Latest news with #JohnOsbourne
CBC
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Rock trailblazer Ozzy Osbourne dead at 76
John Michael 'Ozzy' Osbourne, the lead singer of Black Sabbath, has died at 76, his family confirmed Tuesday. Alan Cross, host of the Ongoing History of New Music podcast, says he will be remembered as 'one of the most influential musicians of all time.'
Telegraph
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Biting the bat, urinating on the Alamo: 10 wild Ozzy Osbourne stories
The final performance of Black Sabbath, at the Back To The Beginning concert at Villa Park on Saturday, is notable in two ways. Not only will it see the end of one of Britain's most influential bands, but with the retirement of singer John 'Ozzy' Osbourne, the world of rock 'n' roll will lose one of its genuine top-tier wild men. Likely, you'll be familiar with the phrase 'they don't make 'em like they used to'. Well, in this case, they really don't. It is worth noting I think, that stories of personal excess by people who seem at liberty to do whatever they want, and to get away with it, are usually a lot more fun for the people hearing about them than they are for those partaking in them. Certainly, some of the scrapes featured here seem squalid even at a distance of years and miles. Others, though, contain the right ingredients, in exactly the right measurements, for the creation of rock star folklore. Strap yourselves in, then, and place your hands inside the cars, for a ride on the rollercoaster of rock 'n' roll excess. 10. He went to jail before anyone had even heard his name At age 17, Ozzy Osbourne was sent to prison for being a burglar. With a finesse that was somewhat below the level of master thief, he stole a telly that was too heavy to carry and blagged an armful of clothes that were designed for babies. For his troubles, the young miscreant was sentenced to three months in Winston Green prison after his dad refused to pay the court fine (he ended up serving six weeks). 'I tried a bit of burglary,' he later said, 'but I was useless.' But Ozzy did find a measure of gainful employment in his teenage years. The job at which he was best, and at which he lasted the longest, was in an abattoir at which he was promoted to the role of killing cows and pigs. As you will see, this might explain rather a lot.... 9. He tossed a TV out of a hotel room window… and might have killed someone Following a concert at the Stadion Strahof, in Prague in 2002, Ozzy Osbourne realised that he was missing one vital accomplishment from the rock star playbook: he'd never thrown a television set out of a hotel room window. Perhaps fearing that the ghost of Keith Moon might be laughing at him, in order to right this flagrant oversight, the singer undertook the apparently tricky task of freeing the telly from its moorings in his room at the Four Seasons before seeing if it could fly. Spoiler warning: it could not. As he later told the Daily Star, 'I ripped the television off the wall, [guitarist] Zakk [Wylde] picked it up and threw it out of the f------ window. It landed on the floor and f------ exploded. It went like a bomb.' All good clean fun, though, no? All pretty routine stuff? Well, not exactly. As the singer added, 'Little did I know that there was a guy smoking [outside] and I shudder to think if that had hit him. I would have killed him stone dead.' 8. He bit the head off a bat Given that it's the chomp that was heard around the world, in all likelihood, you probably already know this one. What is less widely appreciated, though, is that when 17-year-old Mark Neal threw a dead bat onstage at a concert at the Veteran's Memorial Auditorium, in Des Moines in 1982, Ozzy believed he was biting the head off a toy rather than a real animal. After the show, the singer was taken to the nearby Broadlawns Medical Center for a series of painful rabies shots. Pam Culver, the nursing supervisor on duty that night, later told the Des Moines Register that 'for a week… probably 50 percent of my job [was] fielding calls from England and Canada and all over the United States [from] people who wanted to know how much did it cost to do that [treat the patient], and did it hurt, and how many shots did he have to have, and what part of his body did we have to attack?' For his part, Ozzy later said that 'the name of the town Des Moines is embossed in my head'. 7. He also decapitated a dove On the day of the release of the US edition of his debut solo album, Blizzard Of Ozz, on March 27, 1981, Ozzy Osbourne decided to forego a formal introduction to the suits and record executives attending a CBS sales conference in Los Angeles. Instead, in an experience they wouldn't soon forget, he bit the head off a dove. Contrary to contemporaneous reports, though, in what might just be a mitigating factor, it was later revealed that the singer had decapitated a bird that was already dead. Speaking to the Sounds journalist Garry Bushell three months after the outrage, he put the record straight. 'I wanted to make a real impression,' he said (which likely he did). 'The scam is the bird was dead. We were planning to release it there, but it died beforehand. So rather than waste it I bit its head off. You should have seen their faces. They all went white. They were speechless. That girl in the pictures was screaming. Eventually a bloke came up and said, 'You'd better go'.' The dead bird, he added, tasted like 'tomato sauce'. Despite his paymasters claiming he would never record for the label again, CBS (through the Epic label) continued to release Ozzy's albums long into the future. 6. Come to think of it, no animal is safe around Ozzy Osbourne. Buckle up; it gets worse. For reasons known only to themselves, at one point, the Osbournes owned 17 cats. Not just this, but for reasons known only to herself, Sharon Osbourne decided it was a good idea to leave her husband alone with them. Ozzy takes up the tale. 