Ozzy Osbourne once snorted £5,000 of cocaine and downed a bottle of brandy… then went rabbit hunting.
But before he jumped into the motor brandishing two shotguns, the ex-Black Sabbath front man wanted to literally raise hell by holding a seance.
Ozzy’s monster booze and drugs session were revealed by Manchester punk poet John Cooper Clarke in his memoirs.
The so-called Bard of Salford told how in the 1980s an artist pal visited Ozzy at his mansion with a view to creating a record cover.
But the wheels fell off the plan when the wild man of heavy metal hit the booze and drugs.
In his autobiography, Clarke wrote: “Meanwhile back in Manchester, Steve Maguire was also having a heavy metal moment.
John Cooper Clarke told a tale about Ozzy’s hellraising in his memoirs (Image: Redferns)
“Ozzy Osbourne, who had been recently sacked from Black Sabbath for drug and alcohol-related reasons and gone solo, was so taken with Steve’s cover artwork on my first album that he invited him to visit his mansion in the rural Midlands to discuss a possible collaboration.
“Ozzy wanted to commission Steve to provide an illustration for the sleeve of Crazy Train, a single taken from his debut album Blizzard of Ozz.
“Whenever I ran into Steve, he’d regale me with the horrors of his and Ozzy’s last meeting.
“On one occasion Ozzy had ushered him into the basement where he produced a plastic shopping bag full of high-grade cocaine, Steve’s favourite drug, and instructed him to feign ownership in the event of his wife Sharon asking any questions.
“As if Sharon was likely to fall for that. Like Steve, your archetypal impoverished artist, his famished frame clad in a frayed shirt, patched-up jeans and a thread-bare donkey jacket, was going to be in charge of three million quid’s worth of sniff.
Ozzy apparently tried to keep his drug taking from wife Sharon (Image: FilmMagic)
“On another occasion, after hovering up about five grand’s worth of the stuff and gargling with a full bottle of Napoleon brandy, Ozzy suggested a séance.
“Steve declined – he wasn’t superstitious, but when faced with nonsense such as this his default position was paranoia.
“Instead, Ozzy produced a couple of shotguns and took Steve out on a moonlit rabbit hunt in his Land Rover.
“Steve was quite sentimental about rabbits: he had one for a pet.”
Clarke added in the best-selling I Wanna Be Yours: “After that, for one reason or another, the collaboration went off the boil.”
Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
