John Michael “Ozzy” Osbourne (76) – frontman with Black Sabbath – was born 3 December 1948 in northern Birmingham, England. With 3 older sisters and 2 younger brothers the family lived in a 2 bedroom home in the Aston area of Birmingham.
This is a tribute to one of rock’s true superstars; someone who was so far out from the norm that pigeonholing him and his band Black Sabbath, was virtually impossible. In 1970 Led Zeppelin was considered heavy metal. A couple of months later but Sabbath had a new, already younger audience. Despite getting terrible reviews initially, the band gained traction. Kind of like KISS. But KISS was flamboyant, the fantasy of middle class players (and listeners!), Sabbath was dark and dirty and the band came from Birmingham, not London.
It was late July 1970 and we -my band- were on the road to a Saturday night gig in Dusseldorf Germany, when “Paranoid” came on the radio. All five of us instantly stopped what we were doing and turned up the volume. The pumping energy was intoxicating. All powerchords I knew and since it fit our musical bill, I suggested we’d play that song that evening without knowing the title nor the lyrics. My opening lyric was “I did it (finished!?) with my woman, ’cause she couldn’t help me with my mind”. The pulsating hook was easy “Can you help? Occupy my brain, ok yeah” The rest was improvised gibberish. The audience was German, nobody would probably know the song yet. So what the hell, we went for it, improvised the lead in an E-minor pentatonic….and got a thundering applause. That was our introduction to the Gentle Prince of Darkness and his band Black Sabbath. We had improvised something like this before with Guess Who’s “American Woman.” It was the exhilarating fun of being a rock circuit band of the day.
Ozzy’s life was so multi faceted, cross experienced and balls against the wall, that no tribute could do it complete justice. But next to Lemmy Kilmister, he was the truest personification of rock. Lemmy was an icon, but Ozzy is the Legend. So here goes his life (in a nutshell).
At the age of 11, Ozzy suffered sexual abuse from school bullies. He said he attempted suicide multiple times as a teenager. But later he participated in school plays, including Gilbert and Sullivan‘s The Mikado and H.M.S. Pinafore. The extroverted part of Ozzy began showing, albeit sometimes a bit over the top. Upon hearing the first hit single of the Beatles at age 14, he became a fan of the band and credited their 1963 song “She Loves You” with inspiring him to become a musician. In later life Osbourne said that the Beatles made him realize that “he was going to be a rock star the rest of his life”. He said so to Paul McCartney in a 2001 video clip.
Osbourne left school at the age of 15 and was employed as a construction site laborer, trainee plumber, apprentice toolmaker, car factory horn-tuner, and slaughterhouse worker. At the age of 17, he was convicted of robbing a clothes shop, but was unable to pay the fine; his father also refused to pay it to teach him a lesson, resulting in Osbourne spending six weeks in Winson Green Prison.
In late 1967, Geezer Butler, another Birmingham musician, formed his first band, Rare Breed, and recruited Osbourne to be the singer, actually against the advice of guitarist Tony Iommi, who was doubtful of Ozzy’s singing capacity. The band played two shows and broke up. Osbourne and Butler reunited in another band, Polka Tulk Blues, which included guitarist Tony Iommi and drummer Bill Ward, whose band Mythology had recently broken up. They renamed the band Earth, but after being accidentally booked for a show instead of a different band with the same name, they decided to change the band’s name again, settling on the name Black Sabbath in August 1969. The band’s name was inspired by the film of the same title. Black Sabbath noticed how people enjoyed being frightened during their stage appearances, which inspired their decision to play a heavy blues style of music laced with gloomy sounds and lyrics. While recording their first album, Butler read an occult book and woke up seeing a dark figure at the end of his bed. Butler told Osbourne about it, and together they wrote the lyrics to “Black Sabbath“, their first song in a darker vein. Soon he adopted the moniker “Prince of Darkness”.
The first album was the self-titled ‘Black Sabbath’, released 13 February 1970. Seven months later the second album ‘Paranoid’ was released and broke the band worldwide. Eight months after ‘Paranoid’, the third album ‘Master of Reality’ was released. It was Sabbath’s third album in 18 months. The album reached the top ten in both the United States and UK, and was certified gold in less than two months. In the 1980s, it received platinum certification and went Double Platinum in later years. Initial reviews of the album were unfavorable. Lester Bangs of Rolling Stone famously dismissed Master of Reality as “naïve, simplistic, repetitive, absolute doggerel”, although the very same magazine would later place the album at number 298 on their 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list.
