Wild life of rock’s ‘prince of darkness’ | UK News

Ozzy Osbourne, who has died at the age of 76, helped forge the sound that became known as heavy metal – and on top of that, the frontman practically invented the image of the wild rock star.

Ozzy’s band Black Sabbath made an indelible mark on music by pioneering heavy metal – and were hailed as a major influence by a range of artists who followed them.

With his wailing vocal style and “prince of darkness” reputation, Ozzy led the band to become global stars – before he was fired due mainly to his increasing dependency on drugs and alcohol.

But he carved out a successful solo career before reuniting with the band, as well as becoming the unlikely star of a hit TV reality show which showcased his erratic domestic life.

He was born John Michael Osbourne in the Aston area of Birmingham, on 3 December 1948. His father Jack was a toolmaker, while his mother Lillian worked at the Lucas factory, which made car components.

He picked up the nickname Ozzy at primary school and it stuck.

Aside from gifting him his moniker, school was a dismal experience for young Osbourne. He suffered from dyslexia and what would now be termed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

He left at 15 and wandered into a series of dead-end jobs, including some time spent working in a slaughterhouse, which allowed him to play practical jokes in pubs by putting cows’ eyeballs in peoples’ pints.

He even turned his hand to crime but found he had little luck there either. A TV fell on him while he was burgling a house and he later spent six weeks in Birmingham’s Winston Green prison after robbing a clothes shop.

What saved him was music: the sound of the Beatles singing She Loves You out of a crackly transistor radio transformed his life.

“It was such an incredible explosion of happiness and hope,” he later told writer Bryan Appleyard. “I used to dream – wouldn’t it be great if Paul McCartney married my sister.”

He persuaded his dad to buy him a microphone and an amplifier and, together with a friend Terry ‘Geezer’ Butler, formed a band called Rare Breed – which lasted for just two performances.

The pair became part of a Blues outfit named Polka Tulk Blues, later renamed Earth, along with guitarist Tony Iommi and drummer Bill Ward.

The band, intent on making what they called “scary music”, rehearsed in a room opposite the local cinema – where a screening of the 1963 horror film, Black Sabbath, gave birth to the band’s name and first hit.

“I didn’t invent that sort of music,” Ozzy later recalled. “When I look back at that song, Black Sabbath, I think, how did I even begin to think of a melody like that?”

The song, written by Osbourne and Butler, opened their 1970 debut album which, despite a mauling from music critics, reached number eight in the UK charts and number 23 in the US.

Further success followed with a string of best-selling albums including Paranoid, Master of Reality and Volume 4, all of which sold more than a million copies.

By the time the band released Sabbath Bloody Sabbath in 1973, even the critics were beginning to heap praise on them.

One writer described it as a “masterpiece” and went on to say he thought the band had discovered a newfound sense of finesse and maturity.

The 1975 album Sabotage also received critical praise, but by this time the band were beginning to unravel and Black Sabbath were destined to lose their momentum.

Osbourne was already starting to succumb to the drink and drugs that would come to dominate his life. His unreliability became legendary and was beginning to irk fellow members of Black Sabbath.

Family life was also under strain, with his addictions, affairs and frequent touring jeopardising his relationship with wife Thelma and their two children. The pair would later split.

Osbourne had always covered up his insecurities by acting as the band’s clown, but by now his antics were seriously hindering Sabbath’s development.

His relationship with Iommi had never been smooth and Ozzy began to resent what he saw as the guitarist’s domination of the band.

In 1978 he spent three months working on a solo project called Blizzard of Ozz, but returned to Sabbath to record the album Never Say Die.

After a lacklustre tour, Osbourne was fired by the other members of Sabbath on the basis of his substance abuse, being replaced by Ronnie James Dio.

Osbourne later claimed that his dismissal was unfair, claiming: “We were all as bad as each other.”

The problem was that Ozzy was not as good at handling the effects of the myriad substances in which the whole band indulged.

