Chapter 1The Boy from Aston

Foreword

I have spent my working life writing about the radicals of the Celtic fringe — the quarrymen and tinners and chapel firebrands of Wales and Cornwall, the men and women who stood up in the industrial peripheries of Britain and refused, in pamphlets and pulpits and strike committees, to accept the life the machine had assigned them. That was my beat, and I was content in it. So when I told people I was writing a book about Ozzy Osbourne, the reaction was fairly uniform: a pause, a careful look, and then the question of what, exactly, the Prince of Darkness had to do with anything I had ever cared about. He bit the head off a bat. He had a reality television program. He was, they meant, not my subject.

He was more my subject than almost anyone I have written about.

Because the people I had spent decades studying were the articulate resisters — the ones who could read the system that was grinding them and write the counter-argument. John Michael Osbourne could not read the system. He could barely read at all. The letters moved on the page, and the schools of postwar Birmingham, which had no word for dyslexia and no patience for the children of toolmakers, sorted him into the failure category and closed the file. The eleven-plus, the secondary modern, the factory gate, Winson Green prison: every institution that processed him reached the same verdict, and the verdict was that he was nothing. What interested me — what has always interested me — is what a person does with a verdict like that. The radicals I knew answered it with words. Here was a man who had been locked out of words entirely, and who answered it with noise. I wanted to understand that answer.

I worked, as I always work, from the record: the published memoirs, his own accounts in their several tellings, the press archives, the court records, the vast public documentation of a life that was lived, for better and worse, almost entirely in view. I expected the record to give me a story about excess, because excess is the story the culture has agreed to tell about him. What the record gave me instead was a story about industry. The sound that frightened the world in 1970 was not conjured from any occult source. It was made of Birmingham — of a guitarist's fingertips left in a sheet-metal press, of prosthetics moulded from washing-up bottle caps, of detuned strings and a drummer who hit like a man striking metal, because striking metal was the work the city had trained him for. The devil's interval sat on top of it, but underneath it was the foundry, all the way down.

I expected, too, to find the usual arc of the rock biography: the rise, the fall, the cautionary ending. The record declined to cooperate. This was a man declared finished at thirty who was not finished; fired from the band he had fronted, who built a second career larger than the first; written off as a burnt-out joke, who became the unlikely patriarch on a million television screens; handed a degenerative diagnosis, who got himself to one last stage in his home city and sang. The judgments were always authoritative. They were always wrong. A biographer learns to distrust his own verdicts in the company of a life like that.

Why does Ozzy Osbourne deserve a book of this kind — the kind I would write about a Merthyr rioter or a Penrhyn striker? Because his life is the plainest surviving account of what Britain's industrial machine did to the children it fed on, and of what one of those children did back. He never wrote a manifesto. He could not have. But the sound he carried out of Aston said what the manifestos said — that the life assigned was not the life owed — and it said it loudly enough that the whole world heard. From a farm in west Wales, a long way from any factory, that seemed to me a story worth telling properly.

— Roderick Penraith, west Wales

Chapter 1 · The Boy from Aston

The house at 14 Lodge Road, Aston, Birmingham, was a two-up, two-down terraced dwelling that had been built in the Victorian era for workers who would never own it. The walls were thin enough that you could hear the neighbors arguing about money, which they always were, because there was never enough. The toilet was outside, shared with the row, and in winter the pipes froze solid. There was no hot water on tap. The bathtub, when it appeared, sat in the kitchen, and the family took turns in the same water, the youngest going last, by which point the water was gray and barely warm.

John Michael Osbourne was born on December 3, 1948, the fourth of six children born to John Thomas "Jack" Osbourne and Lillian Unitt. His father worked night shifts at the General Electric Company plant on Witton Lane, where he was a toolmaker, the skilled trade that produced the dies and jigs the rest of the workforce used. His mother worked days at the Lucas factory on the other side of the city, assembling parts for cars. Jack Osbourne would die of cancer in January 1978, during the brief period when Ozzy had walked out of Black Sabbath; at the hospital, just before dying, he had told his son: "Do something about your drinking, John. It's too bloody much." Ozzy, by his own account, got through the funeral a week later on neat whisky, poured from the morning onward. The shift arrangement meant the children saw their parents in rotation, one always arriving as the other left, a relay of exhaustion that defined working-class family life in postwar Birmingham. "It was a grinding fucking routine, day in, day out," Ozzy would later write of his parents' schedule. "But you didn't hear them complaining about it."

