Ozzy Osbourne obituary: hell-raising frontman of Black Sabbath

Times

3 days ago

'Never mind the dog, beware of the owner,' read the sign on the gates of Ozzy Osbourne's Los Angeles mansion. It was intended as a joke. Yet at the height of the Black Sabbath singer's notoriety as one of rock's wildest hell-raisers the warning might have been construed as deadly serious.
Osbourne's much-chronicled excesses included biting off the head of a bat on stage — he said he thought it was rubber — snorting a line of ants in a drunken contest with the lead singer of Mötley Crüe and being arrested for attempting to strangle his wife Sharon at their daughter's sixth birthday party after a five-day vodka bender. Sharon forgivingly declined to press charges on the grounds that 'the person who all but choked me to death was so far gone on drink and drugs that it wasn't him'.
On tour in Texas he was arrested for urinating on the Alamo. He was wearing a dress at the time, which outraged the locals even further. He had been up drinking and taking drugs all night and Sharon, who was also his manager, had hidden his clothes in an attempt to get him to sleep it off. He simply borrowed hers instead. He also turned up to a meeting over dinner with the boss of his record company in Germany so wasted that he climbed on the table, disrobed to do a naked goose-step and concluded the performance by urinating in the chief executive's wine glass.
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His saving grace was that much of this appalling behaviour was done with an earthy sense of humour. When given a rabies jab after biting the bat, he deadpanned that the poor creature had 'better get Ozzy shots'. When animal rights activists turned up at subsequent concerts to protest, he responded by throwing raw offal at them.
His addictions at different times included dependency not only on alcohol but heroin, cocaine, LSD, barbiturates, amphetamines, cough mixture and a full cabinet of prescription drugs. At one point his doctor admitted to having prescribed him 13,000 doses of 32 different drugs in one year. He was 'more Spinal Tap than Spinal Tap', a reference to the spoof movie for which Black Sabbath were the partial inspiration.
'People would emigrate to get away from me. I was f***ing crazy,' he boasted. 'I was the guy parents loved to hate. They used to say: 'Lock up your daughters, dog, bat — Ozzy Osbourne is coming to town.'' When he fell in the shower and broke his leg, he was so out of it that he walked around for several days before he realised. Not for nothing did he give his solo albums titles such as Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman.
When drink and drugs had not rendered him physically incapable, he was also a serial womaniser. Life on the road was, he said, 'a bag of dope, a gram of coke and as many chicks as I could bang'. He called them 'the spoils of war' and once bedded a Japanese groupie in his hotel room, forgetting that his wife was already asleep in the bed. When he imported the habits of the road closer to home and slept with two of his children's nannies, Sharon took to hiring male carers.
Somehow he survived the drink, drugs and other vices of the rock'n'roll lifestyle to become an improbable 21st-century television star when he and his dysfunctional family were the subject of a fly-on-the-wall human soap opera.
One of the most successful reality television programmes ever made, The Osbournes took to the air on MTV in 2002. In the show Ozzy appeared as a damaged but harmless cartoon character as he shambled around his home in a bathrobe, trying unsuccessfully to work the TV remote, wringing his hands over the lavatory habits of his numerous cats and dogs and reeling with exasperation as he tried to keep up with his wife and wayward children. 'I love you all but you're all f***ing mad,' he yelled at them.
The family were dubbed 'the Munsters of rock' and the show, which ran for three years, transformed the one-time heavy metal prince of darkness into an almost respectable, mainstream celebrity, who went on to dine with President George W Bush and performed at Buckingham Palace to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II's golden jubilee.
Over the years there were several spells in rehab but Ozzy invariable fell back into his old ways, until one therapist smartly turned the tables on him. 'Imagine you're the sober one and your wife is the alcoholic drug addict, f***ing all these guys. She's lying on the floor, she's pissed herself, she's f***ing wrecked the house — how do you think you'd cope?' the therapist asked. Osbourne admitted that he could not.
It was a salutary lesson, reinforced when, as he approached 70, he realised that every one of his old drink and drug buddies was already dead. 'No one's come back and said, 'Hi, Oz, it's cooler on this side. Come and join us,'' he noted with uncharacteristic pragmatism.
He referred to Sharon as The Controller, a term that combined her roles as manager, counsellor and a wife who was not afraid to read him the riot act. He credited her with having 'literally' saved his life and although at times he had a strange way of showing it, he appeared to love her deeply. When she was diagnosed in 2003 with colon cancer he was distraught. 'I remember holding her in my arms and thinking, God, let her get through the night,' he recalled.
Once she had made a complete recovery, Ozzy reverted to type. The couple briefly separated in 2013 when she found he was doing drugs again and she kicked him out once more three years later when at the age of 67 began an affair with the celebrity hairstylist Michelle Pugh, 23 years his junior. In the end she took him back, as she had on every previous occasion. As incorrigible as ever, when asked after their reconciliation what was the secret to a long marriage, Osbourne retorted: 'Don't get caught with your mistress.'
