Ozzy Osbourne: none more black

He's led the ultimate rock-star life: drink, drugs, sex, jail, rehab, an incident with a bat. David Thomas asks him how he keeps going after all that excitement

The celebrity repentance has become something of an art-form. For years now, Elton John has done little else but admit to his past excesses, whether of drugs, drink, food, foot-stamping or flower-purchase. Gazza's outed himself as an alcoholic. I once even got Keith Richards to admit that he regretted his heroin addiction.

But no one confesses like Ozzy Osbourne. You barely have to ask the dotty old Black Sabbath bat-muncher a single question before he's off on a point-by-point analysis of the damage wreaked on what was an already fragile psyche.

Before we plunge into the morass that is his skull, however, a point of information: Ozzy Osbourne is incredibly successful. More than 30 years after the Sabs had their one and only UK Top 5 single, "Paranoid" (Ozzy has never got above 20 in his own right), he has a new album, Down To Earth, and he is still an enormous concert attraction, particularly in the United States.

Every summer, his Ozzfest, a touring outdoor jamboree filled with bands which are guaranteed to be as loud as they are anti-social, sets off around the US like a bitter and twisted equivalent to the Grateful Dead treks that used to be an annual staple of American life.

"I thought it would fizzle out after a year or two," admits Ozzy but, seven years on, Ozzfest still makes tens of millions of dollars. So tell, me, Oz, what exactly is it like?

"It's really a day of hard-rock music," he explains, Brummie accent still untouched by years in California. (He is staying in a rented Malibu beach-house, as we talk, awaiting a move into his new mansion in Beverly Hills.) "There are two or three different stages and there's a concourse where we've got people like the Reverend B Dangerous, hammering nails into his skull. It's a carnival kind of vibe – a good day out, weather permitting."

It never pays for actual death and destruction to intrude about the carefully stage-managed morbidity of Ozzy's live act, which panders to the eternal teenage obsession with hell, horror, doom and damnation. His annual winter trip around America used to be known as the Black Christmas Tour. But the events of 11 September kiboshed that title. So this year it'll be A Night of Merry Mayhem, and all the proceeds from his Ozz Bless America tour merchandise will be given to the families of police and firefighters affected by the World Trade Centre disaster.

Merry Mayhem? Charity? Some purists will say that sounds like Ozzy Lite. But I'm not sure. I reckon he has a sweet nature, hidden away behind the dyed black hair, the pendulous jewellery, the spike on the end of one fingernail and the tattoos across his knuckles.

As he puts it (and does so, I should add, apologetically, as if asking for forgiveness, rather than giving you some clever patter): "I'm a 22-carat headcase, but I'm a loveable loony."

He's sweet, like a gawky adolescent boy is sweet, precisely because he's trying so hard to cover it up behind his tough-guy posing. And that, I'm certain, is the secret of his success – his fans instinctively understand that he's not faking his confusion. There's a part of him that's forever teenage: preserved, or pickled, in all those narcotics.

For example, he hides away when there are cool girls in the house. "My daughter Amy had her 18th birthday party on the beach the other night. But I could not go out there. I sat in my room drinking Pepsis all night. I just feel like I've got two extra elbows. I forget people's names. I feel like a jigsaw puzzle – only the last piece doesn't quite fit the hole.

"I run on fear, I always have. I wake up looking for trouble. It's like I'm in a minefield and I spend all day trying to get to the safe zone. All I do is rush through the day so I can get to sleep and be out of it. But I need medication just to get to sleep."

He takes a whole range of prescription drugs – psychiatric, psychotic and anti-depressant. "I have so many weird issues. When I finish talking to you, I'm going to see my psychiatrist. He can't understand how I'm still walking and talking. I should have been long gone."

It doesn't take a shrink to glean some understanding of his problems. A factory-worker's son, born in the West Midlands, Ozzy was raised in the same dead-end streets that still produce the world's heavy metal fans. "At school I had dyslexia and what they now call attention deficit disorder – my children have it, too: we live in California so they can go to a special school. I would get by in class by clowning around. But when I left school I could never hold down a job. I felt like a caged animal."

Literally so: at 17, he spent two months in jail for burglary. On his release, he found better ways of venting his frustration. "I discovered rock'n'roll. You could go round Europe in a van with your best mates, drinking beer, smoking dope and screwing chicks."

Though plagued by stage-fright so drastic that his wife and manager Sharon – the daughter of Don Arden, one of the legendary figures of rock management – has to reassure him that his fans really love him before he can go on, he never used to perform drunk. "I'd go on with a hangover from the night before. But as soon as we got on the bus after the show, I'd be drinking four bottles of Hennessey a night and cases of beer. I had a coke habit and I smoked like a train."

But none of this mattered so long as he delivered the goods onstage. "This is the only job where the more messed up you get, the more they like you. If you turn up at your office job full of heroin, they say, 'Sorry, mate, you're fired'."

But nobody ever said that to Ozzy. "I overdosed on a daily basis. I could do the Egon Ronay Guide to Rehabs. But if you play with fire too long, you're going to get burned, and you don't come out the other side unscathed. I did a good job of screwing my brain cells right up."

By the late Eighties, even Ozzy was beginning to think he'd gone too far. "My first marriage had been blown out by alcohol and drugs and I was doing a good job on the second one, too. Sharon just wouldn't put up with it. It got tiresome for her. I'd go on lost weekends, leave home on Thursday, and come back the next Wednesday in a dreadful state. She dealt with it by not saying anything. It was worse than a bollocking. She'd just go, 'Come on, kids, we're out of here.'"

And then, in September 1989, he hit rock bottom. "On one excursion, I attempted to kill my wife. It's a rude awakening when you wake up in jail and you say to the police officer: 'Why am I here?' And he replies: 'What? You mean you don't know?' I assumed that I must have run into a crowd of people, or smashed up a pub."

Ozzy has spent the past decade cleaning up, both financially and personally. "I still do take a drink, but to nothing like the extent that I did," he says. Because of his medication, he lays off any additional drugs. "If I was to add ecstasy, I'd explode. There'd be a pair of shoes on the floor, and a splat on the ceiling."

But the person behind the image and underneath the chemicals still remains. He's naturally prone to depression, eager to please, insecure about his lack of education – the kind of guy who goes along with what people have said, and then spends the whole of the next day furious about the argument he should have had, but didn't.

Ozzy doesn't want to think too hard about what keeps him at the top. "I don't want to know. If I could work that out, I'd fall to pieces. People say my legacy is that everybody would like to be Ozzy for a day. But if they were Ozzy for a day, they'd soon change their minds."

That's the paranoia that made him famous, and the genuine misery that keeps him there. It's called rock'n'roll, kids. Just say, "No."

'Down To Earth' is out now on Epic records