Once he’d entered his 70s, Ozzy Osbourne told us that he wanted to “live life to the full”. Now, following the devastating loss of metal’s greatest-ever icon, we look back over exactly that: an incredible lifetime of changing heavy music forever, influencing more bands than anyone can possibly count, and of course causing some memorable mischief along the way…
‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice’ – ‘If it is his monument you seek, look around you.’
How many tributes? How many photos? How many bouquets on Birmingham’s famed Black Sabbath Bench and by the murals on the city’s walls? How many words from over half a century’s worth of musicians and fans whose lives have been changed by his music, and who all just assumed he’d live forever, because he’s Ozzy? And yet, added together, all of this beautiful, grief-stricken display of love can only sum up a grain of the true enormity of his life, and the huge, shuffling footprints he leaves behind.
Ozzy’s legacy is in everything that followed after him. Without him and Black Sabbath, heavy metal wouldn’t have come about as it did. On his own, both as one of rock’s greatest artists and greatest wildmen, he left an equally massive mark. As a figure, a totem, a loveable, oafish star with a penchant for pissing about, as Ozzy, he was bigger and just more than anyone else you could name.
You’d have no Metallica, no Maiden, no metal, no Green Day, no Deftones, no Korn, no Nirvana, no Foos, no My Chem, no Slipknot, no Slayer, no Bring Me The Horizon, no Rage Against The Machine, no Nova Twins, no no fun of any kind. That his music is of such an influence on both Judas Priest and YUNGBLUD, two artists almost 50 years apart but still playing on a pitch set up by him, just shows the scale of what we’re dealing with here. Ditto that salutes have come from the likes of UB40, Duran Duran, Rod Stewart, Flavor Flav and Elton John. You know you were something special when one of the most loving messages comes from Kermit The Frog.
One need only look back two and a bit weeks, to much, much more joyous times at the Back To The Beginning farewell show in he and Sabbath’s home turf of Aston to see all of this writ large. There is nobody else for whom Metallica or Guns N’ Roses would open, much less for what was essentially petrol money. But it wasn’t about that, was it? It was about the pilgrimage, it was about being part of it, to have one final, fantastic moment together.
When Ozzy appeared on his enormous throne and began singing, clearly digging the deepest he’s ever had to, it was one of those rare moments where it wouldn’t have mattered to a full stadium of people if the man they were there to see had squeaked the words out. He was there, and he was doing it, back with the full squad of Sabbath lads. You could feel how much it all meant in every line and every tear. It was fucking brilliant.
And now, so soon, you feel even more grateful for it. Ozzy wasn’t robbed. As enormously sad as losing him is, he at least fought to throw such a glorious final hurrah and say goodbye properly, with his mates, with Zakk Wylde almost standing guard during his Ozz's own set, and a palpable sense of fraternal love as the four men of Sabbath did it for the final time. Touring life sputtering out after his last proper gig – the LA Forum on New Year’s Eve, 2018 – and simply fading away, that would have been a far sadder and more boring full-stop on the career, the life, of such a giant. Of all the things Ozzy did – drugs, booze, pranks, stupid stunts, biting the head off a bat, pissing on The Alamo while off his head and wearing one of his wife’s dresses – such mundanity was not one of them.
Ozzy, The Prince Of Darkness, The Double O, The Godfather Of Heavy Metal, The Madman, Sharon’s Husband, Dad, Grandad, John – however you called him, such a life is worthy of a thousand nights like that at Villa Park. And it still wouldn’t have been enough.
To go back to the actual beginning, none of this was on the cards. Born in 1948, the young John Osbourne and the rest of Sabbath arrived into a Britain still recovering after World War II. As a massive industrial city, and where RAF Spitfires were made, Birmingham had been hit particularly hard by the Blitz. Growing up in Aston, Ozzy would play in ‘bomb building sites’ – the un-cleared wreckage of buildings bombed years before. “For years I thought that’s what playgrounds were called.”
It wasn’t a time of plenty. His father, Jack, was a toolmaker, and the family – Ozzy, his parents and five siblings – shared a two-bedroom terraced house. Ozzy’s own prospects weren’t particularly great, either. In the ’50s, teachers thought his dyslexia was “just me being lazy”, and at 15, he left school without a qualification, and doomed career attempts included plumber, tuning horns in a car factory, and abattoir worker. Outside work, he was a skinhead with a penchant for the pub.
“My dad used to say, ‘You’re either gonna do something special, John, or you’re gonna go to prison,’” he recalled. Prison came first. Having got into petty crime as a bored teen – he named scrumping apples as the reason he got sacked from the plumbing job – he eventually got busted after committing a burglary while wearing fingerless gloves and leaving prints everywhere. “I was the Norman Wisdom of burglary!”
