Last rites, p.28
Last Rites, page 28
But of course the people who run security at the suites are just regular TSA government workers. And they just about shit themselves when they looked at their X-ray machine and saw the Osbourne crown jewels going through. So the conveyor belt thing was stopped, everything had to come out and they started going through every piece of jewellery, counting all our cash, making sure it was all allowed.
Meanwhile, Sharon realised someone had fucked up our booking, so we weren’t all sitting together. Which was a bigger deal than it sounds, ’cos I couldn’t exactly ask some random bloke sitting next to me to lift me out of my seat and walk me to the bog every five minutes during the flight. So of course Sharon went off at the ticket ladies, screaming like a banshee, and they were just looking back at her like she was insane. But eventually she managed to get it all sorted out – just in time for the TSA guys to declare they were gonna confiscate fifteen of our twenty-five grand, because the limit is ten grand per person.
‘But there’s five of us!’ Sharon said to the guy.
‘Yeah, but it was all in one person’s bag.’
‘THEN SPLIT IT UP BETWEEN US!’
The cherry on top was when they made me get out of my wheelchair and ‘walk’ through the body scanner. I almost went through that thing arse over tit. But ’cos I had something in my pocket, they had to pat me down anyway. Next thing I knew, I had some 500lb guy’s hand between my arse cheeks while he was whispering in my ear – ‘I’m at your buttocks now, sir, and headed to your inner thigh’ – all while Sharon started screaming again, and the rest of the TSA guys did another count of the banknotes, ’cos they’d lost track the first time.
Well… this is going smoothly, I thought.
I managed three days at Welders before I was in hospital again. This time, though, it wasn’t an emergency. It was just part of switching over from the American healthcare system to the English one. It was Robbie Williams who sorted me out, funnily enough. He’s a good mate of Sharon’s. When he heard I was coming back, he said, ‘Ozzy should meet up with my guy.’ So Robbie’s doc came over to the house, a very nice man, and looked over my whole medical history. He said the best way to come up with a plan was for me to go over to his clinic and get a whole bunch of tests. So, next thing I knew, I was checked into the Wellington Hospital in St John’s Wood, north London.
I was there eight days in the end. Everything seemed under control other than my blood pressure. It can go from 83 to 300 in an hour, which is fucking crazy. Just standing up too quickly can cause me to black out. It’s called ‘orthostatic hypotension’ or something. It’s common in people with Parkinson’s, apparently, ’cos all the things your nervous system is supposed to do on autopilot get out of whack.
By this point, it was only a few weeks before the show. Sharon was terrified it was gonna get out that I was in hospital, even though it was just for tests, ’cos people would think it meant the show was off. Initially we thought my trip to the Wellington would just be a quick in-and-out. But as the days dragged on, we began to seriously regret checking me in as John Osbourne. I mean, it didn’t exactly take Inspector Morse to work out that was me. Every day, Sharon was begging the staff to keep quiet and stop any leaks getting out. Then on day five or six we get a phone call from the front desk. ‘We’ve got a message for John Osbourne,’ said the receptionist. ‘His brother’s here to see him.’
It was panic stations at that point. I mean, okay, yes, I’ve got a brother, Paul… but he had no idea where I was. So this was a fan or a reporter trying to sneak in. Almost certainly a reporter. Which meant the news was already out. When I saw the fire in Sharon’s eyes, I almost felt sorry for the guy. I was like, holy fuck, this bloke has got absolutely no idea what’s about to come down on his head.
Instead of going down there herself, Sharon sent our security team. Ex-military, all of ’em. One of the guys is seven feet tall. They all have arms like Popeye. So they collar this guy, scream in his face, demand to know who he is, what he’s up to, search him up and down, scare the living daylights out of him – and in the end all they find on him is a Tesco fruit platter and a get well soon card. And when they check out his driving licence, it turns out his name’s Bob Osbourne or something. He really had come to see his brother. Who really was called John.
I mean, what were the chances of two John Osbournes being at the same hospital?
If you’re reading this, Bob, I’m terribly sorry.
Give my best to John.
Once the tests were done, I had my stage fright to deal with.
