(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Tue 28 October 2025 12:00, UK
If there’s one word which pretty much sums up the life and times of Ozzy Osbourne in a nutshell, it would be wild. That’s how you know, when he described one tour as the wildest experience he’s ever had, that it was truly off the scale.
Between infamously biting the head off a bat while on stage to accidentally drugging a vicar, the Prince of Darkness didn’t get his name for nothing. In some ways, it seemed like every moment of his career was fuelled by some sort of bizarre escapade, aptly summed up in the ‘Crazy Train’ that he called both his life and his job. It was never in Osbourne’s nature to pull on the emergency brakes, but there was one unparalleled band that made him come close.
As heavy metal protégés to Osbourne’s 1970s blueprint with Black Sabbath, when Mötley Crüe formed as the second coming of the genre at the dawn of the ‘80s, they evidently felt they had a lot to live up to. Clearly not ones to back down from a challenge, they took that mantra to the extreme, making more than a notorious name for themselves as the ultimate hedonists of the scene. The trouble was, in the process, they almost pushed their hero to the absolute breaking point.
The California band won the prized spot as Osbourne’s support act on his Bark at the Moon tour in 1984, an event which massively helped to propel their career into the heavy metal spotlight. But the fact that anyone involved even has a memory of this is frankly nothing short of a miracle, given how close they all came to the edge of something unspeakable. Yet by some random stroke of good luck, they did all survive to tell the tale – and, even better than that, they still managed to remain friends.
By 2010, and the umpteenth iteration of Ozzfest, they had all kissed and made up when Mötley Crüe were invited to perform at the Prince of Darkness’s festival. But the memories of their first rodeo evidently still haunted him. When asked if the antics of the ‘80s would make a resurgence, Osbourne flatly replied: “No. I’m going to do my gig and fuck off home. That tour was the wildest tour I was ever on. I remember saying to [then Crüe manager] Doc McGhee, ‘I think one of us is going to die on this tour.’ [Mötley Crüe] were bad news; they were out of control. I was with Nikki Sixx a couple of days ago and he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t get stoned any more. We’re all different guys now.”
That was probably just as well, because it’s fair to say that none of them would have survived if they had carried on that same trajectory. While you would hardly consider them wizened souls, they were certainly reformed rockers – not without their spirits dulled, but at least with their various degrees of wildness turned down a notch or two as they sailed into the twilight of their careers. Sometimes the boring option is the sensible one.
The true craziness of the Bark at the Moon tour should probably just be left to the imagination, because it’s certain that whatever our worst visions are, it was probably still a hell of a lot darker than that. Making it out the other side was not only an applaudable feat but also the mark of both Mötley Crüe – they were truly like the cats with nine lives, never to be outdone and never to bow out before it was time for the real curtain call.
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