The making of Ozzy Osbourne

OZZY Osbourne is famously candid, but there are some questions he doesn't want to be asked.

Ozzy Osbourne

OZZY Osbourne is famously candid, but there are some questions he doesn't want to be asked.

Well, one question. "One thing that amazes me is that, even now, people still go up to me and say, 'So, Ozzy, did you really bite the head off a bat?' If you don't know that, you must be living in a cave. On my epitaph it'll read, 'Ozzy Osbourne -- The Man who Bit the Head off a Bat'."

It is a pre-emptive comment. Nobody said anything about the bat. (For those cave-dwellers among you: yes, he really bit the head off a bat. In his defence, he thought it was rubber.) No matter. Those days are over. After decades of wild behaviour, fuelled by drugs and alcohol, he hasn't touched a drop, or taken anything illicit, for three years.

"I turned around to myself and said, 'I don't like me like this any more', and I meant it. That was the first step I took. I always think that, when people go, 'I went to rehab. It didn't work', it's not that the rehab didn't work. The information they gave you about yourself, you didn't practise. I just got fed up with me being that f . . ked-up all the time. It wasn't fun any more."

So Ozzy Osbourne is clean! It may seem unthinkable but, like many reformed alcoholics, he wants his story to be told, and was therefore happy to walk the red carpet at New York's Tribeca Film Festival for the premiere of the documentary God Bless Ozzy Osbourne. This goes through his life, from when he was a working-class boy (originally called John) in Birmingham, England, who decided to become a musician after hearing the Beatles' She Loves You. The film traces his time as the lead singer of the pioneering hard-rock band Black Sabbath and his 1982 comeback (thanks to his wife and manager, Sharon) in his Madman persona, with his maniac glare and numerous reported stunts. "A lot of it was just made up, and not by me," he says.

The Osbournes, a 2002 reality TV show, followed Ozzy, Sharon and their children Kelly and Jack. It was MTV's highest rating series, styled as a sitcom about a drugged-out rock star, his patient wife and their teenage brats. (Normally, such kids would have been rebels. With such parentage, however, they seemed more like chips off the old block.)

Jack, now 26, is funny, amiable and one of the film's producers. "I kind of wanted to set the record straight about who Ozzy Osbourne actually is," he says. "The Osbournes was done at a very strange time in our family and there were a lot of things going on. My dad isn't the same person today as he was back then and I wanted to show that."

The morning after the red-carpet premiere, Jack and Ozzy arrive at the press conference in one of the Tribeca cinemas. Ozzy looks tired. He may be sober now, but the years have taken their toll. While he is generally polite, his hair and his language are as defiant as ever. Often, Jack has to repeat the questions. While Ozzy has given up many aspects of the rock lifestyle, he is still touring and, as one of the founders of heavy metal, his hearing isn't so good.

Fortunately, he hears the first question: "What would be your legacy, if you can put it all into a phrase or an idea?"

"Survival," Ozzy says. "As I'm getting older now, a lot of the friends I used to party with are all dead. I'm lucky to be alive. I'm lucky to be playing music. I'm currently finishing a world tour. Sometimes I have to pinch myself and think, 'Man, I'm 62 and people still want to see my music.' When I made the first Black Sabbath album, I didn't think I'd be 45 years up the road and still doing it. I had no idea. I'm blessed. I'm very lucky."

For the film, Jack hired directors Mike Fleiss and Mike Piscitelli to spend two years on the road with Ozzy and his band, as well as plough through 1500 hours of archival footage and several revealing photos. The film reveals several little-known facts. How many children does Ozzy have? Five, actually: two from an earlier marriage, as well as Kelly and Jack's older sister, Aimee, who (despite sharing the address) refused to appear in The Osbournes. She and her half-siblings all appear in God Bless Ozzy Osbourne, however, mainly to speak about Ozzy's past failings as a father. Kelly, previously known as perhaps the rudest Osbourne, is more emotional, recounting her father's struggle and eventual redemption.

Part of the success of The Osbournes, however, was its peculiar sweetness, even in a family with two drug addicts (Ozzy and Kelly, both since cured) and endless yelling matches. In a business where marriages are notoriously short-lived, Ozzy and Sharon have been married for 29 years. "Some people jump off the boat after the first bump in the river," Ozzy says, "but some people carry on. I mean, the first marriage didn't [work] and the second marriage did. I didn't take something away from the first marriage and say, 'Oh, I forgot to do that.' It's just the way it turned out. I'm glad."

Part of the secret, it seems, is that Sharon is a saint. In the film, Ozzy recalls a morning when he awoke to find that, not for the first time, he had physically abused her. It was one of his road-to-Damascus moments.

Osbourne's unblinking honesty and generosity in describing such moments impressed co-director Fleiss.

"Ozzy gave so much of himself and his life and his stories," he says. "That was the key to the picture."

Fleiss, whose background is in reality TV, is an unabashed fan of his subject, calling him "the most important figure in the history of rock 'n' roll".

Really? The most important? "He was one of the architects of the heavy rock movement, which is still a thriving part of the music industry," Fleiss argues. "No other artist from the 60s is still selling tickets and records to kids in their teens today. The man plays world tours and they're all sold out. Who maintains that sort of relevance over four decades? I don't think anybody else."

Even if it would be too generous to mention, say, Bob Dylan or Paul McCartney (who also appears in the film, revealing that even he admires Osbourne's music), Rolling Stones fans would be within their rights to protest against this statement. Still, as we talk, there is no time for a debate. Of course, few would deny that Osbourne is highly significant as a musical innovator and as the archetypal rock star, living the celebrated rock lifestyle like there was no tomorrow.

One scene in God Bless Ozzy Osbourne shows him looking at his 1980s videos, highly unimpressed.

But while he doesn't want to promote his old life, he has no regrets. "There's good and bad in life. The good things and the bad things are part of the journey, I suppose. I'm not really proud of it, but it's true."