I Am Ozzy Read online

  Eventually he turned Queen’s Evidence, which means you take a reduced sentence for ratting on someone who’s more important. Then, when you get out of prison, they give you a new identity. They sent him off to live in Southend or some out-of-the-way place. He was under police protection twenty-four hours a day. But after years of waiting for him to come out of the slammer, his wife broke down and asked for a divorce. Pat goes into his garage, starts up his car, puts a hosepipe over the exhaust, and feeds it through the driver’s window. Then he gets inside and waits until the carbon monoxide kills him.

  He was only in his early thirties.

  When I heard, I phoned his sister, Mary, and asked if he had been loaded when he’d killed himself. She said they hadn’t found anything: he’d just done it, stone-cold sober.

  It was the middle of winter 1966 when I got out of the nick. Fucking hell, man, it was cold. The guards felt bad for me, so they gave me this old coat to wear, but it stank of mothballs. Then they got the plastic bag with my things in it and tipped it out on to the table. Wallet, keys, fags. I remember thinking, What must it be like to get your stuff back after thirty years, when it’s like a time capsule from an alternative universe? After I signed some forms they unlocked the door, pulled back this barbed-wire-covered gate, and I walked out into the street.

  I was a free man, and I’d survived prison without being arse raped or beaten to a pulp.

  So how come I felt so fucking sad?

  2

  Ozzy Zig Needs Gig

  Knock-knock.

  I poked my head through the curtains in the living room and saw a big-nosed bloke with long hair and a moustache standing outside on the doorstep. He looked like a cross between Guy Fawkes and Jesus of Nazareth. And was that a pair of…? Fuck me, it was. He was wearing velvet trousers.

  ‘JOHN! Get the door!’

  My mum could wake up half of Aston cemetery at the volume she shouted. Ever since I’d got out of the nick, she’d been breaking my balls. Every two seconds, it was ‘John, do this. John, do that.’ But I didn’t want to answer the door too fast. I needed a moment to sort my head out, get my nerves under control. This bloke looked like he was serious.

  This could be important.

  Knock-knock.

  ‘JOHN OSBOURNE! GET THE BLOODY—!

  ‘I’m getting it!’ I stomped down the hallway, twisted the latch on the front door, and yanked it open. ‘Are you… “Ozzy Zig”?’ said Guy Fawkes, in a thick Brummie accent.

  ‘Who wants to know?’ I said, folding my arms.

  ‘Terry Butler,’ he said. ‘I saw your ad.’

  That was exactly what I’d hoped he was going to say. Truth was, I’d been waiting a long time for this moment. I’d dreamed about it. I’d fantasised about it. I’d had conversations with myself on the shitter about it. One day, I thought, people might write newspaper articles about my ad in the window of Ringway Music, saying it was the turning point in the life of John Michael Osbourne, ex-car horn tuner. ‘Tell me, Mr Osbourne,’ I’d be asked by Robin Day on the BBC, ‘when you were growing up in Aston, did you ever think that a simple advert in a music shop window would lead to you becoming the fifth member of the Beatles, and your sister Iris getting married to Paul McCartney?’ And I’d answer, ‘Never in a million years, Robin, never in a million years.’

  It was a fucking awesome ad. ‘OZZY ZIG NEEDS GIG’, it said in felt-tip capital letters. Underneath I’d written, ‘Experienced front man, owns own PA system’, and then I’d put the address (14 Lodge Road) where I could be reached between six and nine on week nights. As long as I wasn’t down the pub, trying to scrounge a drink off someone. Or at the Silver Blades ice rink. Or somewhere else.

  We didn’t have a telephone in those days.

  Don’t ask me where the ‘Zig’ in ‘Ozzy Zig’ came from. It just popped into my head one day. After I got out of the nick, I was always dreaming up new ways to promote myself as a singer. The odds of making it might have been a million to one – even that was optimistic – but I was up for anything that could save me from the fate of Harry and his gold watch. Besides, bands like the Move, Traffic and the Moody Blues were proving that you didn’t have to be from Liverpool to be successful. People were talking about ‘Brumbeat’ being the next ‘Merseybeat’. Whatever the fuck that meant.

