“Here’s the thing, man,” wonders the late Ozzy Osbourne in his new memoir. “Why would anyone want life advice from me?”
Yes, he gave us Iron Man, War Pigs, Planet Caravan and so many other metal classics. But, by his own admission, Osbourne was also a criminal, a cheat and an addict, who routinely risked his and others’ lives and bit the head off a bat. (In his defence, he says, he thought it was a toy.)
For all his mistakes and misdemeanours, however, Osbourne comes off well in Last Rites (written with Chris Ayres): self-aware, level-headed and savagely funny, and not just by rock star standards.
Osbourne died in July aged 76, less than three weeks after performing with the original Black Sabbath. Like a dispatch from beyond the grave, Last Rites documents his struggles behind the scenes with Parkinson’s disease, high-stakes spinal surgery in 2019 and successive complications.
But it wasn’t all bad, Osbourne adds, typically self-effacing: he also voiced King Thrash in Trolls World Tour, and made a song with Post Malone.
Reflecting on his golden rule as the “Prince of Darkness”, he writes: “I had 70 great years, which is a lot longer than I ever expected or probably deserved.” Here are 10 takeaways.
1. Where there’s a will, there’s a way
Osbourne credits his career to his dad, who bought him a 50-watt PA system on hire purchase for £250 – £2,000-3,000 in today’s money, and an “astronomical sum” for a factory-worker father-of-six in Birmingham.
Ozzy’s greatest regret was that he never thanked him: “Without that PA system, I’d never have left Aston.”
Aged 19, and fresh out of prison (for burglary), Osbourne put together his first band: the Polka Tulk Blues Band, named after his mum’s preferred brand of talcum powder. But they were always metal, in spirit if not yet in name.
Tony Iommi, the guitarist and “unofficial leader” of Black Sabbath, lost the tips of two fingers in an industrial accident. Not to be dissuaded, “He just invented himself a set of new fingertips using an old Fairy Liquid bottle, then re-taught himself how to play,” Osbourne writes.
Later Ozzy displayed the same resolve and enterprising spirit to get high, befriending every crooked medical professional who’d write him a prescription. “At one point I had more friends who were dental anaesthesiologists than the average dental anaesthesiologist did.”
2. Anything can be addictive if you’re an addict
As a “world-class” drug addict and alcoholic, Osbourne’s tastes had a tendency to escalate. One pint of Guinness led to nine more, then cocaine, then pills; an attempt to quit smoking resulted in him smoking 30 cigars a day.
His only saving grace, Osbourne writes, was that he had “never, ever wanted to shoot up … Needles just freak me out, man.” More or less everything else was fair game, narcotic or no.
Ozzy describes being addicted to all manner of drugs, of course, but also sex, fame, fast cars, Yorkshire Tea, English sweets, doodling, wordsearch books, “texting funny shit” to his mates and Peter Gabriel’s album So, which he played so much upon its release that his security guard was forced to take stress leave.
At one point, Osbourne was eating so much ice-cream (vanilla and chocolate only, “sometimes strawberry”), he decided it would be more cost-effective to hire a chef to make it for him. “Big mistake … After a few weeks, I became pre-diabetic.”
Even his healthier habits spiralled out of control. In Los Angeles, Osbourne got hooked on apples, and “none of that granny smith bullshit”: they had to be pink ladies, hand-selected from the uber-expensive LA grocer Erewhon. At his peak, Osbourne was eating 12 a night. “I guess I’m a recovered apple-a-holic now.”
3. You can buy the Ferrari(s). It doesn’t mean you can drive
Osbourne’s last bender was in 2012. “The first sign of trouble,” he writes, was when he bought a Ferrari 458 Italia, then a second Ferrari 458 Italia, then an Audi R8 – despite never having learned to drive.
He sat his test in LA: a “piece of piss”, Osbourne writes. “All you’ve gotta do is drive around the block at this place in Hollywood and not crash into anything. They don’t even make you park, never mind do a hill start.”
But once back in Buckinghamshire, the Californian driving licence went to Ozzy’s head. He started drinking and driving to High Wycombe to buy coke. “To this day, I have absolutely no memory of ever going to High Wycombe.”