The city they lived in was still pockmarked with bomb craters. The Luftwaffe had targeted Birmingham's industrial corridor with sustained fury during the Blitz, recognizing that the factories clustered along the canal network from Aston to Smethwick produced a significant fraction of Britain's war materiel. By 1948, the rubble had been partially cleared, but the scars remained. Empty lots where houses had stood, walls sheared away to reveal wallpaper patterns that had been chosen by people now dead. The children of Aston played in these ruins. They built dens in the rubble, found shrapnel, told each other stories about what the buildings had been before the bombs came.

Aston was not the worst neighborhood in Birmingham, but it was poor enough that the distinction hardly mattered to the people who lived there. The houses had been built for factory workers in the 1880s and 1890s, and they had been slowly deteriorating ever since. The streets were narrow and blackened with soot from the factories that surrounded them on every side. The air itself had a metallic quality: you could taste the industry. In winter, the fog mixed with factory smoke to produce a yellow-gray haze that sat in the streets and refused to lift for days.

The Osbourne household was cramped in the way that only true poverty makes possible. "There were just grey skies and corner pubs and sickly looking people who worked like animals on assembly lines," Ozzy recalled of the neighborhood. "There was a lot of working-class pride, though. People even put those fake stone bricks on the outside of their council houses, to make it look like they were living in fucking Windsor Castle." Six children and two adults in a space designed for four. Jack and Lillian's bedroom. The children divided up between rooms by age and gender as best the geometry allowed. A kitchen. A front room for company that rarely came. The children slept in various configurations: top to tail, two to a bed, the youngest in a cot that had served all six of them in turn.

The family that filled the house had a particular shape. Jean came first, the eldest, old enough to function almost as a second mother by the time John was small. After Jean came Iris, then Gillian. Three older sisters who arrived in close succession and established the household's rhythm before any of the boys were born. John was the fourth child and the first boy. After him came two younger brothers: Paul, the well-behaved one in the blazer and grey flannels who turned every parental comparison into a small humiliation, and Tony, the youngest of all six, the baby of the family. Three girls, then three boys. The household had absorbed his sisters' fights and music long before it learned what to do with him, and there were two more boys arriving behind him as he tried to figure out where in the queue he belonged.

John, nobody called him Ozzy yet, that would come later, was a small boy, slight and pale, with a face that seemed permanently startled. He had large eyes that gave him an expression of perpetual surprise, as though the world kept presenting him with information he had not expected. His siblings would later describe him as the odd one out, which in a family of six is a notable distinction. He was not the eldest (Jean) or the youngest (Tony, two boys after him). He occupied the uncomfortable middle territory where you had to work for attention but lacked the leverage of being either firstborn or baby. Jean watched out for him; Iris and Gillian fought their own wars; Paul shamed him by good behavior; Tony was too small, for a long time, to count.

What set him apart first was not wildness or rebellion but something closer to bewilderment. The world seemed to operate according to rules that other people understood intuitively but that remained opaque to him. This would later be diagnosed, partially, as dyslexia, but in 1950s Birmingham, dyslexia was not a diagnosis available to the children of factory workers. What was available was the judgment of the school system, which was swift and final: John Osbourne was thick.

Prince Albert Juniors in Aston was his first institutional encounter, and it established a pattern that would repeat through every school he attended. The letters on the page moved. They rearranged themselves. They refused to stay where the teacher said they belonged. When asked to read aloud, the words came out wrong, transposed, garbled, sometimes in an order that made the other children laugh. The laughter was the worst part. Not because it was cruel, though it was, but because it confirmed what the teachers' exasperation had already suggested: that there was something fundamentally wrong with his brain.

The 1944 Education Act had created the tripartite system that sorted British children into grammar schools, secondary modern schools, and technical schools based on the eleven-plus examination. The system was, in theory, meritocratic. In practice, it was a machine for confirming the class position children had been born into. Grammar school children went on to white-collar careers. Secondary modern children went into factories. The eleven-plus tested exactly the skills that John Osbourne could not demonstrate: reading comprehension, written expression, the ability to organize information on a page. He failed comprehensively.

The secondary modern schools of 1960s Birmingham were holding pens. The teachers knew it. The students knew it. The curriculum was nominal: enough reading and arithmetic to fill out a factory employment form, enough geography to know that England was part of something larger, enough history to produce a vague patriotism. The real education happened in the corridors and the playground, where the pecking order was established through a combination of physical toughness and verbal wit.

