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Happy Birthday Ozzy Osbourne, You Bloody Miscreant!

Happy Birthday Ozzy Osbourne, You Bloody Miscreant!

The singer turns 68.

Anonymous

Anonymous

Ozzy Osbourne. With a name like that, you know what you're gonna get. How many Ozzys do you know that sit around at home getting excited about the X Factor final? They're all out on the tear, craving wonga and women, whispering sick nothings into the ears of anyone that'll listen.

Credit: PA

The Ozzy in question here, the legendary frontman for Black Sabbath, is being celebrated because it's his birthday. Yes, can you believe the Prince of Darkness turns 68 today?

Here's the thing. Ozzy's done a lot of mad stuff during those years. A lot of bad things. And, frankly, it's amazing how he's still kicking. In his memoir, he writes: "They said I would never write this book. Well, fuck 'em - 'cos here it is. All I have to do now is remember something... Bollocks. I can't remember anything."

Credit: PA

Ozzy always had a taste for hellraising, even prior to making it big. As a teenager, he landed a job in a slaughterhouse where he got to shoot cows in the head (it was a different time) with a steel spike. It would leave him totally smothered in animal insides. This non-squeamish attitude to blood was later demonstrated on tour with Sabbath. One night, he managed to find a deceased shark to drag around their hotel room. Bandmate Tony Lommi reminisced: "With drugs always you get bored, so you must do something to one another. Like Ozzy hauling a shark through a window, dismembering it and soaking our room in blood."

Outside of work as a teenager, he went on the rob, ending up serving a three-month prison sentence - his longest ever. Somehow, he managed to evade jail time from then on out.

Many and various are the antics Ozzy indulged as a young man, and then a not-so-young man, and then an older man. Basically, he's been batshit since birth.

Credit: PA

When he toured with Motley Crue in the mid-1980s, Ozzy asked member Nikki Sixx for a line of coke, as you do, only to be let down when he discovered there was none left. In its place, Ozzy racked up a line of ants and snorted them through a straw.

Then there's the Alamo incident, in which a pissed Ozzy dressed up in his wife Sharon's clothes, fled his hotel room in the middle of the night, breaking into the Alamo building and pissing all over the icon of Texan independence. "I can honestly say, all the bad things that ever happened to me were directly, directly attributed to drugs and alcohol. I mean, I would never urinate at the Alamo at nine o'clock in the morning dressed in a woman's evening dress sober," he later said.

And then of course, last but not least, the time he bit the head off a bat. A fucking bat. During a gig. Why? In fairness, he thought it was a fake one. A plastic, squeaky toy. Ozzy ended up getting treated for rabies because of it.

"Immediately, though, something felt wrong," Ozzy said. "Very wrong. For a start, my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid, with the worst aftertaste you could ever imagine. I could feel it staining my teeth and running down my chin. Then the head in my mouth twitched."

He also bit the head off a dove once. And that was fully intentional, so we'll have to always take the last tale with a pinch of salt.

Anyway, here's to you lad. And happy birthday! Just stop biting the heads off things, please.

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