Osbournes Show Quotes

The Jesus freaks were the worst. While the ‘Suicide Solution’ case was going through the courts they followed me around everywhere. They would picket my shows with signs that read, ‘The Anti-Christ Is Here’. And they’d always be chanting: ‘Put Satan behind you! Put Jesus in front of you!’ One time, I made my own sign – a smiley face with the words ‘Have a Nice Day’ – and went out and joined them. They didn’t even notice. Then, just as the gig was about to start, I put down the sign, said, ‘See ya, guys,’ and went back to my dressing room.

I was fifteen when I left school. And what did I get to show for my ten years in the British education system? A piece of paper which said: John Osbourne attended Birchfield Road Secondary Modern. Signed, Mr Oldham (Headmaster) That was f**king it. Not a single qualification. Nothing. I had two career choices: manual labour or manual labour.

There was a cinema called The Orient outside the community centre where we rehearsed in Six Ways, and whenever it showed a horror film the queue would go all the way down the street and around the corner. ‘Isn’t it strange how people will pay money to frighten themselves?’ I remember Tony [Iommi] saying one day. ‘Maybe we should stop doing blues and write scary music instead.’

It just really sickens me today to watch everybody fawning all over Sharon Osbourne. She’s a talent judge on TV and she has her own show and this and that. This is the most evil, shittiest woman I’ve ever met in my life. She would fucking have you killed if it was to her advantage. She’s just… it’s just… if people really knew.

It was one giant learning curve, figuring out how to be married and how to create content for a kind of show that had never been done before, something they were calling a “reality show.” The Osbournes had premiered the previous year and had become the highest-rated show on MTV. As much as The Osbournes showed the “real” life of a celebrity family, they would have been the first to say it was kind of a circus. My dad pitched Newlyweds to MTV right after the wedding. This would be two celebrities, who viewers were used to seeing air-brushed to perfection, eating cereal and passing gas. Dad’s theory was that this would get me and my music on MTV—who never played my videos unless it was on TRL—while also undoing the damage of how I’d been marketed by the label. “If girls knew you, they’d like you,” he said. “Columbia’s been pushing them all away with this sexy-Barbie stuff. This show would be about your heart.

During a rehearsal session, while the group watched the crowd crowd out of a cinema showing an Italian horror film, The Three Faces of Fear (Black Sabbath in the English version), Geezer Butler suggested adopting that title, convinced that a darker and more sinister approach could differentiate them from other bands of the time.