As he would doubtless have admitted, the teenage John Michael “Ozzy” Osbourne did not seem much like someone with a glittering future ahead of them. His childhood had been troubled – he struggled at school, partly as a result of dyslexia, and suffered sexual abuse at the hands of two older bullies – and his prospects after leaving school aged 15 seemed non-existent. Even his attempts to become a criminal ended in farce. He was, he later noted, “fucking useless” as a burglar: a television he was attempting to steal fell on top of him; operating in the dark, he inadvertently stole a selection of baby clothes rather than the adult garments he had intended to sell around the pubs of his native Aston in Birmingham. Finally, he was caught and sent to prison for six weeks.
“OZZY ZIG NEEDS A GIG” read the card he left in the window of a local music shop, and “need” seems to have been the operative word: by the time he joined a heavy blues rock band called Earth as vocalist, he was out of other options. It wasn’t even as if Earth, or Black Sabbath as they became, offered an obvious ticket to fame and fortune: their big idea to advance their career involved loading their van up with equipment, then driving it to other artists’ gigs uninvited, sitting outside on the off-chance that one of the bands performing pulled out and they could fill in.
