“You’ve no idea how I feel – thank you from the bottom of my heart,” an emotional Ozzy Osbourne told fans as he performed from a throne on stage at his beloved Villa Park, reunited with Black Sabbath, less than three weeks ago.
It was an exit on his own terms by heavy metal’s biggest character, with a supporting line-up of hard rock luminaries including Slayer, Metallica and Guns’n’Roses, all inspired by his music.
With Black Sabbath, Osbourne was at the forefront of heavy metal. As Ozzy, he was one of the biggest rock stars in the world. Nowhere was this more evident than at the Back To The Beginning in his home city, where 40,000 fans gathered to see the show billed as his “final bow”.
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“Without Sabbath, there would be no Metallica,” frontman James Hetfield told the crowd in Birmingham.
It was a sentiment echoed by many of the other acts who performed on stage. Announced by his wife Sharon earlier this year, the show was a chance for the performer to reunite with Black Sabbath and say thank you and farewell to fans after years of health problems, including Parkinson’s disease, which had forced him to cancel recent tour shows.
Other celebrities, from Sir Elton John to Dolly Parton, sent video messages of support. Fans knew it would be his last performance, but could not have known his death, at the age of 76, would come so soon.
It was a truly metal goodbye.
‘I think there’s a wild man in everybody’
John Michael Osbourne was born in Solihull in December 1948 and grew up in the Aston area of the West Midlands city.
As a teenager, he was bullied at school. Drink and drugs later became a way to escape his fears, he said in interviews, and after leaving school at 15, he worked several jobs, including labouring and in an abattoir.
It was hearing The Beatles, he said, that made him want to be a musician.
“I think there’s a wild man in everybody,” he says in a resurfaced interview clip. “Ozzy Osbourne and John Osbourne is two different people. John Osbourne is talking to you now.” His eyes widen a little manically, he grins, the voice cranks up. “But if you want to be Ozzy Osbourne, it’s like… it just takes over you.”
In 1967, he was recruited to the band that two years later would become Black Sabbath, inspired by a film of the same title. This was a line-up of four working-class schoolfriends – Tony Iommi, Bill Ward and Geezer Butler, alongside Ozzy – who twisted heavy blues into something darker, creating a sound and otherworldly image that felt new, exciting and rebellious.
A self-titled debut album was released in 1970 and made the Top 10 in the UK. The follow-up, Paranoid, released just seven months later, topped the charts after the single of the same name became their big breakthrough. The album also included the unforgettable Iron Man and the anti-war protest song War Pigs – its unmistakeable riff inspiring the Arctic Monkeys’ 2014 single, Arabella.
Black Sabbath went on to release six more albums with Osbourne at the helm before he was fired in 1979 due to his drinking and substance use, something he claimed was no better or worse than other members at the time.
In 1980, he returned with his debut solo album, Blizzard Of Oz, and the lead single Crazy Train. As a solo artist, he went on to release 13 studio albums – the last being Patient Number 9, in 2022 – and had hits with songs including Mr Crowley, Diary Of A Madman, No More Tears, Bark At The Moon and Shot In The Dark.
His first UK number one was a re-recording of the Black Sabbath ballad Changes, as a duet with his daughter, Kelly, in 2003, and his collaborations over the years included everyone from Alice Cooper (Hey Stoopid in 1991) and Post Malone (Take What You Want in 2019) to, in a somewhat unusual move, Hollywood star Kim Basinger for a re-recording of the dance hit Shake Your Head by Was (Not Was) in 1992.
With Black Sabbath and as a solo star, he is estimated to have sold 100 million records throughout his career – for context, this is reportedly on a par with Sir Paul McCartney’s solo sales – so the numbers speak for themselves.
Biting the bat
Osbourne was also a huge personality and played up to his hellraising image – the Prince of Darkness.
The most famous Ozzy story goes like this.
