Ozzy Osbourne Has Passed Away
Ozzy Osbourne, frontman of the band Black Sabbath, has died at the age of 77, reports The Guardian.
"With more sadness than words can express, we are forced to announce that our beloved Ozzy Osbourne passed away this morning. He was with his family and surrounded by love. We ask everyone to respect our family's privacy at this time,” his family announced.
No cause of death was given, although Osbourne had various health problems in recent years.
According to The Guardian, he was one of the most notorious figures in rock and roll: an innovator who helped bring about heavy metal, an addict whose substance abuse led to an attempt to murder his wife, and later a reality TV star, beloved for his confusion with family life in the show The Osbournes.
His death comes less than three weeks after he retired from the stage.
On July 5, Osbourne reunited with members of the original Black Sabbath lineup for the first time since 2005 at the "Return to the Beginning" farewell concert with some of metal's biggest names.
"I was lying down for six years, and you have no idea how I feel," he told the audience that night, referring to extensive health problems, including a form of Parkinson's disease and numerous spinal surgeries.
"Thank you from the bottom of my heart," he added.
Difficult childhood
He was born as John Michael Osbourne in 1948 in Birmingham, as the son of factory workers. He had a tough childhood. Besides living in relative poverty, at the age of 11 he was sexually abused multiple times by two boys.
"It was horrible... It felt like it would last forever," he told the Mirror in 2003.
He was also arrested for theft.
"I wasn't good at it. F***ing useless," he admitted in 2014.
The industrial working-class environment shaped the sound of Osbourne's ultimate music project, Black Sabbath, whose heavy sound revolutionized British rock music.
"We wanted to represent what we thought of the world at that time. We didn't want to write happy pop songs. We gave it that industrial feel," said the band's bassist Geezer Butler in 2017.
The band, named after a Boris Karloff horror film, also included guitarist Tony Iommi and drummer Bill Ward. They released their first album in 1970, followed by albums that are considered the cornerstone of heavy metal.
Paranoid (1970) featured tracks that left a strong impression, like "Iron Man" and "War Pigs," and topped the UK album chart, while the cacophonous, psychedelic sound palette of "Master of Reality" (1971) had a major influence on the slower sound of doom metal, notes The Guardian.
Osbourne recorded five more acclaimed albums with Black Sabbath, but became so addicted to alcohol and drugs that he was fired in 1979 and replaced by Ronnie James Dio.
Osbourne eventually returned to the band for the album "13" in 2013, which topped the charts in the US and UK. Black Sabbath also went on tour, playing their final concert in Birmingham on February 4, 2017.
Soon after leaving Black Sabbath, he began a solo career with the album "Blizzard of Ozz," which went five times platinum in the US, releasing 11 studio albums, one of the last being "Ordinary Man" in 2020.
Bizarre incidents
The most notorious incident occurred in 1982, when he bit the head off a dead bat, which he believed was a stage prop, while performing in Iowa.
He later went to the hospital to get a preventive rabies vaccine.
He also claimed, confirmed by his former publicist, that he bit the heads off two doves in 1981 during a failed meeting at a record company, initially intending to release them as a sign of peace.
He had four children, two from his first marriage to Thelma, and two from his marriage to Sharon.
He married Sharon in 1982, and she began managing his solo career. Her business sense and his popularity helped them amass great wealth.
Attempted murder of his wife
In 1989, Ozzy Osbourne was arrested for attempting to murder Sharon by strangling her while drunk.
He recalled the incident in a 2007 interview: "I woke up in that little cell with human feces on the walls, and I thought, 'What the f*** have I done now?' A policeman read something off a piece of paper and said, 'You are charged with attempted murder of Mrs. Sharon Osbourne.' I can’t tell you now how I felt. I was just numb."
The couple later reconciled, although they soon separated again in 2016 after Osbourne cheated on her with a hairdresser.
Accidents and illnesses
In 2003, Ozzy broke his neck, collarbone, and ribs in an accident while riding a quad bike at his home in Buckinghamshire. Sharon later said he stopped breathing for a minute and a half "and there was no pulse." He was also told he was nearly paralyzed due to the accident, and in 2005 he was diagnosed with Parkin syndrome, which causes tremors.
After years of sobriety, in 2013 he admitted to drinking and using drugs for a year and a half, but was committed to becoming sober again, saying: “I was in a very dark place and I was an asshole to the people I love the most, my family.”
In 2019, Osbourne went on what was announced as his final world tour, titled "No More Tours 2." (He had originally announced retirement in 1992 with the “No More Tours” tour, but later changed his mind.) Illness forced him to postpone his European tour in 2020.
“It seems like since October everything I touch turns to sh*t,” he said, and he also spent some time in the hospital treating a hand infection.
In 2020, Osbourne announced that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, and in 2022, he had spinal surgery after a fall in 2019 that worsened previous injuries.
A year later, he canceled his UK and European tour due to “physical weakness,” citing “three operations, stem cell treatments, endless physical therapy sessions, and the latest groundbreaking Cybernics (HAL) treatment.”
