Nicko McBrain has told USA Today that Ozzy Osbourne once pulled him back from the rail of a ferry and that he had no memory of it at all.
The night in question was 1975, long before Iron Maiden. In the book McBrain describes Osbourne arriving at a hotel room party with pills falling out of his pockets. Some thirty years later the two met at a charity event and McBrain brought the evening up, assuming Osbourne would remember none of it. Osbourne remembered more than he did.
Do you remember me saving your life, he asked. On the boat coming back from Calais. You were just that drunk that you nearly fell over the rail. I grabbed you just in time.
The book is where the rest of that decade goes. Elsewhere in it McBrain describes the night Rod Smallwood told him on the back of a tour bus that the band would not work with him if he carried on, and the moment he says the penny dropped. He is blunt about the version of himself being described: a superstar attitude, and at least one person he says he treated badly and would apologise to now.
Hello Boys And Girls! came out on 10 November through Harper Nonfiction.