THE SEVEN WEEKS THAT CHANGED ROCK
NO MORE TEARS OZZY
OSBORNE
Come the end of the 80s, Ozzy was in tatters, but by 1991 he was back, sober and fit again.
GETTY
In 1980 Ozzy Osbourne released Suicide Solution, a song that (contrary to the thoughts of illinformed conservative Christians) warned of the perils of drinking yourself to death. A little under a decade later he was in serious danger of suffering that fate himself.
In a decade defined largely by excess and hedonism, Ozzy had gone off the rails in a big way. Stories of his misadventures made tabloid headlines (cultivating a legend around the rock’n’roll madman), but the reality was decidedly less glamorous. By his own admission (in his autobiography I Am Ozzy), he “wasn’t the bat-biting, Alamo-pissing, Crazy Trainsinging rock’n’roll hero”, so much as someone who couldn’t drink without soiling himself, blacking out or upsetting his family. And then on September 3, 1989 he tried to murder his wife Sharon.