“I thought they’d all tell me to fuck off, to be honest.”
Ozzy Osbourne’s joyous cackle suggests that he still can’t quite believe that the names Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton will be printed beneath his own in the credits for Patient Number 9, his new, thirteenth, solo album. Rather sweetly, the 73-year singer, one of the most instantly identifiable and influential rock stars on the planet, is transformed into a gushing fan-boy when the subject of the two English guitar legends’ surprise cameos on his forthcoming record is raised. Even more sweetly, he puts forward his belief that his invitation to Jimmy Page to participate in the album sessions may have gone unanswered due to Page having upgraded to a new phone. “It wasn’t that he didn’t want to do it,” Ozzy insists, “[but] he never responded to my text. So I’m thinking that he’s bought a new phone, because [otherwise] he would have picked up the phone.”
It’s early afternoon in Los Angeles, the city that John Michael Osbourne has largely called home since the late 1970s, when his future wife and manager Sharon Arden scraped his barely sentient, alcohol-and-cocainepickled body off the filthy floor of his blacked-out hotel room at Hollywood’s Le
