Sharon Osbourne doesn't look like a Monster of Rock. The petite, demure 48-year-old holding court in the penthouse suite of London's St Martin's Lane Hotel seems far from the ferocious, ball-breaking figure of legend. She's here from LA to organise a heavy metal festival but she could feasibly be a lady of leisure fixing a whist drive. Until, that is, this self-effacing, almost prim woman begins to tell a few stories. "I see that Eminem gets in trouble for singing about killing his wife," she says, with a tilted grin. "At least my husband actually tried to do it!" Ah, yes. Her husband. For 20 years, Sharon Osbourne has been married to Ozzy, the Black Sabbath singer and heavy rock demigod. It's well documented that their union hit a low in August 1989, when the star returned from playing, ironically, a peace festival in Moscow. Ozzy sank four bottles of complimentary vodka, informed his wife, "I've decided you have to go," and tried to strangle her. "I called the police, and they locked him up," Osbourne reminisces, with an oddly affectionate chuckle. "I didn't press charges but he went into rehab for three months. He was totally insane from all the drink and drugs he was doing, and well, these things happen."
This year Sharon and Ozzy debuted on the Rich List with a joint fortune of £40m. She generated more than half of it, mainly through her artist management activities, as well as the launch and promotion of Ozzfest, the gargantuan heavy metal festival that has toured the US annually for the last six years and hits Milton Keynes this weekend. Osbourne is a pint-sized, dignified, immaculately groomed, middle-aged rock chick. Her accent skips between her native London, Ozzy's doleful Brummie twang and the easy drawl that betrays the couple's last decade in LA raising their three children. Clearly, though, she has a core of pure steel.
Osbourne launched the phenomenally successful Ozzfest in the US in 1996 as an aggrieved riposte to a perceived slight. A few months earlier, she had approached the organisers of Lollapalooza, the achingly hip bohemian travelling rock festival, to ask if Ozzy could play that year's event. "They laughed at the idea," she recalls, eyes burning at the injustice. "They all thought Ozzy was so uncool. So I thought, 'Right, I'll organise my own fucking festival.'" Lollapalooza is long gone now but Ozzfest now grosses $20m every summer in the US, and has launched the careers of Marilyn Manson, Limp Bizkit and Slipknot. This weekend in Milton Keynes, a reformed, creaking Black Sabbath headline over Slipknot, Tool and Papa Roach.
Ozzfest has successfully rehabilitated Ozzy Osbourne from the lost, drugged-up pantomime figure of the late 1980s to a force in music, and nobody who has observed the process seriously doubts that the grounded Mrs O has been his saviour. Her devotion to him is indisputable. "He's a legend," she says, simply. "I admire him and I love him."
Osbourne's early emotional life was troubled. Her father was Don Arden, the legendarily heavy-handed and confrontational svengali manager of Gene Vincent, the Small Faces and, later, Black Sabbath. Arden was frequently accused of violent, bullying tactics by his artists. His daughter followed him into the family business: "If he'd been a butcher, I'd be slicing lamb chops now."
In 1979, Black Sabbath sacked Ozzy. Sharon Arden began to date him, and took over his management from her father. Don Arden was livid. The next time she visited him, his vicious pet dogs savaged her. She was pregnant, and lost the child. "It was horrific," she winces. In the mid-1980s, Don Arden faced trial for false imprisonment and blackmail of business associates, but was acquitted. His son David was found guilty of the same charge and jailed. Osbourne has had no contact with her father for 20 years, but the wounds still fester. "The best lesson I ever had was watching him fuck his business up," she says. "He taught me everything not to do. My father's never even seen any of my three kids and, as far as I'm concerned, he never will."
When Osbourne took over Ozzy's career, the heavy rocker was in a severe drink and drug-fuelled decline and she wasn't too far behind. She was once arrested in LA for drink-driving and bailed out by her best friend, Britt Ekland. Osbourne awoke the next day oblivious to the incident until Ekland jogged her memory. Through these dark days, her shrewd management skills just about kept the family business on the road, but Ozzy and Sharon became notorious for their Sid and Nancy-style alcoholic antics. "Our fights were legendary," she recalls. "We'd beat the shit out of each other. At a gig, Ozzy would run off stage during a guitar solo to fight with me, then run back on to finish the song! We were in the gutter, morally, and I realised that if we both carried on, we'd wind up a washed-up pair of old drunks living in a hovel somewhere. So I stopped drinking."
