Ozzy Osbourne, the howling singer, madcap showman and self-anointed “prince of darkness” who helped pioneer heavy metal’s thunderous, earsplitting sound as the front man for Black Sabbath, has died.
His passing comes just weeks after he reunited with his bandmates for a farewell concert in England.
He was 76.
“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,” a family statement posted by the AP said.
“He was with his family and surrounded by love. We ask everyone to respect our family privacy at this time.”
A cause was not immediately announced. Osbourne had been hospitalised several times in recent years and revealed in 2020 that he had Parkinson’s disease.
Playful and flamboyant, with an exuberant personality that belied the foreboding music he recorded with Black Sabbath in the 1970s, Osbourne was a dominant figure in hard rock for more than four decades, known as much for his manic performance style – he once bit the head off a bat, mistaking it for a toy – as his distinctive nasal yawp.
In a career punctuated by struggles with drug and alcohol addiction, he established himself as a successful solo artist in the 1980s with songs like Crazy Train and Flying High Again; launched an annual heavy-metal festival, Ozzfest, in the 1990s; then returned to pop-culture prominence in the early 2000s with an Emmy-winning reality show The Osbournes, which focused on his turbulent family life.
Running for four seasons, it became one of MTV’s most popular programmes and paved the way for family-based reality shows centered on Gene Simmons, Hulk Hogan and the Kardashian-Jenner clan. It also introduced a bumbling, charmingly profane Osbourne to a younger generation unfamiliar with his hell-raising heyday in Black Sabbath.
Formed in Birmingham, England, in 1968, Black Sabbath drew on the aggressive, blues-inspired sound of groups such as Led Zeppelin and Blue Cheer, and emerged as the leaders of a demonic new movement in rock-and-roll. They were angry, disillusioned by the Vietnam War, and often drunk or drugged-out, snorting cocaine out of salad bowls after playing to sold-out shows at stadiums in the English Midlands and American heartland.
Songs such as Iron Man, War Pigs and Paranoid featured nightmarish imagery about “vengeance from the grave” and a “figure in black”, set to ominous power chords from guitarist Tony Iommi and jazz-inflected rhythms from drummer Bill Ward and bassist Geezer Butler, the group’s principal lyricist.
Black Sabbath’s mystical name, coupled with the inverted cross that was featured on the gatefold cover of their first album, spurred speculation that they might be practicing Satanists or followers of occultist Aleister Crowley. Instead, Osbourne said, they had simply noticed the popularity of horror movies at the local theater and sought to translate those box-office hits into a spooky but socially conscious brand of hard rock.
“We couldn’t conjure up a fart,” he told Rolling Stone in 2002. “We’d get invitations to play witches’ conventions and black masses in Highgate Cemetery. I honestly thought it was a joke. We were the last hippie band – we were into peace.”
Mainstream critics were unimpressed. “Surely rock was sinking to an all-time low with this Satanic claptrap,” Mark Coleman wrote in the Rolling Stone Album Guide, reviewing the band’s self-titled 1970 debut. But Black Sabbath sold more than 75 million records, were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2006 and influenced just about every metal act that followed.
Their second album, Paranoid (1970), released seven months after their first, topped the charts in Britain, reached No 12 in the United States and was named the greatest metal record of all time in a 2017 list by Rolling Stone. “It’s the blueprint for metal,” Rob Halford, the singer for Judas Priest, wrote in the liner notes for the album’s 2016 reissue. “It led the world into a new sound and scene.”
While Iommi served as the group’s musical architect and Butler was its poet, Osbourne – credited as a co-writer for all the band’s early hits – played the role of ringmaster, dressing in black and prancing across the stage before leading a bacchanalia in the wings.
At the height of his debauchery, he was drinking four bottles of cognac a day, by his account, and using thousands of dollars worth of cocaine each week, habits that contributed to his firing from Black Sabbath in 1979. His father had died, his first marriage was ending in divorce, and soon after he began touring on his own, his guitarist – 25-year-old Randy Rhoads – died in a plane crash, accelerating a downward spiral of drug use and depression.
Osbourne went on to spend years in and out of rehab, fighting to tame his excesses while reinventing himself as a magnetic, if frequently unnerving, solo artist. He hosed audiences with water, threw raw meat into the crowd and staged the hanging of a dwarf named after singer Ronnie James Dio, his diminutive replacement in Black Sabbath.
While on tour with Mötley Crüe in the early 1980s, he snorted a line of ants through a straw, daring band leader Nikki Sixx to do the same. “We thought we had elevated animal behavior to an art form,” Sixx wrote in Mötley Crüe’s 2001 autobiography The Dirty. “But then we met Ozzy.”
