An entertaining, heartwarming memoir detailing the adventures and valuable life lessons learned from the authorās four decades of friendship with Ozzy Osbourne and the Osbourne family.
Stephen Rea was born in Northern Ireland in 1969, the same year āThe Troublesā began. Violence was everywhere. His grandmother was nearly killed when gunmen opened fire on the wrong house, leaving young Stephen to pick at the bullet holes in the walls. He found refuge from this turmoil in heavy metalāespecially the music of Ozzy Osbourne. As a pre-internet teenager, he hunted down dozens of live concert bootlegsācorresponding by mail with collectors around the worldāand devoured every music magazine he could find.
In late 1984, when Stephen was fifteen, he read about a huge festival in Rio de Janeiro that January called āRock In Rioā whose bill included AC/DC, Queen, and Osbourne. As a lark, he asked his parents if they would take him, and was stunned when they said yes. He was even more shocked when his mother, looking for information about how to get tickets, began a correspondence with Osbourneās secretary, who scored the family VIP passes and introduced them to Osbourne in Brazil. Thus began a friendship with Ozzy, his wife Sharon and the rest of the Osbourne family that has continued for decades.
While traveling on tour in the mid-nineties, Ozzy gifted Stephen a pair of fancy leather notebooks and told him to keep a record of their adventures and conversations. The result is Ozzy & Me: a beautiful behind-the-scenes memoir that proves the life-affirming, soul-nourishing power of musicāand disproves the notion that you should never meet your heroes.