I couldn’t decide what was worse, the idea of not being able to do the gig, or the stress of having to follow Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, Steven Tyler, Ronnie Wood and Sammy Hagar after breaking my neck and not touring for six years. Meanwhile, the show just kept getting bigger and bigger. Sharon was doing an incredible job. As was Tom Morello, who was acting as musical director, deciding who was gonna play what, and in what order. As all these huge names kept getting announced I was like, holy fuck, it’s gonna be up there with the Freddie Mercury tribute concert. Or like metal’s answer to Live Aid.
It didn’t help that during my eight days in hospital, I had nothing to do but worry.
After all the shit that had gone down at the start of the year, I kept thinking, what am I gonna get next? I always seem to pick something up in hospitals. They’re full of germs, those places. One more bout of pneumonia, I thought, and it’s goodbye Ozzy, never mind the gig.
Don’t get me wrong – when I had a clear head I thought, it’s gonna be fine. But when I was lying in bed at night I’d be like, I can’t go, I can’t do this. I kept saying to Sharon, we’d better get a video made, ’cos there’ll be an empty stage. She just looked at me like I was mad. She knows me better than I do. When I get all doomy, she just lets me rant.
She knew I was just scared.
For a while, I tried tuning my hearing aids into my iPhone so I could listen to music, to stop my head doing a number on me. But that didn’t work. One day I’d say to Sharon, ‘I can’t do two sets, I’ll just do Sabbath.’ Then the next day I’d be like, ‘Fuck Sabbath, I’ll just do mine.’ I’d go back and forth. I tortured myself.
Eventually Sharon said, ‘Look, there’ll be no back-up plan. No video. No pre-recorded anything. If you can’t sing on the night, just talk to the crowd and thank them. All you need to do is get up there and be Ozzy.’
Rehearsals with Sabbath started about three weeks before the show. We went down to this studio owned by one of the guys in the Prodigy, somewhere out in the countryside. No one knows where it is, so it’s very quiet.
It was great to see the guys again. It’s fucking incredible we’re all still here – how many bands can say that after fifty-seven years? – but of course we’ve all got our own shit going on. I can’t walk. Bill’s got a bad heart. Tony’s got this thing with his shoulder. The healthiest of us is Geezer – maybe it’s ’cos he’s a vegetarian. It took us a while to blow the cobwebs off, start playing like our old selves again. But we got there eventually. And we were having fun, joking around like we were still kids in Aston.
What made it even better was our old road crew being there. It was like this big family reunion. And of course they’re all getting on a bit too. We’ve all got pot bellies now. We’re all shrinking by the fucking day. The sad thing was, one of our longest-serving roadies, Bobby Thompson, a Scottish guy, isn’t around any more. When he died, the invitation to his funeral was in the form of a backstage pass with his picture on it. What really touched me was that a lot of guys came to the rehearsal with that same pass around their necks. It was really special, man.
With my own band – Zakk on guitar, Adam Wakeman on keyboards, Tommy Clufetos on drums and Mike Inez from Alice in Chains on bass – we only rehearsed for a day. It sounded fucking great.
Then it was time to relocate to Villa Park. And of course that’s when the heavens opened and it started to piss it down with rain. It had been weirdly lovely English summer weather until then. I was thinking, oh God, here we go. A few days of this and I’ll be coughing up a lung. But the gods must have been smiling on me, ’cos the next day it was nice and warm again – and it stayed that way until the day of the show.
The gates opened at 11 a.m. on Saturday 5 July, a couple of hours before the first band went on. Meanwhile, I stayed at the hotel with my vocal coach, trying to keep my head in the right place. I can never watch the bands before me. Maybe that’s a bad thing, but if I get distracted, I’ll forget what I’ve got to do. And of course the whole show was being recorded, so I knew I could watch it all back later.
It was 6 p.m. when I got to the gig. The feeling was just incredible. When I was in the dressing room, people were coming in and out constantly. All of my old road crew work for Metallica now so it was so great to see ’em all, as well as Martha, my lovely wardrobe lady. Slash was there, I remember, and all of my kids. Everybody kept crying. But they were happy tears, y’know? I shed a few myself.