Sharon – still in LA, making her TV Show The Talk – eventually got wind, sold all of his cars and got him into AA. “That one bender cost me north of half a million quid.”
4. Don’t try that stunt at home
In 2018, Ozzy was five years sober, a few months off turning 70 and busy preparing for his farewell tour, No More Tours II. (The first No More Tours tour, in the 90s, had been billed as his farewell “before I realised there’s only so much time you can spend in your back garden wearing wellies”.)
Life was good, as evinced by his hi-tech bed. Osbourne describes it as having “a “bigger brain than ChatGPT”, with two remotes for him and Sharon to each adjust their separate sides and “motors, wires and gear wheels”.
Ever since he was a boy – and through his marriage, much to Sharon’s displeasure – Osbourne had always taken to bed with a flying leap. One night in 2018, he got up to relieve himself before returning to bed with his usual stage-dive. This time, however, he landed on the floor, hard.
“To this day, I don’t understand how the fuck I could have missed it … It’s like having a Sherman tank parked in the middle of the room.”
5. Always get a second opinion … and read the small print
In 2003, while filming The Osbournes, Ozzy had crashed his quad bike, broken his neck and spent eight days in a chemical coma. The failed stage-dive into bed, 15 years later, dislodged the metal holding his shoulders and spine together, necessitating intrusive surgery.
Though Osbourne was advised to get a second opinion about having surgery, he wound up going ahead with a specialist he dubbed “Dr No Socks … ’cos he didn’t wear any”. For years after the procedure, he struggled to recover and suffered serious illnesses such as sepsis and pneumonia.
Together with the Covid-19 pandemic, this forced the delay, then the cancellation, of No More Tours II, sparking online rumours of Osbourne’s death. At one point he was in intensive care. “I’d never taken so many drugs in my life, which was fucking saying something.”
Though Ozzy did not blame Dr No Socks, he regretted not getting a second opinion, he writes. “It’s hard to imagine it could have turned out any worse.”
Osbourne’s other big regret was not checking the fine print of his first contract with Black Sabbath. Not comprehending the term “in perpetuity” cost the band their publishing rights, which were signed over to “a bloke called David Platz, who died in the nineties”, and since then his children.
Once Osbourne asked his accountant how much that mistake had cost him. The accountant replied reluctantly, and only after being pressed, that it was roughly £100m. “I had to go and sit down.”
6. Always leave an impression
Ozzy is ambivalent about Black Sabbath’s devilish reputation, and his own as the “Prince of Darkness” (“not that I knew who the fuck John Milton was”).
His first musical love was Cliff Richard; later, he was starstruck meeting Phil Collins. Of the teenage girls who used to run out of Sabbath gigs screaming, he writes: “You’ve gotta remember, a lot more people went to church back then.”
Nonetheless, when asked by Sharon to “make an impression” at a big meeting with his American label in 1980, Osbourne’s response was to pull a live dove out of his jacket pocket, having stashed it there for a vaguely-thought-out stunt about peace – and bite its head off. “The place went absolutely fucking nuts. People screaming. Crying. Throwing up.”
Osbourne adds that he was 36 hours into a 72-hour bender. “The poor dove didn’t deserve it,” but it did help with the marketing drive for his solo album, Blizzard of Ozz. “People thought I was an absolute fucking lunatic.”
Decades later, when Covid hit, Osbourne was shaken by the risks he’d run with the dove and then the bat in Des Moines (though, again – he thought it was a toy). “Of all the bullets I’ve ever dodged, not catching some mutant virus … has gotta be right up there.”
7. Choose your opening act carefully
For all its occultish stylings, Black Sabbath was “the kind of band that went on stage in our jeans and leather jackets”, Osbourne writes – “a male band … for male audiences”. They struggled when metal started to shift towards spectacle.
Picking Kiss to open for their mid-70s tour was a mistake, Osbourne writes, remembering their Spandex jumpsuits, bared nipples, extravagant facepaint and “half a ton of explosives”. Sabbath bassist Geezer “almost had a heart attack” at Gene Simmons, 7ft tall in platforms, waggling his tongue.