There was music, though. Having been inspired to try singing after falling in love with The Beatles, he persuaded his dad to take out a loan to buy a vocal PA, and put a card in the local music shop window: ‘Ozzy Zig needs gig – has own PA.’ That last bit was important, because when Tony Iommi, who’d been to school with Ozzy and thought he was a prat, turned up to his house to audition him, he didn’t want to know. But a PA was a PA.
As the Polka Tulk Blues Band, then Earth, Ozzy, Tony, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward came into Britain’s then-thriving blues scene. Wanting to stick out and noticing the way people queued for horror movies, they began playing what Geezer called “scary music”, and changed their name to Black Sabbath, after the 1963 Boris Karloff flick. With their all-black wardrobe, long hair and, save for the fresh-faced Ozzy, huge moustaches, they certainly fit the bill.
For the first half of the 1970s, Sabbath couldn’t miss. Their debut announced them as a new musical force with an alluring, sinister streak, and just 217 days later, second album Paranoid became an instant hit following the success of its titular single, tapping into the angst around the Vietnam War with its lyrical and musical dread.
Less than a year after that, 1971’s Master Of Reality continued the odyssey, making them even bigger stars in the process. Some people got the wrong idea about the band’s image – and after a curse was put on them, Ozzy’s dad made their famous big crucifixes for protection – but it couldn’t stop them. The music they were making would literally change the world for almost anyone who heard it.
If Tony Iommi was the genius riff wizard, powered by the incredible Geezer Butler/Bill Ward swinging rhythm section, Ozzy’s monotone wail was what gave Sabbath their heart. Though it was usually Geezer writing the lyrics – and to whom he’d often tell “I’m not singing that, there’s too many long words” – it was Ozzy who had an inexhaustible talent with melody that made everything work together. In this, Sabbath’s first three records are simply impeccable. Coupled with his likeable, un-slick stage presence, Ozzy quickly became the loveable face of the band.
The other thing he brought to the table was a slice of madness, often powered by drink and, after they hit paydirt in America, drugs. “I just thought drinking was what adults did,” he would later muse to K!. “They’d all go down the pub after work, get pissed, then do it again.”
Flush with new money, having splashed out on cars, watches, decent shoes and clothes, Sabbath started doing that as well. More so.
“I remember going to Florida for the first time and swimming in a pool outside at 11 o’clock at night, stoned on marijuana. I thought, ‘This is big, like.’ We’d do a gig, and we’d have all this fucking booze, and we’d just load it up in the limo, go to the hotel, take a few chicks back, smoke a bit of pot…”
Then in 1971, they got introduced to cocaine, dedicating the following year’s perfect Vol. 4 album to ‘The great COKE cola company’ after getting the stuff delivered in soap powder boxes during its creation, racking up a bigger drug bill than they did for the studio.
“We went from being a rock band messing around with drugs, to a drugs band messing around with rock,” recalled Ozzy.
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Sabotage were killer records, but cracks were starting to show. In 1977, with the band exhausted, creatively dry, and off their heads, Ozzy quit, returned, then was booted out in 1979, with Bill Ward delivering the news, he was out, on a charge of being way too out of it.
With a severance of 95 grand, Ozzy holed up in a hotel in LA for one last blowout, with the view that this was it, so he may as well enjoy it before a presumably depressing return to civilian life. Which didn’t happen.
When Sharon Arden, daughter of Sabbath’s manager, the legendary Don Arden, took him on, refusing to let him reach that bleak foregone conclusion, most people looked at Ozzy the way Ozzy looked at Ozzy at the time: the bloke who used to be in Sabbath.
But what she saw in him was magic. He was a hell of a frontman, a great singer, a star. Troubled, perhaps, and with a young marriage to his first wife Thelma Riley (also mother to his two kids Jessica and Louis, as well as her own son Elliot) that was falling apart, but he himself was far from done. In late 1980, he returned with his first solo album, Blizzard Of Ozz. With a new band including killer guitarist Randy Rhoads, it was an electrifying return. The following year, Diary Of A Madman sealed it. Ozzy was back. What’s more, he was quickly becoming an icon again.
It didn’t hurt that reputation and rumour played into the madman rep. In 1981, he’d taken doves to a label meeting with the intention of releasing them as a peace symbol. He ended up biting one of their heads off and spitting it onto the exec’s desk. In perhaps his most famous act of horseplay gone wrong, in 1982 he inadvertently bit the head off a bat that had been thrown onstage, believing it to be fake – “I had to get fucking rabies shots in my arse with this fucking giant needle.” Then there was the infamous U.S. tour with Mötley Crüe, on which he got into a gross-out contest with his young support act, won by snorting a line of ants.
Taking to The Prince Of Darkness nickname, and ramping up the theatrics with songs like Mr. Crowley, Ozzy became known as rock’n’roll’s most loveable madman. But behind all the horsing about – he once shaved his head, and would go onstage in a wig, which he’d rip off halfway through to shock from the audience – Ozzy was also a somewhat lost soul with a big heart. In later years, he would often wish that his parents could have lived long enough to see the extent of how well he’d done.