I kept thinking how crazy it was that the house where I grew up, 14 Lodge Road, was just a quarter of a mile away. Sharon told me there was a line of fans at my old front door, waiting to take a selfie in front of it. Even some of the bands had gone over there. The doorbell must have been going off like crazy. My dad would have been livid – he used to sleep during the day ’cos he did the night shift at the factory.
The stage for the gig was a revolving one – like at Live Aid – so getting into position was easy. Certainly a lot easier than the lift I had to take at the Commonwealth Games. But ’cos I’ve lost even more mobility since then, there was no way I could stand up like I did at the Games – even with a support – so they sat me on this massive black throne.
It was a necessary evil, the throne. And they made the best of it, giving it a skull on each armrest and bat wings on the back. At one point there was talk of making it fly over the stage and shoot water at the crowd, but thank fuck that didn’t happen, ’cos knowing my luck, it would have crashed.
As the stage began to turn, all I could think was, is my voice really up for this? Parkinson’s messes up your vocal cords, and it only gets worse as times goes on. If I didn’t get constant voice and speech therapy, I wouldn’t be able to hold any kind of tune at all. I’m lucky Sharon’s forced me to do it over the years, even when I didn’t want to.
But as soon as the curtain went up, I forgot about my nerves.
Suddenly I was looking out over forty-two thousand faces, with another 5.8 million watching online, not that I gave the livestream much thought when I was up there. That was when the emotion really hit me. I’d never really taken it on board that so many people liked me – or even knew who I was.
It was overwhelming, man, it really was.
We got through ‘I Don’t Know’, ‘Mr. Crowley’ and ‘Suicide Solution’ no problem at all. The show was all about going back to the beginning, so that’s why we chose those early songs. Someone said doing ‘Suicide Solution’ must have felt like a vindication, after that whole thing in the eighties when they tried to put me on trial for the lyrics, accusing me of encouraging people to kill themselves. But that never occurred to me when I was up there. I just did the song. I was having a ball.
But I choked up badly when I started ‘Mama, I’m Coming Home’. I mean, it’s Sharon’s song, y’know? One of her favourites. And of course Lemmy wrote it with the two of us in mind. That alone was enough to bring tears to my eyes. But the feeling I had was about more than that. It was my last hurrah. I’d made it to the stage after six traumatic years, after losing the ability to walk or do anything on my own. It was just the whole thing, all of it coming together.
I just couldn’t hold in my emotions any more.
Out in the crowd, everyone was holding up the lights on their phones. Someone said in the papers it was like I was attending my own wake, which would be a very metal thing to do. But it didn’t feel like a funeral. It felt like a celebration. There was just so much love in that stadium, man. I could feel it coming at me in waves. It was how I imagined the first Woodstock festival must have been. I mean, I had tears streaming down my face, but I felt so uplifted by it all. And of course the crowd noticed I was struggling, and they started singing back the words. I’ve been so lucky to have had so many wonderful fans. God bless you all.
By the end of the song, thank God, I’d managed to pull myself together.
Then it was one last ride on the Crazy Train and time for the Sabbath set.
The guys in Sabbath were as nervous as I was about me doing two sets in a row. They had no idea if I could pull it off. They were also nervous about the revolving stage. During the last Sabbath tour, we played on a revolving stage in California, and every time it turned all our fucking amps fell over. Either that, or our cables got unplugged. And believe you me, you don’t want to be anywhere near Tony when that kind of shit happens.
The biggest problem I had with Sabbath was the throne. The back of it was so high I couldn’t hear the backline – the row of amps at the back of the stage, if you ain’t familiar – so I had to rely on the monitor speakers. I’d never done a gig like that before. In a smaller place, on a different stage – or if I’d been sitting on a stool – I could have felt like I was part of the band. Instead, I felt like I was out there on my own. Meanwhile, I took out my hearing aids, ’cos I was worried the frequencies would get messed up and I’d end up singing flat, which had happened a few times when we did The End Tour in 2017.
But it couldn’t have gone better. When the crowd chanted the tune of ‘War Pigs’ like they were cheering on England at the World Cup, it was just electrifying. Then we did ‘N.I.B.’, ‘Iron Man’… and ‘Paranoid’.
