The day I tried to kill Sharon

Sharon is responsible for most of it - the clusters of Jo Malone candles, the portraits of dogs, the acres of embroidered cushion and pretty lace curtains - but it's Ozzy's influence that makes it such fun.

In the hallway, a lectern in the shape of an eagle sits beneath a grand wooden staircase, and in the library - a room in fact devoted to the state-of-the-art music system (the books that line the walls are all fake) - iron crosses loom over deep, comfy-looking sofas. The house does contain real books, though not for the benefit of Ozzy, who's profoundly dyslexic. On one coffee table, next to a framed letter from Sir Paul McCartney, I spot a self-help book called The Seven Day Parent Coach, a quick fix for stressed-out mums.

But the best thing about the Osbournes' place is that (oh, irony) it was built by Quakers, and sits next to the prettiest Quaker village you ever did see. Just imagine how many times Ozzy got wrecked to the point of oblivion here, in a house erected by the most famously abstemious sect in 17th-century Britain.

Not that he drinks nowadays. I'm here to talk to Ozzy about his new album, Black Rain, the first one he has ever made sober. He's not sure how long he has been off the booze, the drugs, the everything, but it's about two years. He still takes it one day at a time, and won't be drawn into self-congratulation for fear of complacency. "I don't like to harp on about how long it's been, because next week I'll be lying in a f****** bar out of my brain with someone taking a picture of me," he says. "It's happened before."

Yet he looks pretty good, at 58, all things considered (and consider particularly that near-fatal quad bike accident in 2003, which has left him with memory loss and "metal all over my body"). He is dressed head to toe in black, naturally, but his hair is dyed a softer brown, and he has swapped his trademark shades for big, black-rimmed glasses that make him look like a hippy professor. At one point he lifts his T-shirt to display the paunchy middle-aged spread that working out won't shift. "I'm thinking of having liposuction. I used to have a pouchy chin and I had some on that years ago."

But he doesn't shake as alarmingly as he used to on The Osbournes, the fly-on-the-wall TV show that made Ozzy, Sharon, Jack and Kelly the 21st-century celebrities they now are.

And the album, too, co-written with producer Kevin Churko, is a real return to form, a mix of the bone-shaking metal that Ozzy does so well, complete with ghoulish vocals, and chartfodder ballads that sound like love songs to Sharon ("I know you think you're all alone/ I haven't been there when you needed me/Let me be your rock/I can be the pillar of strength that you need", and so on).

Famously, it was in 1989 that Ozzy, blitzed on alcohol, actually attempted to strangle his wife. He recounts the story by way of explaining just how powerful alcoholism is, for even that shameful episode didn't stop him drinking. "One of my daughters, Kelly, is 22, and she was just born when I first [decided] to get help, so it's taken me all this time to finally do it. I mean, you can guarantee one of three things if you drink like I did: death, if you're lucky, insanity, or jail.

"I used to black out a lot. And my biggest fear was waking up in a police cell and having an old lady say to a police officer, 'Yes, that's the guy who ran my husband down,' or, 'That's the guy who hit my son over the head with an axe.' It used to terrify me. And then it happened - that day when I woke up in this little single cell with human s*** up the walls - and I thought, 'What the f*** have I done now? Has one of my practical jokes backfired?' So I asked a police officer. I said, 'What am I here for?' I hadn't got a f****** clue. It's the most horrific feeling. He read me a piece of paper, and said, 'You're charged with attempting to murder Mrs Sharon Osbourne.' I can't tell you how I felt. I just went numb.

"But even that didn't stop me. It was only when I got sick and tired of feeling sick and tired that I finally got my s*** together."

He has an AA sponsor in America, whom he phones every day, and who tells him not to let his ego get in the way of attending meetings. "At the beginning I was thinking, 'This is me, Ozzy, do I really want to go and sit in a room full of drop-outs?' And my sponsor says to me, 'When you were drinking, did you ever go to inferior bars?' And of course I did, if there was a drink at the end of it. Nothing stopped me going to bars."

Indeed, when Sharon once took all his clothes from a hotel room to stop him going out to drink, he simply put on one of her dresses and went out in that.

I wonder how he'd describe the Higher Power he's asked to call upon at those 12-step AA meetings? He thinks hard. "I suppose it's God, for want of a better word, but I don't read the Bible. Have you ever tried reading that thing? I wouldn't have wanted to be alive in those days, when Adam lived to be, like, 1,000 years old. I can't do it, being dyslexic. By the time I finished page one, I'd be dead."

If Ozzy provided unintentional comedy in The Osbournes, in person he's knowingly a hoot. His voice breaks into crackly giggles as he describes shopping with Sharon in Beverly Hills, where the Osbournes have that amazing second home. "I hate it. I f****** hate it. If I want a black shirt, I'll find out my size and go and get one. Sharon has to look through every shirt in the shop. I end up losing it. An assistant will come up to me and say, 'Mr Osbourne can I interest you in this lovely pink coat?' Me? Pink? The Prince of Darkness, in pink?"

