A-list stars join Osbourne family as they lay rock icon Ozzy to rest in grounds of his beloved UK home
The Black Sabbath rock legend's wife Sharon broke down in tears yesterday as she read tributes as thousands of fans lined the streets of his hometown Birmingham for the coffin procession.
3
3
3
Sharon was supported by their children Jack, 39, Kelly, 40 and Aimee, 41, and Ozzy's son Louis, 50, on Wednesday, as they walked to a memorial carrying purple flowers.
He's being laid to rest today at the family's multi-million-pound mansion in Welders, Buckinghamshire.
It comes after pals said Sharon wanted to bury Ozzy in the garden.
Roads have been closed off and some A-list pals like Sir Elton John are not attending.
Ozzy died on Tuesday surrounded by his loved ones after a series of lengthy health battles.
A source told The Mirror: "It's a lovely house and Sharon wanted to bring him back from LA.
"I don't know if she will feel strong enough to have a big memorial for all the people who want to say goodbye to him.
"We think she may want to bury him privately at home, in the garden."
Earlier this month, the rocker played at Villa Park - reuniting with his bandmates on stage for the first time in 20 years.
Three years ago, Ozzy and wife Sharon were given the green light by the council to transform their historic Buckinghamshire home to include a new adjoining mega-extension solely for the Black Sabbath frontman.
The Sun previously revealled that the rehab wing is as huge as the historic Grade II-listed home.
Ozzy's heart would have broken seeing Sharon's tears
By Ellie Henman
TO the sound of the fantastic Bostin Brass Band, Ozzy's cortege passed slowly along Broad Street.
Along with the bursts of applause from the thousands of devoted fans who had lined up to say goodbye, the procession was everything Ozzy would have wanted.
This day was, as he had hoped, a celebration of his life and his legacy.
His heart however, I know, would have broken to see his wife Sharon, held up by her son Jack, breaking down in tears in front of the sea of flowers that had been laid for him at the Black Sabbath bridge.
Those close enough to Sharon shouted out to her and applauded in a small gesture of support.
Today was no doubt one of the most difficult days of Sharon's life.
My heart ached as I saw Jack, Aimee, Kelly and Louis standing shoulder to shoulder in the city their father made so proud.
Losing your husband, your father, is difficult enough. Sharing that grief, although they wanted to, would have been incredibly hard.
This afternoon's procession was the first of two fitting farewells to the Prince of Darkness who would have no doubt made a joke about all the fuss.
As Ozzy himself said, there was no such thing as death for him.
'I will retire when I hear the nail go in the box and then I will do an encore,' he joked last year.
'I am the Prince of Darkness.'
Tomorrow Sharon, their children, and Ozzy's closest friends will gather at a church in Gerrards Cross to say their final goodbyes to the pioneer of heavy metal music.
Ozzy, I have been told, will then be laid to rest in the family's Buckinghamshire home where he made so many happy memories.
The pain of his loss will never go away for those closest to him and for the fans who held him up as an icon.
