. It also sounds like a series that's gonna see a standard trial for treason. So let's see what happens. From Audible Originals and Sammy Stats Audio, this is the fourth and final episode in our series, Sharon and Albert. British Scandal was hosted by me, Matt Ford. And me, Alice Levine. For Samistat, our series producer was Chica Ayres. Our assistant producer was Louise Mason.

Our senior producers were Joe Sykes and Dasha Lisitsina. Our engineer was Jai Williams. Executive producers for Audible were Theodora Leludis and Estelle Doyle. Tänkstå. Okej, så ni vill öppna lite butik för. Förlåt, en kedja av du tycker. En global kedja. Med drönableveranser. Och rundstationer. Okej, klart vi tänker stort. Välkommen till Sven. Affair.