'I was taking drugs so much I was a f----up,' he said. 'The final straw came when I shot all our cats. We had about 17, and I went crazy and shot them all. My wife found me under the piano in a white suit, a shotgun in one hand and a knife in the other.' Despite changing many of his wicked ways, the singer's animus for all creatures great and small remains present and correct. In 2021, in an interview with the Scotsman, Osbourne admitted to shooting at animals that wandered into the garden of his Los Angeles mansion during lockdown. He described the pastime as being 'good fun'. 5. Now we mention it, human beings ought to take care, too In a trespass for which he has been entirely forgiven – for some reason – in 1989, Ozzy attempted to murder Sharon Osbourne at their home in rural Buckinghamshire. He would later describe the mayhem as 'being the calmest I ever felt in my life. It was like serenity. Everything was just peaceful.' For her part, in the documentary Biography: The Nine Lives Of Ozzy Osbourne, Sharon recalled having 'no idea who sat across from me on the sofa, but it wasn't my husband. He gets to the stage where he gets this look in his eyes where his shutters are down and I couldn't get through to him.' Notwithstanding a sense of complete calm, afterwards, Ozzy claimed to have little memory of the incident. 'All I remember is waking up in Amersham jail,' he said. 'I asked the cop, 'Why am I here?' and he says, 'You want me to read your charge?' So he read, 'John Michael Osbourne, you have been arrested for the attempted murder of Sharon Osbourne'.' The case was later dropped after Sharon declined to press charges. 4. Striking Bill Ward in the unmentionables In Los Angeles, in 1972, Black Sabbath's appetite for cocaine had become sufficiently all-consuming that they considered bestowing the title Snowblind on the album on which they were working. This being said, quite how hard they were working on the LP remains a moot point. Certainly, they had time to partake in some 'fun and games' at the expense of drummer Bill Ward. Speaking to Rolling Stone, Ozzy recalled: 'I see this aerosol can and squirt his dick with it. He starts screaming and falls down. I look at the can and it says, 'Warning: do not spray on skin – highly toxic'. I poisoned Bill through his d---.' In what could be a sign that Osbourne's memory is not exactly up to code, in his autobiography, from 2010, the incident was recalled rather differently. In it, Ozzy writes, 'One day, Tony gets this can of blue spray paint and sneaks around the other side of the railing [and sprays Bill's] d--- with it. You should have heard him scream, man. It was priceless. But then, two seconds later, Bill blacks out, falls headfirst over the railing and starts rolling down the hillside.' 3. Shark attack Despite its scant details, this story is just too good-slash-bad to leave out. When out on the promotional trail for his autobiography Iron Man: My Journey Through Heaven & Hell With Black Sabbath, guitarist Tony Iommi recounted yet another incredible story of Ozzy Osbourne mistreating one of God's creatures. Speaking to the Daily Star, he said: 'With drugs you always get bored, so you must do something to one another. Like Ozzy hauling a shark through a window, dismembering it and soaking our room in blood.' Alas, this is all we have for this one. Incredibly, the journalist who wrote the story appears not to have thought to ask Iommi to elaborate. 2. He gave drugs to a vicar Shortly after moving to the English countryside, Ozzy Osbourne had one important instruction for his first wife, Thelma. 'Don't let anyone eat this fucking cake,' he told her. 'It will be bad.' And it was. Along with sugar, flour and eggs, the sweet treat contained a sizeable amount of Afghan hashish. A few days later, after returning from – where else? – the pub, the singer noted with alarm that his commandment had been broken in the worst way imaginable. 'I did a double-take because the vicar was in our house, having a cup of tea in the kitchen with a piece of this cake,' he recalled in an interview with GQ. 'I haven't got a driving license, but he was slumped in my kitchen, so I had to drag him out by his hair, push in the back of his, drive him to his door and then walk home.' The man of the cloth wasn't seen in his parish for the next two weeks. Ozzy continued: 'Then I saw him in a pub on a Sunday morning and he said, 'I must have caught such a dreadful flu at yours. I hallucinated for three days and had to miss church.'' 1. He urinated on the Alamo Not only did Ozzy Osbourne urinate at the site of the Alamo, but he did so in the middle of the day while heavily drunk. There's more. After soaking his own clothes by falling into a canal at the sharp end of an all-night drinking binge, he was also wearing a selection of his wife's clothes, including a pair of bloomers. In his rip-roaring book Can't Stand Up For Falling Down, the British journalist Allan Jones, who witnessed the scene, recalled 'looking around to see a man and a woman, the latter with her hands to her mouth, while her husband… looks like he's on the way to having a seizure of some kind'. Apprehended by a State Trooper, Ozzy's question as to what all the fuss was about was answered with the words, 'Mister, when you piss on the Alamo, you piss on the state of Texas – that's what all the fuss is about'. Incredibly, after Sharon Osbourne pointed out that the 15,000 people who had bought tickets for that night's gig at the nearby Hemisfair Arena might react badly to a sudden cancellation, the singer was released from jail before darkness fell. Decades later, speaking with his father on the History Channel, Jack Osbourne correctly noted, 'Dad, you literally pissed your way into American history books. Apparently, when people visit the Alamo, they ask more questions about you than they do about Davy Crockett.'
