How Ozzy Osbourne wanted to be remembered before his death at 76
Prior to his death at age 76, the legendary rocker said 'survival is my legacy' during a 2022 interview with People.
The Black Sabbath frontman confirmed his Parkinson's diagnosis in 2020. Osbourne had also undergone multiple surgeries in recent years, including going under the knife for a debilitating spinal injury in 2019.
Advertisement
'I mean, I'm 73. People go, 'Well, you're 70… why don't I throw the towel in?' Why should I? People still want to buy my records,' he told the outlet at the time. 'People still want to see me, so why should I? It motivates me to get off my backside and do something. I mean, if my career had gone down the toilet and I knew it was the end, I'd be pretty miserable.'
Osbourne also detailed how he wants others to interpret his legacy.
8 Ozzy Osbourne of Black Sabbath.
Redferns
Advertisement
8 Singer Ozzy Osbourne of the British heavy metal band Black Sabbath performs in 1974 in Los Angeles, California.
Michael Ochs Archives
'Never give up,' the Grammy winner stated. 'If you've got a passion for something, you've got to find a way around it to carry on the passion.'
In 2018, Osbourne touched on being a two-time Hall of Famer, telling The Guardian: 'I'd like to be remembered for the work I did with Black Sabbath. I'm so proud of the music. But to be honest, just being remembered would be an achievement to me.'
He added, 'I come from Aston in Birmingham, y'know? I used to play on bombsites… There's a guy living in the house I grew up in, and they charge people £200 to sleep in the bedroom I had as a kid.'
Advertisement
8 Ozzy Osbourne at the Moscow Music Peace Festival in 1989.
Getty Images
Osbourne's family confirmed his death to The Post on Tuesday, sharing, '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's privacy at this time.'
Two years before his passing, the star got candid on his ailments.
'It's been five years of absolute hell for me and the family,' Osbourne said on 'Piers Morgan Uncensored' in Sept. 2023.
Advertisement
8 Ozzy Osbourne visits the SiriusXM Studios on December 11, 2014.
Getty Images
'My family has been so supportive,' he continued. 'I couldn't have done it without them. It's been really a bad scene.'
The rocker, who was diagnosed in 2003, shared: 'I have Parkinson's — but I never think about it.'
Jack Osbourne, who was at the interview with his mom Sharon and sister Kelly, told Morgan, 60, that the 'biggest misconception' about his dad's condition was that Parkinson's was his only health challenge.
8 Tommy Clufetos, Geezer Butler, Ozzy Osbourne, and Tony Iommi perform onstage as Black Sabbath on 'The End Tour' at Nikon at Jones Beach Theater on August 17, 2016.
WireImage
'It's really the neck injury and the fall that he took,' Jack, 39, explained about the Prince of Darkness.
In 2019, the late star fell and suffered a major neck injury that required surgery. He previously hurt his neck in 2000 during a bike crash.
'I just got up and carried on but I had broken my neck, and I carried on working with it until I had that fall, and then just everything came undone,' he explained.
Advertisement
Sharon, 72, also revealed how her husband's health challenges affected her.
8 Geezer Butler, Bill Ward, Ozzy Osbourne and Tony Iommi pose backstage during Black Sabbath Reunion Press Conference at The Whisky a Go Go on November 11, 2011.
WireImage
'It changes your whole life,' she confessed. 'Suddenly you're off in another direction and your life changes so drastically. It's really hard. For the last five years, our life has changed dramatically.'
'But on the other hand,' Sharon noted, 'it's great that I've had Ozzy at home for five years. He's driving me crazy, but we've been together everyday for five years.'
Advertisement
In 2023, the musician canceled his tour three months before it was scheduled to kick off due to health complications.
8 Jack Osbourne, Aimee Osbourne, Kelly Osbourne, Sharon Osbourne and Ozzy Osbourne attend the premiere of 'Little Nicky' on November 2, 2000.
Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
8 Ozzy Osbourne in Birmingham, Wednesday, July 23, 2025.
AP
The heavy metal icon told Rolling Stone at the time that he had 'at best, ten years left' to live.
Advertisement
'I don't fear dying,' he said. 'But I don't want to have a long, painful and miserable existence. I like the idea that if you have a terminal illness, you can go to a place in Switzerland and get it done quickly. I saw my father die of cancer.'
Two weeks prior to his death, the reality television alum performed at Black Sabbath's 'Back to the Beginning' farewell concert.
He couldn't walk on his own anymore, sat in a black leather chair and performed for the crowd at Villa Park.
