Goodbye Ozzy Osbourne, the innately likeable Prince Of Darkness

With that event, did one detect an almost biblical theme? Here was Birmingham’s ­prodigal son, the West Midlands ‘Prince of Darkness’, returning to say a final goodbye to his fans in the city that made him: “I couldn’t have done my final show anywhere else,” he said. “I had to go back to the beginning.”

If Osbourne was the second city’s homecoming king, rock’n’roll (heavy metal division) was his undisputed ­fiefdom. Back To The Beginning, featuring the original 1968 Black Sabbath line-up – singer Osbourne; ­guitarist Tommi Iommi; bassist Geezer Butler; drummer Bill Ward – sold out the 40,000-capacity stadium in minutes, with live-streaming added for a wider global audience. The globally acclaimed all-day event was lauded before it even began for having “the greatest heavy metal line-up ever”, including Metallica, Slayer, Alice In Chains, Anthrax, Pantera and also featuring members of Guns N’ Roses and Rage Against the Machine.

In Birmingham, the show was reported to have boosted the local economy, Taylor Swift-style. Murals were painted on walls and there were Ozzy-themed exhibitions and art shows. The Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Black Sabbath: The Ballet, which first premiered in 2023, returned. A commemorative Lego Black Sabbath was put on display at the Legoland Discovery Centre.

It bears noting that this wasn’t Ozzy’s first “final show”. Reprising the biblical theme, Osbourne was a veritable comeback Lazarus – rising again with lucrative regularity, over a decade-spanning trajectory in which he’d sold hundreds of millions of records. His wife Sharon – the former judge on The X Factor and mother to his children Aimee, Kelly and Jack – is credited with masterminding his lengthy career, including the early-2000s TV reality show, The Osbournes, which got the family labelled: “The Munsters Of Rock”.

Sadly, this time, the final-ever show proved to be for real.

Osbourne had long been suffering from poor health. Along with myriad injuries and ailments, Parkinson’s disease meant that by the time of the event he walked with difficulty, often using a cane. Last year, when he was inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall Of Fame for the second time as a solo artist – Black Sabbath was inducted in 2006 – Osbourne did so sitting on a black throne encrusted with skulls. He used the same throne onstage for Back To the Beginning.

This masterful final act – 40,000 double-denim-ed bums on seats; rock royalty happy to serve as support acts – wouldn’t have happened for just anyone.

Ozzy and Black Sabbath were a bona-fide twin-headed global cultural phenomenon: four youths from the wrong side of the tracks, first creating heavy metal then transcending it. All these years on, ­classic Sabbath songs such as ‘Paranoid,’ ‘Iron Man’ and ‘Into the Void’ can still strip the enamel right off your teeth.

Then there was Osbourne’s parallel “career” as rock’n’roll’s most indefatigable wildling, a one-man Spinal Tap (he was sacked by Black Sabbath in 1979). Drugs, sex, arrests, outrages, notoriously biting the head off a bat onstage in Iowa in 1982 – what didn’t he do? Osbourne even managed to shock Mötley Crüe by snorting a line of ants. In 1989, he attempted to strangle Sharon while high on hallucinogens.

In a later era, Ozzy might have been cancelled. Instead the goodwill towards him was always remarkable. He possessed an innate likability that seemed largely due to his self-deprecating, quintessentially Midlands humour – highlighted in the TV reality show The Osbournes – still intact after ­living in the US for decades.

When I interviewed Osbourne in 2007, far from the shambling cartoon of rock’n’roll legend, he was clever, charming, dry-witted and totally at ease with rubbishing his own myth. As he told it, the well-publicised Black Sabbath devil worship sounded more like Carry On Satanism: “We thought it was like a Dennis Wheatley book, or something.” The ‘Prince of Darkness’ reputation? “It’s better than being called an asshole.” How long did his adolescence last? “It will be over around 2083, I think.”

Here, then, were some of the essential paradoxes of Ozzy Osbourne. He did not return to Birmingham as the prodigal son, rather as one of the city’s prime cultural exports, alongside musicians such as Fleetwood Mac’s late Christine McVie and UB40 and the TV juggernaut, Peaky Blinders. He lived in the US for decades but wherever he went, he didn’t just bring the darkness and the chaos, in so many ways (culturally, psychologically) he also brought the Midlands: that unique, down-to-earth take on rock’n’roll.

As much as Back To The Beginning was framed as a homecoming, marking the return of a legend, in all the important ways, Ozzy Osbourne – the West Midlands’ very own black beating heart – never really went away.

An earlier version of this piece ran in The Observer print edition on Sunday 6th July. It has since been updated.

Photograph by Mick Hutson/Redferns