Free I Am Ozzy by Ozzy Osbourne;Chris Ayres Page B

did you think it was, Bill?' I said. 'The hanging gardens of fucking Babylon? So, I'm on
the shitter, and I've got this right old cliffhanger of a Richard the Third coming down the pipe--' Geezer groaned.
'--and I'm looking straight ahead at this shelf in front of me. My mum's put a tin of talcum powder on
there, right? She loves that stuff. When you go to the bog after she's taken a bath it looks like Santa's
fucking grotto in there. Anyway, it's that cheap brand of talc, the one with the black and white polka dots
on the side...'
'Polka Tulk,' said Tony.
'Exactly,' I said. 'Polka Tulk!' I looked around the table, grinning. 'Fucking brilliant, eh?' 'I don't get it,' said Bill, his mouth still full. 'What's your mum's smelly old armpits got to do with our
band?'
'The Polka Tulk Blues Band,' I said. 'That's our name!'
The table went so quiet you could almost hear the steam rising from the four mugs of tea in front of
us.
'Anyone got a better idea?' said Tony.
Silence.
'It's settled then,' he said. 'We're the Polka Tulk Blues Band - in honour of Ozzy's mum's smelly old
armpits.'
'Oi!' I said. 'Enough of that! I won't have a fucking word said against my mum's smelly old armpits.' Bill roared with laughter, and more blobs of egg and sauce flew out of his mouth.
'You two are just animals,' said Geezer.
The name wasn't the only decision we had to make. Also put to the vote was whether we needed
more band members. In the end we agreed that the kind of songs we'd be playing - dirty, heavy, Deep
South blues - tended to work better with a lot of instruments, so ideally we could use a saxophonist and a
bottleneck guitarist to give us a fuller sound. Tony knew a sax player called Alan Clark, and a mate of mine
from school, Jimmy Phillips, could play bottleneck.
To be honest with you, we also wanted to copy the line-up of Fleetwood Mac, whose second album -
Mr Wonderful - had just come out and blown us all away. Tony was especially taken with Fleetwood Mac's
guitarist, Peter Green. Like Clapton before him, Green had played for a while with John Mayall & the
Bluesbreakers, but he was now a fully qualified rock god in his own right. That seemed to be how guitarists
made the big time: they joined an established act, then they left to front their own projects. Fortunately for
us, Tony had been taken off the market by his injury just when he was about to be snapped up by a bigname act.
Their loss was our gain.
That weekend, we met up for our first rehearsal at a community centre in Six Ways, one of the older
and shittier parts of Ashton. There was only one problem: we could barely hear the PA above the noise of
the A34 underpass outside. Making the din even worse were the cars and trucks circling the massive
concrete roundabout they'd just built on top of the fucking thing. They were pouring so much concrete in
Aston in those days that we might as well have bought some fur hats and started calling each other
comrade. I mean, for fuck's sake, the place was grey enough as it was without adding more fucking grey
everywhere.
To cheer things up a bit, I went out one night with an aerosol can - I'd had a few beers - and did
some 'decorating'. One of the things I graffitied on a wall by the roundabout was 'Iron Void'. Fuck knows
what was going on in my head.
The rehearsals went all right, considering I'd never sung with a proper band before. Basically, the lads
would just jam, and then Tony would give me a nod when he thought I should sing. For lyrics, I just came
out with whatever bollocks was in my head at the time.
It wasn't easy for Geezer, either. He didn't have enough dough at the time to buy a bass, so he did the
best he could with his Telecaster - you can't put bass strings on a normal guitar, 'cos it would snap the
neck. I think Tony was worried about Geezer at first, but it turned out that he was a fucking awesome bass
player - a total natural. And he looked more like a rock star than anyone else in the band. Our first gig was up in