Nevertheless, she continued to tolerate her husband's excesses. On one occasion she flew to Tokyo to join him on tour. After the show she went ahead to their hotel room, only to be woken hours later by a young Japanese girl climbing into their bed. A drunken Ozzy had forgotten his wife had arrived. "It's funny now," she says, with a tight smile. "It wasn't then."
The Osbournes had three children in the late 1980s, but it took the shock of his 1989 murder attempt to wean Ozzy off the bottle. By then his wife had begun to forge a reputation as one of the most driven and uncompromising managers in the music industry. The industry had confidently expected her to fail, and Osbourne whole-heartedly set about proving them wrong. "People would openly say, 'You and Ozzy won't last,'" she remembers. "They expected him to have a big-titted blonde trophy wife and he'd got me, a short, fat, hairy half-Jew. I had a lot to fight against."
There were early echoes of her estranged father's modus operandi in the tales that began to filter through the rock world. One promoter was kneed in the groin after defaulting on payments due, and on one irate visit to a company peddling illegal merchandise, she single-handedly trashed their office's computer system. "I felt so ashamed afterwards," she recalls. "Plus I dropped my car keys there, and had to go back to collect them!"
Nevertheless, Osbourne feels she has been popularly vilified because the music industry remains overwhelmingly a man's world. "I'm pretty reasonable," she claims. "If I were a man, I'd just be seen as a great toughie businessman. I'm a woman, so men say, 'Oh, she's a bitch, a whore, a cunt.' I'm afraid it's just what you men do. Plus, I work with my husband, and every woman protects their family." Family unity became even more paramount for the Osbournes in 1992 when Ozzy was diagnosed as suffering from multiple sclerosis, announced his retirement and played a farewell tour. Six months later a second opinion pronounced the diagnosis a false alarm, but the family have only now publicly acknowledged the scare.
As Ozzfest has developed, Osbourne has cut back on her multifarious artist management posts. Last year, however, saw a flash of her famous fiery temper. She lasted only three months in charge of Billy Corgan's Smashing Pumpkins before quitting via a legendary press statement. "I must resign due to medical reasons," it pointedly stated. "Billy Corgan is making me sick." She says: "I shouldn't have said it, but I like to be honest, and after all these years I can't be bothered being politically correct." She's also declined - more politely - recent requests for career guidance from Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst, Guns N' Roses and Courtney Love. "Although I do like Courtney," she says. "She's hysterical."
Osbourne has, however, found time to work with family friend and Wayne's World director Penelope Spheeris on the movie We Sold Our Souls to Rock'n'Roll, a fly-on-the-wall record of last year's Ozzfest. One film highlight is a spirited public debate between Osbourne and a preacher picketing a show, who informs her that her husband is "a practising cannibal". "That's about the one thing Ozzy hasn't done," Osbourne confides, the perfect deadpan comedienne. The movie is currently awaiting cinema release.
Osbourne's career has been powered by one major imperative: to avoid replicating the sins of her father. "I don't want my kids to ever go through what I had to," she says, emphatically and repeatedly. She's particularly concerned that her children respect the metal fans who afford them their privileged lifestyle. "I caught the kids giggling once at some Ozzy fans," she says. "I was so angry. I said to them, 'Don't you ever laugh at those people, because they're the reason we live in the house we do, drive the car we do, and you go to the schools you do. Show some respect.'" She goes on: "Two years ago, Ozzy was touring America at the same time as the Spice Girls. We stayed at the same hotels. Every day the girls would come out and completely ignore the fans outside. Kids were crying. Ozzy and I were yelling at them, 'You bitches! How can you treat people like this?'" She sniffs: "Mind you, maybe that's why they're in the position they are now."
Nowadays, Osbourne and her 14-year-old son, Jack, trawl LA's rock clubs searching for upcoming bands to play the second stage at Ozzfest. Mr and Mrs Osbourne, however, are largely enamoured of a quiet night in. "We never go out, if we can help it," she confides. "Ozzy likes to watch the History channel. The only music he plays is the Beatles. When we do Ozzfest, our next-door neighbour, Pat Boone, minds the house. We keep ourselves to ourselves." And she laughs, recognising the absurdity of the claim. The Osbournes' marriage has survived farce, tragedy and rich comedy; now, it appears, they've ended up as the heavy metal Terry and June.
The Ozzfest is at the Milton Keynes Bowl on Saturday.
