IT’S ONE OF the most infamous stories from Ozzy Osbourne’s storied career, summing up the chaotic excess that marked his time in music and entertainment for more than half a century.

But what is the the story to the time Osbourne – who died yesterday aged 76 – supposedly biting his head off a real live bat?

While this is not exactly a rubber-stamped iteration of FactCheck, let’s have a go at separating fact from fiction on the incident.

In 1982, Osbourne was on a solo tour of the US which had brought him to Des Moines, Iowa.

He was promoting his second solo album, Diary of a Madman, and – befitting the man and the album name – a convention of his shows was that Osbourne would fling raw meat into his audience.

According to some reports of the time, he had quite literally rigged a catapult to launch the meat into the audience.

His audience took to the growing tradition and began coming with animal parts of their own to return fire. Makes sense.

In one instance during the Des Moines show, Osbourne picked up a critter thrown on the stage and, apparently thinking it was a rubber toy bat, bit its head off.

As reported by local newspaper Des Moines Register at the time, the rocker left the city with a “four-day supply of rabies vaccine and a bat taste in his mouth”.

Dead or alive

Accounts seem settled on it not being a rubber bat, but conflicting versions start to appear on a crucial aspect: was the bat dead or alive at the time Osbourne took the bite?

According to his 2010 autobiography, I Am Ozzy, Osbourne quickly felt a “warm, goopy liquid” in his mouth and realised it was not a rubber bat after all. The creature even “twitched” in his mouth.

After biting into it, he sees his his wife and manager Sharon gesturing to him.

“And I’m like, what you talking about,” Osbourne said in 2006. After Sharon told him it’s a “dead, real bat”, the singer realised what he’d done.

The fan who has claimed credit for the bat was 17-year-old Mark Neal, who supposedly came upon the bat after finding it outside his school.

In another sign that there are elements of Chinese whispers to this story, other tellings recount that it was actually Neal’s brother who had found the bat and brought it home, only for the poor creature to die.

But either way, Neal kept the bat in his freezer for about two weeks before the show took place and has been widely accepted as the one who flung the animal corpse at Osbourne – unwittingly creating an infamous moment in music history.