On the top of his extra, his 9 lives took prime billing. However as Ozzy Osbourne appreciated to level out, he’d additionally had two separate births.
Born John Michael Osbourne in Aston, Birmingham, on December third, 1948, many years later, he would describe himself as a “child who was afraid of all the things”; a poverty-stung petty thief whose lack of washing services meant he “felt like a peasant”; a category clown who joked to discourage bullies and defang the unhappiness he stated walked alongside him for 76 years.
However that first life ended on the fateful day in 1968 when Osbourne pinned a labeled advert to the noticeboard of a Birmingham music store (‘Ozzy Zig wants gig’). That act set in movement Ozzy’s ascent because the singer for Earth, quickly renamed Black Sabbath, the band that fired the beginning pistol for heavy steel: an unholy new style that within the fingers of guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Invoice Ward was the auditory equal of falling anvils.
As Sabbath superior, John Osbourne was usurped by the rising Ozzy persona: a mad-eyed dervish whose head-banging stage presence was the proper match for the band’s Panzer tank groove.
“I believe there’s a wildman in all people,” he stated as soon as. “I’m a cut up persona. Ozzy Osbourne and John Osbourne are two completely different individuals. John Osbourne is speaking to you now. However if you would like me to be Ozzy Osbourne” – a flash of mania danced in his eyes – “then it takes over.”
Inside the ranks of Sabbath, no person questioned Tony Iommi’s dominance: the guitarist was within the 12 months above Osbourne at Birchfield Highway Secondary Fashionable Faculty, and even into his seventies, the singer claimed “Tony intimidates the fuck out of me, and he is aware of it”.
However whereas Osbourne was mainly recruited for the Vox PA audio system gifted by his beloved father, the singer proved way over a passenger or resident buffoon.
Revisit Sabbath’s basic early output and also you’ll be reminded of a wierd, unsettling, totally distinctive vocal that makes your pores and skin tingle and crawl. Warfare, witchcraft, psychological sickness… no different golden-era rock vocalist might have offered Geezer Butler’s troubled lyrics higher, as a result of it appeared possible that Osbourne was residing each line. From the witch’s cat yowl that coils by way of the spooky opening title monitor of 1970’s seminal Black Sabbath, to the gleeful-sounding remark of Warfare Pigs’ burning our bodies, and the bereft upper-register monotone of Paranoid, Osbourne introduced the razor edge to a band whose riffing was the archetypal blunt instrument.
These first albums had been epochal, offering a sonic template that impressed generations of musicians. In his speech inducting Sabbath into the Rock And Roll Corridor Of Fame in 2006, Metallica frontman James Hetfield spoke of encountering the band for the primary time, of his nine-year-old self discovering “a strong, loud, heavy sound” that moved his soul.
“If there was no Black Sabbath,” drummer Lars Ulruch acknowledged, “I might nonetheless presumably be a morning newspaper supply boy.”
Foo Fighters chief Dave Grohl is simply as unequivocal.
“I like Black Sabbath,” he advised Kerrang! In 1997. “They made an incredible contribution to music in the present day. Virtually each band that made it massive within the Nineties, together with Soundgarden and Nirvana, owe a debt to them. We had been completely into them in Nirvana.”
“I like Ozzy, too,” Grohl added. He was as soon as thought of ‘The Most Evil Man In Rock’ and but he is the cutest and funniest man in rock, too. He is just a bit child… with a hash pipe in his mouth!”
As Grohl intimated, for all his wildness, there was a vulnerability about Ozzy, too, that meant he usually took the position of fall man. Throughout periods for 1972’s Vol.4, the Sabbath lineup had been all residing “the rock star life” – however Ozzy was deemed to have fallen furthest into unhealthy methods, and by decade’s finish, following the discharge of By no means Say Die!, he was sacked, later changed by Ronnie James Dio.
Sodden with drink, nostrils frosted with coke, written off by the business and holed up in squalor at a West Hollywood lodge, one of the best Osbourne might hope for, he remembered, was to have “one final blast with the booze and dope, fuck as many tarts as I can after which go house. After which someday Sharon got here round…”
The daughter of the formidable old-school rock supervisor Don Arden, the toughness in Sharon Arden’s DNA was the decisive think about pulling Osbourne out of the filth for 1980’s massive-selling Blizzard Of Ozz. It was a spectacular comeback album pushed by the neo-classical flash of the younger Californian guitarist Randy Rhoads, whose tragic loss of life in a 1982 plane prank gone improper can be one of many nice sorrows of Ozzy’s life.
Sharon Osbourne proved a much-needed steadying rock all through this stormiest of lives, even when the wedding they embarked upon that very same 12 months was no person’s concept of a Mills & Boon romance (Ozzy, listening to voices, as soon as tried to strangle her). It’s exhausting to think about that Ozzy’s solo profession would have flown so excessive with out her agency hand – or that another rock partner would have tolerated a rap sheet that included urinating on the Alamo, falling asleep face-down in his dinner throughout an interview with journalist Mick Wall and biting the heads off a menagerie of wildlife.
Requested in 2020 what he needed as his epitaph, Ozzy didn’t miss a beat: “Bats style like shit.”
Ozzy’s antics might need set a excessive bar for others to comply with, however these first two solo albums – Blizzard and Diary Of A Madman – stood up in their very own proper, buoyed by the brilliance of Rhoads, shoulder to shoulder with one of the best of Sabbath’s work. Tom Morello nails it: “Popping out of most likely the best heavy steel band of all time in Black Sabbath, to discover a musical accomplice that would assist construct a catalog with the best exhausting rock songs of all time, that is a miracle proper there.”
Showing in Penelope Spheeris’s 1988 documentary, The Decline Of Western Civilization Half II: The Metallic Years, Osbourne already seemed slightly fragile, spilling orange juice on his kitchen worktops. By 2002, when his profile was reignited by The Osbournes actuality TV sequence, he had settled right into a cosier, extra avuncular position: the notion of the Prince Of Darkness terrifying anybody now appeared distant. However whereas the present painted him as incompetent – struggling to function TV remotes and so forth – interviewers found a person who was nonetheless trustworthy, sharp and fiercely witty, even after he revealed he was struggling with Parkinson’s in 2020.
To informal observers, it is going to most likely be the bat and The Osbournes that bubble to the highest of their recollections of Ozzy Osbourne within the days to come back. Music followers know higher. Osbourne belonged to that unique membership of rock stars who segued from a legendary band to an equally storied profession of his personal. Wanting again now, it’s debatable whether or not Sabbath or his solo output is the principle occasion. Loopy Practice is each bit as very important a signature tune as Paranoid. 2020’s Odd Man was an equally spectacular swansong as 2013’s valedictory 13. Whichever method you slice it, it’s a rare physique of labor: the substance that can outlive the ephemeral tales of substance abuse.
Black Sabbath’s farewell Again To The Starting present on July 5 at Birmingham’s Villa Park stadium, positioned inside a plectrum flick of the streets that the band’s 4 authentic, and reunited, members grew up on, was unforgettable and emotional, not merely due to the astonishingly influential, timeless music it showcased, however for the sheer outpouring of affection and respect each musician who graced the stage directed in direction of the Godfathers of Metallic, and their stricken, however unbowed frontman specifically.
The final of his 9 lives might need been used up – however Ozzy Osbourne’s legacy is forged in stone. As the focus, face and frontman of the band who not solely co-created the steel style, however made it appear to be one of the best celebration on the town, you couldn’t overlook him if you happen to tried.
And the world by no means, ever will.
John Michael ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne
December 3, 1948 – July 22, 2025
