Ozzy Osbourne's most shocking moments
Drug and alcohol use often fuelled manic behaviour in front of his adoring audiences, and also his most crazed moments in between shows.
These are some of the most memorable and infamous moments from the hell-raising life of the late heavy metal pioneer.
The Alamo
In 1982, Osbourne was wearing one of his wife's dresses for a photoshoot close to The Alamo in Texas, the site of a heroic sacrifice by the Texan troops against the invading Mexicans.
The rock star drunkenly relieved himself on a cenotaph commemorating the dead, later donating thousands to the group which maintains The Alamo.
In the midst of an alcohol and drug haze, Osbourne said that he set about slaughtering 17 cats with a shotgun.
The rocker said he was found by his wife under a piano, armed with a knife in one hand and a shotgun in the other.
Ants
Osbourne toured with Motley Crue in the 1980s, and it was during this time that he is rumoured to have shocked his fellow rockers after 'spotting' a line of ants.
Bassist Nikki Sixx claimed that Osbourne took a straw and, as if snorting cocaine, hoovered the line of ants up his nose.
Bats
In 1982, Osbourne was on stage at a gig in Des Moines, Iowa, during a US tour.
A fan threw a bat on stage, and in the frenzy of performance Osbourne – believing it to be rubber – bit its head off. There remains debate as to whether the bat was alive or dead when it was thrown on stage.
Doves
Osbourne had history with the decapitation of winged creatures, beginning with an incident which stunned CBS Records executives.
Celebrating a new album in 1981, the Black Country-born rock star was intending to release two doves in a symbolic act at the record label. Instead, he grabbed a dove and bit its head off, before being thrown out of the building.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
20 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Ozzy Osbourne is seen just two days before his death in a final heartwarming video having breakfast with his family
Ozzy Osbourne was seen spending time with his family in a sweet final video shared just two days before his death aged 76. The music legend died on Tuesday just weeks after he took to the stage for his final show with Black Sabbath, with his family confirming the sad news in a statement. Ozzy's daughter Kelly Osbourne, 40, shared the video with fans on her Instagram Story on July 20, just two days before the singer died. In the clip, Ozzy was sat at a kitchen table using his tablet while spending time with his youngest daughter and her two-year-old son Sidney. The trio were enjoying breakfast together while reading the newspapers, including the Daily Mail which was spread out on the table. Kelly said: 'Good morning', before panning the camera to her father who was wearing a pair of headphones as she said, 'Dadda, say good morning'. Ozzy leaned forward and replied, 'Good morning'. Ozzy passed away on Tuesday, just weeks after he took to the stage for a final performance with his band in Villa Park, Birmingham. The Osbourne family said 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. We ask everyone to respect our family privacy at this time.'Sharon, Jack, Kelly, Aimee and Louis.' Ozzy was born John Michael Osbourne in Birmingham in 1948, and dropped out of school at the age of 15. After serving two months in prison for burglary, he decided to pursue his love of music and by 1970 Black Sabbath had gained a huge following in the US and UK with the release of their first album. Ozzy quit the band in 1978 and divorced his first wife Thelma Mayfair, who he had two children with, four years later, amid his ongoing substance abuse problems. He went on to marry second wife Sharon Osbourne, who helped him transform into a successful solo artist and the couple had three children together. In the clip, Ozzy was sat at a kitchen table using his tablet while spending time with his youngest daughter and her two-year-old son Sidney over breakfast Ozzy gained a whole new audience of fans with the family's reality TV show The Osbournes in 2001. He is survived by his wife Sharon and his five children, Jessica, Louis, Aimee, Kelly and Jack. The Black Sabbath legend had been suffering from Parkinson's disease since 2003 and had undergone seven surgeries in the past five years, including a fourth spinal surgery in September 2023. His health battle began more than two decade ago, when in 2003, he broke his neck after falling off a quad bike leading to some extensive back surgery and metal rods being put down his spine. The British musician was diagnosed with a mild form of Parkinson's disease in 2003, however he only went public with the condition in 2020. However, Ozzy previously said that his biggest struggles were due to a fall which he suffered in 2019 which caused metal rods in his back to dislodge. The rods had been put there following a quad bike accident at his Buckinghamshire home in 2003. He told Rolling Stone UK magazine: 'The second surgery went drastically wrong and virtually left me crippled. 'I thought I'd be up and running after the second and third, but with the last one they put a f*ing rod in my spine. 'They found a tumour in one of the vertebrae, so they had to dig all that out too. It's pretty rough, man, and my balance is all f*ed up.' The illness led to him cancelling a string of tour dates while he recovered, including postponing the UK and European legs of his No More Tours 2. Ahead of his final live performance in July 2025, which was a benefit concert in Birmingham, Ozzy gave an update on his health status and state of mind. Speaking on SiriusXM's Ozzy's Boneyard, he said: 'You know what, I go on about the way I can't walk and I can't do this, but you know what I was thinking over the holidays? For all of my complaining, I'm still alive.' He continued: 'I may be moaning about how I can't walk as well but as I look down the road, there's people that didn't do half as much as me, and they didn't make it.' 'I'm trying to get back on my feet.' Host Billy Morrison added: 'Ozzy, you are so much better than you were just a year ago.' He replied: 'Yeah, but the recovery is very slow. That f***ing surgeon. Plus the Parkinson's. When you get up in the morning, you just jump outta bed. Oh I have to balance myself, you know? But you know, I'm not dead, as you say. I'm still actively doing things.' Also ahead of the gig, Ozzy's wife Sharon revealed: 'Ozzy's working with his therapist every single day. He's doing really well, actually. Ozzy's number one thing in life is his fans, so he's working hard to be ready for them, to make this show the perfect way to end things.'