To be somewhat fair, the early critics simply couldn’t adjust quick enough to the changes in popular music taking place at the time. From the Summer of Love to Psychedelic folk rock, Westcoast Popart to Hendrix and Joplin and the eighteen wheeler sound of Led Zeppelin, nobody was ready for the persona of Ozzy Osbourne and a band named Black Sabbath. The kids from Birmingham steamrolled over accepted blues based formulas and had opened an alternative universe.
After the unexpected success of their first album, Black Sabbath were considering Don Arden, as their new manager. His 18 year old daughter Sharon was at that time working as his receptionist. Ozzy admits he was attracted to her almost immediately but assumed that “she probably thought I was a lunatic”. Osbourne later recalled that the best thing about eventually choosing Don Arden as manager was that he got to see Sharon regularly, though their relationship was strictly professional at that point.
In September 1972, Black Sabbath released Black Sabbath ‘Vol. IV’ featured the song ‘Changes’. Critics were still dismissive of the album; however, it reached gold status in less than a month and was the band’s fourth consecutive album to sell over one million copies in the United States.
In November 1973, Black Sabbath released the critically acclaimed Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. For the first time, the band received favorable reviews in the mainstream press, who seemed to have finally caught on. Gordon Fletcher of Rolling Stone called the album “an extraordinarily gripping affair” and “nothing less than a complete success”. Decades later, AllMusic’s Eduardo Rivadavia called the album a “masterpiece, essential to any heavy metal collection”, while also claiming the band displayed “a newfound sense of finesse and maturity”. The album marked the band’s fifth consecutive platinum selling album in the US. Sabotage was released in July 1975. Again, there were favorable reviews. Rolling Stone stated, “Sabotage is not only Black Sabbath’s best record since Paranoid, it might be their best ever.” In a retrospective review, AllMusic was less favorable, noting that “the magical chemistry that made such albums as Paranoid and Volume 4 so special was beginning to disintegrate”. Technical Ecstasy, released on 25 September 1976, was also met with mixed reviews. AllMusic gives the album two stars, and notes that the band was “unravelling at an alarming rate”, perhaps the result of Ozzy rapidly coming undone in a world of drugs and alcohol.
Between late 1977 and early 1978, Osbourne left the band for three months to pursue a solo project called Blizzard of Ozz, a title which had been suggested by his father. Three members of the band Necromandus, who had supported Sabbath in Birmingham when they were called Earth, backed Osbourne in the studio and briefly became the first incarnation of his solo band.
At the request of the other band members, Osbourne rejoined Sabbath. The band spent five months at Sounds Interchange Studios in Toronto, where they wrote and recorded their next album, Never Say Die! “It took quite a long time”, Iommi said of Never Say Die! “We were getting really drugged out, doing a lot of dope. We’d go down to the sessions, and have to pack up because we were too stoned; we’d have to stop. Nobody could get anything right; we were all over the place, and everybody was playing a different thing. We’d go back and sleep it off, and try again the next day.”
In May 1978, Black Sabbath began the Never Say Die! Tour with Van Halen as an opening act. Reviewers called Sabbath’s performance “tired and uninspired” in stark contrast to the “youthful” performance of Van Halen, who were touring the world for the first time. The band recorded their concert at Hammersmith Odeon in June 1978, which was released on video as Never Say Die. The final show of the tour and Osbourne’s last appearance with Black Sabbath for another seven years, was in Albuquerque, New Mexico on 11 December.
In 1979, Black Sabbath returned to the studio, but tension and conflict arose between band members. Osbourne recalled being asked to record his vocals over and over, and tracks were manipulated endlessly by Iommi. The relationship between Osbourne and Iommi became contentious. On 27 April 1979, at Iommi’s insistence but with the support of Butler and Ward, Osbourne was ejected from Black Sabbath. The reasons provided to him were that he was unreliable and had excessive substance abuse issues compared to the other members. Osbourne maintained that his use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs at that time was similar to that of the other members.
Ozzy had been lead singer for the first eight Black Sabbath albums.