People ask me what I thought about Bill Ward taking off his shirt, and all I can say is, I’d have been worried if he hadn’t. I mean, okay, he’s not exactly Mr Universe – he’s a seventy-seven-year-old bloke. But he’s Bill, that’s what he does. At every gig since 1968. So why the fuck would he stop now?
The only thing that was really frustrating for me was that I wanted to jump up and run around the stage. I tried a few times. You can see it on the tape. I wanted to get up from that throne so badly. But my legs are too weak now. And my balance has gone to shit. My trainer had told me, if you put your legs in a certain position, you can give it a go, see what happens. But nothing happened, and it pissed me off no end. But what can you do? Everything else about the gig was perfect. I mean, those fireworks after ‘Paranoid’ – they were the best I’d ever seen.
Geezer gave me a cake at the end, as you probably saw if you watched the video. But the problem is, none of us have changed since we were twenty years old. We’re a bunch of jokesters. We never stop taking the piss. I was convinced Geezer was gonna smack it in my face or something. When he appeared out of nowhere holding what looked like a cream pie and went, ‘All right, here you go,’ all I could think was, what the fuck are you doing? I was convinced it was all some kind of wind-up. Then, when the show was over, I couldn’t see what was going on over the back of my throne, so it felt like I was out there for a moment all on my own. That’s why you could see me shouting ‘TURN THE FUCKING STAGE!’ to anyone who’d listen.
It was chaos, like it’s always been.
But that’s rock ’n’ roll for you.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Back to the Beginning was the best medicine I’ve had since all my medical shit started back in 2019. It was a magical night. It couldn’t have been better.
Sharon worked so hard to make it happen. For two years, non-stop. She’s like the new Bob Geldof. She did a phenomenal job. As did Tom and the army of other people involved. I had the easy part – all I had to do was perform. I had almost nothing to do with the planning. I had so many things go wrong with my health since that last big surgery in 2023, if felt like every day I’d just wake up, do what I was told, then go back to bed. My whole life was just getting wheeled in and out of rooms. I barely knew what time it was, never mind what day.
Back to the Beginning was the biggest metal show in history, or so I’m told. And although the early figures in the press of £140 million raised for the three charities were a bit misleading – I mean, Live Aid only raised £40 million on the day it was held – it must have been in the tens of millions. The show even ran under time. Nothing in the history of rock ’n’ roll has run under time. It was like a military operation. All I can say is thank you and God bless to everyone who took part. None of the bands got paid, and they all came a very long way. As for which band Sharon kicked off the bill for demanding a fee, I don’t want to know. I mean I think I do know… but I’d rather not focus on that.
I got such a kick out of watching it all back later.
When Sharon first told me Yungblud was gonna perform, I never realised he had such an incredible vocal range. But fuck me, the guy can sing. Everyone was just bowled over by his version of ‘Changes’. It was phenomenal. He sang it so well, man. It’s gonna be released as a single, apparently, with the proceeds going to charity.
I was also so happy to see Jake E. Lee up on stage, part of Tom’s all-star supergroup. As I said earlier, he left my band in 1987 under unfortunate circumstances. After that, he was flying for a while. But the guy’s had so much bad luck. He lost his wife, then the lead singer of his band, Badlands. Then of course he got shot in Las Vegas – which apparently happened ’cos he confronted two guys trying to steal a motorbike from one of his neighbours. He was much more badly injured than I thought. One of the bullets went through his lung. Apparently, the gun they used was linked to a couple of murders, so the good news is that the guys who did it will probably be put away for a very long time. I hadn’t spoken to Jake for thirty-eight years when I saw him at the show. There was a big crowd around me at the time, so we only managed to say a few words, but I texted him after, and told him that when I get it together, we should meet up. He said he’d love to.
The video messages during the show also meant the world to me. Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to record something. I was blown away by the kind words. Elton John, the guys in AC/DC, Billy Idol, Cyndi Lauper, Def Leppard, Jonathan Davis, Marilyn Manson, even Dolly Parton. I wish I had some great Dolly stories to tell you, but I’m just a fan, like everyone else. I did meet her in an elevator one time. I couldn’t believe how tiny she was for someone with such a huge voice. Meanwhile, Ricky Gervais cracked me up by doing his message in the bath. I’ll never forget the time we both went on The Graham Norton Show. I whispered in Sharon’s ear that I needed to piss – ‘cos I always need to piss – so Sharon asked Graham, then Ricky said he needed to go too. That clip’s become a classic on YouTube.
