As the lead singer of Black Sabbath, he helped invent heavy metal. On The Osbournes, he presented a comedic counterpoint to his rock ’n’ roll infamy.
Ozzy Osbourne, who achieved enormous success as a pioneer of two disreputable but popular entertainment genres, heavy metal music and reality television, died Tuesday. He was 76.
His family announced the death in a statement, which did not say where he died or specify a cause. He had been treated in recent years for a rare genetic condition called Parkinsonism, with symptoms similar to Parkinson’s disease, exacerbated by his chronic drug abuse.
Although Osbourne repeatedly announced his retirement over the years – he called a series of live dates in 1992 the “No More Tours” tour and a 2018 series “No More Tours II” – he gave his final concert this month, at a festival in his hometown, Birmingham, England, in his honour. Seated on a black throne, visibly moved by the enthusiasm of the crowd, he closed out his career by reuniting the original lineup of his heavy metal group Black Sabbath.
As the lead singer of Black Sabbath, Osbourne was one of the inventors of heavy metal. As a solo artist, he became a remarkably durable star, with 13 platinum albums and the nickname “Prince of Darkness”.
But he achieved even wider fame for his rock ’n’ roll excess, including an onstage incident in which he bit the head off a bat.
The hit MTV reality show The Osbournes presented a comedic counterpoint to his infamy and his taste for satanic imagery; revealing himself as the befuddled patriarch of a chaotic but loving family, he became a TV star.
“All the stuff onstage, the craziness, it’s all just a role that I play, my work,” Osbourne insisted in an interview with The New York Times in 1992. “I am not the Antichrist. I am a family man.”
Born John Michael Osbourne in Birmingham on December 3, 1948, he was the fourth of six children of John Thomas Osbourne, a toolmaker who worked the night shift at a power plant, and Lillian (Levy) Osbourne, who worked the day shift at an auto-parts factory. The Osbournes were crammed into a small working-class home; when Ozzy was young, it had no indoor plumbing.
An indifferent student with undiagnosed dyslexia and attention deficit disorder, Ozzy dropped out of school at age 15 and had a series of short-lived jobs, including 18 months at a local slaughterhouse. After he was fired from that job (for fighting), he had a brief career as a burglar; when he was arrested, his father declined to pay the fine, and Ozzy spent three months in prison, which led him to abandon his criminal ambitions.
His father did, however, buy a PA system so Ozzy could pursue his dream of being a rock singer. That system, plus a flyer reading “Ozzy Zig Needs Gig,” got him into a band in 1968 with three young Birmingham musicians: bassist Geezer Butler, drummer Bill Ward and guitarist Tony Iommi.
After some false starts, including a stint as a blues band called Earth, the group embraced the logic that people paid to be scared at horror movies, and the young musicians renamed themselves Black Sabbath, inspired by a Boris Karloff film with that title. They also used the name for one of their early songs, which laid out their sonic template: deafening volume and grinding tempos, with Osbourne yowling about portents of doom.
Anthems for the alienated
The quartet released its debut album, also called Black Sabbath, in 1970, and followed with seven more over the next eight years. The band’s music was largely reviled by critics and snubbed by radio stations, but its albums were consistently certified platinum, and songs like Paranoid, Iron Man and War Pigs became anthems for generations of disaffected youth.
Osbourne was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice, as a member of Black Sabbath in 2006 and as a solo performer in 2024. When he inducted Black Sabbath, Lars Ulrich of Metallica praised the group’s “huge hymns of doom”. “When it comes to defining a genre within the world of heavy music,” he said, “Sabbath stand alone”.
Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins told the Times in 2025: “I first heard Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality when I was 8 years old and have been chasing that sound as a musician ever since. What drew me to them was this sense of cosmic ennui and a shadowy warmth that is only theirs.”
Songwriter and author John Darnielle, who released an Osbourne-themed EP with his band the Mountain Goats and published a novel about Black Sabbath, said in an interview for this obituary, “Ozzy’s vocal tone is distinctive, for sure, but I think the main thing is that his vocal lines just relentlessly shadow the chord progression with an insistence most singers would probably avoid so they can look more clever.” He added that Osbourne “found a way to make singing lead heavy, without trying to belt like a blues singer, which is what most of his contemporaries did”.
Osbourne had long drunk to excess, but as Black Sabbath became successful he could afford a wider variety of intoxicants, and he enthusiastically pursued all of them. As he wrote in his autobiography, I Am Ozzy (2009), “Over the past 40 years I’ve been loaded on booze, coke, acid, quaaludes, glue, cough mixture, heroin, Rohypnol, Klonopin, Vicodin, and too many other heavy-duty substances to list.” Throughout his career he frequently announced his sobriety, only to backslide into addiction.
When not touring with Black Sabbath, he lived in the British countryside with his wife, Thelma, in a home he nicknamed Atrocity Cottage. “People would come to stay with us,” he wrote in his autobiography, “and they’d never be the same again.” His every whim was indulged, no matter how foolish; after repeatedly failing his driving test and tired of riding to the local pub on his lawn mower, he bought a horse.
