‘I’ll never die, because I’m immortal,” sings Ozzy Osbourne on the second track of his 13th solo album. It’s not the last time Patient Number 9 mentions cheating death: “I’m coming out of my grave … you’re going to see my face,” he sings on No Escape from Now, while One of Those Days has him “killing myself – but I never die”. You could say all this seems par for the course, more of the supernatural hokum that has been part of the Ozzy Osbourne brand since Black Sabbath first appeared. There’s a lot of said hokum here, albeit with its tongue more obviously lodged in its cheek than it was 50 odd years ago: Patient Number 9 is an album that comes decorated with pantomime villain cackles, grown men’s voices crying “Mummy! Mummy!” in fear and what sounds like the bad guy in a campy horror flick shouting, “Somebody stop me!” A song that mentions decomposition, meanwhile, concludes with the words, “I loike worms,” in a thick Brummie accent.