Meanwhile, Sharon realised someone had fucked up our booking, so we weren’t all sitting together. Which was a bigger deal than it sounds, ’cos I couldn’t exactly ask some random bloke sitting next to me to lift me out of my seat and walk me to the bog every five minutes during the flight. So of course Sharon went off at the ticket ladies, screaming like a banshee, and they were just looking back at her like she was insane. But eventually she managed to get it all sorted out – just in time for the TSA guys to declare they were gonna confiscate fifteen of our twenty-five grand, because the limit is ten grand per person.
‘But there’s five of us!’ Sharon said to the guy.
‘Yeah, but it was all in one person’s bag.’
‘THEN SPLIT IT UP BETWEEN US!’
The cherry on top was when they made me get out of my wheelchair and ‘walk’ through the body scanner. I almost went through that thing arse over tit. But ’cos I had something in my pocket, they had to pat me down anyway. Next thing I knew, I had some 500lb guy’s hand between my arse cheeks while he was whispering in my ear – ‘I’m at your buttocks now, sir, and headed to your inner thigh’ – all while Sharon started screaming again, and the rest of the TSA guys did another count of the banknotes, ’cos they’d lost track the first time.
Well… this is going smoothly, I thought.
I managed three days at Welders before I was in hospital again. This time, though, it wasn’t an emergency. It was just part of switching over from the American healthcare system to the English one. It was Robbie Williams who sorted me out, funnily enough. He’s a good mate of Sharon’s. When he heard I was coming back, he said, ‘Ozzy should meet up with my guy.’ So Robbie’s doc came over to the house, a very nice man, and looked over my whole medical history. He said the best way to come up with a plan was for me to go over to his clinic and get a whole bunch of tests. So, next thing I knew, I was checked into the Wellington Hospital in St John’s Wood, north London.
I was there eight days in the end. Everything seemed under control other than my blood pressure. It can go from 83 to 300 in an hour, which is fucking crazy. Just standing up too quickly can cause me to black out. It’s called ‘orthostatic hypotension’ or something. It’s common in people with Parkinson’s, apparently, ’cos all the things your nervous system is supposed to do on autopilot get out of whack.
By this point, it was only a few weeks before the show. Sharon was terrified it was gonna get out that I was in hospital, even though it was just for tests, ’cos people would think it meant the show was off. Initially we thought my trip to the Wellington would just be a quick in-and-out. But as the days dragged on, we began to seriously regret checking me in as John Osbourne. I mean, it didn’t exactly take Inspector Morse to work out that was me. Every day, Sharon was begging the staff to keep quiet and stop any leaks getting out. Then on day five or six we get a phone call from the front desk. ‘We’ve got a message for John Osbourne,’ said the receptionist. ‘His brother’s here to see him.’
It was panic stations at that point. I mean, okay, yes, I’ve got a brother, Paul… but he had no idea where I was. So this was a fan or a reporter trying to sneak in. Almost certainly a reporter. Which meant the news was already out. When I saw the fire in Sharon’s eyes, I almost felt sorry for the guy. I was like, holy fuck, this bloke has got absolutely no idea what’s about to come down on his head.
Instead of going down there herself, Sharon sent our security team. Ex-military, all of ’em. One of the guys is seven feet tall. They all have arms like Popeye. So they collar this guy, scream in his face, demand to know who he is, what he’s up to, search him up and down, scare the living daylights out of him – and in the end all they find on him is a Tesco fruit platter and a get well soon card. And when they check out his driving licence, it turns out his name’s Bob Osbourne or something. He really had come to see his brother. Who really was called John.
I mean, what were the chances of two John Osbournes being at the same hospital?
If you’re reading this, Bob, I’m terribly sorry.
Give my best to John.
Once the tests were done, I had my stage fright to deal with.
