Mail on Sunday, February 15, 2004
When heavy-metal band Black Sabbath was in its heyday in the Seventies, birds and bird-like animals would have shuddered at the thought of Ozzy Osbourne. The band's routines often featured dead meat and live animals. When an audience member tossed a bat on stage at one performance, Ozzy promptly bit its head off. He dished out similar treatment to a dove. A home in a cave, a dungeon or other dismal abode would have suited Ozzy’s stage persona.
In fact, he and first wife Thelma Mayfair lived in Bullrush Cottage, a modest country farmhouse near Ranton in Staffordshire. Shops and neighbours were few and far between, but the local pub was within walking distance.
‘This house gave Ozzy the bolt hole he needed from his hectic life,’ says current owner Phillipa Stigwood. ‘He even built a sauna and installed a shower in his studio to chill out.’
Pub or no pub, the entertainer had access to all the booze and pills he wanted, and he often wanted vast amounts of both.
One of six children, John Michael Osbourne grew up in a two-up two-down with outdoor lavatory in Aston, Birmingham, where he was born in 1948. His parents had one bedroom, the children the other—sharing a bed and a bucket.
The son of a toolmaker, Ozzy thought of becoming a plumber and worked for a time in an abattoir. He also tried his hand at burglary, which earned him six weeks of free accommodation in Winson Green.
The Beatles changed his life. Their music inspired him to become a rock singer and he aped their lifestyle.
When Ozzy proposed marriage to his single-mum girlfriend Thelma, a 22-year-old with a five-year-old son, he was encouraged by the fact that Paul McCartney had married a woman who had a child. During their time at Bullrush Cottage, Ozzy and Thelma had two more children, Jessica Starshine and Louis.
If the former owner of Bullrush Cottage went on to front the world’s most famous dysfunctional family, current owners the Stigwoods have no future at all in reality television. Roland and Phillipa run a computer services company, daughter Jo is doing A-levels and wants to be a policewoman, and 16-year-old twins James and Christopher excel at cricket.
The cottage is an ideal family house, partly thanks to the improvements Ozzy made to the house and grounds. The 150-year-old main house was enlarged from two to four bedrooms. Later, a large sunroom was built next to the kitchen. Ozzy added a further extension—large enough for a recording studio, mixing room, a loo and a shower.
The Stigwoods converted the bright studio into a family room, and the mixing room into a bedroom. ‘We had hundreds of holes to fill in,’ says Roland. ‘Ozzy displayed his gold discs and other awards in the main house, but he had shelves with all his tapes in the mixing room.
Now the owner of lavish homes in Buckinghamshire and Los Angeles, Ozzy’s bourgeois homeowner tendencies were evident in his Staffordshire years. A key feature of the property is the panoramic view from the main living rooms and three of the four upstairs bedrooms. The cottage overlooks an expanse of farms and fields with Stafford Castle in the distance. The garden is mostly lawn except for one small clump of strategically placed trees and shrubs.
‘There’s a house behind those trees,’ Roland says. ‘Ozzy thought that the house spoiled the view, so he planted the trees to hide it. He had the overhead wires moved underground.’
The front garden has a willow tree beside a small pond. ‘Ozzy added the waterfall that feeds the pond, and in summer this is one of my favourite spots,’ says Roland.
But Ozzy’s stay in Staffordshire was dedicated more to a hedonistic lifestyle rather than sedate home improvement. ‘He used to, race his cars and bikes around the fields. When Thelma hid his clothes so he couldn’t go to the pub, he would wear one of her dresses,’ says Phillipa.
Ozzy and Thelma decided that chickens might be a soothing addition to the household until, one manic moment, Ozzy grabbed a shotgun and blasted all the birds in sight.
‘Our neighbour lived here at the time and she told me she went to see what all the fuss was,’ says Phillipa. ‘When she saw the dead chickens, she asked Ozzy, “Are you unwinding?”’
No blue plaque honours Ozzy’s stay at Bullrush Cottage, and the National Trust has no plans to turn it into a shrine. Yet the house has a place in the nation’s musical heritage.
‘During our first few years here, someone would put an audio tape through the letterbox every six months or so,’ says Phillipa. ‘There was German writing on the parcels and we assume they were demos. Ozzy had a reputation for being generous with start-up bands. A few years ago some roadies from Wolverhampton who worked with Ozzy on his original tour of America came to the house to take pictures. We gave the tapes to them to pass on to Ozzy if they saw him.’
Ozzy’s tenure at Bullrush Cottage came to an abrupt end in the early Eighties. Thelma’s patience had been sorely tested by his long absences and outrageous behaviour. When his affections shifted to Sharon, the end of a doomed marriage was sealed. Thelma filed for divorce and stayed in the cottage for a few more years. Ozzy, currently recovering from a serious quad bike accident, had three children with Sharon and showed that he had a few more lives and careers still in him.
• Bullrush Cottage is for sale at £475,000 through Reeds Rains, 01785 850241.