John Osbourne had the verbal wit. This was the paradox that dyslexia created: a boy who could not decode the written word was often, in conversation, the quickest and funniest person in the room. His mind worked in images, in associations, in leaps that bypassed the linear logic of print. He could make people laugh. In a school where academic achievement was irrelevant and social survival was everything, this was a more valuable currency than any exam result.

But the wit existed alongside something darker. The small boy with the startled eyes was learning, through daily repetition, that the institutions designed to help him regarded him as defective. The school did not teach him to read; it taught him that he could not read. The distinction matters. A child who has not yet learned to read is in one psychological state. A child who has been told, through years of failure and humiliation, that reading is something his brain cannot do, is in another state entirely. The latter child does not simply lack a skill. He carries a conviction about his own inadequacy that seeps into everything else.

At home, the dysfunction was of a different kind. Jack Osbourne was not a violent man, but he was an absent one, present in the house but absent in the way that matters to children. "He was a good guy, my old man: simple, old-fashioned," Ozzy wrote decades later. "He would say to me, 'You might not have a good education, but good manners don't cost you anything.' And he practised what he preached: he'd always give up his seat on the bus for a woman or help an old lady across the road. A good man. I really miss him." The night shifts had hollowed him out. He came home in the morning as the children left for school, slept through the day, and left for the factory as they were going to bed. On weekends, he was either recovering from the week's shifts or drinking at the pub, which served the same purpose as sleep. The toolmaker's hands stayed competent into old age (Ozzy would later say his own knack for fixing things came from watching his father), but the patience rarely lasted long enough to teach the lesson.

Lillian was the force in the household. She was tough in the way that working-class mothers of that era had to be, managing six children on wages that never stretched far enough, maintaining a household that was always one broken boiler or one missed paycheck away from crisis. She had no patience for self-pity and little tolerance for excuses. The children were expected to contribute, to behave, to not bring trouble to the door. When trouble came anyway, as it did with increasing frequency as John grew older, Lillian's response was a mixture of fury and resignation: the fury of a woman who had enough to deal with already, the resignation of one who had always known that this child was going to be difficult. Jean, the eldest sister, more than anyone, became his buffer against that fury. "I don't know what I would have done without Jean, to be honest with you," Ozzy would later say.

The neighborhood itself was an education. Aston in the 1950s and early 1960s was a community organized around the factory system. The factories (GEC, Lucas, BSA, the countless smaller metalworking shops) were not just employers but the organizing principle of social life. Men went to work at the same time, came home at the same time, drank at the same pubs, supported the same football teams (Aston Villa, whose ground was a short walk from Lodge Road). Women worked their own shifts and ran the households. Children grew up knowing exactly what their future held: a factory job, marriage, children, the same streets, the same pubs, the same slow grind until retirement or death.

This was not, in the telling of it, a landscape that produced rock stars. But Birmingham's industrial culture contained within it the raw materials of something the city's planners had never intended. The factories produced noise: a constant, ambient roar of machinery that the residents no longer consciously heard but that shaped their relationship to sound. The metalworking shops produced rhythms: the stamp of presses, the grind of lathes, the clang of metal on metal. The children of Aston did not grow up in silence. They grew up in a wall of industrial sound, and the music they would eventually make carried that sound within it.

The other thing the factories produced was damaged hands. Birmingham's metalworking industry had an injury rate that would be considered scandalous by later standards but that was simply the cost of doing business in the 1950s. Men lost fingers, tips of fingers, portions of hands. They wrapped the stumps and went back to work. Among those men, working at a sheet metal factory in Aston, was a teenager named Anthony Frank Iommi, who in 1965, on his last day at the factory before leaving to pursue music full-time, fed a sheet of metal into a press and lost the tips of the middle and ring fingers of his right hand.

But that comes later. In the late 1950s, John Osbourne was still a small boy in a crowded house, failing at school, absorbing the neighborhood's ambient violence and humor and noise, and beginning to understand that the life mapped out for him (school, factory, marriage, pub, death) was the only life available unless he found a way to blow it apart.

The first escape route he tried was performance. Not music, not yet. That would require instruments and instruction, neither of which was accessible to him. Performance in the more basic sense: making a spectacle of himself. He discovered early that he could get attention by doing things that other children would not do. Eating worms. Climbing structures that were obviously dangerous. Accepting dares that no sane person would accept. He was not brave in the conventional sense. He was terrified most of the time, a fact he would freely admit decades later. But the terror was less painful than the invisibility. A boy who eats a worm is disgusting, but he is not ignored. A boy who climbs to the top of a factory wall is reckless, but he is watched.