I couldn’t decide what was worse, the idea of not being able to do the gig, or the stress of having to follow Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, Steven Tyler, Ronnie Wood and Sammy Hagar after breaking my neck and not touring for six years. Meanwhile, the show just kept getting bigger and bigger. Sharon was doing an incredible job. As was Tom Morello, who was acting as musical director, deciding who was gonna play what, and in what order. As all these huge names kept getting announced I was like, holy fuck, it’s gonna be up there with the Freddie Mercury tribute concert. Or like metal’s answer to Live Aid.
It didn’t help that during my eight days in hospital, I had nothing to do but worry.
After all the shit that had gone down at the start of the year, I kept thinking, what am I gonna get next? I always seem to pick something up in hospitals. They’re full of germs, those places. One more bout of pneumonia, I thought, and it’s goodbye Ozzy, never mind the gig.
Don’t get me wrong – when I had a clear head I thought, it’s gonna be fine. But when I was lying in bed at night I’d be like, I can’t go, I can’t do this. I kept saying to Sharon, we’d better get a video made, ’cos there’ll be an empty stage. She just looked at me like I was mad. She knows me better than I do. When I get all doomy, she just lets me rant.
She knew I was just scared.
For a while, I tried tuning my hearing aids into my iPhone so I could listen to music, to stop my head doing a number on me. But that didn’t work. One day I’d say to Sharon, ‘I can’t do two sets, I’ll just do Sabbath.’ Then the next day I’d be like, ‘Fuck Sabbath, I’ll just do mine.’ I’d go back and forth. I tortured myself.
Eventually Sharon said, ‘Look, there’ll be no back-up plan. No video. No pre-recorded anything. If you can’t sing on the night, just talk to the crowd and thank them. All you need to do is get up there and be Ozzy.’
Rehearsals with Sabbath started about three weeks before the show. We went down to this studio owned by one of the guys in the Prodigy, somewhere out in the countryside. No one knows where it is, so it’s very quiet.
It was great to see the guys again. It’s fucking incredible we’re all still here – how many bands can say that after fifty-seven years? – but of course we’ve all got our own shit going on. I can’t walk. Bill’s got a bad heart. Tony’s got this thing with his shoulder. The healthiest of us is Geezer – maybe it’s ’cos he’s a vegetarian. It took us a while to blow the cobwebs off, start playing like our old selves again. But we got there eventually. And we were having fun, joking around like we were still kids in Aston.
What made it even better was our old road crew being there. It was like this big family reunion. And of course they’re all getting on a bit too. We’ve all got pot bellies now. We’re all shrinking by the fucking day. The sad thing was, one of our longest-serving roadies, Bobby Thompson, a Scottish guy, isn’t around any more. When he died, the invitation to his funeral was in the form of a backstage pass with his picture on it. What really touched me was that a lot of guys came to the rehearsal with that same pass around their necks. It was really special, man.
With my own band – Zakk on guitar, Adam Wakeman on keyboards, Tommy Clufetos on drums and Mike Inez from Alice in Chains on bass – we only rehearsed for a day. It sounded fucking great.
Then it was time to relocate to Villa Park. And of course that’s when the heavens opened and it started to piss it down with rain. It had been weirdly lovely English summer weather until then. I was thinking, oh God, here we go. A few days of this and I’ll be coughing up a lung. But the gods must have been smiling on me, ’cos the next day it was nice and warm again – and it stayed that way until the day of the show.
The gates opened at 11 a.m. on Saturday 5 July, a couple of hours before the first band went on. Meanwhile, I stayed at the hotel with my vocal coach, trying to keep my head in the right place. I can never watch the bands before me. Maybe that’s a bad thing, but if I get distracted, I’ll forget what I’ve got to do. And of course the whole show was being recorded, so I knew I could watch it all back later.
It was 6 p.m. when I got to the gig. The feeling was just incredible. When I was in the dressing room, people were coming in and out constantly. All of my old road crew work for Metallica now so it was so great to see ’em all, as well as Martha, my lovely wardrobe lady. Slash was there, I remember, and all of my kids. Everybody kept crying. But they were happy tears, y’know? I shed a few myself.
I kept thinking how crazy it was that the house where I grew up, 14 Lodge Road, was just a quarter of a mile away. Sharon told me there was a line of fans at my old front door, waiting to take a selfie in front of it. Even some of the bands had gone over there. The doorbell must have been going off like crazy. My dad would have been livid – he used to sleep during the day ’cos he did the night shift at the factory.