Meanwhile, “The closest I got to a sexy album cover was me in a werewolf costume,” Osbourne writes. They thought they’d learned their lesson: “You wanted your support act to be good, but didn’t want to upstage yourself. You wanted Status Quo, basically.”
Instead, for their 1978 tour, Sabbath wound up booking a little-known LA outfit called Van Halen. After he watched 20,000 jaws drop at Eddie Van Halen’s futuristic performance of Eruption, Osbourne recalls “going back to our dressing room in silence and just sitting there, staring at the fucking wall”. Every night of the tour, Van Halen “just slaughtered us”.
8. Marry someone who makes you feel like Ozzy, not John
Osbourne met Sharon through her father, Don Arden, Black Sabbath’s early manager. When Paranoid came out, in 1970, she was about 18 and working as his receptionist.
Sharon’s first memory of Ozzy, he writes, was when he came into the office “with no shoes on”. His first memory of her was thinking, some time later, “Wow, what a good-looking chick.”
They eventually married (after Osbourne’s divorce) in 1982 in Hawaii; Ozzy concluded the occasion at 5am, passed out in the hotel corridor. “The only consummating that went on was between me and every bottle of booze they had.”
Despite their ups and downs (with the nadir of Osbourne being charged with attempting to murder Sharon in 1989, precipitating a five-month separation), Osbourne credits his wife with getting him sober and saving his life.
Before, he says, he was living a split existence as John Osbourne, “the guy who lived in a quaint English village, drove a Range Rover and wore wellies”, and Ozzy the rock star. “Once I married Sharon, John never came back … ‘I like you as Ozzy,’ was all she said.”
After Osbourne sobered up, Sharon confiscated all tempting substances and stashed them in the “loft of no return” – including a bottle of Scotch kindly sent to him after his quad bike accident, by the now King Charles.
9. Interesting people are interesting doing nothing. But it doesn’t have to be broadcast
The Osbournes arguably invented reality TV, but as with much in Ozzy’s life, he writes, it happened by accident.
He’d been approached about basing a sitcom on his life, “kind of a rock’n’roll Addams Family”, he writes. But after seeing the Osbournes’ 2000 episode of MTV’s celebrity-home tour show Cribs, “the TV people were like, fuck it, let’s just stick some cameras in their house and see what happens”.
Osbourne’s subsequent ascent to “Tom Cruise or Meryl Streep”-level fame went to his head. After four seasons, the entire family was “desperate to get our lives back”, he writes.
“I’m fucked if I know how the Kardashians have lasted this long … When the final camera guy left, it was such a relief, man. To take a shit without a boom mic over your head.”
Ozzy was likewise sceptical of social media. The expectation to broadcast “if you so much as scratch your bollocks” made him feel wistful for his childhood, when he could stop and smell the roses. “Not that there were many roses in Aston.”
10. Ageing is a privilege
Before his bed-diving injury in 2018, 69-year-old Osborne was counting himself lucky to be alive.
Many of his peers from the 1970s and 1980s – David Bowie, George Michael, Tom Petty, Michael Jackson, Motörhead’s Lemmy – had died. Meanwhile, Ozzy was planning a tour, despite having lived just as hard, if not harder.
In his 30s, Osbourne knocked back four bottles of cognac a day; he later travelled with his coke dealer (or “blow butler”) and had to pop nine pills at once, just “to get a buzz on”. After a near-miss combining codeine and vodka, Osborne switched to barbiturates – used for euthanasia and the death penalty – because he “thought they were safer”, he writes.
It wasn’t just the drugs and the alcohol that he was lucky to survive. In 1982, Black Sabbath’s tour bus was hit by a light plane, killing guitarist Randy Rhoads, makeup artist Rachel Youngblood and the pilot; Osbourne was sleeping inside. The quad bike accident 20 years later nearly left him paralysed; instead he was rebuilt into a literal Iron Man, “half-man, half-rivet”.
By the time it came to writing Last Rites, Osbourne had made his peace with his mortality. Indeed, he was marvelling that he’d made it this far. “Death’s been knocking at my door for the last six years, louder and louder … At some point, I’m gonna have to let him in.”