But with his music, Ozzy's legacy will continue to inspire and delight generations to come.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BBC News
20 minutes ago
- BBC News
Bradford Arts Centre £7.5m rebuild project enters final stages
A £7.5m "transformation" of a former post office into what will be known as the Bradford Arts Centre is reaching its final stages. Builders began the refurbishment scheme of the Kala Sangam Arts Centre in St Peter's House, Little Germany, in January 2024. Bradford Arts Centre was due be finished in the summer, but delays mean the five-storey facility will now reopen in October. The renamed venue will include a 170-seat theatre, five dance studios and improved accessibility as a result of two new lifts being installed. St Peter's House, which is Grade II listed, was built in the 1880s as the city's General Post was also home to a museum before Kala Sangam, a South Asian community arts centre, moved in during 2007. Alex Croft, the centre's chief executive officer, said: "Frustratingly, we are going to open a couple of weeks later than we should have done."In the grand scheme of a build that we've been building for over 18 months we're pretty good."He added: "Only being a couple of weeks after where we wanted to be means we haven't had to lose anything from our performance programme."Kalan Sangam was originally founded in 1993 in Leeds as an arts venue accessible to "people of all ages and abilities".It moved to Bradford in 1997 and was set up in the Carlisle Business Centre before moving to its current Croft said the decision to change the centre's name was made after a year of consultations with more than 30 arts groups across the district. "This whole project has been about opening up access to the building," he said. "The name Bradford Arts Centre does what it says on the tin - it tells people who we are."He added: "The word we use to describe this project is transformational - Bradford deserves this building, it deserves this space." Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
The Guardian
22 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Lust and anger drive the Bonnie Blue saga, but moral outrage misses the point: this is hardcore economics
Bonnie Blue has sex with men on camera for money. Lots of men one after the other, to be precise, for lots and lots of money: the commercial niche she invented to distinguish herself from countless other amateur porn stars jostling desperately for attention on OnlyFans was inviting 'barely legal' ordinary teenage boys (which in porn means 18-plus) to have sex with her on film, and flogging the results to paying subscribers for a fortune. Unusually, her model involves a woman making millions out of men generating content for free, which makes it slightly harder than usual to work out exactly who is exploiting whom if she turns up (as she did in Nottingham) at a university freshers' week with a sign saying 'bonk me and let me film it'. But debating whether getting rich this way makes Bonnie personally 'empowered' seems tired and pointless. It was with this old pseudo-feminist chestnut that Channel 4 justified last week's ratings-chasing documentary on her attempt to sleep with 1,000 men in 12 hours, a film that finally brought her into the cultural mainstream. There's more to this story than sex, gender politics or Bonnie herself, and whatever is driving her (which she swears isn't past trauma, 'daddy issues' over a biological father she never knew, or anything else you're thinking: though she does say maybe her brain works differently from other people's, given her curious ability to switch off her emotions). It's at heart a story about money, the merging of the oldest trade in the world with a newer attention economy inexorably geared towards rewarding extremes, and what that does to the society that unwittingly produced it. As her now-estranged husband explained admiringly to camera, though OnlyFans performers often invite a man to imagine he's doing whatever he wants to them, that's an illusion: really they're out of reach. But Bonnie (real name Tia Billinger) isn't. She actively encourages her fans to come and do it to her for real. She is the parasocial relationship – that strange confusion created when you think you know someone because you've seen so much of their life unfold on your phone screen, though in reality they're a stranger – taken to its fantasy conclusion: a stalker's dream made flesh. Like what you see? Then just reach through the screen and grab it. Bonnie/Tia comes across essentially as a female Andrew Tate, telling teenage or otherwise vulnerable audiences that they have a right to sex – in one video urging men not to feel guilty about taking part in her stunts, she says it's only what they were 'owed', the language of the incel forum – and that it's hot to be slapped around or degraded; but, unlike Tate, with the apparent authority of actually being a woman herself. Channel 4 filmed the men queueing up to join her 1,000-men stunt mostly as a line of mute, anonymous shuffling feet. But we already know that watching near-ubiquitous porn online has changed the way younger generations have sex. What does being invited into the picture do? No wonder Ofcom is taking an interest, while the children's commissioner for England, Rachel de Souza, warns against TV normalising things that – as she put it – teenagers find 'frightening, confusing and damaging to their relationships'. Ironically, the biggest short-term beneficiary of such a storm may be Bonnie/Tia herself, already a dab hand at posting rage-bait videos expertly calibrated to provoke women who already can't stand her (and are willing to explain why at length to their own followers on their own social media channels). Being hated is great for business, she explains chirpily: the more women publicly denounce her, the more their sons and husbands will Google her. Her real skill is in monetising both lust and rage, crossing the internet's two most powerful streams to capture its most lucrative currency: attention. 