As the frontman of Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne, who has died aged 76, did not only help invent heavy metal, said The Daily Telegraph, he also pioneered its outrageous lifestyle: “preposterous theatrics”, rumours of satanism and shocking excesses.
“I’m something of a madman,” Osbourne said. “If it’s booze, I drink the place dry. If drugs, I take everything and scrape the carpet for little crumbs.” He bit the head off a dead bat during a concert in 1982; he snorted a line of ants while partying with Mötley Crüe; and he was banned from performing in Texas, for urinating on the Alamo Cenotaph while wearing a dress (his wife Sharon had hidden his clothes to stop him going out, so he had borrowed hers). He was serially unfaithful to Sharon: he slept with his children’s nannies; on tour in Japan he took a fan to bed in his hotel room, forgetting that Sharon was there already. And in 1989, he was accused of trying to strangle her.
Nevertheless, both with Black Sabbath and as a solo artist, he managed to release several hit albums, and to tour solidly, before finding a new level of fame in the 2000s as a reality TV star. “The Osbournes” proved a revelation, said Spencer Kornhaber in The Atlantic. The supposedly demonic, self-styled Prince of Darkness turned out to be a doting (foul-mouthed) family man, bumbling around a mansion in LA.
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Yet this “cognitive dissonance” was at the heart of his success. He’d invented a sound and an identity “with terrifying connotations”, but “that identity was rooted” in the thing it superficially obscured – the warm “human core inside each of us. Osbourne knew that metal is not the music of hell but rather the music of Earth, not a fantasy but a survival guide.”
Although accused of promoting satanism, Black Sabbath had no sympathy for the devil. As Osbourne said, “The closest we ever got to black magic was a box of chocolates.” And most of the terrible things he did were as a result of being addled by drink and drugs. He had thought the bat was a plastic toy; he apologised to and was forgiven by the state of Texas; and he’d woken up in a jail cell with no memory of strangling Sharon. He was horrified when he was told that he had nearly killed her: it was the stuff of nightmares. He went into court-mandated rehabilitation after that incident.
Born in Birmingham in 1948, John Osbourne grew up in Aston. His parents both worked in nearby factories, but with six children, money was tight. At school, he struggled with dyslexia. He was once sent home for not being clean enough – a humiliation he never forgot – and he was sexually abused by two classmates. He left at 15.
It was his love of The Beatles that inspired him to join a band. Black Sabbath was formed in 1968. Their distinctive sludgy sound was partly the result of guitarist Tony Iommi slicing off his fingertips at work at a sheet metal factory, and making false ones out of plastic and leather. But they’d also resolved to exploit the new popularity of horror films. Osbourne sang in a howl; their lyrics contained references to Satan, war and insanity.
In 1970, their first album reached the Top 10. Osbourne suddenly had more money than he’d ever imagined. As a rock star, he could, he recalled, “get drunk morning, noon and night, and nobody would care”. Then he found cocaine. He admitted to having been a terrible husband to his first wife, Thelma Riley. Sabbath fired him in 1979. It was Sharon – whose father Don Arden had been their manager – who steered his solo career.
Numerous hits followed, but Osbourne’s addictions intensified. He was badly affected by the death of his guitarist Randy Rhoads in a plane crash in 1982, and he faced lawsuits over claims that one of his songs had been a factor in two suicides (the suits were dismissed). In the 1990s, he took time out to try to sober up. He stormed back with 1995’s album “Ozzmosis”, and the launch of the Ozzfest metal festival. Soon, he was playing with Sabbath again. He and Sharon seemed devoted, but in 2016 they temporarily separated: she’d discovered that he’d had a long affair. In 2019, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
Last month, he returned to Birmingham to take part in a farewell concert – “Back to the Beginning”. He’d told Rolling Stone in 2023 that as his health declined, “I just want to be well enough to do one show where I can say, ‘Hi guys, thanks so much for my life…’ If I drop down dead at the end of it, I’ll die a happy man.”