The singer was on stage in Des Moines, Iowa, 1982, when the bat appeared. He assumed it was a toy. So, like any good hellraiser would do, he bit its head off.
For more than 40 years, he found himself jokily fielding questions about bats. What do they taste like? (Salty). What happened afterwards? (Headline news, painful rabies shots). Do you have any pets? (Yes. They’re all dead).
“I get a lot of weird people at my concerts,” he told David Letterman in 1982, of how the animal came to appear in front of him. “It’s rock ‘n’ roll, y’know”.
He was sometimes irritated by the bat connection. But he also played up to the image, recounting the story in interviews, offering plush bat toys among his merch, and appearing as himself, biting a bat, in the 2000 Adam Sandler comedy Little Nicky, about the son of Satan.
Known for catapulting raw meat at fans during gigs, there were plenty of other tales of darkness and debauchery. Osbourne’s wild persona and on-stage theatrics always went hand-in-hand with the music.
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From Prince of Darkness to reality TV
He was famously managed by his wife, Sharon, whom he first met when her dad, Don Arden, was managing Black Sabbath. As well as the music, Sharon and Ozzy together founded the Ozzfest festival tours in 1996 – and in 2002 came his second act.
It’s hard to imagine it now, but before the perfectly coiffed Kardashians it was a scruffy 50-something rocker from Birmingham and his family who ruled the Hollywood reality TV scene. As with his music, he was a pioneer – this time round of a new era of addictive viewing.
The Osbournes followed the lives of Ozzy and Sharon and two of their children, Kelly and Jack (their eldest daughter, Aimee, famously had nothing to do with the show), and the family fallouts and sunny California culture clash proved to be a ratings winner. The MTV series catapulted the metal star to global mainstream celebrity heights.
His marriage to Sharon was tumultuous but the pair always stayed together, and they renewed their wedding vows in 2017. Sharon was the driving force behind Ozzy’s successes, to him eventually getting clean, and behind his farewell show.
Despite weathering the storm of drink and drug use, Osbourne’s air of indestructibility was challenged when a quad bike accident left him with a broken collar bone and ribs, as well as short-term memory loss, in 2003.
The 2020 documentary Biography: The Nine Lives Of Ozzy Osbourne, had summed up with its title the performer’s seeming ability to defy the odds. However, the health problems started to mount up. Scheduled tours were postponed, and in 2023 he told fans holding on to tickets that he had come to the realisation he was “not physically capable” of dealing with life on the road.
But there was one gig he couldn’t miss – a surprise appearance to close the Commonwealth Games in his home city in 2022, just weeks after undergoing surgery.
Now, fans will remember the shows they did get to see, the music that ushered in a new genre – and especially his most recent gig, which was said to have raised around £140m for charities. Just a few days afterwards, his new memoir, Last Rites, was announced. It will be released in October.
During his career, Osbourne was inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame and the US Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame – twice for both, with Black Sabbath and as a solo artist. “Countless artists from many genres have credited Ozzy as a major influence, including Metallica, Lita Ford, Rage Against The Machine, and Busta Rhymes,” reads his US citation. “With his longevity, impact, and iconic persona, Ozzy Osbourne is a phenomenon unlike any other.”
He also has a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame – as well as in Birmingham’s Broad Street – an Ivor Novello, and five Grammy wins from 12 nominations.
But other honours, such as the NME’s Godlike Genius award, and Classic Rock’s Living Legend, also give a sense of how much his personality played a part in why he is so beloved by fans and critics alike. In the Nine Lives documentary, daughter Kelly describes him as “the most irresistible mad man you will ever meet in your life”.
Osbourne’s was an unlikely journey from Birmingham to LA. He was a working-class hero of heavy metal, a reality TV favourite – forever the Prince of Darkness.
“People say to me, if you could do it all again, knowing what you know now, would you change anything?” he once said. “I’m like, f*** no… If I’d done normal, sensible things, I wouldn’t be Ozzy.”