'She's a marketing genius,' her female publicist tells Channel 4, laughing as the team discuss how best to commercially exploit footage of an appalled mother trying to retrieve her son from one of Bonnie/Tia's filmed orgies. OnlyFans performers can't advertise as a normal business would, so they promote themselves by seeding clips across social media, ideally of them doing something wild enough to go viral: since people get bored easily, the pressure is always on to keep getting wilder and wilder, pushing way past whatever you thought were your limits. That has long been the trajectory of porn stars' careers, of course. But it's also recognisably now true of so much contemporary culture, from fully clothed influencers to reality TV shows forced to introduce ever more cruel plot twists to stop the formula getting stale (this year's Love Island has noticeably morphed from dating show into a kind of brutal sexual Hunger Games), and arguably even broadcasters such as Channel 4 fighting desperately for audience share in a world of almost infinite competition for eyeballs. When I finish watching 1000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story on catchup, the channel's algorithm perkily suggests an episode of Sex Actually with Alice Levine. Like the sexy stuff? Want more? Please don't leave me for YouTube! As with Tate, if Bonnie was somehow shut down there would be another one along soon enough. She's a feature, not a bug, the inevitable product of an economy relentlessly geared to giving an audience what it most reliably pays for – to feel angry or horny, or both at once – and then endlessly pushing its luck. But society does still have some limits to impose on what is in the end just another business model. Her current nemesis is Visa, which processes OnlyFans payments and which she says declined to be associated with her 1,000-man marathon, leading to her being banned from uploading it and cashing in. (Legislators have long regarded mainstream financial services companies on whom porn sites rely to rake in their profits as the crack in their armour, more susceptible to public opinion and regulatory pressure.) Meanwhile, a new taskforce on pornography headed by the Tory peer Gabby Bertin, who formerly worked for David Cameron in Downing Street, is arguing for a ban on content likely to encourage child sexual abuse – which Bertin argues could encompass 'barely legal' material or (as Bonnie has also experimented with doing, as her options narrowed) casting grown porn actors as schoolgirls. Like Labour's battle against Page 3 girls in the 1990s, which in retrospect seems an astonishingly innocent era, if ministers want to pick this fight with porn it will be brutal. But doing nothing might, in the end, be more so. Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
BBC News
22 minutes ago
- BBC News
London grief rave helps mourners celebrate loved ones
It looks like a rave. It sounds like a rave. And it is a rave. But everyone here has one thing in common - they have all lost a loved the Southbank Centre in London on Sunday, people gathered for what is being called a "grief rave" – an event that combines music, movement and memory to help people process Blackwood attended in honour of her mother, who died almost four years ago."I grew up watching my mum dance in the kitchen when she was cooking Sunday roast," she said. "When I heard on the radio, there was this grief rave. What better way to represent my mum and celebrate her life." The grief rave was founded more than three years ago by Annie Frost Nicholson and Carlie Attridge."I lost a friend few years ago," said Ms Attridge, who also founded The Loss Project, an organisation supporting people through grief."She was an old-school nineties raver, and I remember her every year by dancing to her favourite rave tune."She said they wanted to "create a space where people can express their own individual grief, but collectively join in and dance together"."It kind of creates a sense of joy and hope," Ms Attridge added. One feature of the event is the Fandango Discoteca, a small soundproof pod where visitors can be alone, choose a song that reminds them of someone they have lost, and grieve however they Spearing lost her twin sister Charli more than a decade ago. She said spaces like this helped her keep her sister's memory alive."I would say it's taken me 10 years to find out who I am without being part of a pair, she told BBC London."So our relationship was very much like Batman and Robin. She was Batman and I was Robin." "The person that dies, they don't leave us. Their story doesn't end when they die. We keep writing their stories," Ms Spearing added."And so by bringing your person and listening to their music again. Just allowing that little seed of who they are to just grow and influence the people around you. "I think that's what this space allows as well. It's about celebrating that person."