The legendary hitmaker sang five songs solo, and was then accompanied by his former bandmates Tony Iommi, Bill Ward and Geezer Butler for four final Black Sabbath tunes.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Tom's Guide
24 minutes ago
- Tom's Guide
Voice cloning, celebrity impersonations and the need for safeguarding — Hume's CEO sounds off on the world of AI voice generation
On a Wednesday afternoon, I'm sitting on a video call listening to Ricky Gervais tell me a joke about voice cloning. Then, Audrey Heburn follows up to tell me her opinions on artificial intelligence. Unsurprisingly, neither of these people were actually on the call. Instead, it's Hume's CEO and chief scientist, Dr Alan Cowen, on the other side. He's showing off the latest update to his company's AI voice creation service EVI 3. Given just 30 seconds of audio, the tool can create a near-perfect replica of someone's voice. Not just their tone or accent, this new feature captures and replicates mannerisms and personality, too. Ricky Gervais telling me jokes about voice cloning features has his same dry wit and sarcastic tone. And Audrey Heburn is wistful and intrigued, while talking in a softer British accent of the time. But it's not just celebrities. This tool can take and replicate any voice in the world, all from just one small audio clip. Obviously, a tool like this has the benefit of changing the world, both for the better and the worse. Cowen sat down with Tom's Guide to explain this new tool, his background, and why his team wants to revolutionize the world of AI voice cloning. Hume operates in an area of AI that oddly doesn't come up as much. They are a voice generation software, making the claim of being 'the world's most realistic voice AI'. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. I think this is the fastest evolving part of the AI space. There are competitors from OpenAI and Google, but what we've done with Evi 3 is take the technology to the next step. It has come a long way over the years, now offering text-to-speech with a range of preset voices, as well as the ability to design a voice from a description. Now, with this latest update, the company can also clone any and all voices. 'I think this is the fastest evolving part of the AI space. There are competitors from OpenAI and Google, but what we've done with Evi 3 is take the technology to the next step,' Cowen explained on the call. 'Previous models have relied on mimicking specific people. Then you need loads of data to fine-tune for each person. This model instead replicates exactly what a person sounds like, including their emotions and personality.' This is achieved by using Hume's large backlog of voice data and reinforcement learning so that they don't have to mimic specific people. Give the model a 30-second clip, and it can recreate it from scratch. This allows the model to learn your specific inflections, accent and personality, while training it against a huge backlog of voice data to fill in the gaps. Of course, a model like this works best when given a good representation. A muffled clip of you talking in a monotone voice won't match your personality much. However, it currently only works for English and Spanish, with plans for more languages in the future. If, like me, your first thought at hearing all of this is concern, then surprisingly you have something in common with Cowen. 'I think this could be very misused. Early on at Hume, we were so concerned about these risks that we decided not to pursue voice cloning. But we've changed our mind because there are so many people with legitimate use cases for voice cloning that have approached us,' Cowen explained. 'The legitimate use cases include things like live translation, dubbing, making content more accessible, being able to replicate your own voice for scripts, or even celebrities who want to reach fans.' While these use cases do exist, there are just as many negative ones out there as well. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, recently warned of the risks of AI voice cloning and its ability to be used in scams and bank voice activations. This technology, paired with video and image generation could be the push deepfakes have needed for a while to become truly problematic. Cowen explained that he was aware of these concerns and claimed that Hume was approaching it as best as they could. 'We are releasing a lot of safeguards with this technology. We analyze every conversation ,and we're still improving in this regard. But we can score how likely it is that something is being misused on a variety of dimensions. Whether somebody is being scammed or impersonated without permission,' Cowen said. 'We can obviously shut off access when people aren't using it correctly. In our terms, you have to comply with a bunch of ethical guidelines that we introduced alongside the Hume Initiative. These concerns have been on our mind since we started, and as we continue to unroll these technologies, we are improving our safeguarding too.' The Hume Initiative is a project set up by the Hume company. It's ethos is that modern technology should, above all, serve our emotional well-being. That is somewhat vague, but the Initiative lists out six principles for empathetic technologies: Of course, while these are good guidelines to follow, they are subjective, and only beneficial when followed. Cowen assured me that these are beliefs that Hume stands by and that, when it comes to voice cloning, they are well aware of the risks. Early on at Hume, we were so concerned about these risks that we decided not to pursue voice cloning. But we've changed our mind because there are so many people with legitimate use cases for voice cloning that have approached us. 'We are at the forefront of this technology and we try to stay ahead of it. I think that there will be people that don't respect the guidelines of this kind of tool. I don't want people to walk away thinking there is no danger here, there is,' Cowen explained. 'People should be concerned about deepfakes on the phone, they should be wary of these types of scams, and it something that I think we need a cross-industry attempt to address.' Despite being aware of the risks, Cowen explained that he thought this was a technology that they had to build. 'The AI space moves so fast that I don't doubt that a bad actor in six months will have access to something like this technology. We need to be careful of that,' Cowen said. Cowen spent a lot of our chat focusing on guidelines and the legitimate concerns of this kind of technology. His background is in Psychology and strongly believes that this kind of technology will have more of a positive effect on people's wellbeing than negative. 'People have been really enjoying cloning their voices with our demo. We've had thousands of conversations already, which is remarkable. People are using it in a really fun way,' Cowen said, after discussing what he thinks people get wrong about this kind of technology. He strongly believes that it can be used for fun, to help build people's confidence and can even be used for training purposes or for voice acting needs in films as well as dubbing. Of course, just like with many other areas of AI, the positive benefits are competing with the negative. Being able to have a generic voice read a script is useful, but rather uneventful in risk. Being able to accurately recreate any voice in the world comes with a long list of concerns. For now, Cowen and his team are way ahead in this venture, and seem committed to the ethical side of the debate, but we remain early into the life of this kind of technology.
