Everyone who watched Ozzy Osbourne play his last show, at Villa Park in his hometown of Birmingham on Saturday, July 5, has their own vivid memory of it.
“As soon as he hit the stage, everything changed,” says Mastodon drummer Brann Dailor, whose band had opened the Back To The Beginning gig eight hours earlier. “As long as he sat there, it didn’t matter if he didn’t sing a note, because everyone was doing it for him. It was a beautiful thing to be a part of, everyone weeping and hugging. The Mr. Crowley intro came on and everybody was just done.”
For Lamb Of God’s Randy Blythe, it was just as emotional. “Everybody around me crying, that’s my strongest memory,” says Randy. “I remember [US festival promoter] Danny Wimmer being so caught up in it all, with tears just coming down. During Sabbath, I was out with [Living Colour guitarist] Vernon Reid and we were just stood there watching like, ‘Holy shit!’ We hung off every word.”
Halestorm guitarist Joe Hottinger likewise remembers the electric atmosphere in Villa Park, and the sense of togetherness that came with it. “When you’re in the middle of 45,000 people, everybody just gets into it,” he says. “Ozzy would clap and I’d think, ‘This is the last time I get to clap with Ozzy, so you clap, damn it!’ So everybody did! We were all singing along and crying – especially during Mama, I’m Coming Home. So many people, feeling the same emotion. It was intense and magical.”
Back To The Beginning’s musical director, Tom Morello, had promised that it would be “the greatest day in heavy metal history”, and the day delivered on that promise. This was a tribute to Ozzy and Black Sabbath, taking place a stone’s throw from where they grew up, formed the band and forged the sound that would change the world.
But it was more than that: this was a celebration of a community, one that had been born in the pubs and rehearsal rooms of Birmingham more than 55 years ago and gone on to spread around the globe. And at the centre of it all was John Michael Osbourne.
After the joy, came the sorrow. On July 22, just 17 days after the Back To The Beginning show, the Osbourne family released 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,” it read. “He was with his family and surrounded by love.”
The outpouring of emotion that greeted the announcement of Ozzy’s death was a measure of the man and everything he’d achieved. His Black Sabbath bandmates Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward paid heartfelt tribute, as did everyone from Metallica, Judas Priest and Jack Black to Elton John, Oasis and even Celine Dion. But it was a brief, two-word post on Black Sabbath’s own account that truly summed up what everybody was feeling: ‘Ozzy Forever’.
Ozzy Osbourne was the worst retiree in the history of music. He announced his first retirement in 1992 at the age of 43, after being misdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis (that retirement lasted three years). Black Sabbath themselves played at least two farewell shows before bowing out in 2017 with their The End tour, though even that wasn’t the last we saw of them.
And while Ozzy’s own farewell tour, No More Tours 2, was curtailed after one leg by Covid and health issues, he still returned to the studio to make two more albums, 2020’s Ordinary Man and 2022’s Patient Number 9. His reluctance to quit could be traced back to his own father. Jack Osbourne had retired in 1977 at the age of 63 and died a few months later.
“‘I’m gonna have some time to do the garden now,’ he’d told me,” wrote the singer in his 2010 autobiography, I Am Ozzy. “So he did the garden. But as soon as he’d done the garden, that was it. Game over.”
But Back To The Beginning was different. It really did feel like Ozzy’s final bow. The effects of spinal injuries sustained in a near-fatal 2003 quad bike accident, the aftermath of a serious fall in 2019 and a Parkinson’s diagnosis had combined to make standing difficult, hence the gothic black throne he was seated on during his two performances at Villa Park.
He was a frailer figure on the night than he had been in previous years, but those physical ailments were surmounted by an iron-willed desire to say goodbye to the fans who had made him who he was. That and the fact that 45,000 people were roaring him on.
“It was such an incredible opportunity for everyone to say goodbye to Ozzy,” says Brann Dailor. “And a chance for Ozzy to say goodbye.”
The Back To The Beginning show couldn’t have taken place anywhere but Birmingham. Ozzy may have spent much of his time in recent decades in Los Angeles, but he remained a West Midlander to his bones.
“Ozzy never lost his accent, never lost touch with his roots,” says Lisa Meyer, founder of Birmingham’s Home Of Metal, a project that celebrates the city’s legacy of heavy music, and Sabbath in particular. “He was always repping Birmingham. You couldn’t ask for a better representative, someone who embodies the sense of humour and the authenticity.”
England’s second city was central to Black Sabbath. Ozzy always shot down suggestions that the clanging coming from the local factories inspired Sabbath’s groundbreaking sound, but the band and their singer were undeniably a product of their working class background.