Black Sabbath fired Osbourne in 1979, shortly after he fell asleep in the wrong hotel room in Nashville, Tennessee, and woke up – reportedly 24 hours later – to discover that he had missed a concert. The band continued with a series of other vocalists, most notably Ronnie James Dio.
Osbourne, meanwhile, holed up in a Los Angeles hotel room, wallowing in his bad habits – until Sharon Arden, the brassy daughter of his manager, Don Arden, came to bawl him out for having stolen an envelope of cash from her (he spent it on drugs). The next day, she returned and offered to manage him. After he accepted, father and daughter sued each other; they remained estranged for decades.
Ozzy Osbourne and Sharon Arden married on the Fourth of July in 1982, a date he said he chose so he wouldn’t forget his anniversary.
55 million sold
In 1980, Osbourne released a gleefully apocalyptic solo album, Blizzard of Ozz, containing his trademark song, Crazy Train. It was a hit. He toured and recorded relentlessly, becoming a bigger star than ever and eventually selling more than 55 million albums worldwide.
As Osbourne’s fame grew, his excessive behaviour kept pace. He bit the head off a live dove at a record-company conference. He bit the head off a dead bat during a concert in Des Moines, Iowa. (It had been thrown onstage by a fan; Osbourne said he assumed it was a rubber toy.) He pelted audiences with raw meat. When he ran out of drugs, he snorted a line of ants. Wearing his wife’s dress, he drunkenly urinated on the Alamo – possibly his most expensive transgression, since it meant he couldn’t perform in San Antonio for years.
While many fans were thrilled by these rock-star anecdotes, Osbourne’s erratic actions when he was intoxicated had real victims: sometimes animal (armed with a shotgun at his British estate, he slaughtered an entire henhouse and a family of cats), sometimes human. (He gave his first wife a black eye and, after trying to choke his second wife, Sharon, woke up in a cell, charged with attempted murder; believing he was remorseful, she dropped the charges.)
Tragedy struck in 1982. While Osbourne slept in his parked tour bus in Leesburg, Florida, his lead guitarist, Randy Rhoads, went for a joyride with makeup artist Rachel Youngblood in a plane flown by the bus driver, Andrew Aycock. The plane buzzed the bus twice, and on the third pass, crashed into it, killing everyone on the plane. After a few days Osbourne soldiered on, eventually settling on Zakk Wylde as his guitarist.
A song he had written with Rhoads about his own alcoholism, Suicide Solution, put Osbourne at the centre of a lawsuit in 1986, when the parents of a California teenager claimed the song had induced him to kill himself. The suit was dismissed.
Undaunted, Osbourne returned to suicidal imagery in his 1989 duet with Lita Ford, Close My Eyes Forever, his only Top 10 single on the American pop charts. His only other Top 40 single in the United States was the sentimental power ballad Mama, I’m Coming Home, which reached No 28 two years later.
When Osbourne wanted to play the Lollapalooza festival in 1995, he was rebuffed; irked, the next year Sharon Osbourne began Ozzfest, which became a long-running, lucrative summer package tour featuring hard-rock and heavy-metal acts, persisting until 2018. The headliner was usually Osbourne himself, sometimes reuniting with Black Sabbath.
A homebody offstage
Although Osbourne styled himself as a menacing banshee, offstage he was a genial homebody. Devoted fans had known this at least since 1988, when the Penelope Spheeris documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years featured a gregarious Osbourne making scrambled eggs while wearing a leopard-print kimono.
The rest of the world discovered that side of his personality in 2002, when the TV series The Osbournes began, showing the loving (but often beeped for profanity) home life of Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne and their teenage children Jack and Kelly. (Another daughter, Aimee, chose to stay away from the cameras.)
Although he periodically complained that he was supposed to be the Prince of Darkness, the show, which lasted until 2005, featured him befuddled by TV remote controls, house cats and bubble machines. It was the most popular show MTV had ever aired and inspired dozens of celebrities to allow cameras into their homes, hoping for the same quantum leap in their fame.
“One day we were normal,” Kelly Osbourne told Rolling Stone in 2002, “and the next day we were the most famous family in America.”
As Osbourne shuffled around his home in Beverly Hills, California, viewers could see that he had a noticeable tremor. He eventually discovered that he had Parkinsonism.
His health worsened after a near-fatal accident in 2003, when he flipped an all-terrain vehicle on his property in England. “I’d been taking lethal combinations of booze and drugs for decades,” he reflected in his autobiography, “but it was riding over a pothole in my back garden at two miles an hour that nearly killed me.”
Despite those setbacks, Osbourne continued to parlay his unlikely fame into a wide series of ventures. He starred in a flop variety show, Osbournes Reloaded; filmed a history-themed TV series with his son, Ozzy & Jack’s World Detour; and even wrote an advice column for Rolling Stone.
Survivors include his wife and their children; three children from his first marriage; Jessica, Louis and Elliot; and numerous grandchildren.
Osbourne remained devoted to his family and grateful for his success. But he said he knew exactly how he would be remembered:
“Ozzy Osbourne, born 1948. Died, whenever. He bit the head off a bat.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Gavin Edwards
Photographs by: Chad Batka
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