Lizo Mzimba
Entertainment Correspondent
Alamy
When it comes to the unruly world of rock, shocking behaviour is rarely frowned upon.
Just the opposite. Most of the time it’s practically mandatory.
If there are limits, few performers have pushed those generous boundaries more than John Michael Osbourne, aka Ozzy Osbourne, or the Prince of Darkness, who has died aged 76.
You don’t get a nickname like that by accident.
Black Sabbath fans initially dubbed him with it thanks to his jet black onstage persona, decadent aura and lyrics that seemed obsessed by the occult.
Still, his actions on the night of 20 January 1982, when the body of an unfortunate creature ended up separated from its head, were bat-split crazy, even by Ozzy’s excessive standards.
It’s an event that, decades later, is still discussed as one of the most notorious moments in heavy metal history.
Although, oddly, this wasn’t even the first time that the singer had seemingly been involved in the decapitation of an innocent animal.
But more of that later.
When it comes to Ozzy and the bat, it’s unsurprising that, over the years, recollections have differed on the precise turn of events.
Sometimes that was because people’s memories clashed. But mostly it depended on which version of the story Ozzy was in the mood to tell.
Some facts about the incident, however, are unambiguous.
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Ozzy became a hugely successful solo artist after he was thrown out of Black Sabbath
In January 1982, Ozzy was two months into a gruelling tour promoting his second solo album, Diary of a Madman. A tradition had developed where the singer would catapult pieces of raw meat and animal parts – including intestines and liver – into the audience.
So far, so revolting. And perhaps, not totally inexplicable behaviour for a man who’d once served an apprenticeship at an abattoir.
Throughout the tour, word quickly spread about the practice, and Ozzy’s fans were nothing if not resourceful. At every venue, they knew exactly what was coming, and they turned up armed and ready to retaliate.
So when something small and black landed on stage during a rowdy Wednesday night show at Des Moines’ Veterans Memorial Auditorium, the singer thought it was a rubber toy.
Now, here’s where recollections start to veer off in different directions.
In his 2010 autobiography I Am Ozzy the singer says he picked it up, stuffed it in his mouth, and chomped down.
“Immediately, though, something felt wrong. Very wrong. For a start my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid,” he recalled. “Then the head in my mouth twitched.”
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Ozzy had a reputation for darkness and gore
“Somebody threw a bat. I just thought it was a rubber bat. And I picked it up and put it in my mouth. I bit into it,” he told the programme.
Then he says he realised: “Oh no, it’s real. It was a real live bat.”
So is this the definitive version of the story – live bat thrown on stage, Ozzy bites into it? Far from it.
Ozzy hadn’t always insisted the bat was alive when it was thrown towards him.
Back in 2006, he gave the BBC a take on the story that was subtly, but crucially different.
“This bat comes on. I thought it was one of them Hallowe’en joke bats ‘cos it had some string around its neck,” he said.
“I bite into it, and I look to my left and Sharon [Osbourne, his wife and then manager] was going [gesturing no].
“And I’m like, what you talking about? She [says], ‘it’s a dead real bat’. And I’m… I know now!”
So was the unfortunate winged mammal dead or alive?
Who better to confirm whether it was bereft of life and had ceased to be, than the person who claims to have actually brought the bat to the concert?
Dead or alive?
According to the Des Moines Register, that man was Mark Neal.
He was 17 at the time of the concert. And his account of the events leading up to the gory night was this: His younger brother had brought the bat home a fortnight before but, sadly, it hadn’t survived.
Neal said that, by the time he took it to the concert, it had been dead for days.
So it seems that the available evidence about this legendary piece of heavy metal excess, placed at number two in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of Rock’s Wildest Myths, does point to it being largely true.
Everyone agrees that the bat did find its way into Ozzy’s mouth, although it seems likely it was no longer alive by that point – something Ozzy himself concurred with. Sometimes.
But what of an eerily similar incident some nine months before in Los Angeles?
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Ozzy’s solo career won him a new army of fans
Again the details vary, usually depending on who Ozzy was talking to.
The basic facts have never been in dispute. Ozzy was due to meet a group of CBS record label executives in Los Angeles, and Sharon had the idea of him bringing three live doves with him.
After giving a short speech of thanks, the plan was for Ozzy to throw them into the air, so everyone could watch them flutter away, in a symbolic gesture of peace.
Spoiler alert: That’s not what ended up happening.
Doves of peace
Ozzy had been drinking brandy all morning, and he later told rock biographer Mick Wall that a PR woman at the meeting had been seriously annoying him.
According to Wall’s book, Black Sabbath: Symptoms of the Universe, Ozzy “pulled out one of these doves and bit its [expletive] head off just to shut her up”.
“Then I did it again with the next dove,” he added, “spitting the head out on the table”.
“That’s when they threw me out. They said I’d never work for CBS again.”
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“That’s when they threw me out. They said I’d never work for CBS again”
In version two, recounted some months later, he told Sounds’ magazine’s Garry Bushell a slightly different story.
“The scam is the bird was dead. We were planning to release it there, but it died beforehand. So rather than waste it, I bit its head off.
“You should have seen their faces. They all went white. They were speechless.”
The ringmaster of rock excess
Ozzy, of course, had a reputation to uphold. After all, this was the man who’d been thrown out of Black Sabbath because, even by rock’s astronomically lax standards, his drink and drug consumption was considered too much.
And while his encounters with bat and dove may not have seemed cricket to many, they – with helpful dollops of exaggeration – added significantly to Ozzy’s outrageous image.
They undoubtedly gave him even greater publicity and notoriety, helping his solo career to skyrocket like a bat out of hell.
And even though he might not be guilty of every misdemeanour that was attributed to him over the years, there’s little doubt that he reached heights (or depths) that other rock stars never dared to contemplate.
That meant that he was seen as the undoubted ringmaster of rock excess – a career defining reputation that stayed with him right to the end.