The stage for the gig was a revolving one – like at Live Aid – so getting into position was easy. Certainly a lot easier than the lift I had to take at the Commonwealth Games. But ’cos I’ve lost even more mobility since then, there was no way I could stand up like I did at the Games – even with a support – so they sat me on this massive black throne.
It was a necessary evil, the throne. And they made the best of it, giving it a skull on each armrest and bat wings on the back. At one point there was talk of making it fly over the stage and shoot water at the crowd, but thank fuck that didn’t happen, ’cos knowing my luck, it would have crashed.
As the stage began to turn, all I could think was, is my voice really up for this? Parkinson’s messes up your vocal cords, and it only gets worse as times goes on. If I didn’t get constant voice and speech therapy, I wouldn’t be able to hold any kind of tune at all. I’m lucky Sharon’s forced me to do it over the years, even when I didn’t want to.
But as soon as the curtain went up, I forgot about my nerves.
Suddenly I was looking out over forty-two thousand faces, with another 5.8 million watching online, not that I gave the livestream much thought when I was up there. That was when the emotion really hit me. I’d never really taken it on board that so many people liked me – or even knew who I was.
It was overwhelming, man, it really was.
We got through ‘I Don’t Know’, ‘Mr. Crowley’ and ‘Suicide Solution’ no problem at all. The show was all about going back to the beginning, so that’s why we chose those early songs. Someone said doing ‘Suicide Solution’ must have felt like a vindication, after that whole thing in the eighties when they tried to put me on trial for the lyrics, accusing me of encouraging people to kill themselves. But that never occurred to me when I was up there. I just did the song. I was having a ball.
But I choked up badly when I started ‘Mama, I’m Coming Home’. I mean, it’s Sharon’s song, y’know? One of her favourites. And of course Lemmy wrote it with the two of us in mind. That alone was enough to bring tears to my eyes. But the feeling I had was about more than that. It was my last hurrah. I’d made it to the stage after six traumatic years, after losing the ability to walk or do anything on my own. It was just the whole thing, all of it coming together.
I just couldn’t hold in my emotions any more.
Out in the crowd, everyone was holding up the lights on their phones. Someone said in the papers it was like I was attending my own wake, which would be a very metal thing to do. But it didn’t feel like a funeral. It felt like a celebration. There was just so much love in that stadium, man. I could feel it coming at me in waves. It was how I imagined the first Woodstock festival must have been. I mean, I had tears streaming down my face, but I felt so uplifted by it all. And of course the crowd noticed I was struggling, and they started singing back the words. I’ve been so lucky to have had so many wonderful fans. God bless you all.
By the end of the song, thank God, I’d managed to pull myself together.
Then it was one last ride on the Crazy Train and time for the Sabbath set.
The guys in Sabbath were as nervous as I was about me doing two sets in a row. They had no idea if I could pull it off. They were also nervous about the revolving stage. During the last Sabbath tour, we played on a revolving stage in California, and every time it turned all our fucking amps fell over. Either that, or our cables got unplugged. And believe you me, you don’t want to be anywhere near Tony when that kind of shit happens.
The biggest problem I had with Sabbath was the throne. The back of it was so high I couldn’t hear the backline – the row of amps at the back of the stage, if you ain’t familiar – so I had to rely on the monitor speakers. I’d never done a gig like that before. In a smaller place, on a different stage – or if I’d been sitting on a stool – I could have felt like I was part of the band. Instead, I felt like I was out there on my own. Meanwhile, I took out my hearing aids, ’cos I was worried the frequencies would get messed up and I’d end up singing flat, which had happened a few times when we did The End Tour in 2017.
But it couldn’t have gone better. When the crowd chanted the tune of ‘War Pigs’ like they were cheering on England at the World Cup, it was just electrifying. Then we did ‘N.I.B.’, ‘Iron Man’… and ‘Paranoid’.
People ask me what I thought about Bill Ward taking off his shirt, and all I can say is, I’d have been worried if he hadn’t. I mean, okay, he’s not exactly Mr Universe – he’s a seventy-seven-year-old bloke. But he’s Bill, that’s what he does. At every gig since 1968. So why the fuck would he stop now?
