SOME musicians are inspired by love or politics or injustice. Others, meanwhile, were motivated entirely by mountains of cocaine, like these:
Ozzy Osbourne
Given that his most famous record is called Paranoid, it checks out that Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath were fuelled almost entirely by cocaine. Probably the most effective anti-drug campaign that could ever be produced would be to show children footage of Ozzy Osbourne, high as a kite, biting off the head of a live bat.
David Bowie
Bowie found international success pretending to be Ziggy Stardust, a sort of androgynous space wizard sent to earth to become a rockstar. Amazingly, this was before he’d really gotten into drugs. But things went downhill because, before long, he was living in LA, surviving off cocaine and milk, and referring to himself as the Thin White Duke.
Elton John
In the mid-1970s Elton John got so massively into cocaine that he probably single-handedly made a significant contribution to Colombia’s GDP. Coincidentally, the quality of his music also fell off a cliff. Anyone who’s tried to sit through the entirety of his double album Blue Moves would be similarly driven to drug dependence to endure it.
Axl Rose
The Guns n’ Roses frontman is known for his shrill vocal style as much as for his troubling wardrobe choices. As someone with absolutely no connection to Scotland the decision to wear a kilt sparks several questions. However, thinking pairing it with a bandana and a leather waistcoat is a good idea could only be down to copious cocaine use.
Fleetwood Mac
This hard-partying band allegedly snorted so much cocaine in their time that if you laid it all out in one long line it would stretch seven miles. Probably not great for their health, and certainly bad for their relationships, but it did motivate them to spend enough fraught, angry hours in the studio to create Rumours, lauded as one of the best albums of all time.
