Rocker Ozzy Osbourne, whose reality show The Osbournes recently became the biggest hit series in MTV’s 21-year history, had a pretty wild childhood, according to excerpts released Monday from the new book Ozzy Unauthorized.
Author Sue Crawford reveals in her book that a young Ozzy tried to commit suicide, joined in gang fights and drank hard.
“The 14-year-old made a noose out of his mother’s clothesline, put it over his head, fixed the other end securely to a high gate and jumped from a chair,” said an excerpt published in the UK newspaper The Sun.
“My mother was an amateur singer, my father was an amateur drunk,” Osbourne was quoted as saying. He also witnessed his father beating his mother and became violent himself.
“In breaks at the age of only 7, he would organize ‘hanging squads’ where he and his mates would find rope, grab an unsuspecting victim, then ‘hang’ them in the toilets before letting them go, frightened but unharmed, ” Crawford goes on to say.
Osbourne was also a hard drinker who, by the age of 17, spent six weeks in jail for breaking into a shop. During his prison stint, he reportedly smashed another inmate over the head with a metal chamber pot to deflect unwanted advances.
The book also reveals that Osbourne left school at an early age to work several jobs, one as a slaughterman, killing 250 cattle a day and gutting sheep. “It fostered his weird reputation for a fascination with animals and death,” it said.
Osbourne, now 53, recently sang at Queen Elizabeth’s Golden Jubilee concert, also known as the Party in the Palace, which attracted well over a million people to Buckingham Palace on June 3.
Ozzy Unauthorized will be published in July 2002 by Michael O’Mara Books.