He is survived by Sharon. The pair wed in 1982 on America's Independence Day, a date he claimed to have chosen because he knew that otherwise he would never have remembered their anniversary. He is also survived by their three children. Aimee, an actress and musician, refused to participate in The Osbournes but her siblings, Kelly and Jack, became teenage celebrities as a result of the show. Both followed their father into rehab before re-emerging to become TV presenters.
His first marriage was in 1971 to Thelma Riley; the pair met in a Birmingham nightclub. They had two children, Jessica and Louis, and he adopted her son Elliot from a previous relationship. However, in the 2011 documentary God Bless Ozzy Osbourne he freely admitted to having been an absentee father who could remember nothing about their childhood.
He was born John Michael Osbourne in December 1948 in Aston, Birmingham, the fourth of sixth children, to Jack, a toolmaker, and Lillian (née Unitt), a factory worker. The family of eight lived cheek-by-jowl in a terraced house and Osbourne said his earliest memories were of fear. 'I've never been comfortable in my own skin. For some reason, I'm a frightened soul,' he complained. His brash public persona was a defence mechanism.
School was a disaster and he suffered from undiagnosed attention deficit disorder and dyslexia. Obsessed with morbid fantasies, he dreamt about murdering his mother, burning his sister and hanging himself. He vented his frustration by shooting at his neighbour's cats with an air rifle and his first job on leaving school at 15 was in an abattoir. Music was his escape; he was entranced by the Beatles. 'I would sit for hours daydreaming — wouldn't it be great if Paul McCartney married my sister?'
At the age of 17 he served six weeks in prison for robbery after his father refused to pay the fine imposed by the court. The experience behind bars scared him enough to turn him away from a life of petty crime and, given that his only accomplishment at school had been to appear in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, he resolved to become a singer.
After working his way through a number of undistinguished 1960s Birmingham rock bands he ended up in Earth, who in 1969 changed their name to Black Sabbath after the Boris Karloff horror film. One of the first heavy metal bands, they had no time for fey hippie idealism. 'We were living in Birmingham,' Ozzy recalled. 'We had no money, we never had a car, we very rarely went on holiday — and suddenly we hear: 'If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear a flower in your hair.' And we're thinking, 'This is bollocks — the only flower I'll wear is on my f***ing grave.''
Sabbath determined that the best way to make themselves different was to play louder and heavier than anyone else, helped by Osbourne's yelping vocals and the distorted sound of Tony Iommi's guitar underpinned by Bill Ward's thumping drums and the subterranean rumble of Geezer Butler's bass. The occult imagery of the band's name — reflected in album artwork and song lyrics — owed more to the hammy novels of Dennis Wheatley than any genuine connection with black magic. Nevertheless, Black Sabbath were branded as satanists, and Christian rock groups in America burnt their records.
The band's breakthrough came in 1970 when the album Paranoid topped the British charts. The group released eight LPs during the Seventies, selling millions as relentlessly bludgeoning songs such as Paranoid, Iron Man and Into the Void struck a chord with disenfranchised and nihilistic teenagers who shared Osbourne's contempt for the love and peace slogans of flower power.
By the mid-1970s Black Sabbath were in the grip of what Osbourne called 'rock star fever … limousines everywhere, groupies … dealers dropping by with bags of white powder'. Recording sessions consisted of 'being in the Jacuzzi all day doing cocaine and every now and then we'd get up and do a song'.
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After a series of drunken fights with other band members, Osbourne was fired in 1979 and fell into a deep depression. He spent the next three months sitting in a hotel room in LA with the curtains closed as he drunk and drugged himself into oblivion. It was, he was convinced, his 'last party', and when the money ran out he planned to 'go back to Birmingham and the dole'.
Enter Sharon Arden, daughter of Don, a notoriously violent music mogul with alleged mafia connections who at the time was Black Sabbath's manager. Her instructions were to broker a rapprochement between Osbourne and the band but instead she took over the management of his solo career and married him, resulting in a family feud in which father and daughter did not speak to each other for 15 years.
Osbourne's solo success soon outstripped that of Black Sabbath, who soldiered on without him. Inevitably controversy followed his 1984 song Suicide Solution, which allegedly triggered a spate of teenage deaths; Osbourne was sued by three families claiming that his music was to blame for the suicide of their offspring.
'Parents have called me and said, 'When my son died of a drug overdose, your record was on the turntable.' I can't help that,' he protested with a regrettable lack of sympathy. 'These people are freaking out anyway and they need a vehicle.' When the cases were eventually dismissed, with typical poor taste Osbourne joked: 'If I wrote music for people who shot themselves after listening to my music, I wouldn't have much of a following.'
He survived various health scares including a broken neck that put him a coma for eight days after he crashed a quad bike, and reunited with Black Sabbath on several occasions. He announced in 2020 that he had been given a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, and played a farewell concert with Black Sabbath at Villa Park in Birmingham weeks before he died.
Looking back he characterised his life of hell-raising as 'fun, but selfish fun'.
'I think everybody would love to be the wild one for a weekend,' he said. 'I guess I just took it too far. Ozzy was the guy I created for the stage, but at the end of the day I was him 24/7.'
Ozzy Osbourne, musician, was born on December 3, 1948. He died after suffering from Parkinson's disease on July 22, 2025, aged 76