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
Magnificent: Stevie Wonder at BST Hyde Park reviewed
The highs of Stevie Wonder's Hyde Park show were magnificently high. The vast band were fully clicked into that syncopated, swampy funk, horns stabbing through the synths, the backing singers adding gospel fervour. And Wonder – now 75 – sang like it was still the 1970s, his voice raspy one minute, angelic the next. Anyone who heard that phenomenal group play 'Living for the City' or 'Superstition' and didn't feel 'ants in my pants and I need to dance', as James Brown once put it, should resign from life: they do not deserve such joy. That said, there were oddities. We were blessed with visits from four of Wonder's nine children, two of whom were given whole songs to sing while the great man had a breather, as were three of the backing singers. Then there was the opening of the show: ten minutes of Wonder addressing the crowd, who maintained a respectful silence while being told over and over – in different formulations and intermittent lapses into faux cockney – that there was too much anger in the world and we all needed to love each other. He couldn't decided whether he wanted to be Dick Van Dyke or Martin Luther King. Needless to say, scientists have as yet ascertained no link between pop stars telling concert-goers that we need to love each other more and increased social cohesion. Actually, the latest studies suggest that the longer such lecturing goes on, the more irritation among those being lectured rises. It's a phenomenon some call the 'Imagine Syndrome', which Wonder exemplified by then playing 'Imagine', so we could hear its timeless message of triteness through fresh ears. But within four songs we were at 'Master Blaster', then 'Higher Ground' and one was willing to forgive everything – all the gloopy ballads, all the showbizzery, even the white jacket with diamanté portraits of John Lennon and Marvin Gaye. Even singing 'Happy Birthday' to his youngest daughter was fabulous because it was Stevie Wonder's 'Happy Birthday', not the song that launched a thousand cakes. There comes a point where you have to see these people before it's too late. I'm glad I got to see Stevie Wonder while he was still recognisably good enough to be Stevie Wonder because some legends are at the point where it's their catalogues rather than their voices that bring 65,000 people out. The day after Wonder, Hyde Park was meant to host the final show by Jeff Lynne's ELO, but a 'systemic infection' had forced him to cancel. I had seen Lynne a few times, and it was always tremendous fun. The week before, I had been at Villa Park, watching the final performance by Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne, which was extraordinary and moving. What struck me was how under-celebrated the Birmingham music scene of the late 1960s has been. You can't move for the mythologising of Manchester and Liverpool pop, and though the city bigs up its links to metal, you rarely hear about the products of Brumbeat. But this was the generation that gave us Steve Winwood (and the Spencer Davis Group and Traffic), Lynne, Ozzy and Sabbath, Roy Wood (who was the pre-eminent genius of the lot at the time), the Moody Blues and half of Led Zeppelin. That's one of rock's greatest cities, not the butt of a joke. Finally to Heavenly, the most overqualified group in pop history (seriously, Google them). They are the unlikely heroes to a small but dedicated scene, known as indie-pop or twee-pop, in which emotional directness trumps technical virtuosity: Kurt Cobain loved them for being punk rock and entirely without machismo. Theirs is a political stance based on not compromising principles (the show was part of a DIY weekender they had organised themselves) and being avowedly feminist ('Hearts and Crosses' sets a story of rape against queasy fairground organ). That makes it sound strident and hectoring, but Heavenly are not that. The songs would not have troubled Steely Dan's session guys, but they are full of joy, vim, life. Best of all, there were plenty of twentysomethings in the crowd, filming and dancing and singing along. No need to be Stevie Wonder to be an inspiration to the generations to come; simply capture something truthful.