The only thing that was really frustrating for me was that I wanted to jump up and run around the stage. I tried a few times. You can see it on the tape. I wanted to get up from that throne so badly. But my legs are too weak now. And my balance has gone to shit. My trainer had told me, if you put your legs in a certain position, you can give it a go, see what happens. But nothing happened, and it pissed me off no end. But what can you do? Everything else about the gig was perfect. I mean, those fireworks after ‘Paranoid’ – they were the best I’d ever seen.
Geezer gave me a cake at the end, as you probably saw if you watched the video. But the problem is, none of us have changed since we were twenty years old. We’re a bunch of jokesters. We never stop taking the piss. I was convinced Geezer was gonna smack it in my face or something. When he appeared out of nowhere holding what looked like a cream pie and went, ‘All right, here you go,’ all I could think was, what the fuck are you doing? I was convinced it was all some kind of wind-up. Then, when the show was over, I couldn’t see what was going on over the back of my throne, so it felt like I was out there for a moment all on my own. That’s why you could see me shouting ‘TURN THE FUCKING STAGE!’ to anyone who’d listen.
It was chaos, like it’s always been.
But that’s rock ’n’ roll for you.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Back to the Beginning was the best medicine I’ve had since all my medical shit started back in 2019. It was a magical night. It couldn’t have been better.
Sharon worked so hard to make it happen. For two years, non-stop. She’s like the new Bob Geldof. She did a phenomenal job. As did Tom and the army of other people involved. I had the easy part – all I had to do was perform. I had almost nothing to do with the planning. I had so many things go wrong with my health since that last big surgery in 2023, if felt like every day I’d just wake up, do what I was told, then go back to bed. My whole life was just getting wheeled in and out of rooms. I barely knew what time it was, never mind what day.
Back to the Beginning was the biggest metal show in history, or so I’m told. And although the early figures in the press of £140 million raised for the three charities were a bit misleading – I mean, Live Aid only raised £40 million on the day it was held – it must have been in the tens of millions. The show even ran under time. Nothing in the history of rock ’n’ roll has run under time. It was like a military operation. All I can say is thank you and God bless to everyone who took part. None of the bands got paid, and they all came a very long way. As for which band Sharon kicked off the bill for demanding a fee, I don’t want to know. I mean I think I do know… but I’d rather not focus on that.
I got such a kick out of watching it all back later.
When Sharon first told me Yungblud was gonna perform, I never realised he had such an incredible vocal range. But fuck me, the guy can sing. Everyone was just bowled over by his version of ‘Changes’. It was phenomenal. He sang it so well, man. It’s gonna be released as a single, apparently, with the proceeds going to charity.
I was also so happy to see Jake E. Lee up on stage, part of Tom’s all-star supergroup. As I said earlier, he left my band in 1987 under unfortunate circumstances. After that, he was flying for a while. But the guy’s had so much bad luck. He lost his wife, then the lead singer of his band, Badlands. Then of course he got shot in Las Vegas – which apparently happened ’cos he confronted two guys trying to steal a motorbike from one of his neighbours. He was much more badly injured than I thought. One of the bullets went through his lung. Apparently, the gun they used was linked to a couple of murders, so the good news is that the guys who did it will probably be put away for a very long time. I hadn’t spoken to Jake for thirty-eight years when I saw him at the show. There was a big crowd around me at the time, so we only managed to say a few words, but I texted him after, and told him that when I get it together, we should meet up. He said he’d love to.
The video messages during the show also meant the world to me. Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to record something. I was blown away by the kind words. Elton John, the guys in AC/DC, Billy Idol, Cyndi Lauper, Def Leppard, Jonathan Davis, Marilyn Manson, even Dolly Parton. I wish I had some great Dolly stories to tell you, but I’m just a fan, like everyone else. I did meet her in an elevator one time. I couldn’t believe how tiny she was for someone with such a huge voice. Meanwhile, Ricky Gervais cracked me up by doing his message in the bath. I’ll never forget the time we both went on The Graham Norton Show. I whispered in Sharon’s ear that I needed to piss – ‘cos I always need to piss – so Sharon asked Graham, then Ricky said he needed to go too. That clip’s become a classic on YouTube.