This was the prototype of a persona that would eventually fill stadiums. The essential transaction was already in place: I will do something that shocks you, and in return, you will pay attention to me. The content of the shock would change. Worms would become bats, playground dares would become stage theatrics. But the underlying exchange remained the same across five decades.

The other escape was music, though it arrived not as a calling but as a virus. The vector was a radio. The Osbourne household had one, and it sat in the kitchen, and it played the BBC, which in the late 1950s meant a diet of light entertainment, news, and whatever popular music the corporation deemed suitable for broadcast. This was not a rich musical environment. But in 1960, when John was eleven, the radio began to transmit something that sounded different from everything that had come before. His older sisters helped. Jean came home with Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley records the BBC would not have played in daylight, and Iris and Gillian sang along to the Everly Brothers in tight harmonies that surprised a small brother who was supposed to be ignoring them.

The Beatles did not come from Birmingham, but they came from a city that was, in its essentials, the same city. Liverpool, another industrial port town where working-class children were not supposed to become famous. Then, as Ozzy would later put it, the Beatles happened: suddenly the four of them were all over the radio and the television. The conversion moment came when the teenaged John Osbourne spent his last pay cheque from the job at the Lucas plant — a factory job of which more below — on their second LP, With the Beatles. The moment he got the record home, by his own account, everything changed — a light went on in his head, and Lennon and McCartney's harmonies carried him out of Aston and into a fantasy world he never wanted to leave. John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Ozzy noted, had not wanted to work in a factory either. And they hadn't.

What the Beatles represented, before any analysis of their music, was proof. Proof that boys from streets like his could make sounds that the whole country listened to. Proof that the factory was not inevitable. This was the message that mattered, and it was received not just by John Osbourne but by thousands of boys across Britain's industrial cities who heard the same music and drew the same conclusion. The guitar became the escape hatch. The band became the vehicle. The stage became the alternative to the factory floor.

But there was a problem, and it was the same problem that had followed John Osbourne since he first sat in a classroom and watched the letters rearrange themselves on the page. He had no money for a guitar. He had no money for lessons. He had no connections to anyone who could teach him to play. He had no education that would help him understand music theory. He had, in short, nothing that the aspiring musician was supposed to have.

What he had was a voice.

Not a trained voice. Not, at this point, even a particularly good voice. But a voice that could carry a tune, project across a room, be heard over the noise that was always present in the streets and houses and factories of Aston. He began to sing along with the radio, learning the melodies by repetition, discovering that his ear was good even when his eyes were not. The music entered through the ears and bypassed the reading disability entirely. He did not need to decode notation. He did not need to read lyrics from a page. He could hear a melody once and reproduce it, could hear a song three times and know it completely.

This was not yet a career plan. It was not yet even a serious ambition. It was a thirteen-year-old boy singing along with the radio in a kitchen in Aston, unaware that the voice emerging from his throat would eventually be heard by millions of people who would never set foot in Birmingham, who would never see the terraced houses or smell the factory smoke or understand the particular quality of desperation that produced the sound they loved.

The adolescence that followed was chaotic in the way that adolescence in Aston was expected to be chaotic. The school system had finished with him, or rather, he had finished with it, leaving at fifteen with no qualifications and no prospects beyond the factory gates that were already open and waiting. The future that had been laid out for him since birth was now ready to be occupied.

He did not occupy it willingly. He occupied it because there was nothing else. He took a job at a factory, quit or was fired, took another, quit or was fired again. He worked at a Digbeth slaughterhouse — the one job, he would say later, that he actually enjoyed, though he came to regret its casual cruelties. He plumbed. He labored on construction sites. He spent a year tuning car horns at the Lucas plant, his mother's workplace, the job she had pulled strings to find him in the hope that proximity could keep him out of trouble.

Nearly every job confirmed the same thing: he was not built for this. Not in the romantic sense of being too talented for manual labor. There was nothing romantic about it. He was simply unable to perform the basic functions required. His attention wandered. His hands were clumsy. His timekeeping was disastrous. The dyslexia that had sabotaged his education now sabotaged his employment, because factory work required following written instructions, reading dials, filling out forms. The world of work, like the world of school, was organized around the written word, and the written word remained his enemy.

It was during this stretch, seventeen years old, his hair growing long because it could, that he made his first attempt to look the part of someone he had not yet figured out how to be. He could not afford a guitar, but he could afford a sewing needle and a bottle of Indian ink. He had taught himself the technique on his own arm: a blob of ink on the tip, push it through the skin far enough to take, do it again, watch the dot become a line and the line become a letter. One afternoon he walked out to Sutton Park, the green expanse on the northern edge of Birmingham that the city's working-class boys treated as free real estate, and spent the whole afternoon there spelling out O-Z-Z-Y across his knuckles, one painstaking puncture at a time. He went home that night feeling really fucking pleased with himself. His father went white. "Son, you look like a fucking idiot," Jack said.