He resurrected his Blizzard of Ozz with the help of Sharon Arden, the daughter of Black Sabbath’s manager Don Arden. The couple would later marry and go on to have three children – Aimee, Kelly and Jack.

She also attempted to help him control his intake of drink and drugs. There were periods when he appeared to have kicked his addictions – but he often fell off the wagon.

“If it wasn’t for Sharon,” he later told Appleyard, “I’d be long dead.”

Controversy was never far away. The most notorious incident was biting the head off a live bat while on stage in Iowa in 1982. He had been catapulting raw meat into the audience on tour, which prompted fans to throw things on stage in return. He claims he thought the bat was fake before he took a bite.

He did not attempt to use the same excuse about the two doves whose heads he bit off during a record label meeting the previous year.

His other exploits included being arrested for urinating on Texas war monument the Alamo while wearing one of Sharon’s dresses; getting thrown out of the Dachau concentration camp for being drunk and disorderly while on a visit during a German tour; pulling a gun on Black Sabbath’s drummer while on a bad acid trip; blacking out and waking up in the central reservation of a 12-lane freeway; and massacring the inhabitants of his chicken coop with a gun, sword and petrol while wearing a dressing gown and pair of wellies.

That all added to Ozzy’s legend, but in reality most of his behaviour was not very appealing or glamorous. He was a wreck, and the drink and drugs gave him a Jekyll and Hyde personality.

In 1989, he woke up in jail to be told he had been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder for strangling Sharon. He could not remember anything about it. She dropped the charges.

Meanwhile, his first solo album went platinum and the follow-ups, Diary of a Madman and Bark at the Moon, were also best-sellers.

He toured extensively throughout the 1980s and 90s, as well as achieving huge commercial success with Ozzfest – a series of tours, mainly in the US, that featured bands across all genres of metal.

Osbourne headlined most of the festivals and there were even appearances by his former Black Sabbath bandmates.

Then In 2002, he and his family were catapulted to a new form of fame when they unwittingly pioneered reality TV as cameras captured the foul-mouthed (but affectionate) dysfunction of their home life.

It was a huge success, even though the US broadcasts were heavily censored to remove Osbourne’s frequent profanities – something that was not deemed necessary when the show aired in the UK.

At the same time, Osbourne continued to record – but was forced to take a break in 2003 when he fell off a quad bike and sustained serious injuries.

It was while he was recovering in hospital that he topped the UK singles charts for the first time, with a recording of the Black Sabbath song Changes, on which he sang a duet with his daughter Kelly.

Black Sabbath reunited in 2005, and again in subsequent years without drummer Bill Ward, and in 2013 went back to the top of the UK album charts – 43 years after their last number one, Paranoid.

The resulting tour saw a newly-energised Ozzy: word and note perfect, fronting a band that had lost none of its old magic.

In 2018, he claimed to have ditched the alcohol and the drugs and would be reining in his touring lifestyle.

“I have grandchildren now and I’m 70 years old and I don’t want to be found dead in a hotel room somewhere,” he told a journalist while promoting Ozzfest that year.

However, he had other health issues to contend with. At first, he thought the shaking in his hands was a result of his lifetime of excess. But in 2007 he was diagonosed with a condition called Parkinsonian syndrome, then in 2019 with Parkinson’s disease.

He suffered spinal damage in a late-night fall the same year, which aggravated the injury he sustained in the quad-bike crash. Repeated surgeries had limited success.

But he was determined to bow out of the public eye with a customary bang.

He, Sharon and his old Black Sabbath bandmates lined up a farewell concert at Villa Park football stadium, which took place just over two weeks ago.

An array of fellow rock legends – including Metallica, Guns N’ Roses and Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler – lined up to perform and pay homage to him and Sabbath’s influence.

Osbourne himself performed seated because of his mobility problems, but managed to recapture his old magic – belting out his hits while clapping, waving his arms and pulling wild-eyed looks, just like old times.

“I’m proud of what I’ve achieved with my life,” he once told an interviewer. “You couldn’t have written my life story if you’d been the best writer in the world”.