Axios
an hour ago
- Axios
There may not be a song of the summer, but there's certainly a sound
As Google Trends data suggests, people aren't necessarily rallying around a particular song of the summer this year, as they have in the past. The big picture: If last summer boasted an abundance of refrains — "that's that me espresso," "they not like us," "good luck, babe" — this summer is all crickets, trends data suggests. Unless you're on TikTok. Zoom in: Even if there's not a song of this summer, there's certainly a sound. A 2024 ad from British budget airline went mega-viral on TikTok and has soundtracked at least 2.2 million videos on the platform. The jingle features singer Jess Glynne's 2015 song "Hold My Hand." Most videos using the audio depict something gone haywire: a flooded subway car, a log through a windshield — holidays straight from the Final Destination universe. Between the lines: The Trump administration was criticized for using that viral sound as part of its meme-heavy social media presence that has adopted a mocking tone toward undocumented immigrants. The White House and the Department of Homeland Security posted videos showcasing deportations and ICE raids, featuring footage of Homeland Security officers escorting handcuffed, detained people from a van and onto a plane — with the Jet2 commercial as the audio. If "song of the summer" is a numbers game, this year it's an open-and-shut case, with the title going to Alex Warren's "Ordinary," which just topped Billboard's Hot 100 chart for its ninth non-consecutive week. The other side: Some argue, however, that there are other, less quantifiable criteria that define a zeitgeist-dominating tune. Last year's "Brat Summer," for instance, infiltrated the lexicons of everyone from the former Vice President to the dictionary. In 2022, Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)" re-entered airwaves nearly 40 years after its release, thanks to a perfectly-deployed Netflix needle drop. There's the lasting cultural cache of a track like Megan Thee Stallion's "Hot Girl Summer," which brands referenced ceaselessly in 2019 and which the artist herself has capitalized on through brand deals years later. But Charli XCX's Brat never hit number one on the Billboard Hot 200, and neither "Running Up That Hill" nor "Hot Girl Summer" ever topped the Billboard Hot 100. The intrigue: People seem to be in agreement about the lack of a summer '25-defining track. The search query "no song of the summer" reached an all-time high in July and "what is the song of the summer" is being searched more than ever before, according to Jenny Lee, lead data analyst at Google Trends. "Justin Bieber" and "Sabrina Carpenter" are the top trending artists searched with "song of the summer" since June 20, however, with Carpenter's "Manchild" and Ravyn Lenae's 2024 track "Love Me Not" also generating interest. But "Jet2 summer" has both the meme DNA of Brat Summer and pulled-from-the-archive lore of Kate Bush.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Grammy-nominated Artist Cancels Tour After Clear Warning
Grammy-nominated singer JP Saxe warned fans that his tour was at risk of being canceled, but now he has confirmed that reality. On July 28, the singer, who became known for his hit song 'If the World Was Ending,' warned his fans that if he did not sell thousands more tickets to his tour in the next 48 hours, he was going to be forced to cancel the entire tour. "I'm extremely embarrassed to tell you this, but I'm going to tell you anyway," JP Saxe said in a video posted on Instagram on July 28. "If I don't sell 20-or-so thousand tickets to my tour in the next 48 hours, it's going to be canceled." The artist warned fans that if they were waiting until the last minute to buy tickets to his show, that strategy was not going to work because then there "wouldn't be a show to buy tickets to." "I hold on to a sliver of hope that I will see you in the Fall," he said in the video. Unfortunately for JP Saxe, he did not see the surge in ticket purchases he was hoping for. A few days after posting his initial video, JP Saxe took to social media once again to thank everyone who bought tickets to the tour, but he also shared the unfortunate news that it still was not enough to save the tour. 'Over the last few days, we sold a few thousand extra tickets and I am beyond grateful to every one of you who bought one,' Saxe said in the video. "Those few thousand tickets are a reminder that being transparent in failure sometimes can be more powerful than the facade of success," he continued. "They were a reminder of how wonderful it can be to ask for help and watch a community come together, and this really was the nicest the Internet has ever been to me. 'But what those tickets are not is enough to save this tour,' he said candidly. "I'm really sorry. I'm so sorry." The good news is that everyone who bought a ticket will get their money back. "Every ticket purchased will be fully refunded with a side of immense gratitude from a dorky ginger Canadian," he said. JP Saxe then vowed to make sure this doesn't happen again. "I'm still a little embarrassed. I'm also feeling a lot of ambition to make sure this never happens again, and just to make the most honest music I possibly can and the squad can grow and we can have these full rooms," he said. "Until then, I love you. And I'm grateful to each one of you who bought a ticket. "And I'm really sorry." Grammy-nominated Artist Cancels Tour After Clear Warning first appeared on Men's Journal on Aug 8, 2025 Solve the daily Crossword
