With a moniker like “The Prince of Darkness”, it’s no surprise that the late Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne was no saint. From petty crime to wild drug escapades, the metal legend had a longstanding affinity with the darker side of life, which is how he gained such an iconic and inescapable epithet.
While there are many tales that Osbourne’s wild life spawned, giving insight into his closeness to the dark, the one most commonly associated with his position as Satan’s man above ground is the time he bit the head off a live bat during a performance in Des Moines in 1982.
That might be the incident that tied Osbourne to all things hellish in the eyes of the public, but there is another caper that really did show he wasn’t the most pious person. This was the moment in the early 1970s when he accidentally spiked the local vicar, of all people. In a life filled with surreal moments, this was by far one of the most outlandish, and you can’t help but think it could have only happened to Ozzy.
The story has cropped up numerous times across the past few decades. However, it was in 2020, when Ozzy was speaking to GQ for an extensive discussion about his life and times, that he went into more detail about what went down, and also, characteristically, left some key plot points out, leaving it up to the imagination to fill in the blanks.
The interviewer didn’t waste any time changing the conversation’s course, openly asking the Black Sabbath legend whether he was religious or not. The answer he got was one of the most typically Ozzy answers he ever gave, showing that despite his health travails he still possessed that caustic Brummie wit.
Ozzy said: “I’ve tried reading the Bible but it’s in a f*cking language that I don’t understand. Someone should do a version in my language: ‘And so Jesus said, “F*ck off!” And lo, they all f*cked off.'”
This was the perfect launch pad to prompt Ozzy about the time he unwittingly got his local vicar stoned. “F*cking hell…”, the ‘Iron Man’ star replied.
Continuing, earnestly: “I’d bought some hash and I’d made a cake with it. I put it in a tin and went to the pub and I said to my ex-wife [Thelma Riley, whom he married in 1971], ‘Don’t let anybody eat this f*cking cake. It will be bad.’ Anyway, I came back from the pub a few days later…”
He was asked about the key bit of “a few days” at the pub, which Osbourne seamlessly swerved, leaving it up to fans to wonder what on earth he was doing for so long.
The ‘Prince of Darkness’ then explained: “…and I did a double-take, because the vicar was in our house, having a cup of tea in the kitchen with a piece of this cake. I hadn’t got a driving licence, but he was slumped in my kitchen, so I had to drag him out by his hair, push him in the back of his car, drive him to his door and then walk home. I didn’t see him for two weeks after that and I thought I’d killed him! Then I saw him in a pub on a Sunday morning and he said, ‘I must have caught such a dreadful flu at yours. I hallucinated for three days and had to miss church.’ I was just relieved to see him. F*cking hell, he’s alive! Because that was a big chunk of hash.”
Given his hard-living nature, it’s surprising to fans that Osbourne had a vicar round at his house, but to him it wasn’t all that incongruous.
He and his wife Thelma had just moved to the countryside at that point, and the locals had been very welcoming. As part of ingratiating the newcomers, the local congregation were also trying to get the couple to go to church, to see if they wanted to confess their evident sins. Instead, the vicar ended up being spiked, and getting stoned out of his mind. I’d wager he never expected that.
