Ozzy Osbourne is famous for many things - drink, drugs, his explosive wife Sharon and their MTV show, The Osbournes. But the Prince of Darkness is also known for his macabre antics. After signing his first record deal in the US, he celebrated by releasing a dove and biting its head off in front of horrified executives. He reportedly then spat it out as blood dripped from his lips.
And he was back at it in 1981 while touring his hit, Diary of a Madman, in a show dubbed the Night of the Living Dead. Keen to give fans a full 360 degree experience, each night the audience was pelted with 25lbs of pig intestines along with calves' livers, raw chickens, sheep testicles, live snakes and even dead rats.
Wanting to return the favour, fans started bringing their own meat to throw back, with Ozzy likening it to a grim 'custard-pie fight'.
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“It gave me this idea to throw, instead of pie, bits of meat and animal parts into the audience. I thought it was hilarious," he told the documentary The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne .
"[They'd throw back] sheep testicles, live snakes, dead rats, all kinds of things. Someone once threw a live frog onto onstage. It was the biggest frog I’d ever seen, and it landed on its back."
But things took a grisly turn one night at a show in Des Moines when a young man decided to take a bat to the gig.
The fan has always insisted the bat was already dead. Ozzy, however, told a different story.
According to the rocker, the bat did indeed look lifeless as it lay motionless on the stage, seemingly stunned by the lights.
Thinking it was plastic, Ozzy picked it up and bit into his neck, but was horrified when blood started pouring down his throat. According to some reports, the bat fought back and even managed to bite him.
“I thought it was a rubber bat,” he previously said. "I picked it up, put it in my mouth, crunched down, bit into it, being the clown that I am."
Realising his mistake, he was whipped off stage and rushed to hospital to undergo treatment for rabies.
"Bats are the biggest carriers of rabies in the world," he said. "And I had to go to the hospital afterwards and they started giving me rabies shots. I had one one each rear and I had to have that every night."
But 40 years on, and Ozzy has a very different relationship with bats, having submitted plans to install bat conservation boxes at his UK mansion.
And as for the whole dove/bat fiasco, it's a saga he wishes he could escape.
He previously told The Mirror: "It's going to be on my f***ing gravestone. You’d think it was all I'd ever done, but I've done a lot more f***ing things than that.
"When people ask what it's like to bite the head off a bat, I get kind of p*ssed off because they haven't done much research."
And while he's mended his gruesome ways, he's also spent years working on his sobriety, explaining that his infamous partying stopped being fun and started feeling 'shallow'.
He explained: "Well, no. What happened with me was I'd get unhappy, then I'd have a drink and I'd get unhappier. So what's the f***ing point in doing something that makes you feel worse? There was a time when it was f***ing great – cocaine, booze, women and all the rest, but as life went on, it got a bit shallow."
And he credits wife Sharon with being the one who saved him from himself, admitting that if he hadn't met her, "I'd be dead".
"I'd have killed myself by now," he continued. "Falling in love with Sharon was the best thing that ever happened to me. She was patient, she stuck by me. Someone asked me, 'Imagine if it was the other way around, you were the sober one and she was the one on the floor covered in p*ss and puke every day. How long do you think you would last?'
"And I was like, 'F**k, that’s a good question.' I really don’t know the answer. She stuck it out. Her being sober saved me. She's not a big drinker – she has a few glasses of wine and she goes f***ing nuts."
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