He was replaced with another voice of rock and roll Ronnie James Dio, who sang with Black Sabbath from 1979 – 1982 and 1991 – 1992, while also participating in the Heaven and Hell project from 2006 until his death in 2010.
After leaving Black Sabbath, Osbourne recalled,
“I’d got £96,000 for my share of the name, so I’d just locked myself away and spent three months doing coke and booze. My thinking was, ‘This is my last party, because after this I’m going back to Birmingham and collect unemployment benefits.”
However, Don Arden signed him to Jet Records with the aim of recording new material. Arden dispatched his daughter Sharon to Los Angeles to “look after Ozzy’s needs, whatever they were”, to protect his investment. Arden initially hoped Osbourne would return to Sabbath, who he was personally managing at that time, and later attempted to convince the singer to name his new band “Son of Sabbath”, which Osbourne hated. Sharon attempted to convince Osbourne to form a supergroup with guitarist Gary Moore.
“When I lived in Los Angeles”, Moore recalled, ” Moore’s band G-Force helped him to audition musicians. If drummers were trying out, I played guitar, and if a bassist came along, my drummer would help out. We actually felt sorry for him, basically. He was always hovering around trying to get me to join, and I wasn’t having any of it.”
A year after Ozzy was kicked out of Sabbath, Sharon Darden started managing his solo career, which mostly because of her influence sky-rocketed. The two got married in 1982 after Ozzy got divorced from his first wife Thelma. Ozzy released his first solo album ‘Blizzard of Ozz’ in 1980. The album featured songs that became true Ozzy classics, ‘Crazy Train’ and ‘Mr Crowley’, supported by guitar virtuoso Randy Rhoads fretboard pyrotechnics.
Manager Sharon, together with the virtuosity of Randy Rhoads put Ozzy back together and created the Blizzard of Ozzy:
Dana Strum, a bassist and acquaintance of Rhoads in L.A., was aware of Ozzy’s search for a new guitar player and persistently encouraged Rhoads to audition. Nobody is denying the epiphany of Randy Rhoads’ arrival, though. The 22-year-old Quiet Riot guitarist was no Sabbath fan and almost bunked his audition slot, but he only had to doodle a few harmonics through a practice amp for Ozzy to promise him a call-back. “I’d never auditioned anyone, and I was all over the fucking place,” Ozzy admitted later. “But fucking hell, when I first heard Randy play, it was poetry in motion. I thought, ‘Wow, I’m onto a great thing here.’ Who knows why we worked so well. Who knows the answer to anything? But sometimes you’ll meet a girlfriend and it’s more than just a fucking night in the sack.”
“Ozzy said all he’d heard all day was guys trying to play like Tony Iommi,” Randy once noted. “He appreciated that I was playing my own style.” There is a romantic notion that Osbourne and Rhoads shook on their partnership right here. Actually, says bass player Daisley – who kept a diary from 1976 and wrote a tell-all autobiography called For Facts Sake! – after the audition the singer left LA for his home in Stafford, England, and Rhoads only re-entered the frame after yet another guitarist was fired.
“That’s when Ozzy said, ‘Well, I met this great guitar player in LA,’” Daisley explains. “The management wanted to keep it as a UK-based band, but no guitarists were that interested, because Ozzy didn’t have the best reputation to work with.”
Reluctantly, management flew Rhoads to London, continues Daisley. “Ozzy and I went into Jet Records in about October 1979, and Randy was already there. Now Ozzy had told me that Randy was a guitar teacher at his mum’s school in LA, so I anticipated a guy with a pipe slippers, cardigan and glasses. I walk in and see this young guy; his clothes were very fitted, his hair was perfect, his nails were manicured. I actually said to Ozzy: ‘D’you think he’s gay?’”
But when Rhoads plugged in, the planets aligned. “When we finished our first jam,” recalls Daisley, “we said at the same time, ‘I like the way you play.’ He was confident and precise; he had the influence of bluesy players like Hendrix, Blackmore and Jeff Beck, but his classical training gave him another dimension.” So after a decade spent cowering beneath Iommi’s iron fist, Ozzy was back from the dead with a band that nurtured his talent, rebuilt his confidence, and even transposed keys to suit his doomy bark. “In Sabbath,” Ozzy said, “I’d have to put my vocals on whatever key they put the song in, and sometimes I couldn’t reproduce it onstage. But Randy was like, ‘Come on, maybe you should try it in this key.’”
