Ozzy Osbourne is definitively a weird guy, do you still have doubt about this? During an interview with Shortlist, he got to talk about a few things, giving his opinion about the recent U2/Apple launch – ‘It was fucking selfish, really’ – and about his job and his drugs and alcohol consumption – ‘So when you get somebody off the beaten track who doesn’t play by any rules, [rock’n’roll] is the perfect job. If I worked at IBM, they wouldn’t put up with my antics.’ And so far nothing scandalous but you know it could be coming with Ozzy!
Then he talked about the time he was invited to the White House and met the president at the time, ‘George Bush, I never quite got his deal’… it was just before 9/11 he and Sharon were in New York, and then Ozzy declared this:
‘We were in New York when that happened!…. ‘I wasn’t scared, I was excited! It was my kind of craziness, y’know. The day after that happened, there was fucking nobody in New York. I remember standing on the steps of the hotel, and – you know when you see an old cowboy film and that tumbleweed rolls past on the ground? There was newspapers just floating around on the streets. It was so fucking weird. Everybody just backed off Manhattan because they didn’t know if it was an all-out thing or what.’
‘My kind of craziness’? So Ozzy feels good in the middle of the apocalypse, why should we get shocked, surprised or mad at him? This is effectively his territory, we should not expect less from the prince of darkness. Still, people are not going to like this, how can you get ‘excited’ while people are jumping out of buildings to escape fire, while thousands of people are dying, children are losing their parents and death is everywhere… It is a very weird thing to say! Still he comes back to reason (or does he?) when he mentions the next danger:
‘But I hope this Isis lot don’t get going. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s in mankind to try to kill each other for one thing or another. And I think sooner or later one of these crazy fuckers is going to get a nuclear weapon or some fucking thing, and fuck a lot of people up. That’s in our nature. I hope it won’t happen, but it looks like it could happen if they get it.’
And will you be excited when it happens Ozzy?
Iman Lababedi adds: I was there as well and he is right, it was exciting. I felt the same way with bombs going off in Lebanon, very excited, very on edge, high adrenaline. Of course, I was a lot younger…
