“My daughter’s the same, Aimee, my oldest,” Ozzy fires back. He may have trouble expressing himself, but he’s as sharp, pithy and unguarded as ever.In February 2020, I met him at his LA mansion as he was about to release his last solo album,. He was shuffling, overweight, wheezing – the result, he said, of the 2019 neck surgery causing his spine to press on his lungs – and struggling to speak.
“With the pressing on the spinal column, I got nerve pain. I’d never fucking heard of nerve pain!” he exclaims, mouth gaping and gulping. “You know when you’re a kid, and you’re playing with snow and your hands get really cold? Then you go in and you pour on hot water, and they start getting warm? And you get those chills? And it fucking hurts? It’s like that.”“It got so bad that at one point I thought: ‘Oh God, please don’t let me wake up tomorrow morning.’ Because it was fucking agony.
There are other medications, too, three pills taken daily for the Parkinson’s. But even they come with a sting in the tail, including short-term memory loss. He also endures constipation, so he takes laxatives – “and then you go and it’s dynamite time!” he cackles. For Ozzy, though, the most frustrating aspect of Parkinson’s is not knowing where it will end.
The Ozzy version: “Everything’s fucking ridiculous there. I’m fed up with people getting killed every day. God knows how many people have been shot in school shootings. And there was that“And I don’t want to die in America. I don’t want to be buried in fucking Forest Lawn,” he says of the LA cemetery favoured by expired celebrities. “I’m English. I want to be back. But saying that, if my wife said we’ve got to go and live in Timbuktu, I’ll go.