Ozzy Osbourne has bitten the heads off of doves and bats, ingested just about every hard drug there is, drank himself into oblivion, but when it comes to getting vaccinated against COVID-19, he tells us he’s not running out the door to get it.
“If they could find a vaccine I don’t want to be the first one in the line to get a shot and wake up with another set of antlers on my head. The realistic look is 2022 really [to return to touring] because it’s gonna take another year for it to settle down.”
Ozzy has been riding out the pandemic at home in Los Angeles, which he says hasn’t been easy.
“My sane world is like a tightrope. I can either flip one way or the other you know. My house has got 19 dogs. My kids are going mad. We’ve got COVID-19 [in the world]. I can’t go out. I won’t wear a mask — but I will wear the thing if I go out. But to avoid wearing them I won’t go out. And that’s driving everybody nuts because I got air rifles, targets. You know, I even started to sample the weed again. Well what’s a good man supposed to do in a pandemic?”
And, on top of all this, he’s still rehabbing from the injuries sustained in a fall at home in early 2019.
“Five days a week I have physical therapy. I go on walks or I exercise myself. I go in the pool. I don’t drink alcohol. I don’t — uh hum — smoke (laughs). I can’t wait to get well enough to come on the road. I love you all. But I want to be physically 100-percent.”
Ozzy, who released a 40th anniversary digital edition of his debut album Blizzard of Ozz last Friday, is also working on songs for a new album.
The 40th anniversary of Blizzard of Ozz came 10 years after Black Sabbath‘s second album, Paranoid, which marked its 50th anniversary on Friday — it was released on September 18th, 1970. Tony Iommi acknowledged the milestone, saying, “I look back and am amazed how we released Black Sabbath in February 1970 then toured, wrote, recorded and released Paranoid only seven months later! And these weren’t knock-off albums, they are both full of our classic tracks.”
A 50th anniversary deluxe edition of Paranoid will be released on October 9th