Ozzy Osbourne, godfather of heavy metal who led Black Sabbath, dies at 76
Either clad in black or bare-chested, the singer was often the target of parents' groups for his imagery and once caused an uproar for biting the head off a bat. Later, he would reveal himself to be a doddering and sweet father on the reality TV show 'The Osbournes.'
Black Sabbath's 1969 self-titled debut LP has been likened to the Big Bang of heavy metal. It came during the height of the Vietnam War and crashed the hippie party, dripping menace and foreboding.
The band's second album, 'Paranoid,' included such classic tunes as 'War Pigs,' 'Iron Man' and 'Fairies Wear Boots.' The song 'Paranoid' only reached No. 61 on the Billboard Hot 100 but became in many ways the band's signature song. Both albums were voted among the top 10 greatest heavy metal albums of all time by readers of Rolling Stone magazine.
'Black Sabbath are the Beatles of heavy metal. Anybody who's serious about metal will tell you it all comes down to Sabbath,' Dave Navarro of the band Jane's Addiction wrote in a 2010 tribute in Rolling Stone.
Sabbath fired Osbourne in 1979 for his legendary excesses, like showing up late for rehearsals and missing gigs. He reemerged the next year as a solo artist with 'Blizzard of Ozz' and the following year's 'Diary of a Madman,' both hard rock classics that went multi-platinum and spawned enduring favorites such as 'Crazy Train,' 'Goodbye to Romance,' 'Flying High Again' and 'You Can't Kill Rock and Roll.' Osbourne was twice inducted to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — once with Sabbath in 2006 and again in 2024 as a solo artist.
The original Sabbath lineup reunited for the first time in 20 years in July 2025 in the U.K. for what Osbourne said was his final concert. 'Let the madness begin!' he told 42,000 fans.
Metallica, Guns N Roses, Slayer, Tool, Pantera, Gojira, Alice in Chains, Lamb of God, Halestorm, Anthrax, Rival Sons and Mastodon did sets. Tom Morello, Steven Tyler, Billy Corgan, Ronnie Wood, Travis Barker, Sammy Hagar, Yungblud and Vernon Reid made appearances.
Osbourne embodied the excesses of metal. His outlandish exploits included relieving himself on the Alamo, snorting a line of ants off a sidewalk and, most memorably, biting the head off a live bat that a fan threw onstage during a 1981 concert. (He said he thought it was rubber.)
Osbourne was sued in 1987 by parents of a 19-year-old teen who died by suicide while listening to his song 'Suicide Solution.' The lawsuit was dismissed. Osbourne said the song was really about the dangers of alcohol, which caused the death of his friend Bon Scott, lead singer of AC/DC.
Then-Cardinal John J. O'Connor of New York claimed in 1990 that Osbourne's songs led to demonic possession and even suicide. 'You are ignorant about the true meaning of my songs,' the singer wrote back. 'You have also insulted the intelligence of rock fans all over the world.'
Audiences at Osbourne shows could be mooned or spit on by the singer, but the Satan-invoking Osbourne would usually send the crowds home with their ears ringing and a hearty 'God bless!'
He started an annual tour — Ozzfest — in 1996 after he was rejected from the lineup of what was then the top touring music festival, Lollapalooza. Ozzfest would host such bands as Slipknot, Tool, Megadeth, Rob Zombie, System of a Down, Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park.
In 2013, he reunited with Black Sabbath for the dour, raw '13,' which reached No. 1 on the U.K. Albums Chart. In 2019, he had a Top 10 hit when featured on Post Malone's 'Take What You Want,' Osbourne's first song in the Top 10 since 1989.
In 2020, he released the album 'Ordinary Man,' which had as its title song a duet with Elton John. 'I've been a bad guy, been higher than the blue sky/And the truth is I don't wanna die an ordinary man,' he sang. In 2022, he landed his first career back-to-back No. 1 rock radio singles from his album 'Patient Number 9,' which featured collaborations with Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Robert Trujillo and Duff McKagan. t earned four Grammy nominations, winning two. (Osbourne won five Grammys over his lifetime.)
At the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2024, Jack Black called him 'greatest frontman in the history of rock 'n' roll' and 'the Jack Nicholson of rock.'
John Michael Osbourne was raised in the gritty city of Birmingham, England. Kids in school nicknamed him Ozzy, short for his surname.
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In the late 1960s, Osbourne teamed up with bassist Terry 'Geezer' Butler, guitarist Tony Iommi and drummer Bill Ward. They named themselves after the American title of the classic Italian horror movie 'I Tre Volti Della Paura,' starring Boris Karloff: Black Sabbath.
The music was all about industrial guitar riffs and disorienting changes in time signatures, along with lyrics that spoke of alienation and doom. 'All day long I think of things but nothing seems to satisfy/Think I'll lose my mind if I don't find something to pacify,' Osbourne sang in one song.
