This being the case, he’s entirely mindful that comments made in anger - let’s say, for the sake of argument, comments pertaining to the current incumbent of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in the District of Columbia and his belligerent, antagonistic, attitude to the United States’ southern neighbour - could inadvertently land him in hot water if taken out of context. Ozzy Osbourne is infinitely sharper than you might realise. Instead, the order decrees, Mrs Osbourne must spend the night aboard the jet on the airstrip, and will be cleared to return to Los Angeles at dawn. But in times of heightened political rhetoric, acts of mercy can be interpreted as signs of weakness, and as negotiations at the airport continue, word is passed down the chain of command to the effect that this particular visitor from North America – citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as she might be – will not be permitted to officially enter the country. Upon touching down in Mexico, with promises being made that the absent travel document will be couriered in on the next south-bound flight from LA, it initially appears that immigration officials at the airport will take a common-sense, if law-bending, view of Mrs O’s misfortune, will come to assess that the internationally-famous wife of one of the planet’s most recognisable rock stars is perhaps unlikely to represent a serious threat to the security of the state. “She goes, ‘I haven’t brought my passport’. “I go, ‘What’s that darling?’,” says Ozzy, replaying the scene. The travelling party’s private jet is descending towards an airstrip outside Mexico City, with just ten minutes remaining of a four-hour flight from Los Angeles, when Sharon Osbourne leans across the seat to her husband and gently says, “Ozzy, I’ve got something to tell you.” To understand the thinking behind Ozzy’s intuition, we must rewind a few days, to the evening of Friday, May 4. And with just three dates of his final world tour ticked off the docket, today he’s taking some convincing that his freshly-launched, long farewell campaign isn’t cursed. He may no longer wear the silver metal cross his father Jack crafted for each member of Black Sabbath to ward off evil spirits back in the ’70s, but he remains reluctant to meddle with forces he does not understand. “It was a voodoo offering, and so everyone freaked.”īy his own admission, Ozzy is a very superstitious man. “Everyone was like, ‘No! No! No!’,” he laughs. During a lull in proceedings, the singer recalls picking up an apple and taking a bite, to the immediate and very visible consternation of his horrified hosts. On that occasion, Ozzy recalls, he was booked for a photo session by a river in Rio de Janeiro, along the banks of which locals had laid out candles and plates of fruit. The singer first visited South America in January 1985, for the inaugural staging of the mammoth Rock In Rio festival, a 10-day event which drew some 1.4 million people to a purpose-built City Of Rock, with Queen, AC/DC, Yes and Rod Stewart among the headline ‘turns’. Sabbath never made it to South America while Ozzy was in the band first time around, but finally played Chile on their farewell The End tour: “It was like Beatlemania in a heavy metal way,” Ozzy recalls. We had to go to see The Sting afterwards to get our minds off it!” We‘re supposed to be the Satan band, and we’re all in one bed, scared shitless. So the four of us, Black Sabbath, go to see this fucking film, and we were so fucking scared, that we had to spend the night together in one room. The manager, Patrick Meehan, comes in and says, ‘You gotta see this film’. “I remember seeing The Exorcist,” says Ozzy Osbourne, a figure in black shuffling carefully between the ossuaries. For all its architectural splendor and undoubted historical significance, this is not a location one would wish to explore in the hours of darkness. Here and there, teddy bears, cuddly toys and cloth dolls are tied to trees and stone crucifixes, heart-wrenching reminders of young children taken from their families too soon. Significantly, there’s no plot for the CIA-sponsored dictator Augusto Pinochet: there is, however, a chilling monument to the thousands of Chileans who were ‘disappeared’ by the military during his brutal regime. All but two of the deceased former Presidents of Chile are interred here. A true city of the dead, it’s a sprawling 210-acre complex of ornate tombs and elegant mausoleums, the final resting place of approximately two million Chilean citizens. Santiago’s Cementerio General is an extraordinary place, as beautiful as it is haunting.
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