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When I went up to the queen, I tried to keep my hand in my pocket. I was afraid she would faint when she saw the tattoo [O-Z-Z-Y on the fingers of his left hand]. She said, “I understand you’re quite the wild one.” I just went, “Heh, heh, heh” [embarrassed laugh]. One thing I noticed—she’s got the greatest skin for a woman of her age.

If television cameras had followed you around as a child in Birmingham [as they did on MTV’s ‘The Osbournes’], what would we have seen?

My home was very poor. My father worked nights as a toolmaker. He was the English Archie Bunker; he wouldn’t change with the times. He would never buy my mom a washing machine. We had a boiler house in the garden—you’d put a fire under this copper boiler, where you would boil the clothes to death. I used to sleep in a bed with one of my brothers. We had no sheets. We had to use old coats.

When I was a young kid, my father would take me on Sunday mornings with my Uncle Jim to the pub, the Golden Cross. Since I wasn’t allowed in, I’d sit on the step, and they’d bring me a shandy, which is half lemonade, half beer. I remember thinking, “Beer must be the best lemonade in the world. I can’t wait until the age when I can drink it.” When I had my first beer, I spat it out: “That can’t be the fucking stuff. It’s like dishwater.” But then I got the glow. I didn’t drink for the taste—I did it for the feeling.

What was your mother like?

She did her best. We never went without food. She stretched things to the limit. There was always a lot of bread and potatoes to fill us up. But money was very scarce. I used to have to ask the neighbors for a cup of sugar, a bottle of milk. One of my biggest fears is going broke. It’s my insecurity, from when I was a child. I never went on holiday, never saw the ocean, until I was fourteen.

You left school at fifteen—because you wanted to or had to?

I wanted to. When I was in school, they didn’t recognize dyslexia. I looked at the blackboard and it was like trying to read a Chinese menu, in Chinese. But I couldn’t hold down a job. First, I worked at a jewelry company—they made napkin rings and cigarette boxes. Then I was a plumber, then a tea boy on a building site. Then I worked in a slaughterhouse. That was the longest job I ever had.

What did you do there?

Kill—at the end of it. It was automated, but the guys would let me shoot a cow now and then. My first job there was emptying sheep’s stomachs of the puke. There was a giant mountain of the stuff. The stink was unbelievable. But you get used to it.

Then I got a job in a mortuary. My mother went ballistic: “You are crazy.” The formaldehyde was awful. I’d have visions of the dead people’s faces when I got home. Then my mother got me my first musical job—I tuned car horns. You were supposed to do 900 a day. Can you imagine being in a room with that fucking racket?

The big thing with working-class people in England was to work until retirement, and then they gave you a gold watch. That equation never made sense to me. I’m going to give you my life for a gold watch? I’d rather break a shopwindow and grab one.

You did some jail time, when you were seventeen, for burglary.

The best thing my father ever did for me was he refused to pay the fine. If you don’t pay the fine, you go to debtor’s jail. I went for a few weeks. He could have paid the fine for me, but after that, I never wanted to go back.

Describe Black Sabbath’s earliest days. You were originally called Earth.

We played twelve-bar blues, like Ten Years After and the original Fleetwood Mac. We had a van full of equipment, and we’d go to gigs hoping the other band wouldn’t make it, which happened several times. We used to play for nothing. We’d do wedding receptions.

We rehearsed at a community center near Tony Iommi’s house, across the road from a movie theater. One morning, Tony says to us, “It’s interesting. I was looking over at the theater.” It was showing something like The Vampire Returns. “Don’t you think it’s weird that people pay money