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
Beguiling grot, TfL surrealism and Insta-art: contemporary art roundup
Last month, I got the train down to Margate to interview the Egyptian-Armenian artist Anna Boghiguian (b. 1946), whose exhibition The Sunken Boat: A glimpse into past histories was about to open at the Turner Contemporary. Long story short, the conversation did not go well: Anna reacted to my questions with some irritation, swatting them away like low-flying bluebottles. I got flustered, she got bored, and eventually so did I. We wrapped things up around the 20-minute mark and I ran away to stare into the abyss. It was a shame, because the show was, for the most part, really good. A political scientist by training, Boghiguian makes installation art that examines how the complex historical, social and political forces that shaped the modern world came into being, often taking an unorthodox point of reference as a means to work her way into the twisty narratives she spins out across her gallery-filling set pieces. There are three such here, the best of which, 'The Salt Traders' (2015), is the first thing we see. For this, Boghiguian decided to look at the history of commerce and empire through the prism of salt, a commodity once so valuable that it gave us the word 'salary'. The aesthetic is resolutely DIY and grungy as hell. The floor is covered with bags' worth of sea salt, and a good third of the space filled with a wooden structure posing as a Roman shipwreck, its sail bearing the image of a map displaying historical trade routes. There are grease-stained swathes of fabric, grimy sheets of paper onto which Boghiguian has scrawled notes on medieval economics, colonialism and god knows what else; there are also 30 worn-out beehives. Everything looks as though it's spent a decade at the bottom of a used ashtray, and that grottiness works on a visceral level. I'm still a bit annoyed, but my verdict is thus: she's 79, and she can probably do what she wants. Back in London, I heard Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964) had an exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ in Soho. The Swiss-born artist is a blue-chip favourite and a prime peddler of photo-friendly spectacle. He works across a bewildering range of media, sometimes falling back on a handful of visual signatures – cutesy sculptures that look like the Easter Island heads as imagined by Pixar; monumental Day-Glo land art – sometimes not. The only thing that really unites his diverse body of work is a slightly winsome quality, and the fact that every time I see his art, I come away feeling that something's missing: call it substance, call it ballast – hell, call it 'soul' if you like; I don't detect it. This show is probably Rondinone's most Instagram-friendly yet: the entire gallery is decked out in violently bright rainbow colours from floor to ceiling, the space interspersed with life-sized polychrome sculptures of ballet dancers in repose or mid-move. It is, in the literal sense, spectacular: the assault on the eyes will leave them adjusting to the real world long, long after you've left, and when I visited, the place was full of tourists taking selfies from every conceivable angle. Still, it left me cold. If the aspiration here is to create a kind of visual poetry, the effect is rather like watching an artist perform an after-dinner magic trick to the thunderous applause of a chalet full of oligarchs. Or worse still: like 'accessible' art as imagined by some terrifying, AI-generated curator of the future. This got me down, but not half as much as what I had in store: a 25-hour visit to Paris in order to end my marriage. I had planned to get blind drunk afterwards but was instead directed to visit Mark Leckey's exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations. If you're not familiar: Leckey (b. 1964) is a ferociously intelligent autodidact who mines the margins of pop culture without slipping into Banksy-like inanity or pseudo-academic overthinking. Instead, his films and installations blend everything down into a murky purée of sound, vision and atmosphere. That last word is key here. For starters, the whole, massive space is lit like a motorway underpass at 3 a.m. on a December morning, as muffled rave basslines and booming, slowed-down voices seemingly emanate from the bowels of the building. For a moment it feels like the worst psychedelic drug experience in history, but your senses adjust and you're suddenly on a planet where Transport for London's ubiquitous road-safety posters carry strange symbolist poetry and slogans; where a map of the artist's local park comes labelled with visionary symbols; where, in one film, shiny pink CGI-generated toys invade a hallucinatory version of Margate. Leckey is an artist so English that it's a wonder the famously Anglo-averse Paris art world ever let him in. For my sake, thank god they did.
