
I did one of Ozzy Osbourne's final interviews… & despite health woes he said ‘I'm nearly dead – but I can't complain'
He gave me one of his broad, infectious grins. It was the same old Ozzy — despite everything.
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With some trepidation, I asked him: 'How are you doing?'
I knew he was in a bad way.
A combination of Parkinson's disease plus the after effects of his quad bike accident and a night-time fall in his bathroom at his Los Angeles mansion.
'I'm nearly f**ing dead!' replied the lovable rogue in his warm Brummie tones, unaffected by years of living in the States.
'But if it is the end of the road for me, I can't complain,' he had continued.
He drew my attention to the loving wife who was with him through thick and thin, the mother of three of his six children.
He said: 'Sharon said to me recently, 'If you had to do it over again, would you change anything?'. 'I told her, 'No, I had a f***ing great time'.'
Then he heaped praise on Sharon for being 'so helpful and supportive' with him.
'It's been hard on her though,' he said, 'because she has to hold the fort'.
Ozzy had long given up alcohol but added: 'My tolerance has gone I'm glad to say because when I started drinking, I would start looking for drugs.
Ozzy Osbourne fights back tears as he thanks wife Sharon for 'saving his life' in appearance at Rock N Roll Hall of Fame
'Sharon had good training in dealing with chaos!'
Only three weeks ago, the Prince of Darkness who brought light into so many lives gave us one last hurrah when heavy metal royalty descended on Villa Park, Birmingham, to pay their respects.
The Back to the Beginning gig ended with him — seated on a giant black throne because he could not stand — joining his Black Sabbath muckers on the songs that took him to the world stage.
Paranoid, Iron Man and War Pigs. Songs that shaped a huge, loud and lairy genre of popular music.
John Michael Osbourne was born 76 years ago into humble surroundings.
His mum Lilian worked at the Lucas car parts factory in Birmingham.
His dad Jack worked night shifts as a toolmaker at the General Electric Company.
But as Ozzy, Prince of Darkness, he was one of the world's greatest showmen.
Singer, hellraiser, comedian, family man (and occasional love cheat), he always kept a smile on his face — even when the chips were down.
I got to know Ozzy well over the years and, every time I met him or spoke to him, he had me in stitches with his wicked sense of humour.
Even when his health was failing, he tried to look on the bright side — literally.
In that same interview last autumn, he broke into the immortal lines from his favourite film, Monty Python's The Life Of Brian: 'Always look on the bright side of life . . . life's a piece of s**t, when you look at it.'
Then Ozzy added: 'I used to sing that to my kids when they were babies. I love that movie!
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'The other day I went to my chiropractor in Beverly Hills and who should be sitting in the waiting room but John 'f**ing' Cleese? It was like meeting the Pope!'
Ozzy also told me about his dream of seeing out his days back home in England, something he managed to do even if it was only for a short time.
"I'm English but I'm becoming an American Brummie,' he sighed.
'I don't want to end my days in America.'
Ozzy was never cut out for school, partly because of his undiagnosed dyslexia.
He left at 15 and found himself in short-lived jobs — including killing pigs in a slaughterhouse.
Then, aged 17, he tried his hand at burglary, stealing shirts from a local shop, and spent six weeks in Birmingham's Winson Green prison.
Yet, from an early age, Ozzy was spellbound by music — most notably The Beatles.
In another of our chats, he cast his mind back to his teenage years and said: 'When I was walking down Witton Road in Aston with a blue transistor radio and She Loves You came on, I thought, 'What the f*** is this?'.
'It used to be Cliff Richard and all that stuff — but this was The Beatles!'
He decided to pursue his dream of becoming a singer — and posted an advert in a local music shop, saying: 'Ozzy Zig Needs Gig. Experienced frontman, owns own PA system.'
It attracted the attention of two of his future Sabbath bandmates — guitarist/composer Tony Iommi and the bassist/lyricist Geezer Butler.
Before the recent Villa Park gig, I asked Iommi to go 'Back to the Beginning'.
'At school, I didn't even know that Ozzy could sing,' he said.