The Guardian in 2009 said the band 'introduced working-class anger, stoner sludge grooves and witchy horror-rock to flower power.'
Much later, a wholesome Osbourne would be revealed when 'The Osbournes,' which ran on MTV from 2002-2005, showed this one-time self-proclaimed madman drinking Diet Cokes as he struggled to find the History Channel on his new satellite television.
He is survived by Sharon, and his children.
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Winnipeg Free Press
2 days ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
When artists die, they leave gifts to us
Opinion Ozzy Osbourne and Aganetha Dyck were very different people who made very different art — and probably have never been included in the same sentence — but I think we can agree that both were pioneers with a rebellious streak. The former was the larger-than-life frontman of the English band Black Sabbath, which basically invented heavy metal. The latter was a fearlessly experimental Manitoba artist who thought to put everything from football helmets to Barbie dolls in beehives to create fantastical honeycomb and wax sculptures and elevated the domestic processes of homemaking into high art, which is also extremely metal. Aganetha Dyck Both died within days of each other. Osbourne died on Monday, and I heard the news while I was doing interviews for a piece about Dyck, who died late last week. I've seen Ozzy in concert three times: at a solo show with one of my best friends when we were in our teens, and then Ozzy with Black Sabbath twice in the 2010s. As for so many others, his music was formative for us. I immediately texted her: she had been dealing with some anticipatory grief over Ozzy since his final concert with Black Sabbath in his hometown of Birmingham, England earlier this month. In between messages with her about Ozzy, I interviewed loved ones about Aganetha. And so, it's been a week of bearing witness to grief, but it's also been a week about art because that's what's left: the art. And we'll always have the art. I wrote this of the Tragically Hip when Gord Downie died in 2017, but I think it's true here, too: Black Sabbath will always be someone's favourite band. Dyck's art will continue to be shown and talked about and exhibited. She will continue to loom large as an influence to all those living artists she mentored, but also all the artists to come who will discover her through her work. The art is the tangible gift they gave us. And what a gift that is. I've written many obits and memorial columns for the newspaper, and it's always a bit strange, because in most cases, these are people I didn't know. Some of them are celebrities; some of them are Manitobans who we have featured in Saturday's A Life's Story feature. Either way, there's an art to these pieces. It's an enormous challenge — and responsibility — to capture a subject without actually interviewing them. It can also be an intrusion, especially if the subject is a newsworthy person whose death has only just happened. (It can also be a complicated assignment because people are complicated, as we've seen with remembrances about Hulk Hogan, who also died this week.) I never got the opportunity to meet Aganetha, but spending time with her this week, in this way, with her friends, family and people she touched with her art, was so special. That's how we're able to bring colour to the black-and-white biographical facts of someone's life: with stories and anecdotes and remembrances. And how she was remembered – her laugh, her fearlessness, her openness — was moving as well. Thinking about a band that was so part of my musical awakening — and so embedded in an important friendship — was also special. Wednesdays What's next in arts, life and pop culture. Writing these kinds of stories inevitably makes you think about how you might be remembered, because no one gets out of this thing alive. You can't control that, of course, but my subjects never fail to inspire me to live better in some way. (Also, you should tell people what they mean to you and what you appreciate about them, and you should do so often.) Sometimes people ask me if these are bummer assignments because we're writing about people who have died. But we're not writing about death. We're writing about life. Jen ZorattiColumnist Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen. Every piece of reporting Jen produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print – part of the Free Press's tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press's history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
National Post
2 days ago
- National Post
Colby Cosh: The tortured vulnerability of Ozzy Osbourne
Article content Sharon has become a global celebrity in her own right, and you can underline those last four words if you like, but that's not Sharon on 'Crazy Train' or 'Mr. Crowley,' either. It almost feels like a category mistake for Ozzy's obituaries to emphasize heavy metal per se, because most metal vocalists aren't anything like Ozzy and can't do what he did, even though many of them have far more pure singing talent. Article content The accepted model of the metal frontman is a strutting peacock of a man, an avatar of imperative power and toughness. On his best records Ozzy is more of a mad prophetic conduit, someone lifted onto a higher plane and brought back to Earth in an obviously damaged state, raving in Blakean riddles as the music thunders ominously around him. Article content In other words, he possessed a tortured vulnerability that really suited the Sabbatarian horror movies. Nobody else could have represented quite the same attitude while singing of being lost in the wheels of confusion or looking through the hole in the sky. A particularly fine example occurs on 'Snowblind' from the album Black Sabbath Vol. 4 (1972). 