  I ain’t gonna pretend I can remember every word of the conversation I had with the strange, velvet-trousered bloke on my doorstep that night, but it I’m pretty sure it went something like:

  ‘So you got a gig for me then, Terence?’

  ‘The lads call me Geezer.’

  ‘Geezer?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You taking the piss?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘As in “That smelly old geezer just shit his pants”?’

  ‘That’s a very funny joke for a man who goes around calling himself “Ozzy Zig”. And what’s up with that bum fluff on yer head, man? It looks like you had an accident with a lawn-mower. You can’t go on stage looking like that.’

  In fact, I’d shaved my head during one of my mod phases, but by then I was a rocker again, so I was trying to grow it back. I was pretty self-conscious about it, to be honest with you, so I didn’t appreciate Geezer pointing it out. I almost came back at him with a joke about his massive nose, but in the end I thought the better of it and just said, ‘So have you got a gig for me or not?’

  ‘You heard of Rare Breed?’

  ‘Course I have. You’re the ones with the strobe light and the hippy bloke with the bongos or whatever, right?’

  ‘That’s us. Only we just lost our singer.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘The ad said you’ve got your own PA system,’ said Geezer, getting straight to the point.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You sang in any bands before?’

  ‘Course I fucking have.’

  ‘Well, the job’s yours then.’

  *

  And that was how I first met Geezer.

  Or at least that’s how I remember it going down. I was an ornery little bastard in those days. You learn to be like that when you’re looking for a break. I was also getting very restless: a lot of the things that had never bothered me that much before had really started to piss me off. Like still living with my folks at 14 Lodge Road. Like still not having any dough. Like still not being in a band.

  The hippy-dippy shit that was all over the radio after I got out of Winson Green was also winding me up, big time. All these polo-necked wankers from grammar schools were going out and buying songs like ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)’. Flowers in your hair? Do me a fucking favour.

  They even started playing some of that shit in the pubs around Aston. You’d be sitting there with your pint and your fags and your pickled egg, in this yellow-walled shithole of a boozer, staggering to the pisser and back every five minutes, with everyone knackered, broke and dying from asbestos poisoning or whatever toxic shit they were breathing in every day. Then, all of a sudden, you’d hear all this hippy crap about ‘gentle people’ going to love-ins at Haight–Ashbury, whatever the fuck Haight–Ashbury was.

  Who gave a dog’s arse about what people were doing in San Francisco, anyway? The only flowers anyone saw in Aston were the ones they threw in the hole after you when you croaked it at the age of fifty-three ’cos you’d worked yourself to death.

  I hated those hippy-dippy songs, man.

  Really hated them.

  They were playing one when a fight broke out in the pub one time. I remember this bloke getting me in a headlock and trying to punch my teeth out, and all I can hear on the jukebox is this kumbaya bullshit being tapped out on a fucking glocken-spiel while some knob-end with a voice like his marbles are in a vice warbles on about ‘strange vibrations’. Meanwhile, the bloke who’s trying to kill me drags me out into the street, and he’s jabbing me in the face, and I can feel my eye swelling up and blood spurting out of my nose, and I’m trying to re
ach around so I punch the fucker back, anything just to get him off me, and there’s a circle of blokes around us shouting, ‘FINISH IT, FINISH IT.’ Then, CRRRAAAAAASSSSSHHHHHH!

  When I open my eyes I’m lying half-conscious in a pile of broken glass, big lumps of flesh torn out of my arms and legs, my jeans and jumper in shreds, people screaming, blood everywhere. Somehow, during the fight we’d both lost our balance and fallen backwards through a plate-glass shop window. The pain was unbelievable. Then I saw this severed head lying beside me and I almost crapped my pants. Luckily it was from one of the shop mannequins, not a real head. Then I heard sirens. Then everything went black.

