On a video call from his home in Los Angeles, Ozzy Osbourne is struggling to recall the exact details of recent years, ones he calls “the worst of my life”. “How many surgeries have I had?” he wonders aloud. “I’ve got more fucking metal in me than a scrap merchants.”
The trouble began in earnest in early 2019, when he was midway through what his wife and manager Sharon had firmly told him was his farewell tour. For one thing, both of them had been working constantly since their teens; for another, Ozzy had been diagnosed with a form of Parkinson’s disease, after years of insisting an intermittent numbness in one of his legs was the result of a drinking binge (or rather its aftermath, during which he says he didn’t move for two days). The tour was going well, but then he caught pneumonia, twice. “And then I had an infection. I’m still on antibiotics to be honest with you, I had a thing put in the vein in my arm to feed in IV shots of them.” Six years later, “I’ve still got it on – it comes out this week, with a bit of luck. Antibiotics knock the hell out of you.”
The European dates of the tour were postponed to give him time to recover. Then, in February 2019, “I went to the bathroom in the night, I didn’t put the light on. I thought I knew where the bed was. I was stupid, I dived and there weren’t a bed there. I landed straight on my face. I felt my neck go crunch. I went: ‘Sharon! Call an ambulance!’ She said, ‘Where the hell are you? Get into bed!’ I said: ‘Sharon, don’t ask questions.’ I thought I was going to be paralysed.”
The fall had “pushed out of whack” existing damage to his neck vertebrae from a 2003 quad bike accident. In intensive care, he was told that if he didn’t have an operation, he would be left paraplegic, but the operation itself was, Ozzy says, “the worst fucking surgery you can imagine. I should have got a second opinion, but you think surgeons know what the fuck they’re doing.”
Two metal plates were put in either side of his spine, but the screws became loose, creating bone fragments and lesions. “They haven’t figured out the damage, it’s so intricate,” Sharon says. Another surgeon was found, who slowly removed all the metal. “Five operations later, it just fucked his body. It was torturous for him: Parkinson’s and damage to his spine. It’s just been horrendous.”
Incredibly, Ozzy continued to work. He released two acclaimed albums, 2020’s Ordinary Man and 2022’s Patient Number 9; guested alongside Travis Scott on Post Malone’s multi-platinum single Take What You Want; and managed to make an appearance at the 2022 Commonwealth Games closing ceremony in Birmingham, performing Paranoid alongside his Black Sabbath bandmate Tony Iommi, with a bracket supporting his back. More incredible still, he says he did it all without the aid of pain medication. “Not anything,” Ozzy says. “And I could have gone ballistic on the medical cabinet. I’ve been on that road before – I used to take painkillers recreationally, they’re very addictive. I’d whack my arm with a fucking lump of wood to get a bottle of them. I mean, there’s so many bent doctors over here [in LA], and I was their best friend.”
Nevertheless, he says, he was horribly depressed after his surgery: at his lowest, he was in so much discomfort that he prayed to die in his sleep. “You wake up the next morning and find that something else has gone wrong. You begin to think this is never going to end. Sharon could see that I was in Doom Town, and she says to me, ‘I’ve got an idea.’ It was something to give me a reason to get up in the morning.” He laughs. “I thought: oh, fucking hell, she’s got an idea. Here we go.”
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Sharon’s idea was to stage a farewell show, for charity, in Ozzy’s home town of Birmingham, featuring not just a reformation of the original lineup of Black Sabbath, but a litany of artists they influenced. It says something about the respect the band are held in, about the sheer length of the shadow Sabbath cast over hard rock that, as Ozzy characteristically puts it, “everyone and their fucking mate started jumping on board”.
The lineup for the gig is genuinely extraordinary: Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Slayer, Pantera, Alice in Chains, Anthrax, Mastodon, Tool; members of Judas Priest, Limp Bizkit, Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Megadeth, Van Halen, Ghost and Faith No More. Moreover, the bill appears to be growing all the time: when I speak to Sharon, she informs me that Soundgarden and Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler are the latest additions. The show’s musical director, Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello, says, “There’s some pretty great surprises that are not posted anywhere.” It’s hard to argue with Morello’s assessment that the gig, called Back to the Beginning, might represent “the greatest day in the history of heavy metal”. Equally, it seems fraught with potential issues.
First of all, it involved reconvening the four original members of Black Sabbath. The quartet formed in 1968. It’s almost impossible to overstate the impact of the music they made between then and Ozzy Osbourne’s initial departure from the band in 1979: there’s a chance metal, grunge and the rest might have come into existence without their cocktail of sludgy downtuned riffs, overpowering volume and bleak lyrics delivered in Osbourne’s despairing wail – the sound, as Morello puts it, of “the no-hope working class driving a stake through the heart of the flower power generation” – but it’s very difficult to picture what it might have sounded like.
“The Beatles were my thing, they were everything to me,” Ozzy says when the subject of Sabbath’s influence comes up. “When I met Paul McCartney it was like seeing God. I was telling a guy about it one day. His kid was with him, and he said to me, ‘You know what you said to that guy about meeting Paul McCartney? That’s what I felt like when I met you.’ I was like, ‘You what?’ You never think about it.”
