(Credits: Far Out / Warner Records INC / Alamy)
Sat 22 November 2025 3:00, UK
Our Prince of Darkness, Ozzy Osbourne, can be remembered for many things, but all of them are symbols of a hellish life well-lived.
At the helm of Black Sabbath, he birthed heavy metal, spearheading a genre of black-clad doom. In the face of sunshine hippie idealism, Osbourne found solace in the darkness and curious oddities of the underworld. Black Sabbath, then, soundtracked a counter to blinded optimism.
As a frontman, he introduced a new level of bizarre and, in the midst of provocative stage antics and harrowing lyricism, Osbourne always found a new boundary to be demolished. Even later, as the effects of drug use and alcoholism began to take its toll and Osbourne reluctantly transitioned from his customary chaos into a relatively calmer life, the inklings of the true madman never disappeared. At once polarised and demonised, all of it was trivial to Osbourne: he lived his life on his own hedonistic terms.
In spite of everyone’s expectations, Osbourne persisted with a comical outlook, almost as though he couldn’t help but laugh at the wild turns the universe had taken him on. By the late 1970s, however, Osbourne found himself at odds with his Sabbath bandmates. After he abruptly left the band, a brief solo stint followed before he had a change of heart. Rejoining Sabbath on shaky ground, Osbourne joined in writing and recording what would become the last album with the band’s original lineup, 1978’s Never Say Die!. The album was produced during a mutually strife time for Sabbath, with each member enduring the repercussions of drug use.
Still, Sabbath persisted, preparing to tour in support of Never Say Die! with support from a rising California band, Van Halen.
(Credits: Far Out / Black Sabbath)
Being Van Halen’s first tour, an initiation from the kings of heavy metal was an intimidating welcome. But they quickly earned Sabbath’s respect, thanks to the incredibly virtuous Eddie Van Halen. At the first gig, Osbourne arrived as Eddie performed his now-legendary guitar solo, ‘Eruption’. As Osbourne’s friend Don Airey recalls, “Ozzy said, ‘We just went into the dressing room. We sat there going, That was incredible… and then it finished, and we were just too stunned to speak.”
Later, Osborne declared to Circus magazine, “Van Halen are so good they ought to be headlining the tour.”
While Osbourne showed displays of kindness, he also couldn’t help his mischievous side from showing, more often than not. On one occasion, he left quite the impact on Van Halen’s frontman, David Lee Roth, one that Eddie would later share with his son, Wolfgang Van Halen. Speaking on The Cody Tucker Show, Wolfgang retells one of his father’s distinct memories of Osbourne. “I don’t even know if anybody knows this story but…my dad told me this story. I think it was after one Sabbath show, where Van Halen had opened and they were all at a bar,” Wolfgang recounts.
“Roth was blasting disco and it was bothering everybody else in the bar, and so while he was at the bar or something, basically, Ozzy had come up behind him and started cutting his hair without him realising,” he continues with a laugh. “I had known that story forever and I asked Ozzy if that was true, and he started laughing his a** off. He was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I did that.’”
This was one of many instances in which Osbourne and Roth challenged each other’s wild streaks while touring together. For instance, their infamous cocaine battle resulted in Roth going unconscious and Osbourne going missing, presumed dead until he turned up at a hotel, disoriented.
Perpetually shocking, Osbourne seemed to always have a trick or two up his sleeve to the wonderment of his most formidable opponents in chaos, one of the endless reasons why he remains a symbol of rock ‘n’ roll’s most decadent era.
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