Ozzy Osbourne recalled how he canceled a run of shows with Motorhead in the early ‘80s because he and Lemmy Kilmister had spent a week using cocaine together.

The moment came while they had some downtime during Osbourne’s first road trip as a solo artist, following his firing from Black Sabbath.

“We had a few days off so I went round to Sharon’s father’s house, and Lemmy came with us,” Osbourne told the NME in a recent interview. “Eventually it was time to go back on tour, but I’d been doing coke all fucking week. I come out into the yard and Lemmy comes out and his face is fucking whiter than a ghost. He looks at me and he goes, ‘Fuck me, man, I hope I don’t look as bad as you.’ If Lemmy Kilmister says that to you, you must be fucking bad. I just went, ‘Cancel the gigs.’”

He said that Kilmister’s death in 2016 had hurt him deeply. “It fucked me up bad," Osbourne recalled. "He was a good man. To look at Lemmy, you’d think he had about two brain cells, but he was very knowledgeable. I wish you could have seen his apartment – fucking hell! It was like the Imperial War Museum. I used to buy Nazi daggers for him when I was on the road and bring them back for him. He must have had 10,000 fucking German daggers.”

Osbourne recalled Motorhead’s last shows with their frontman, in the months running up to Kilmister’s death. “I couldn’t believe how thin he was," he noted. "He was a fucking bag of bones. I could see he was very ill, but he kept it to himself. I phoned him on the day he died. Sharon and I were gonna go down to his apartment and see him. I phoned up his apartment, and I don’t know who the fuck it was answered it, but I wanted them to say it was okay to come down. On the third or fourth phone call, they said, ‘He’s gone.’”

Elsewhere in the interview, Osbourne said that even though he's been friends with Elton John for decades, they never partied together. “I don’t think we would have both fucking made the ’90s if we had,” he reflected. “I remember Sharon taking me to a gig of his years ago, and his fucking dressing room was like a fucking bar with every known fucking spirit. Then he’d do seven gigs on the bounce. I’ve said to him, ‘How the fuck did you keep singing?’ If I even thought about cocaine, my singing would go out the fucking window.”