Ozzy grew up in working-class Aston, Birmingham as one of six children, whose dad worked nights in a factory: "One of those guys who'd go to work if he'd been in a car accident, if his house had been blown up..." The children didn't have a holiday until Ozzy was 14, "and that was to Sunderland to stay with an aunt. I saw the ocean and I thought, 'F*** that, where are the palm trees?'

"I used to dream a lot. I joined a band because I loved The Beatles and it was a good way of being with the lads. We'd be on the road with two bob between us. Someone would say, 'What shall we do with it? Four lots of chips, or ten No 6?' And we'd always vote for the fags."

The band, of course, was an early version of Black Sabbath, one of the most influential rock'n'roll outfits of all time. Since its inception, Black Sabbath has sold more than 70 million albums worldwide. Yet, in those days, says Ozzy, they'd pile into the back of a van holding a piece of paper that said, 'De Montford Hall, Leicester: you're on stage at 8:30pm', and ask the way when they got there.

Ozzy recalls this innocent era with fondness. "I'm just like my dad. He never liked change either." One thing that doesn't change, he claims, is an addictive personality. Today's preferred method of self-abuse is television. "I'm a TV addict, if anything. I'm drawn to the destruction of mankind, all that stuff on the Discovery Channel. I call it the 'Hitler Channel' - the wars, bombs, all that dark stuff. I must have watched The World at War 5,000 times. I suppose I'm one of those people who likes to see a car crash. I've always been like that."

A good part of the lyrical content of Black Rain draws on this TV-fuelled obsession. He was in New York during 9/11, he tells me - "I could see the cloud from my hotel" - which seems appropriate, given his voyeuristic taste for the apocalyptic.

So how does he deal with all those dark thoughts now that he's sober? "The sobriety is not so much for me as for my children and for my grandchildren," he says cannily. As well as Jack and Kelly, he has a third child by Sharon - Aimee, who did not feature in The Osbournes - and two older children, Jessica and Harry, by his first wife, Thelma Riley. "But I'm still one of those people who get worried sick if they don't have anything to be frightened of. It's a circular thing. I'm frightened of not having anything to be frightened of. I still have demons. I still get terrible stage fright."

Life is pretty good right now, and there really isn't much to be afraid of. Sharon's cancer scare is over, Jack is thrill-seeking in ways that don't require rehab - bungee-jumping from a helicopter into an active volcano, most recently - and Kelly is forging a career in TV.

Yet Ozzy still leaps up at the end of the interview like a scalded cat, or a big fidgety child glad that the interrogation is over. In his own way, he's a national treasure but, alongside pink coats and houses built by Quakers, that's not the kind of image to sell heavy metal to earnest teens. Will he ever stop?

"If there comes a time when I can't fill arenas and I'm down to playing clubs and bars," he says. "When I was 21, I thought I'd be dead at 40, but that ain't so cool when you're 39-and-a-half. My memory's a bit dozy and I set off metal detectors but, when the Big Man upstairs wants you to stop, you'll stop. And he hasn't wanted me to yet."

• Black Rain is on Epic Records.

OZZY'S "BEST" BITES

• WHEN Ozzy signed his first solo record deal with a major label in 1982 he went into a meeting with some of the record company bigwigs to celebrate, bringing with him two white doves that he planned to release to mark the occasion.

• For reasons unknown he changed his mind and spontaneously bit the head off one of the doves and spat it out. With blood still dripping from his lips, he was escorted out of the building by security guards, biting the head off the second dove as he left.

• Osbourne has admitted that, at the height of his alcohol and drug addictions, he shot 17 cats: "I was taking drugs so much I was a f*****. The final straw came when I shot all our cats. We had about 17, and I went crazy and shot them all. My wife found me under the piano in a white suit, a shotgun in one hand and a knife in the other."

• During his 1981 tour, nicknamed "Night of the Living Dead", Ozzy regularly pelted the audience with pig intestines and calves' livers. Fans began bringing meat, and then dead animals, to throw back. One night in Des Moines, someone threw a live bat onstage. Stunned by the lights, the bat lay motionless, and Osbourne, thinking it was a rubber toy, bit its head off. He was rushed to hospital and given shots for rabies.

• He has said of the incident: "I got rabies shots for biting the head off a bat, but that's OK - the bat had to get Ozzy shots."

• In 1982, Ozzy was arrested for urinating on the Alamo Cenotaph in San Antonio and was banned from the city for 20 years.

• He was later asked why, at the time of his arrest, he had been wearing one of his wife Sharon's dresses: "The only way my wife could stop me from disappearing for a week was to take my clothes. I'd end up wearing hers. I'd be delivered back to our apartment in a drunken heap, all f***** up, and she'd be p***** off because I'd puked down the front of her dress."

• When Mtley Cre opened for Osbourne's Bark at the Moon tour in 1984, each band tried to outdo the other in the rock'n'roll stakes. Ozzy snorted a line of ants with a straw then urinated on the floor and licked it up. Cre guitarist Nikki Sixx rose to the challenge and urinated on the floor, ready to slurp it up, but Ozzy beat him to it.

• "From that moment on," Sixx later recalled, "we always knew that wherever we were, there was someone who was sicker and more disgusting than we were."

ALICE WYLLIE