'It was a racket at first I must say but, after we'd been playing for a while, he got really good.'
As for the singer's madcap behaviour, Iommi continued: 'He got more loony as we went on.
'Eventually, he became like he is — very out front.'
Ozzy once regaled me with stories of his early Sabbath days, how they had so little money that they had to choose how to spend their earnings between 'a bag of chips or a packet of No6 cigarettes'.
Then, in 1970, the band released second album Paranoid, ramping up their dark satanic image.
They were headed for the big time, not only in the UK but in the US and across the world.
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The following year, aged 22, Ozzy married nightclub attendant Thelma Riley but quickly decided it was 'a terrible mistake'.
And though Sabbath released a string of high octane, hugely successful albums . . . Master of Reality, Vol. 4, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and so on . . . the wheels fell off for the larger-than-life singer.
He would numb himself with booze and cocaine and later confessed he had been a 'disgusting' father to his two kids with Thelma — Jessica and Louis.
On April 27, 1979, Ozzy was fired by Sabbath, a seismic event in his life and explained to me by Iommi.
'Obviously drugs were involved,' he said.
'It got to a stage where Ozzy had lost interest.
'He'd go missing for a couple of days in Los Angeles — things like that.
'I was nominated to go to the record company and make all the excuses.
'It got to a point where I had to say, 'Look, we'll have to replace Ozzy or break up'. At the time, it was best for both of us and Ozzy went off and did his own thing.'
And that's when Sharon entered his life.
Then 27, she was the daughter of Sabbath's manager Don Arden.
She convinced Ozzy that he could be a solo star, and that she should be the one to manage him.
Not only did she become mother to his three children Aimee, Kelly and Jack but she also got things back on track — up to a point.
Debut solo album Blizzard of Ozz, with big numbers like Crazy Train, Suicide Solution and Mr Crowley, appeared in September 1980, and eventually sold more than five million copies.
This brings us to Ozzy's most infamous incident — the moment he bit the head off a bat, thinking it was made of rubber.
It happened on January 20, 1982, in Des Moines, Iowa, when a member of the audience threw the poor creature on to the stage.
Ozzy later revealed that the bat was still alive and that it bit him first, hence he needed treatment for rabies.
He told me how his audiences had never let him forget the incident across the decades.
'At one of my gigs, someone let a dog go with a sign on its leg, saying 'Please don't eat me!'.'
Ozzy also told me how loved to clown around like the late great Tommy Cooper — but that his antics didn't go down too well with his bandmates.
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Of one particular tour, he said: 'Most nights, I slipped over on the stage.
'I nearly fell into the f***ing orchestra pit.
"I mean it's tough on the other guys.
'When they were all getting serious, I'd make them laugh and they all get pissed off.
'Nothing's rehearsed with me.
'One day, I'll just put a bucket on my head.'
In later years, Ozzy became much more than just a singer.
He and his family became global TV sensations through their groundbreaking fly-on-the-wall documentary The Osbournes.
It was such a smash hit that it paved the way for similar reality shows featuring Paris Hilton and later The Kardashians.
I remember visiting Ozzy in LA not long after the show ended and being surrounded by some of the family's numerous dogs.
In 2022, I asked him if he missed the hellraising and he answered: 'On the 4th of July, my wife and I celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary and I said to Sharon, 'What the f*** happened to 40 years?'.
When we spoke, he was at pains to point out: 'It's seven years since I had a drink, seven years clean and sober.
'Don't smoke tobacco, don't drink, don't do drugs.
'It's quite boring actually.'
So, what could he still do to give him a hit, I asked.
'The only thing left is masturbation,' laughed Ozzy.
On a more serious note, he added: 'Nearly all the friends I used to drink and do drugs with are dead.
'But I'm still here for a reason.'
That reason was his loving family, wife Sharon, his children and grandchildren - and making music.
'The only thing I can do in life is entertain people, I love it,' he said.
'I'll only stop when a pine lid is being nailed to my box.