  I spent most of the night in hospital being stitched up. The glass ripped off so much skin that I lost half a tattoo, and the doctors told me the scars on my head would be there for life. That wouldn’t be a problem though, as long as I didn’t become a baldie. On the bus back home the next day I remember humming the tune to ‘San Francisco’ and thinking, I should write my own fucking anti-hippy song. I even came up with a title: ‘Aston (Be Sure to Wear Some Glass in Your Face)’.

  The funny thing is, I was never much of a fighter. Better a live coward than a dead hero, that was my motto. But for some reason I just kept getting caught up in all these scuffles during those early days. I must have looked like I was up for it, I suppose. My last big fight was in another pub, out near Digbeth. I’ve no idea how it started, but I remember glasses and ashtrays and chairs flying all over the place. I was pissed-up, so when this guy fell backwards into me, I gave him a good old shove in the other direction. But the bloke picked himself up, went bright red in the face, and said to me, ‘You didn’t want to do that, sunshine.’

  ‘Do what?’ I said, all innocent.

  ‘Don’t play that fucking game with me.’

  ‘How about this game then?’ I said, and tried to chin the cunt. Now that would have been a reasonable thing to do, had it not been for a couple of things: first, I fell over when I took the swing; and second, the bloke was an off-duty copper. Next thing I knew I was lying face-down with a mouthful of pub carpet and all I could hear was this voice above me going, ‘You just assaulted a police officer, you little prick. You’re nicked.’

  As soon as I heard that, I jumped up and legged it. But the copper ran after me and pulled some rugby move that sent me crashing down on to the pavement. A week later I was in court with a fat lip and two black eyes. Luckily, the fine was only a couple of quid, which I could just about afford. But it made me think: Did I really want to go back to prison?

  My boxing days were over after that.

  When my old man found out I was trying to join a band, he offered to help me buy a PA system. To this day, I’ve no idea why: he could hardly afford to put food on the table, never mind take out a £250 loan on an amplifier and two speakers. But in those days you couldn’t call yourself a singer without your own PA. You might as well have tried to get a gig as a drummer without a kit. Even my old man knew that. So he took me down to George Clay’s music shop by the Rum Runner nightclub in Birmingham and we picked out this fifty-watt Vox system. I hope my father knew how grateful I was for him doing that. I mean, he didn’t even like the music I spent my whole time listening to.

  He’d say to me, ‘Let me tell you something about the Beatles, son. They won’t last five minutes. They ain’t got no tunes. You can’t sing that bleedin’ racket down the pub.’

  It killed me that he thought the Beatles had ‘no tunes’. ‘Taxman’? ‘When I’m Sixty-four’? You’d have to be deaf not to appreciate those melodies.

  I just couldn’t understand what was wrong with him. Still, I wasn’t going to argue – not after he’d forked out £250.

  Sure enough, as soon as people found out I had my own PA, I was Mr Fucking Popular. The first band that invited me to join was called Music Machine, and it was led by a bloke named Mickey Breeze.

  ‘Ambitious’ wasn’t a word you would have used to describe us. Our big dream was to play in a pub so we could earn some beer money. The trouble was, to play in a pub you needed to be able to play. And we never got around to learning how to do that, because we were always in the pub, talking about how one day we could play in a pub and earn some beer money. Music Machine never played a single gig, as far as I can remember.

  Then, after a few months of going nowhere, we finally got something done: we changed our name. From then on, Music Machine was The Approach. Didn’t make any difference, though. All we’d ever do is have these endless tune-ups, then I’d sing in this high-pitched voice as the others tried to remember the chords to some hokey cover version. I used to joke that you could tell I’d worked in a slaughterhouse, ’cos I did such a good job at slaughtering songs like ‘(Sitting on the) Dock of the Bay’. Mind you, at least I was able to keep a tune and reach the high notes without windows breaking and the local tomcats trying to mate with me, which was a start. And what I lacked in technique, I made up for in enthusiasm. I knew from my classroom stunts at Birchfield Road that I could entertain people, but to do that I needed gigs. But The Approach could barely get a rehearsal together, never mind a show.

  So that’s why I put up the ad in Ringway Music. The shop was in the Bull Ring, a concrete mega-mall they’d just finished building in the middle of Birmingham. It was a fucking eyesore from day one, that place. The only way you could get to it was through these subway tunnels that stank of piss and had muggers and dealers and bums hanging around all the time.