The idiot was the point. He could not yet sing, could not yet play, could not yet do anything that would carry him out of the future the city had assigned him. But he could mark himself. He could put a name on his hands that he had chosen, a name that did not appear on any school report or factory employment form, a name that announced (to himself first, to his father second, to the rest of the world eventually) that he was not going to remain John Osbourne, fourth of six, thick at school, useless on the line.

The petty crime began not as rebellion but as economics. He needed money. He could not keep a job. The equation solved itself. He shoplifted clumsily, without sophistication, grabbing things from shops and running. He broke into houses. He was bad at it. On one occasion, he broke into a clothes shop, was unable to find anything worth stealing, and took the shopkeeper's gloves, which he then wore around the neighborhood, where they were immediately recognized. On another occasion, he attempted to rob a clothes shop and cut himself so badly on the window he broke to gain entry that he left a trail of blood leading directly to his house.

The arrests were inevitable. The police in Aston knew the local troublemakers. They patrolled the same streets, drank in adjacent pubs, were often from the same neighborhoods. John Osbourne was not a criminal mastermind. He was a desperate, unqualified, semi-literate teenager whose attempts at crime were marked by the same chaotic incompetence that had marked his attempts at everything else. The courts were lenient at first, then less so. He was fined. He could not pay. He was fined again. He could not pay again. Eventually, he was sentenced to three months in Winson Green Prison.

Winson Green was Birmingham's main prison, a Victorian structure that looked exactly like what it was: a machine for processing human beings who had failed to function within the system designed for them. He was not yet eighteen. He was placed in a cell with a man considerably older and harder than himself, and he was terrified. The terror of prison was qualitatively different from the terrors of school or work. It was total. There was no home to go back to at the end of the day, no kitchen with a radio, no mother whose fury at least confirmed that someone cared what happened to him.

He carried into Winson Green something he had given himself in advance: the four crooked letters on his knuckles, the signature of a person who had decided, at seventeen, that he was no longer going to be invisible. Inside, he would teach himself more tattoos out of boredom, with whatever ink could be improvised. But the name itself, the OZZY across the knuckles, was already there. It had been done in daylight, by his own hand.

He served his time. He came out of Winson Green in 1966 with no money, no qualifications, no prospects, a criminal record, and the nickname he had given himself the year before. The factory gates were still open. The assembly lines were still running. The life he had been born into was still waiting, patient and immovable, ready to receive him.

He put up an advertisement in a local music shop instead.

The advertisement, handwritten in felt-tip capitals and placed in the window of Ringway Music in Birmingham, read: "OZZY ZIG NEEDS GIG." Underneath, he had written, "Experienced front man, owns own PA system," along with the address at 14 Lodge Road where he could be reached on week nights. The PA, improbably, was real. His father, who could barely keep food on the table, had taken out a £250 loan to buy his son a fifty-watt Vox PA system, because in the Birmingham of the late 1960s a singer without a PA was not a singer at all. But the advertisement represented something more important than equipment. It represented a choice. Not a well-informed choice, not a rational choice, but a choice nonetheless: the factory or the stage. The known disaster or the unknown one.

The cardboard notice sat in the shop window with the ambitions of the city's other aspiring musicians: guitarists seeking bands, drummers seeking work, bassists available for sessions. Most of these advertisements led nowhere. The people who posted them went back to the factories eventually, the music dream fading into a hobby, then a memory, then nothing.

This one did not lead nowhere. It brought, first, a knock at the door of 14 Lodge Road: a young man named Terence "Geezer" Butler, then a rhythm guitarist, recruiting a singer for a band called Rare Breed, which had just lost its own. That stint was brief. But months after it ended, the card was still in the window, and it brought two more callers to the same doorstep: a guitarist named Tony Iommi and a drummer named Bill Ward, newly returned to Aston after their own band had collapsed. The guitarist had missing fingertips. Butler had been reading Dennis Wheatley novels about black magic. The drummer hit harder than anyone in Birmingham.

None of them knew what they were about to build. They knew only that the factory was the alternative, and the factory was unacceptable.

The year was 1968. The boy from Aston was about to disappear. The thing that replaced him would be louder than anything Birmingham had ever produced, and Birmingham had produced a great deal of noise.