'When I first found out I had Parkinson's I thought, 'F***!', but then I thought, 'It could be worse, I could be dead'. Everybody would like to be me for a weekend. I've had a great life.'
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Metro
20 minutes ago
- Metro
Oasis honour late rocker Ozzy Osbourne with sweet Wembley show tribute
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Daily Mail
21 minutes ago
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Why Ozzy Osbourne's first wife has airbrushed the rock star from her life: 'Who'd want to be part of that mad family!'
As the patriarch of reality TV show The Osbournes – presiding in potty-mouthed dysfunction over the family antics – he won a new generation of fans, but no one ever really doubted Ozzy Osbourne loved his family, or that they loved him. That affection was reflected in the statement released to mark his death earlier this week, 17 days after the Black Sabbath frontman's farewell concert in his home city of Birmingham. '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,' came the announcement. 'He was with his family and surrounded by love.' What was perhaps striking about the statement was whom it was credited to: Sharon, Jack, Kelly, Aimee and Louis. Sharon, of course, is Ozzy's increasingly fragile, ever-colourful and ever-devoted wife; Jack, Kelly and Aimee are their children together. The name Louis, however, would have been unfamiliar to many. A musician, he was the rocker's son from his first marriage. Two names, however, were missing from the family statement – those of Ozzy's eldest daughter Jessica and his adopted son Elliot. For while Ozzy might have been a trailblazer for reality TV fatherhood, he did have another wife and family first. And save for Louis – who bears a striking resemblance to his father – his first family have maintained a silence in the wake of the 76-year-old's death. Louis, 50, who did make a brief appearance early on in The Osbournes, was, it would seem, at his dad's side at the family's Grade II-listed home on the outskirts of Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire when he died. But what of his sister Jessica, 53, who lives just six miles down the road with her husband and their three children? As yet, she has made no public statement. Nor has there been any statement from New Zealand, where his adopted son Elliot Osbourne, 59, who works for a tech firm, lives with his wife. Elliot was five years old when Ozzy married his mother, nightclub hostess Thelma Riley, in 1971, marking an entry into fatherhood Ozzy himself called 'chaotic at best'. As for Thelma, as the Mail discovered this week, despite living in Birmingham since the end of her tumultuous marriage, she has kept her association with him a closely guarded secret. Indeed, on a peaceful street of terraced homes in Harborne, where she lived for more than two decades, it would seem even her neighbours hadn't known she was once married to one of the city's best-known sons. Photographs from the 1970s show Thelma Riley (born Thelma Rees but who was married briefly to Anthony Riley) as a striking young woman with tumbling brunette hair. Now 76, she is silvery blonde but no less striking. She earned an MBA from Oxford Brookes University in 1999 and co-founded a sales and marketing consultancy. A former neighbour Karen, who lived a few doors away until Thelma moved several years ago, remembers her being 'always beautifully dressed'. 'I knew her name, but we never socialised.' But in 2017, following the final appearance of Ozzy's second wife Sharon on ITV's The X Factor, Karen joked with Thelma about her shared surname, asking if she was any relation. Karen recalls: 'I loved The X Factor and when I bumped into Thelma in the street after Sharon's final appearance I had a laugh with her. I didn't really know her but cheekily asked her if they were related and she looked horrified and said, 'No way, who would want to be part of that mad family!' 'Until this day I had no idea I was a neighbour of Ozzy Osbourne's first wife! She never let on and clearly didn't want to.' A short distance away, at a block of flats Thelma is understood to own and manage, one of her fellow directors tells the Mail that he too is shocked. John Fender, an economics professor, tells the Mail: 'I know Thelma, we are both directors of a company, but I had absolutely no idea. I am in a state of shock, she never mentioned it. She kept it very quiet. I am completely astonished. Osbourne is a fairly common name and I never put two and two together.' She was not always so guarded, though. The Mail spoke to one former colleague who says she burned 'red hot' with fury in the wake of her divorce. Thelma, who is thought to have had a brief third marriage, is now happy with a long-term partner, retired and living quietly on the outskirts of Birmingham. She is very much a part of her children's and grandchildren's lives. That she might want to draw a veil over the torment of her second marriage is not surprising. Ozzy himself spoke regretfully of his treatment of Thelma in his autobiography I Am Ozzy. From the 1960s to the 1980s, Birmingham's Rum Runner nightclub had legendary status. And one night in 1970, Ozzy and fellow Black Sabbath member Tony Iommi, rolled in. In the cloakroom was Thelma Riley. 