Lita Ford has spent her life in rock and roll, so it’s only fitting that even a quiet family meal could turn into something bordering on the absurd. Especially when it involves Ozzy Osbourne, an electric knife, a generous amount of wine — and a cooked lamb that never reached their plates.
Ford was just 16 when she joined the Runaways, the rock act behind the teen anthem “Cherry Bomb,” and she has barely slowed down since. Armed with angular offset guitars — most famously the B.C. Rich Mockingbird — she carved out a career that placed her at the center of hard rock through the ’80s and beyond.
Even offstage, the teenaged guitarist couldn’t escape the orbit of rock celebrities. Judas Priest might drop by her parents’ house for a visit after shows, as would Priest guitarist Glenn Tipton and Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi.
Which is how the Prince of Darkness found himself invited to an Easter lunch one year.
“My father asked him if he wanted to cut the lamb,” Ford recalls in a new interview with the Leona Graham Podcast. “He had an electric knife, and Ozzy had just had a bunch of wine before he cut the lamb, and the lamb ended up on the floor underneath the table. My father laughed his ass off. He just stood there and watched Ozzy!”
In the end, no one got a bite of the lamb. “My mother put some fish on the barbecue,” Ford explains. “She just made something else, and Ozzy said, ‘It’s all right, I don't eat lamb anyway.’
“And I thought, Well, I do!”
Ford doesn’t pin down the year, but the timing lines up neatly with 1989, when she and Osbourne released “Close My Eyes Forever,” a song that climbed to number eight on the Billboard Hot 100.
In the same interview, she pivots from family anecdotes to a familiar frustration: the sense that her guitar work has never received its due. Asked to name an underrated guitarist, Ford doesn’t hesitate.
“I don’t know, maybe me?” she says. “‘Oh, that’s great, who played that guitar?’ I’m like, ‘Well, who the hell do you think played it?’ ‘That’s a nice solo on ‘Close My Eyes Forever,’ who played it?’ What?! Come here, let me slap you.”
The irony is hard to miss. “Close My Eyes Forever” remains the biggest hit of both artists’ solo careers — though Osbourne would later match it with 2019’s “Take What You Want” — and Ford handled every guitar part on the track, from its shimmering acoustic foundation to unapologetically ’80s electric guitar solo.
Yet many listeners still remember her primarily as the vocalist, despite a body of work that tells a different story. The Runaways’ “Cherry Bomb” is driven by her urgent riffing, while solo cuts like “You Drive Me Wild” lean into gritty blues rock.
Part of Ford’s identity as a guitarist has always been tied to her gear choices. In a recent conversation with Kylie Olsson, she explained why she gravitated toward offset guitars in the first place.
“I always wanted to be different from my superheroes,” she said. “Ritchie Blackmore always played a Strat, Jimmy Page was always on a Les Paul. I thought, ‘I don’t want to play a Les Paul or a Strat, I want to be Lita.’ So I started trying awkward-shaped guitars. It just felt good to me, like I had a weapon in my hands. And it just stuck.”
That decision set her apart at a time when few high-profile players were wielding a Mockingbird — Joe Perry and Slash among the rare exceptions — and helped her avoid direct comparisons with her idols. It also reinforced the sense that Ford was carving her own lane, both visually and sonically.
Even now, she remains outspoken, weighing in recently on the amp-versus-guitar debate and arguing for the value of learning the instrument the hard way.
“It’s good to be a little bit of a street gutter rat,” she’s said, contrasting her own formative years with a more polished, tutorial-driven modern approach. And what could be less polished than a meal with Ozzy?
