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Metal Hammer
Metal Hammer
Entertainment
Henry Yates

"Listening to this, it’s like going back to a good time, but a really horrible time at the same time."The story behind the song that saved Ozzy Osbourne's career (and why it gave him mixed emotions over three decades later)

Aaron Rapoport/Corbis/Getty Images.

Summer ’79, and West Hollywood’s glitzy Le Parc Hotel has a nuisance guest. In the months since his ejection from Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne has holed up in a suite he can scarcely afford, nursing “boxes of beer” and feeling “unhappy as fuck”.

Reports of the singer’s state are sketchy – his most regular visitor is his dealer – but the rumour is that he’s not long for the music industry, nor for this world. “I really did think: ‘This is the fucking end for me,’” he told Classic Rock in 2010. “I’d been booted out. I just got fucked up every day. Never went outside. Never even opened the drapes.”

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