Ozzy Osbourne was a rock star for all seasons. The former Black Sabbath frontman, who has died aged 76, helped catalyse the new genre of heavy metal in the 1970s. But if the band raised a mighty din, Ozzy’s antics on and off stage were more outrageous still.
He will forever be notorious for biting the head off a bat during a concert in Iowa in 1982 (he thought it was a rubber toy and required multiple rabies shots afterwards).
[ Ozzy Osbourne 1948-2025: A life in picturesOpens in new window ]
But away from the spotlight, he was equally committed to the cliche of the debauched rocker. He confessed to once nearly killing a man by chucking a television out a hotel window; on another drug-fuelled bender, he tried to shoot the 17 cats he kept at his home. He was found under the table, with a shotgun and knife, giggling furiously.
By his own admission, he was lucky to survive Black Sabbath’s glory years. But just as the band were at the forefront of a new generation of headbanging rockers, so he would push boundaries all over again in the new medium of reality TV as the star of MTV’s The Osbournes, which ran in its original incarnation in 2002-2005.
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Starring Ozzy, his second wife and manager Sharon, and their children Jack and Kelly (another daughter Aimee refused to have anything to do with the series) the show portrayed the former enfant terrible as a lovable, if sweary man of a certain age, who spent his days padding around his vast Beverly Hills mansion, looking for the remote control and bickering with Sharon over whose turn it was to make the tea.
The Osbournes became a sensation and won Ozzy a new generation of fans for whom Black Sabbath and the dawn of heavy metal were ancient history.
However, it will be for his music that he will be chiefly remembered. Formed in Birmingham in 1968, Black Sabbath were founding fathers of heavy metal. Shaped by the industrial heritage of their hometown, tracks such as Paranoid and Iron Man chugged and roared like factory engines pushed to breaking point.
Their engine room was guitarist Tommy Iommi, who lost the tips of two fingers in a production line accident at the age of 17 – a mishap that contributed to the sludgy playing style that became a signature of Black Sabbath.
But if Iommi was the driving force, Ozzy was the charismatic face and voice of the band, his banshee-like shriek at once charismatic and disconcerting.
Their legacy was celebrated earlier this month with a farewell concert in Birmingham’s Villa Park, where a frail Ozzy joined his bandmates on stage. “You’ve no idea how I feel – thank you from the bottom of my heart,” he said on stage, at the end of an evening where fans including Metallica and Guns N’ Roses had paid tribute.
His dark charisma was matched by a self-destructive streak as tumultuous as Sabbath’s mighty riffs. Tiring of his constant drunkenness and unpredictability, his bandmates fired him in 1979 – though they would reunite in 1997 and play a farewell tour in 2016, going on stage in Dublin the same day Donald Trump was sworn in as president.
Osbourne drank on and off through the intervening decades – when I interviewed him in 2007, he expressed regret about his hard-living.
“Until about five years ago, I was drunk all day, every day,” he said. “I never really considered whether it made me a hard person to live with. Can you believe that?
“Then one day, a friend said to me ‘does your wife drink?’ I say ‘yeah, she enjoys the occasional glass of wine’. And he said ‘well, how would you feel if she polished off a bottle of vodka before breakfast – how long would you hang around?’ And I thought ‘not, bloody long’. So it shows how much she loved me that she stayed all that time with me.”
He also spoke with nostalgia but also a degree of horror about his days with Sabbath. “We didn’t really know what we were doing,” he said. “It was all made up as we went along. I remember, with our first album, we recorded it on the way to the ferry.
[ Bat-biter's memoir sinks its teeth into Ozzy's lifeOpens in new window ]
“We had a bunch of songs and our manager rang us up and said would we mind calling by the studio before we went off to tour France. So we went in and someone turned on a mic and ‘bam’, the album came out. We didn’t stop to think about things in those days.
“The thing is, you can’t live that way forever. It catches up with you eventually. I’m glad I slowed down. I think back and recognise what a great life I’ve had.”
