Ozzy Osbourne is looking back on his drinking days as he reveals he once drank “28 gallons of booze” to get through the holiday season.
The 76-year-old Black Sabbath rocker, who has been open about his addiction journey with drugs and alcohol, told The Sun in an interview published on Dec. 31 that he hates Christmas so much, he once “bought a barrel” of alcohol that he knocked back before the big day even hit.
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“I f—ing hate Christmas. It gets right up my a—hole,” said the rocker, who shares kids Aimee, 41, Kelly, 40, and Jack, 39, with wife Sharon Osbourne, 72. “When I used to do booze and get f—d up, I bought a barrel with 28 gallons of booze for me.” He continued. “I drunk it before it was Christmas f—ing Eve.”
Ozzy, who announced in 2020 that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, has spoken numerous times about his sobriety over the years, revealing in a September episode of The Madhouse Chronicles podcast that he’s “not completely sober” at this point in life.
“I use a bit of marijuana from time to time,” he said at the time. “I’m lucky my wife kicked my butt, obviously. She would f—king make life so difficult. Like with marijuana, she’ll f—kin’ find it and get rid of it.” Ozzy also revealed that his doctor had recently prescribed ketamine treatment. “He put a tiny bit in me, but that was enough to spark me,” the musician recalled. “That thing came back and weighted my brain.”
Ozzy’s previous drug experiences led him to a much darker place, as wife Sharon revealed in the 2020 Biography: Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne documentary that he had nearly killed her in a drug-fueled rage 30 years prior.
“I had no idea who was sat across from me on the sofa but it wasn’t my husband. He goes to a stage where he gets that look in his eyes, the shutters were down and I just couldn’t get through to him,” she recalled. “And he just said, ‘We’ve come to a decision that you’ve got to die.’ He was calm — very calm — then suddenly he lunged across at me and just dived on me and started to choke me. He got me down on the ground on top of me.”
Luckily, Sharon was able to locate a panic button nearby, “and the next thing I know, the cops were there.” Ozzy had no recollection of what he had done when he came to and would go on to spend six months in medical detention as part of a court order.
“Thank God the judge put him in treatment for six months. I had time to really think about what he should do,” Sharon said. “I told him, ‘I don’t want the money… but if you do this again, either I am going to kill you or you are going to kill me. And do you want that for the kids?’”
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