  But no one cared: the Bull Ring was a new place to meet your mates, so people went there.

  And Ringway Music – which basically sold the same kind of stuff as George Clay’s – was the best thing about it. All the cool-looking kids would hang around outside, smoking fags, eating chips, arguing about the records they were listening to at the time. All I needed was to get in with that crowd, I thought, and I’d be fucking set. So I wrote the ad and, sure enough, a few weeks later, Geezer came knocking.

  Now, he’s not your average bloke, Geezer. For a start, he never uses foul language. He always has his nose in a book about Chinese poetry or ancient Greek warfare or some other heavy-duty shit. Doesn’t eat meat, either. The only time I ever saw him touch the stuff was when we were stranded in Belgium one time and almost dying of hunger, and someone gave him a hot dog. He was in hospital the next day. Meat just doesn’t agree with him – he’s not one for a good old bacon sarnie. When I first met him he was also smoking a lot of dope. You’d be out with him at a club, say, and he’d start talking about wormholes in the vibration of consciousness, or some other fucking loony shit. But he also had a very dry sense of humour. I’d always be clowning around with him, just trying to get him to lose his cool and crack up laughing, which would set me off, then we’d be fucking sniggering away for hours.

  Geezer played rhythm guitar in Rare Breed, and he wasn’t bad at all. But more important than that, he looked the part, with his Jesus hair and his Guy Fawkes moustache. He could afford all the very latest stitches too, could Geezer. He’d been to grammar school, so he had a real job as a trainee accountant at one of the factories. They paid him fuck-all, but he was still probably earning more dough than me, even though he was a year younger. And he must have blown almost all of it on clothes. Style-wise, nothing was too out-there for Geezer. He’d turn up to rehearsals in lime green bell bottoms and silver platform boots. I’d just look at him and say, ‘Why the fuck would you ever want to wear that?’

  I wasn’t exactly a conservative dresser myself, mind you. I’d walk around in an old pyjama top for a shirt with a hot-water tap on a piece of string for a necklace. I tell you, it wasn’t easy trying to look like a rock star with no fucking dough. You had to use your imagination. And I never wore shoes – not even in winter. People would ask me where I got my ‘fashion inspiration’ from and I’d tell them: ‘By being a dirty broke bastard and never taking a bath.’

  Most people reckoned I’d walked straight out of the funny farm. But they’d look at Geezer and think:
I bet he’s in a band. He had it all. He’s such a clever guy, he probably could have had his own company with his name above the door: Geezer & Geezer Ltd. But the most impressive thing he could do was write lyrics: really fucking intense lyrics about wars and super-heroes and black magic and a load of other mind-blowing stuff. The first time he showed me them I just said, ‘Geezer, we’ve gotta start writing our own songs so we can use these words. They’re amazing.’

  We became pretty tight, me and Geezer. I’ll always remember when we were walking around the Bull Ring in the spring or early summer of 1968, and all of a sudden this bloke with long, frizzy blond hair and the tightest trousers you’ve ever seen pops out of nowhere and slaps Geezer on the back.

  ‘Geezer fucking Butler!’

  Geezer turned around and said, ‘Rob! How are you, man?’

  ‘Oh, y’know… could be worse.’

  ‘Rob, this is Ozzy Zig,’ said Geezer. ‘Ozzy, this is Robert Plant – he used to sing with the Band of Joy.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I said, recognising the face. ‘I went to one of your shows. Fucking awesome voice, man.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Plant, flashing me this big, charming smile.

  ‘So, what you been up to?’ asked Geezer.

  ‘Well, since you mention it, I’ve been offered a job.’

  ‘Nice. What’s the gig?’

  ‘The Yardbirds.’

  ‘Whoah! Congratulations, man. That’s huge. But didn’t they split up?’

  ‘Yeah, but Jimmy – y’know the guitarist, Jimmy Page – he’s still around. So is the bass player. And they’ve got contractual obligations in Scandinavia, so they want to put something together.’