"Ozzy stood up, produced a Zippo lighter from his back pocket, and set Bill Ward's beard on fire": A personal insight into the chaotic, beautiful mind of Ozzy Osbourne

Black Sabbath introduced me to heavy metal in 1971 when I bought their third album, Master Of Reality.

I was just 16, and it’s no exaggeration to say that Master… changed my life. A few short years later I had wangled a job on Sounds music weekly, and it was a dream come true for me to be invited to go out on the road with the Sabs for the first time. Even if it was to Portsmouth and Ipswich.

The resultant Sounds article was a multi-page epic published in January 1976 and titled If The Damned Were Screaming, It Was Impossible To Hear. (If you’ll forgive the plug, it was reprinted in full in the 2004 book Into The Void: An Ozzy Osbourne Reader.) And in the story, I admit I did question the Sabbath frontman’s seemingly fragile state of mind.

"The first time I interviewed Ozzy," I wrote, "he confessed that he was 'three-quarters mad'. He was joking, I assumed. But now I’m not so sure. In some ways he’s disarmingly down-to-earth, genuinely interested in the wellbeing of Sabbath’s fans. In other ways it’s different. "Ozzy jumps from one subject to another, like some frantic pigeon pecking at one crumb and then another," I continued. "He’s as prone to long moments of silence as he is to extended paragraphs of conversation…"

Sitting next to Ozzy in the back of a Range Rover while travelling to a gig at Portsmouth Guildhall, I also noted: "He leaps from his seat in apparent terror at the slightest provocation, even when the car has the furthest of near misses. There’s the finest of lines between normality and insanity, and Ozzy would have us believe he’s straddling that line."

The day after the story was published, Sabbath’s publicist, Richard Ogden, called and said: “Thanks for the piece, but please don’t keep saying Ozzy is mad. He isn’t, you know. He honestly isn’t.”

But I continued to have my doubts, particularly when interviewing the Double-O on another occasion when I had been asked to provide the words for a Sabbath tour programme (I think it was around the Technical Ecstasy period). Sitting together with Sabs drummer Bill Ward in a gloomy Birmingham pub, Ozzy became bored and suddenly refused to answer my questions.

He stood up, produced a Zippo lighter from his back pocket… and set Ward’s beard on fire. Bill responded by dipping a handkerchief into his pint and dabbing the wet cloth around his chin, thus dousing the flames. He shrugged as if it was an everyday occurrence. (But to this day I’ve never smelt anything worse than the odour produced by Ward’s sizzled bristles.)

And then there was the time when I found myself in Bradford in snowy midwinter with, appropriately, Blizzard Of Ozz. It was freezing at the City Hall, and Ozzy decided to skip the soundcheck to search out some warm clothing. With Sharon in tow, we found ourselves in the men’s department of an archaic department store – it was like being in an episode of Are You Being Served?

Ozzy made a beeline for a voluminous dark-green car coat (I knew I’d get there sooner or later) that resembled a Boy Scout tent with fake-fur accoutrements, and tried it on for size in front of a full-length mirror. His long hair all jumbled up in the coat’s collar, and teetering on his icy platform boots, Ozzy beamed: “It’s fookin’ smart, innit?”

It wasn’t, but Sharon simply tut-tutted and waved her credit card at the obsequious Mr Humphries-like sales assistant. Nevertheless, Ozzy was so proud of his purchase he wore it on stage that very night.

But years later, in June 1994, I finally discovered the real Ozzy Osbourne.

It’s the morning after the inaugural Kerrang! awards, where a certain Supertzar (as Sabbath called it on the Sabotage album) had been inducted into the Hall Of Fame.

As soon as I arrive in the office, the phone starts to ring on my desk. There’s a Brummie timbre on the other end of the line, and a lucid sense of purpose: “Geoff? It’s Ozzy. I wanted to thank you for the award. The trophy’s on my mantelpiece and I’m looking at it right now. It’s very, very important to me because, I don’t know if you realise this, but… it’s the first fookin’ award I’ve ever won.”

This time, Ozzy’s voice was trembling for all the right reasons.