“It really was a band,” agrees Daisley. “We were meant to come together. We fed off each other. The music side was more me and Randy: we’d sit on chairs opposite each other, playing the instruments and putting the songs together. I wrote the lyrics. Ozzy was very good at the vocal melodies. The first songs we wrote were Goodbye To Romance, I Don’t Know and Crazy Train.
“That signature riff for Crazy Train in F# minor was Randy’s, then Daisley wrote the part for him to solo over, and Ozzy had the vocal melody. The title came because Randy had an effect that was making a sorta psychedelic chugging sound through his amp. Randy and Daisley were train buffs, they collected model trains, and Daisley said, ‘That sounds like a crazy train.’ Ozzy had this saying, ‘You’re off the rails!’ so we used that in the lyrics.”
Though it received little radio airplay upon its initial release as a single, “Crazy Train” has become one of Osbourne’s signature songs and a staple of classic rock radio playlists over the ensuing years. In January 2009, the song achieved a 2× Platinum certification status.
Meeting with Randy Rhoads solidified Ozzy’s solo career, but sadly also Randy’s destruction. He died two years and one album “Diary of a Madman” later, in a stupid and completely unnecessary, drug induced light plane crash. Randy never reached his true genius. Blizzard Of Ozz was undeniably great. Unleashed in September 1980, it hit the metal scene like a wrecking ball, flicked two fingers at the flailing Sabbath and provided the year’s hottest setlist when the band took it on the road. But if Diary of a Madman was any yard stick of his talent, he would have been the unmatched emperor of rock guitar.
Management and record company double crossed the other musicians in the band by repackaging what had started as a band, into an Ozzy solo project. Despite growing friction, the line-up was still able to pump out the classics when the label pushed for a follow-up. “After we came off the road,” says Daisley, “we started the writing and recording for Diary Of A Madman. With a US tour booked, the label only allowed the band a six-week window at Ridge Farm Studios. Nevertheless, everyone agreed that Rhoads had blossomed between the two albums, and heard in hindsight, his Diary parts do seem more visionary and ambitious, from the swells and selector flicks of rock ballad Tonight to the seismic brutality of Believer. Diary Of A Madman was arguably the stronger of the two albums. It seemed like a tantalizing hint at what the line-up would do next, but turned out to be a maddening full stop instead, as Daisley and Kerslake were fired in 1981 and Randy Rhoads died on March 19, 1982 in a senseless accident.
The dream team had splintered and nothing would be the same. Bark At The Moon, Speak of the Devil and the Ultimate Sin turned out to be the first of several fine albums, yet it’s no insult to argue that Osbourne never quite matched that opening run. “The two albums Randy played on were fucking monsters,” he sighs. “They still sound great to this day.”
The rest of the 1980s acts were wearing spandex, cleaned up for mainstream consumption, and Ozzy was still down and dirty. This is the music you listened to while you drank beer and went wild, not worrying about the consequences, this is the music that infected you and drove you, this was ROCK AND ROLL!
The rest of the 1980 saw many shifts of players in his solo band, while Osbourne continued to struggle with chemical dependency. In 1988 Zakk Wylde came on board and became the most enduring replacement for Rhoads. Together, they recorded No Rest for the Wicked. Also in 1988 Osbourne performed on the rock ballad “Close My Eyes Forever“, a duet with Lita Ford, reaching No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Osbourne’s commercial success of the 1980s continued with 1991’s No More Tears, featuring smash hit “Mama, I’m Coming Home”. The album enjoyed much radio and MTV exposure. It also initiated a practice of bringing in ‘outsiders’ (in this case Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead) to help write Osbourne’s material, instead of only relying on his recording ensemble.
Released on 28 June 1993, Live & Loud was intended to be Osbourne’s final album; it went platinum four times over. In 1993, Osbourne had expressed his fatigue with touring, and proclaimed his “retirement tour” (the retirement was to be short-lived), called “No More Tours”, a pun on No More Tears. Osbourne was awarded a 1994 Grammy for the track “I Don’t Want to Change the World” from Live & Loud, for Best Metal Performance.
