.....Well, it all began one day when the boys left school and got really boring jobs. "To pot with this!" they exclaimed [no pun intended], and decided to form a band called Earth, as Manfred Mann was at that time still known as Manfred Mann.

.....Then, amazingly, and as a direct result of chopping his fingers off, Tony Iommi invented Heavy Metal. And to this day rock guitarists the world over - even famous ones - have never quite succeeded in emulating his sound, hampered as they are by the disability of still having fingers.

.....They toured Germany extensively [great rock phrase that], as did the Beatles before them, but it wasn't really working. It was their thick Bi·i·imming·gam accents that was the problem (and the music) but the boys blamed their name. This, coupled with Manfred Mann's intention to pilfer it, led them to look at a poster for a sad B-movie called Black Sabbath.

.....At this stage they didn't actually know what the name meant, but when their manager's letterbox got jammed the next day with invitations to Satanist covens they decided it would be a good idea for an album.

.....Ozzy then dressed up in a black dress, smeared green face-paints all over himself strategically, and got some geezer to photograph him in front of a dark satanic mill whilst moaning profusely something about "what is this that I see before me..? Shove in a few bells and, Bob's yer uncle! they all immediately became superstars. Being now superstars and the authors of a new artistic genre they felt it necessary to go on Top of the Pops with a number 1 and sing Paranoid, a quaint little ditty lamenting Ozzy's inability (as yet) to attract a woman with the right set of qualities.

.....Another successful album followed, then another, then another, then another, until they all eventually fell out with Ozzy because he was too much of a mess for the rest of the band and the others were a bit worried about how it would look, them still hanging about with him.

.....So, Tony told Bill Ward to go and tell Ozzy he was all washed up and the band then went on to conduct a thirty year experiment to see if it was possible to replace him. It was found that it was not so they eventually let him join again - not that he probably wanted to, because by that time Ozzy had met Sharon who immediately saw his potential as a commercial proposition (and also as a husband/father, which just proves what a woman of vision she was!)

.....Deals were signed with record companies, the devil etc. and within a few months the world (which Jesus had earlier turned down) lay at their feet. Oz then decided he would take the risk that there isn't a God and dubbed himself the 'prince of darkness'. Although his faith in atheism was beset by doubts around 1991 when he did the album No More Tears (which was almost embarrassingly less evil than the rest) he survived to drool another day, in the process manfully resisting the temptation to appear on Stars on Sunday. Birds, insects etc. the world over (particularly plastic ones) would never be safe again, and the world was outraged at one point to learn that he had given a poor innocent little bat rabies!

.....But my, how times have changed. . . In ancient Rome folks used to watch people die horribly for entertainment, then up until Friends it was the Music Hall. Now we have Sky TV we all watch Ozzy shuffling around in his slippers, sticking his hair behind his ears and painting by numbers.

"All this will I give you. . ."...Matthew 4:9