OZZY OSBOURNE: 'I Don't Understand Music'

Ozzy Osbourne recently talked to Neil McCormick of Telegraph.co.uk about drugs, drink, TV stardom, Sharon and his new album. A few excerpts follow:

On a recent suggestion that he employ the services of a vocal coach to help him warm up before performances:

"Fuck off! A fucking vocal coach!? I've burnt everything out of it already. What's he going to find there — Mario Lanza?"

On the fact that he mumbles in an unreconstructed accent that is all but incomprehensible:

"Even I couldn't understand what the fuck I was talking about on television. People would go to me, 'What country do you come from?

"They were going to subtitle it. They could have fucking subtitled it in Arabic; it wouldn't have made any difference."

On music theory:

"I don't understand music, fucking Beethoven, whatever. I get a feeling, and the hairs on my arms stand on end — that's how I judge a song."

On "Black Rain" being the first album he has made clean and sober;

"I thought it was the booze and the dope that was making me creative, and if that's what it takes, I'm finished making records, because I do not want to go there again. I really thought I wouldn't get it back this time. I'm living on borrowed time anyway because of my wild years."

On tracing his connection to BLACK SABBATH's early dark sound to childhood dyslexia:

"I've always been in fear, always blamed myself for situations that have got nothing to do with me. You wake up every day and think, 'Why am I feeling like this?' I'd be afraid because I didn't feel afraid.

On becoming notorious for biting off the heads of bats, snorting a line of ants and allegedly eating his own faeces during a drinking competition with MÖTLEY CRÜE:

"I was like a loony, crazy guy. It's funny to talk about, but, when you wake up in a jail cell and you don't know what you're there for, and your family are looking at you like you're so pathetic, I got fed up with it."

On "The Osbournes" TV show:

"The good side was that it was the biggest thing since sliced bread around the world. The downside was that my kids were all taking heavy drugs, and I was getting fucked up again."

On being sober:

"I've said I'm done a thousand times, I'm finished, then the next week somebody'll get a picture of me lying on the floor of a bar, and it'll be on the front page of the National Enquirer: 'Aliens eat Ozzy's brain.' "

On America's latest drug scourge, crystal meth:

"They make it in the fucking kitchen. I'm watching this guy on TV, and he puts in all his fucking different asthma pills or whatever, then he gets a fucking battery, opens the thing and fucking shreds it, puts that in the fucking pot — and someone is going to inject this shit in their arms!"

On the suggestion that he would have been taking that a few years ago:

"I think I did actually. I wondered why my nose lit up at night when I went to bed."