Back in the saddle in 1995 already Osbourne released Ozzmosis and resumed touring, dubbing his concert performances “The Retirement Sucks Tour”. The album became certified gold and platinum in that same year, and double platinum in April 1999. The line-up on Ozzmosis was Wylde, Butler (who had just quit Black Sabbath again), Steve Vai, and Hardline drummer Deen Castronovo, who later joined Journey. Keyboards were played by Rick Wakeman.
Following two brief, short-set reunions for Live Aid in 1985 and at an Ozzy Osbourne show in Costa Mesa, California, on 15 November 1992, Osbourne, Iommi and Butler did not formally reunite as Black Sabbath until 1997 for the 1997 Ozzfest shows. Ward was absent due to health issues. In December 1997, all four members of the band reunited to record the album Reunion, with Osbourne also touring with the band again from 1997 to 1999 for the album’s concert tour. The album proved to be a commercial success upon its release in October 1998.
But then on December, 8 2003, Osbourne was rushed into emergency surgery following an accident with his quad bike on his estate in Jordans, Buckinghamshire. Osbourne broke his collar bone, eight ribs, and a neck vertebra. An operation was performed to lift the collarbone, which was believed to be resting on a major artery and interrupting blood flow to one of Osbourne’s arms. Sharon later revealed that Osbourne had stopped breathing following the crash and was resuscitated by Osbourne’s then personal bodyguard, Sam Ruston. It later turned out to be the beginning of the end. While in hospital however, Osbourne achieved his first ever UK number one single, a duet of the Black Sabbath ballad, “Changes” with daughter Kelly. In doing so, he broke the record of the longest period between an artist’s first UK chart appearance (with Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid”, number four in August 1970) and their first number one hit: a gap of 33 years. He recovered from the quad accident and went on to headline the 2004 Ozzfest, with the reunited Black Sabbath.
Besides some family reality TV work such as ‘the Osbournes’ on MTV between 2002 and 2005 and ‘Osbourne’s Reloaded’ in 2009, Ozzy stayed productive with more album releases and world tours. In his later years Osbourne attempted to press on with his rock career, but was hampered several times by illness and injury. In early February 2019, Sharon revealed he had been admitted to hospital after suffering from flu. The illness led to him cancelling a string of tour dates while he recovered, including postponing the UK and European legs of his No More Tours 2. In 2022, the rocker revealed he had a rare form of Parkinson’s disease called Parkin 2, which he had since birth.
Ozzy released 11 solo albums between 1983 and 2022. ‘Patient Number 9’ was the last Ozzy album with guests Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Tony Iommi and Taylor Hawkins. He sold in excess of 100 million albums in his lifetime.
In 2025, with the curtains closing on his eventful life, Ozzy Osbourne and the original Black Sabbath members Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward played at their final Birmingham show “Back to the Beginning on July 5.
Ozzy knew this show was it. His last stand on earth. He actually stayed off his pain meds to be lucid for the show and raised $190 million for children’s hospitals and Parkinson’s research. I can’t think of a more rock exit from this world. He also admitted that he should not have done the spinal surgery, because it made his last years much worse.
It was their first appearance with founding drummer Bill Ward since 2005 and first (and last) Black Sabbath show since 2017.
The setlist for posterity purpose was:
• War Pigs
• N.I.B.
• Iron Man
• Paranoid
Ozzy also performed a solo show with setlist:
• I Don’t Know
• Mr Crowley
• Suicide Solution
• Mama I’m Coming Home
• Crazy Train
Ozzy Osbourne died 17 days later on July 22, 2025, a legend of rock. He was 77.
Ozzy was a lad from the back streets of Aston, Birmingham, raised tough and hungry in a place where dreams felt distant…There’s something unique about growing up in a place like that…it teaches you the true meaning of desire. Not the fleeting kind, but the kind that burns deep, the kind that makes you work relentlessly, shaping pain into passion and struggle into skill.
Ozzy Osbourne was, and will be a legend for a couple of generations to come. But before the stages and the spotlight, he was just the lad from Lodge Road who dared to dream….and he did good.
Terry Reid (75) – formidable British singer/songwriter – was born in Little Paxton, St Neots, Huntingdonshire, England. He lived in the village of Bluntisham and attended St Ivo School, St Ives.
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