He describes the frequently turbulent relationship between the band’s four original members as “like a marriage: you have a row with the wife, but then you make up again”. Certainly, said marriage appears to have been going through a particularly rocky patch since the four last played together, 20 years ago. Ozzy says part of the appeal of a final reunion was the involvement of drummer Bill Ward, who had declined to take part in Black Sabbath’s last album, 2013’s 13, or the ensuing farewell tour. Depending on whose story you believe, Ward was either unfit to perform live, or unable to secure a proper contract: either way, a public slanging match ensued. Meanwhile, bassist Geezer Butler – who had been openly critical of what he calls “the politics behind the making” of 13 – says he “hadn’t spoken to Ozzy since the last Sabbath show in 2017, mainly because his wife and my wife had fallen out over God knows what”.
Sabbath’s enmities were apparently remedied with a series of phone calls and texts. Ward and Ozzy were already back in touch – the pair reconnected when Ozzy fell ill – while Ozzy thinks “religious” Aston Villa fan Butler might have been swayed by the fact the gig is taking place at Villa Park – “My first thought was: that’ll make Geezer fucking happier.”
Iommi says he was the member who took the most convincing. “I’m the one that said, ‘I don’t know if we should do it’, because we did a farewell tour and I didn’t want to get into that thing like all the other bands are doing, saying it’s the last tour and then reappearing again. But I’ve been convinced, because we’re doing it for a reason.” The gig will raise money for Parkinson’s and children’s charities: “No one’s getting paid or anything.”
But even with the other members of Sabbath on board, questions loomed – and still loom – over the state of Ozzy’s health. Certainly, none of the members of Black Sabbath seem to know what form their performance is going to take (“I think Ozzy might be on some kind of throne,” offers Iommi, “but I’m in the dark as much as anybody else”), and it’s hard to miss a certain trepidation on their part. “I’m already having palpitations,” says Butler. “In fact, I had a nightmare last night. I dreamed everything went wrong on stage and we all turned to dust. It’s important that we leave a great impression, since it’s the final time that people will experience us live. So it has to be great on the night.”
When I speak to Morello, he’s bullish: “Sharon and Ozzy were like, ‘You’re gonna have Black Sabbath’. And that felt good.” Others are less certain. The day I interview Ozzy, one artist on the bill, Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan, seems to cast doubt on the whole enterprise: “I’m cautious about saying, ‘Yeah, all in, he’s gonna do it.’ Because man, I don’t know what kind of modern miracles we’ll come up with to get him on stage to do the songs … I’m kinda preparing for the worst, but hoping for the best.”
Ozzy is at pains to point out that he isn’t going to be performing a full set. “We’re only playing a couple of songs each. I don’t want people thinking, ‘We’re getting ripped off’, because it’s just going to be … what’s the word? … a sample, you’re going to get a few songs each by Ozzy and Sabbath.”
He says he’s in training. “I do weights, bike riding, I’ve got a guy living at my house who’s working with me. It’s tough – I’ve been laid up for such a long time. I’ve been lying on my back doing nothing and the first thing to go is your strength. It’s like starting all over again. I’ve got a vocal coach coming round four days a week to keep my voice going. I have problems walking. I also get blood pressure issues, from blood clots on my legs. I’m used to doing two hours on stage, jumping and running around. I don’t think I’ll be doing much jumping or running around this time. I may be sitting down, but the point is I’ll be there, and I’ll do the best I can. So all I can do is turn up.”
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If it works, it will be a remarkable victory against the odds, and as every member of Black Sabbath points out, that would be entirely in keeping with their career. No one thought they were going to make it, not even Ward, who legendarily had the eureka moment that shaped the band: why not try to come up with a musical equivalent to the horror films that were packing them in at his local cinema? When Iommi followed through, debuting the song that gave the band their name at a rehearsal, Ward says his first reaction was that, “It scared the hell out of me, I absolutely loved it. Then I thought: oh well, we’ve completely fucked our career now.”
Even when their career took off, Ozzy points out, “I don’t think we ever had a good review. Maybe that was a catalyst in a way: every critic didn’t like us, so more of the people liked us. We were a people’s band: four guys from Aston, one of the poorest parts of Birmingham.” Growing up, “I used to have an old tyre and a stick, rolling it around the streets of Birmingham. We never had a car, never went on holiday, never saw the ocean until I was in my late teens. Couldn’t hold a job down – I’d get four weeks into a factory job and go, ‘Fuck it.’ But we just had a crack and it worked out.”
Whatever happens on 5 July, Sharon says it’s definitely the end. The rest of Black Sabbath seem to be immersed in projects – Ward says he has seven unreleased solo albums to put out, Butler is working on a novel, Iommi has recently helmed, of all things, a Black Sabbath-themed ballet and his own perfume – but, she insists that, for her and Ozzy, “it’s time to say ‘enough’. When you’ve given it your all, you can sit back and say: I did it.”
Hang on: are the Osbournes really going to repair to their home in Buckinghamshire and live a life of genteel retirement? “Yeah. Get some ponies and chickens, and a million dogs. I want to open a dog rescue centre and a horse rescue centre. Scream at the neighbours a couple of times. There you go.”
Ozzy concedes that he’s done, too. “I’d love to say ‘never say never’, but after the last six years or so … it is time. I lived on the road for 50-odd years, and I’ve kind of got used to not picking up my bags and getting on the bus again. I don’t smoke dope or do any of the rock star lifestyle any more. I’m kind of like a homebody. I never go out. I never hang out in bars – I don’t drink. So what the fuck is out there for me? I hate going shopping with my wife. I feel like stabbing myself in the neck after half an hour. But it’s time for me to spend some time with my grandkids, I don’t want to die in a hotel room somewhere. I want to spend the rest of my life with my family.”
• Back to the Beginning is at Villa Park, Birmingham, 5 July