'Who's that?' asked Ozzy, to be told Thelma was a 'lovely gal. Brainy too. But she's divorced and she's got a kid, so watch yerself'. Ozzy unsurprisingly ignored this instruction and, by his account, the night ended with him and Thelma kissing in the back seat of Tony's Ford Cortina. A year later they married at the Birmingham Register Office. 'A terrible mistake,' wrote Ozzy. Black Sabbath were touring; drugs, booze and groupies were beckoning and Thelma, now pregnant, was home alone. 'I would get this crazy restless feeling whenever I was at home, like I was going out of my mind,' wrote Ozzy. 'If I loved Thelma, I certainly didn't treat her like I did. If I've got any regrets about my life, that's one of them. 'I put that woman through hell. I should never have married her. She didn't deserve it; she wasn't a bad person, and she wasn't a bad wife. But I was a f****** nightmare.' Ozzy's worst excesses have been well documented. On the home front, he once took a shotgun to the 17 cats at the couple's home in Staffordshire. He left a stash of cannabis-laced cake in the kitchen that was accidentally given (by Thelma) to the local vicar. And he also shot all the chickens (purchased by Thelma) with a semi-automatic gun then doused the coop with gasoline and set it on fire, finishing off the sole survivor with a sword. In an interview with the Mail, he once admitted his abuse of Thelma was both mental and physical. 'You name it, I did it,' he said. 'I hit her big time and I was a complete idiot.' In the 2011 documentary God Bless Ozzy Osbourne, he revealed he could not remember when Louis and Jessica were born. Louis recalled: 'When he was around and he wasn't [drunk], he was a great father. But that was kind of seldom, really, I just have a lot of memories of him being drunk... It's not good for family life, really.' Jessica made a brief appearance in the documentary, saying: 'I don't remember being put to bed or having a bath by Dad or anything like that. I wouldn't say he was there for us.' Asked if Ozzy was a good dad, she replied: 'No.' Ozzy's divorce with Thelma was agonisingly drawn out – Sharon, his manager's daughter, was already on the scene, but there was a last-ditch holiday with Thelma and the children to Barbados in 1981. Ozzy said: 'We got there at five o'clock and I was legless by six.' The marriage ended the same year. Ozzy would later declare Thelma got the house and 'every last penny I had in the bank'. He also paid for the kids' private school. But he left scars. His relationship with Elliot, who moved from Scotland to New Zealand around five years ago, appears to have always been strained. Ozzy wrote: 'I spent the whole time when I was home screaming at him or whacking him around the ear hole. And it's not like he ever did anything bad to deserve it. I wish I could have been better with him.' The year after the divorce he married Sharon. Their first child Aimee was born in 1983, followed by Kelly in 1984 and Jack in 1985. Kelly and Jack along with their mother were catapulted into the public consciousness, courtesy of MTV's The Osbournes which aired from 2002 to 2005. Aimee chose to remain away from the cameras. Louis once had an apartment in the garden of his father's Beverly Hills home and has always spoken with pride of his dad. He followed, to an extent, in his father's footsteps. He dropped out of university to take a job in a record shop, before getting his big break as a DJ in Ibiza in 1998. Even while a fledgling artist, he was determined to make it on his own, prohibiting use of his father's name, and is now a respected DJ, producer and broadcaster. As Ozzy told the Mail in 2014. 'I was a bad father, an abusive husband and I had an ego the size of India. I spent decades of my life being an absolute idiot. I've got so many regrets I can't even remember half of them. But wives and kids are right at the top.' After so many years of Ozzy's chaotic neglect, how many of his 'first' family will attend any memorials to the late rock star remains to be seen.