“Flowers in your hair? Do me a favour,” he wrote in I Am Ozzy, referring to the mid-60s peace-and-love hippie movement that Sabbath were a negative image of. “The only flowers anyone saw in Aston were the ones you threw in the hole after you when you croaked it at the age of 53 ’cos you’d worked yourself to death.”
Ozzy could easily have followed his dad down that road. His early jobs included working in a slaughterhouse, testing car-horns (“My first job in music,” he once quipped of the latter), and a short and unsuccessful career as a burglar that landed him with a three-month stint in jail almost immediately. But an abiding love of The Beatles inspired him to become a musician and escape the nine-to-five drudgery he was otherwise destined for.
It was an insane dream for a kid who grew up in a two-bedroom terrace house in Aston with five other siblings, but if the young Ozzy Osbourne had a superpower, it was that he wasn’t like everybody else.
“Ozzy proved that someone from a working class background can become a global star,” says Lisa Meyer. “He stands for the idea that you can make something of your life and still proudly be who you are. Ozzy gave a voice to people who didn’t feel like they fitted in, who were different. I think that’s what always drew a lot of people in the metal community to him and Sabbath.”
Randy Blythe isn’t wrong when he says that the world would sound very different if Ozzy and Black Sabbath had never existed.
“Ozzy is one of the creators of heavy metal along with Geezer Butler, Tony Iommi and Bill Ward,” he says. “So what he means to me is the beginning of a genre.”
But Ozzy was more than just the singer in Black Sabbath. He was one of the most successful solo stars of the 1980s and, thanks to Ozzfest, the godfather of a whole new generation of metal bands from the mid-90s onwards. In the last few decades, he occupied a unique place in the culture, the wayward grandpa who everybody loves having round because you can guarantee he’d swear a lot and end up face down in the (non-alcoholic) trifle.
Yet Ozzy was even bigger than music. He began dabbling in films and TV shows, starting with a very funny appearance as a horrified TV preacher in gloriously schlocky 1986 heavy metal horror movie Trick Or Treat, spoofing the kind of religious wingnuts who thought he was leading the Godfearing children of America to Hell.
There were equally memorable appearances in the documentary The Decline Of Western Civilisation Part II: The Metal Years (Ozzy tries to make breakfast!), South Park – Chef Aid (Ozzy kills Kenny!) and even Adam Sandler comedy Little Nicky (Ozzy bites the head off a character who has turned into a bat!). Most famous of all was The Osbournes, the landmark reality TV show that presented Ozzy not as a madman but as a doting family man, albeit one who existed in a nearpermanent state of bafflement.
It was The Osbournes that transformed Ozzy from rock star into bona fide A-list celebrity, launching a wave of similar fly-on-the-wall shows and accidentally inventing The Kardashians in the process.
“I thought it was gonna be a piece of cake, but you have a camera crew living in your house for three years and see how you feel at the end of it,” Ozzy told Metal Hammer in 2022. “You feel like a fucking laboratory rat.”
Ozzy didn’t just cross over into the world of film and TV. In 2009, he made a hilarious cameo appearance in the videogame Brütal Legend, alongside the likes of Jack Black, Lemmy and Rob Halford. The character he played, The Guardian Of Metal, sounded like Ozzy and looked like Ozzy, right down to the round purple granny glasses he was wearing (he also played a second, smaller role in the game as the head of a family of bats, Dadbat).
“Diary Of A Madman was the first album I ever bought,” says Tim Schafer, the game’s writer and creative director, and the man responsible for Ozzy’s appearance. “He’s just the voice to me. Heavy metal is based around two questions: ‘Am I going insane?’ and ‘Is the Devil coming for me?’ And when you’ve got Ozzy singing those things, you really believe him.”
Tim created The Guardian Of Metal with Ozzy in mind, then approached the Osbourne camp via the game’s publishers, Electronic Arts.
“I wrote the script for him, but when he showed up in the studio, he said, ‘Sharon told me just to do my Prince Of Darkness voice,’” says Tim.
Ozzy’s dyslexia meant he initially struggled with the script, so Tim sat on the stool next to him and spoke each line for the singer to read back.
“And he hit everything perfectly. He got all the jokes, he knew how to deliver them, he knew how to be that character.”
Ozzy’s Brütal Legend cameo is up there with the best of his IRL screen roles. But that’s mainly because no one knew how to play Ozzy Osbourne like Ozzy Osbourne.
“Did Ozzy play the game? I’m not sure he did. Maybe [his son] Jack did,” says Tim. “But my memory of him is of this funny, sweet, goofy guy who spent the whole time laughing and telling stories. He was the face of an entire genre, and I felt grateful to have spent that time with him.”