On March 19, 1982, Randy and make-up artist Rachel Youngblood were killed when the light aircraft they were in clipped the tourbus and crashed. Ozzy was devastated, and for the rest of his life would talk about the guitarist. Picking up the tour almost immediately, he didn’t stop, and ascended to even greater fame. But even after finding Zakk Wylde in 1987 – his longest-serving guitar partner and closest thing to the dynamic Ozzy shared with Randy, and a fiercely loyal sidekick who had almost a father-son bond – it was a pain that never diminished.
More happily, three months later, with his divorce final, Ozzy and Sharon tied the knot, a marriage that would last over 40 years, and give them three children, Aimee, Jack and Kelly.
It would become in domestic family life that Ozzy’s demons would be focused, however. For all the accusations of being a black magician or in league with the Devil, it was drink and drugs that did the most harm. Infamously, in 1989, Ozzy woke up in Amersham police station with no recollection of why he was there, horrified to be told he’d tried to strangle his wife in a blackout.
Meanwhile, Kelly and Jack would later recall coming home from school to find him out of it on the couch. During the making of The Osbournes, the 2000s MTV reality show that followed their daily life and made them the most famous family in America, Ozzy, Kelly and Jack all later said they were taking drugs to deal with it all.
Despite all this, the Osbournes have endured. Though not perfect, Ozzy and Sharon’s marriage is also one of immense love. During The Osbournes, that was always there. When Sharon was diagnosed with cancer on the show, the care he had for his wife and family was beautifully clear.
As a team, as well, they were immense. Riding high on his third decade in the ’90s, after earning a fresh round of success with Zakk thanks to No Rest For The Wicked, No More Tears (home to the mega single title-track and Mama, I’m Coming Home, written with Lemmy) and Ozzmosis, in 1996 they started The Ozzfest.
Just as when Ozzy took out Metallica on tour in 1986, or Korn in 1995, it demonstrated just how timeless his music was with coming generations of bands and fans. Over the next decade, it would become the most influential institution in metal, breaking the careers of Slipknot, Linkin Park, Papa Roach, System Of A Down and Lamb Of God, to name a handful.
It was also the vehicle that would get him back together with Sabbath for the first time. In 1997, they headlined the trek, to mass applause. In 1998, the fest came to the UK, with Sabbs headlining. With usual sensibleness, when Bill Ward, unable to play due to illness, came onstage to say hello, Ozzy pantsed him.
You could fill a book with this sort of Ozzy history and stories and musings. There’s loads already. What’s heartbreaking now is knowing there won’t be any more to add.
The last time K! saw Ozzy face to face, it was January 2020, at his house in LA, for a cover feature on Ordinary Man. He’d been laid up for a year with problems stemming from loosening his old neck injury sustained in a quad accident – and actually captured on The Osbournes – while going to the toilet in the middle of the night. He described it as “the worst fucking year of my life”, and was already doubting he’d make the planned tour. A week later, he would announce that he had Parkin 2.
And yet, even with all this, he was still Ozzy. He told one of Sharon’s dogs to fuck off when it tried to sit in his chair. He made gags every other answer. When he started talking about the album, he became animated to a point that it was later remarked on how good his mood was. Best in ages, in fact.
As ever, he also came across as just a bloke from Birmingham who’d found himself in luck’s good books but wasn’t quite sure how. “I can’t fucking believe how I’m still here and got any of this,” he said more than once.
This was why Ozzy was so beloved: his realness. Even as he became one of the most famous people on American TV, he kept the Brummie twang in his voice. He once quipped that he now had a driveway longer than the street he grew up on, but you also got that there was a bit of him still there.
It’s why his music hit like it did. Why you believed him. Why hearing him yell ‘All aboooooard!’ at the start of Crazy Train will forever be a signal to go fucking crazy. Why, two weeks ago, the first lines of Mama, I’m Coming Home reduced an entire stadium to tears.
Now there’s more. And for a bit, even more than that every time a lyric sticks out and gets you in the heart. This feels so enormous because it is. Ozzy wasn’t just a guy with a long career – what he did became part of the building blocks of what we all love. Being there at the beginning of the split from hard rock into heavy metal, there genuinely wasn’t a time when he wasn’t around. To many, the profound shock is that, like The Queen, we all just assumed he always would be.
“I always thought I’d be dead by the time I was 40,” he told us in 2020, with a laugh. “That was alright until I got to fucking 39 and three-quarters! I never analyse, I just get on with it. When you get past 70 you don’t think, ‘Oh God, I’m doomed.’ It makes you want to live life to the full.”
He did, right to the final bell. Farewell, Ozzy. You changed all of our worlds. Thank you.
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