Ozzy Osbourne and late, great Motörhead frontman Lemmy were cut from the same booze-soaked cloth. The friendship between these two icons dated back to the late 70s, and there were plenty of booze-and-chemical-fuelled nights that followed. In 2010, Lemmy sat down with Metal Hammer to look back over three decades of mutual hellraising, songwriting and pissing up keyboard players’ legs.
“I hate reality shows,” growls Lemmy. “If you want ‘reality’, then walk into a bar in Phoenix and say “the Pope sucks Jesus cock in hell!” and you’ll get all the reality you need.”
We’re talking to Lemmy Kilmister, founder and frontman of the mighty Motörhead, about his friend of almost 30 years, one John ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne. The subject of The Osbournes TV show has arisen. Lemmy, it transpires, is not a fan of the show.
“That show wasn’t good for him, and it’s not a show that’s gonna age well because I think people are gonna get cleaner and jog more,” he says bluntly. “I think some will go from the TV show to his music, maybe they didn’t know who he was, so they’ll ask their dad or their big brother. If they were interested in the character then they’d go and find out, but the character wasn’t completely Ozzy, it was just Ozzy the clown.”
In 1981 Motörhead opened for Ozzy on the Blizzard Of Ozz tour, his first solo US tour, and also his first tour of the States since getting the boot from Black Sabbath in 1979. As Lemmy recalls, Ozzy was getting bad press at the time for being constantly drunk, something that an Ace Of Spades-era Motörhead would have seen as more of a challenge than a warning, particularly since it was also Motörhead’s first US tour. The pair had met before, during furtive sojourns in London’s dodgier drinking establishments, but they’d never really hung out together.
“We’d all be in the bathroom briefly, doing what we did,” laughs Lemmy. “He was always in the bathroom, as we all were!”
The Blizzard Of Oz tour was even less salubrious. The gloves were well and truly off!
“We didn’t even have any gloves!” laughs Lemmy. “Well, I think [late Motörhead drummer] Phil Taylor had one but it was boxing glove! Ozzy was drunk all the time, just messed up! They had this keyboard player and he wasn’t very good looking so they hid him behind the PA. They used to take the piss out of him something awful and one night Ozzy walked into the bar and pissed up this keyboard players back and just went ‘hey, it’s raining!’
“That’s the sort of state he was in back then. I mean, that was the tour where Sharon saved his life. You never know how things will turn out in any way, shape or form, but given the state he was in I would have given him two years, tops! Especially if he’d been alone when Randy died. I think that would have finished him. But then Sharon just literally rescued him. I’ve never seen anything like it. One day he was fucked and the next day he was doing all right, y’know?”
It’s been said of Ozzy that he was the gauge by which others judged their excesses. So long as you’re not as fucked up as Ozzy, you were probably okay...
“I never felt that way because I was also a gauge in my own small way,” says Lemmy. “But we were all doing that. Everybody was, it wasn’t isolated. Everybody was fucking wrecked! The crew was wrecked, the promoter was wrecked, the audience was wrecked! It was like wrecking ball time! If it fit in your hand then put it in your mouth, and see what happens, right? ‘What was that? Ketamine!? Oh fuck!’ Some of the best music came from that wrecking crew period,” continues Lemmy. “All of those great albums were written completely devastated on drugs, like it or not. It’s all very well saying they’re really bad for you, but it didn’t half make for a lot of creativity! But the thing with Ozzy was, he started out that tour as a broken man and ended up as a better one, y’know? And I got to see him with Randy Rhoads every night, which was something of a treat.”
The ‘creativity’ of the Blizzard Of Oz tour apparently ended with Lemmy hitting Ozzy over the head with a full dolly tray, while Mr Osbourne returned the favour with custard pies. They have been friends and business associates ever since; Lemmy’s even written a few songs for Ozzy.
“Yeah, I’ve written a few for him,” says Lemmy. “I wrote four on No More Tears and two on Ozzmosis. I wrote Mama I’m Coming Home, Desire, I Don’t Wanna Change The World and Hellraiser. The funniest thing is some bloke was interviewing Ozzy and I was sitting about two feet away. The journalist says, ‘On Mama I’m Coming Home, we finally got to the core of your whole being.’ And Ozzy just goes ‘Lemmy wrote it!’ I wrote them specifically for him. He’d been around my place and he spends half the time getting up and wandering around so you have to kind of follow him and listen, but he used to send me demos of him just making a noise where he wanted the words. It was a very simple process and it’s one of the better ways of doing it: you can sit with somebody for hours and hours and you’ll only basically do the same thing because he knows where he wants the lyrics.”
The royalties for those songs must be great!
“Oh no, I did them for a flat rate,” laughs Lemmy. “This is Sharon we’re talking about! But Ozzy’s one of them fellas, he’s not tall and handsome and he shuffles on stage a bit, but when he’s on stage you don’t watch anybody else because he’s got charisma oozing out of him like blackheads! Amazing charisma. It’s what’s kept him going all these years. I mean, he’s been doing the same act for years, but it doesn’t matter because you’re not counting the songs he did from the last tour, you’re going ‘wow! That guy sounds fucking good!’”
What do you think he’ll be remembered for?
“I think,” says Lemmy, “he’ll be remembered as a monster rock star, because that’s what he is. You can’t calculate the influence that Black Sabbath and Ozzy have had on rock n roll. It’s huge! And good for him!”
Originally published in Metal Hammer Presents: Ozzfest, June 2010