Virtually every band and artist who played the Back To The Beginning show owed a debt to Ozzy. They’d either played with him, opened for him, got a leg-up from him, hung out with him, got pissed with him or, in a few cases, done all of the above.
“Metallica were fortunate enough to support Ozzy in 1986 on his arena tour for The Ultimate Sin,” Lars Ulrich told Metal Hammer in an interview for the official Back To The Beginning gig programme. “It was crazy being out in middle America, playing to an audience who, most nights, had no idea who we were and why we’d been invited to the party, but Ozzy and Sharon were so kind and gracious to invite us onto that tour. They believed in offering a hand down to pull people up. It was overwhelming and exciting and life-changing.”
That supportiveness was just one of the traits that made Ozzy such a beloved figure. Another was his sense of humour. Sometimes he was deliberately funny – pick any random YouTube interview and you’re never more than 20 seconds away from a zinger delivered in that unmistakable Brummie accent. At other times, mostly on The Osbournes, he was blissfully oblivious to the fact that he was making people laugh (there’s a reason the none-more-Ozzy “Who’s the beer thief?” clip has become a meme).
“To me, aside from being the most hilarious guy on the planet and always taking the piss out of something, his heart is bigger than his body,” Zakk Wylde, Ozzy’s longtime guitarist, told Metal Hammer ahead of the Back To The Beginning show.
“He wants to take care of everybody and have everybody have a good time.”
Bassist Mike Inez was part of Ozzy’s backing band at the Villa Park show. Before that, he’d been in the singer’s solo outfit from 1989 to 1992, before leaving to join Alice In Chains. Speaking to Metal Hammer ahead of the gig, he recalled breaking the news of his departure to his boss.
“I was really nervous, and said, ‘Ozzy, can we take a walk?’” remembered Mike. “I said, Alice In Chains has asked me to join the band.’ And he said, ‘If you don’t take the gig, we have to go to hospital.’ I go, ‘Why is that?’ [And he said,] ‘Because it’s going to take a week to get my foot out of your ass.’”
In the wake of Ozzy’s death, various suggestions have been thrown around about the best way to commemorate him, from the nobrainer (a statue) to the ambitious (renaming Birmingham airport after him). For Home Of Metal’s Lisa Meyer, the best way to honour his legacy would be to continue that spirit of supporting subsequent generations of musicians.
“I’m not sure an airport really says much about his life,” she says. “A permanent Home Of Metal museum would be nice, so we can continue to tell Ozzy’s story. But it’s also got to be about the future of heavy music – a bursary or foundation that supports younger musicians, those kids who are plugging in and turning up their amps and making heavy music like Black Sabbath did. Or a live venue, because small venues are really struggling right now. That would be a more fitting legacy: helping to keep metal alive.”
At the end of Black Sabbath’s closing set at Back To The Beginning, after Paranoid roared to its conclusion for the very last time and fireworks exploded from the roof of the stadium, the rest of Sabbath came over to Ozzy’s chair to exchange warm words and, in the case of Geezer Butler, give the singer a cake with his own face on it. There were no tears or histrionics, just four men who had known each other for nearly 60 years exchanging friendly words in the knowledge that this really would be the last time they all shared a stage.
In truth, the day’s most emotional moment had come earlier, during Ozzy’s solo set. Mama, I’m Coming Home, from 1991’s No More Tears album, is the singer’s greatest ballad – a song about distance and longing, forgiveness and connection. Its lyrics may have been written by his great friend Lemmy, but the song was pure Ozzy, and never more so than when he sang it at Villa Park.
Those words – ‘I’ve seen your face a hundred times, every day we’ve been apart / And I don’t care about the sunshine, yeah, ’cause mama, mama, I’m coming home’ – were suddenly cast in a different light: this was Aston’s favourite son coming full circle, and sharing the moment with 45,000 of his closest friends.
It looked from the crowd like Ozzy was blinking back tears as he sang. He wasn’t alone. Ozzy always described himself as a chronic people-pleaser, and the Back To The Beginning gig was just that: one last chance to say thank you to the fans he always said he owed his career to. It’s no exaggeration to say that the love for him that day will never be matched. Ozzy may be gone, but he went out on his own terms.
“It was the greatest way he could say goodbye and I’m so happy he could have that,” says Mastodon’s Brann Dailor. “It was perfect. Whether Ozzy had passed last night or a year from now, I’d have felt the same about the show. I can’t think of a better way to go out.”
Sharon & Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home airs on BBC One October 2. Ozzy: No Escape From Now premieres on Paramount+ on October 7.