To critics on the Christian right, his behaviour reinforced suspicions that Osbourne was nothing less than a psychopathic Satan-worshipper. That view gained increasing prominence after a teenager died by suicide, allegedly after listening to Osbourne’s song Suicide Solution, and the parents filed a lawsuit, holding Osbourne responsible. (The suit was dismissed in 1986 on First Amendment grounds.)
Undoubtedly, Osbourne sometimes took his reputation for skull-crushing rock to literal extremes. At a meeting with CBS Records in 1981, he bit the head off a live dove (or two doves, by some accounts) that was supposed to be released as a “peace offering”. The next year, he bit the head off a bat after a fan threw the creature onstage at a concert in Des Moines.
In his 2009 memoir I Am Ozzy, written with Chris Ayres, Osbourne recalled that he thought the bat was a rubber toy when he picked it up and chomped down.
“Immediately, though, something felt wrong. Very wrong,” he wrote. “For a start, my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid, with the worst aftertaste you could ever imagine. I could feel it staining my teeth and running down my chin. Then the head in my mouth twitched.” (The fan who threw the bat later said that the creature was dead.)
Osbourne was treated with rabies shots as a precaution. After he restarted his tour, he was arrested in San Antonio for urinating on an Alamo memorial, and banned from performing in the Texas city for a decade.
The fourth of six children, John Michael Osbourne was born in Birmingham, England, on December 3, 1948. His mother worked at a car factory by day, and his father worked as a toolmaker by night.
Ozzy, as he was long known, was diagnosed with dyslexia and dropped out of school at 15. He worked at a slaughterhouse, a mortuary and a car-horn tuning plant, among other jobs, and also embarked on a small-time crime spree, stealing apples, pilfering parking meters and eventually burglarising a clothing store.
During a three-month stint in jail, he decided to turn from thieving to singing. “A light went on in my head when I heard” the 1963 album With the Beatles, he recalled in his memoir. “It might sound over-the-top to say it now, but for the first time I felt as though my life had meaning.”
Not quite sure how to launch his career as a musician, Osbourne started by cultivating a rock-and-roll image, growing his hair long and tattooing his nickname into his knuckles with a sewing needle and India ink. Then he bought a public-address system and posted a sign at a music store: “Ozzy Zig Needs Gig.”
By 1968, he had linked up with Ward, Iommi and Butler. They called themselves the Polka Tulk Blues Band, after a brand of talcum powder, before changing their name to Earth and finally Black Sabbath, the title of a 1963 horror film starring Boris Karloff.
Their first four albums, including Master of Reality (1971) and Vol. 4 (1972), are considered metal masterpieces. But cocaine became “the cancer of the band”, Osbourne said, and led to his firing after the release of Never Say Die! (1978).
Osbourne recorded a dozen solo albums with guitarists such as Jake E Lee, Steve Vai and Zakk Wylde, incorporating elements of psychedelic and progressive rock into the moody sound he honed with Black Sabbath.
His 1988 duet Close My Eyes Forever, with former Runaways guitarist Lita Ford, became Osbourne’s sole Top 10 hit. Five years later, he received the Grammy Award for best metal performance for I Don’t Want to Change the World. He was inducted into the Rock Hall as a solo artist in 2024.
Osbourne credited Sharon Arden, the daughter of Black Sabbath manager Don Arden, with encouraging his solo career and supporting him after Rhoads’ death in 1982. They married later that year, and she became his manager and spearheaded the creation of Ozzfest.
Their relationship was often tumultuous. Osbourne flew into violent rages while drunk or high, and entered rehab after a 1989 incident in which he woke up in a jail cell after trying to strangle Sharon.
Osbourne had two children from his first marriage, to Thelma Riley (also known as Thelma Mayfair), and three from his second.
“I wasn’t so much of a dad as I was an extra-delinquent child for my wife,” Osbourne told Rolling Stone in 2017, referring to his pre-rehab years. “I was in a ... bar on the floor all the time, which I’m not proud of.”
Osbourne was diagnosed with Parkin syndrome, which causes tremors similar to those of Parkinson’s disease, and in 2003 was seriously injured in an ATV accident on the grounds of his home near London, breaking his collarbone, eight ribs and a vertebra in his neck, according to a hospital statement at the time.
He sometimes seemed to grow tired of questions about his devilish past, once telling the New York Times that he was “a family man” who found slasher films disturbing.
Still, he expressed few doubts about his legacy, declaring in a Rolling Stone interview that his obituary would almost certainly begin with the words, “Ozzy Osbourne, the man who bit the head off a bat, died.” (He later commemorated the incident by releasing a $40 plush bat toy with a detachable head.)
“I’ve got no complaints,” he said. “At least I’ll be remembered.”