'Snowblind' is a song about cocaine, written (by Butler) for the single most cocaine-influenced record ever made in a heavily cocaine-dependent musical genre. Cocaine is thanked in the liner notes of that LP. And the song starts off with a shimmering Sibelius quality that kind of makes you want to try cocaine: Article content Article content But a few minutes into the track, Bill Ward pulls his boots on, the stillness lurches into a pell-mell boogie, the schoolboy snow metaphor is dropped, and all of a sudden Ozzy becomes a whining alleyway junkie, defending himself exasperatedly — perhaps in the face of what we would now call an intervention. Article content Ozzy, who continued struggling with drug use for three more decades, must have said stupid self-justifying words like these with total conviction a thousand times. They ring so true that you wonder whether Geezer Butler transcribed them directly. And they can only have been addressed to a concerned loved one, to a parent or sweetheart or comrade who had said something like 'Hey, ease up, I don't want you to die.' Notice how every line strikes a different note about drug addiction. 'You think you're better than me?'; 'You don't understand how bad I need it'; 'To hell with all you squares anyway'; 'It brings me a peace I've never known when sober.' Article content Article content Somehow this stanza fell into a love letter to cocaine made by cokeheads while on industrial amounts of coke. Are these words in earnest, or are they an ironic acknowledgment that Black Sabbath has cornered itself in a bad place? Ozzy's pleading vocals preserve the priceless ambiguity, the sense of fragility: 'Snowblind' would never have turned out that way at any other time or with any other singer. It's not a coincidence that Lester Bangs, the magisterial drug-abusing critic who had previously complained of Sabbath's leadenness, suddenly started comparing them to Dylan when Vol. 4 came out. Article content
Canada News.Net
2 days ago
- Canada News.Net
Ozzy Osbourne, frontman of Black Sabbath, passes away
LONDON/LOS ANGELES: Ozzy Osbourne, the legendary frontman of the 1970s heavy metal band Black Sabbath, who shocked audiences by biting the head off a bat on stage and later endeared himself to millions as a foul-mouthed but lovable reality TV star, has died at the age of 76, his family announced on July 22. Known globally as "The Prince of Darkness" and "The Godfather of Heavy Metal," Osbourne's death was confirmed in a statement: "It is with more sadness than mere words can convey that we have to report that our beloved Ozzy Osbourne has passed away this morning. He was with his family and surrounded by love." Osbourne launched his music career in the early 1970s as the frontman of Black Sabbath, delivering powerful vocals on tracks such as "Paranoid," "War Pigs," and "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath." These, along with his solo work, helped him sell over 100 million records worldwide. His sound—marked by heavy guitar riffs and lyrics exploring depression, war, and apocalypse—was paired with theatrical, horror-tinged performances that became his trademark. Among the most infamous was the 1982 incident in which he bit the head off a bat that had been thrown onstage by a fan. Osbourne later explained that he thought the bat was a toy and rushed to the hospital for a rabies shot after realizing the truth. The incident became rock lore and inspired Osbourne to sell soft toy bats with detachable heads. His onstage antics and dark themes made him a frequent target of criticism from conservative and religious groups, who accused him of promoting satanism. Osbourne acknowledged his wild lifestyle and provocative lyrics but dismissed the more extreme claims. "I've done some bad things in my time. But I ain't the devil. I'm just John Osbourne: a working-class kid from Aston who quit his job in the factory and went looking for a good time," he wrote in his 2010 autobiography. Born John Michael Osbourne in Aston, Birmingham, he was the fourth of six children. He struggled in school due to dyslexia, left at 15, and worked a series of menial jobs before a short stint in prison for burglary. His fortunes changed when he joined forces with Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward to form Black Sabbath, inventing a new genre of music in the process. Reflecting on his unlikely success, Osbourne once said: "When I was growing up, if you'd have put me up against a wall with the other kids from my street and asked me which one of us was gonna make it to the age of 60, with five kids and four grandkids and houses in Buckinghamshire and California, I wouldn't have put money on me, no fucking way." Tributes poured in following news of his death. Shabana Mahmood, Britain's Justice Secretary and an MP representing Birmingham, said on X, "One of the greatest gifts my city gave the world." In 2002, Osbourne reached a new generation of fans through the reality TV show The Osbournes, which followed his daily life in Beverly Hills. With his thick Birmingham accent and befuddled commentary, he became a surprising cultural icon once again. The show also starred his wife and longtime manager, Sharon, his children, Jack, Kelly, and Aimee, and several grandchildren. Though no cause of death was given, Osbourne had publicly revealed in 2020 that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, which later left him unable to walk. His final public performance took place in Birmingham on July 5. Seated and occasionally struggling to speak, he thanked an emotional hometown crowd during a tribute-laden concert featuring messages from rock royalty including Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, Metallica's James Hetfield, and Elton John. "Thanks for your support over the years. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I love you," said Osbourne.
