To really understand Ozzy Osbourne’s place in music, you had to have been at Villa Park on 5 July, the day he and Black Sabbath said their last goodbye to the stage. To the world at large, Ozzy might have been a caricature of the heavy metal frontman, but to his people he was much more than that: he was the embodiment of an entire form of music.
That’s why his retirement – just days before his death at 76 – was marked not by the metallic equivalent of the handing over of a carriage clock, but by an event that matched Live Aid in scale and execution: dozens of huge bands – Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Slayer, Tool and more, plus stars including Ronnie Wood and Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler – all come to play for just 20 minutes or so to acknowledge their debt to their founding father. Ozzy’s likeness seemed to dominate Birmingham: his name and face were everywhere. And the love for him when he took the stage was palpable, and overwhelming to both him and many of the 40,000 or so in the crowd.
That day, every band on stage performed an Ozzy or Sabbath song in tribute to the man, each one greeted like a greatest hit, until, as evening fell and the stage lights grew brighter, he took to the stage, on a shiny black throne. That it had to be his last ever show was clear: he was frail, sometimes seeming as if he wanted to pull himself upright but lacking the power to do so. When he began singing, during a set of solo material, it seemed an effort of will for him to get through the song, and sometimes he needed to be carried by the audience, who did so joyfully.
Ozzy seen on screen on his bat throne at the Villa Park gig (Photo: Sachin Ravikumar/Reuters)
After a short interval, he returned with Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward – collectively Black Sabbath – and for four songs, they reminded everyone present (plus millions watching on a livestream) of the magnitude of their achievement. They had invented an entire genre. And every subsequent strand of heavy metal paid due homage.
It was an unlikely culmination to an unlikely career. Ozzy shouldn’t really have become a rock star – it was no more suitable for him than his previous occupation of petty crime. He was not a songwriter – there are credits, but the songs he is best known for had lyrics written by others. He was no one’s idea of a polished performer, with his strange assortment of bunny hops and jumps. Nor was his voice the kind of ferocious foghorn metal bands prefer.
Osbourne sang in a blank, desolate howl that was entirely suited to the music Black Sabbath were playing, and the lyrics their bassist Geezer Butler was writing. He did not descend into a growl, or soar into a scream. His tone and timbre did not vary: the only things that changed were pitch and volume. No one was going to mistake him for Otis Redding.
Yet in a way, he was a soul singer, because with limited tools he could convey immense feeling. Admittedly, it was largely one feeling – desperation – but that was enough. On those 1970s Sabbath albums, there were times when he seemed to be encapsulating a dread so profound it was almost unbearable to speak of. On the title track of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, when he was at the very top of his range, singing that “dreams turn to nightmares”, he sounded like a man pursued by his worst fears.
It was as if when he sang, the clumsy shell that carried him was forgotten, and pure feeling emerged: not feelings many people would want to spend time in, but feelings everyone had suffered at some point or another.
Sabbath were widely ridiculed at the time, but they endured and left a legacy that a million critical darlings would kill for. At any given point in time since 1970 you’ve been able to find a score of different bands who owe their fundaments to Sabbath, in a way that isn’t still true of any other band.
Yes, there are always ballads that summon up the spirit of late Beatles, but no one tries to actually sound like The Beatles. There are always bands with a couple of Stonesy rockers, but they don’t actually try to sound like The Rolling Stones. But there have always been and always will be bands who try to sound like Black Sabbath. Entire sub-genres – doom metal, stoner metal – have been built around trying to sound like Black Sabbath.
Ozzy with band members Bill Ward, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler in 1973 (Photo: Michael Putland/Getty)
Ozzy was thrown out of Sabbath in 1978, because the drink and drugs had made him unreliable, though he protested he was no worse than anyone else in the band. Somehow, though, he turned that sometimes horrifying unpredictability into a new image. Where Sabbath exemplified one strain of metal – gloomy, doomy, crushingly intense and not terribly fussed with what pop fans thought – his solo career came to represent another: the primary-coloured, shock-and-awe silliness of the 80s hair-metal revival.
If Sabbath were heroes to a generation of musicians who wanted to pile on the misery, solo Ozzy was a figurehead to those who came to party: one tale of him on tour with Mötley Crüe opening had him sniffing a line of ants by a hotel swimming pool in the absence of any actual drugs.
Unusually for a veteran star, Ozzy (and his wife and manager Sharon) understood he could not stand still, and the decision to hire a young Los Angeleno called Randy Rhoads to play guitar transformed him. Rhoads brought shininess, showiness and a new melodic precision to Ozzy, and helped him establish his solo career, before being killed as a passenger in one of rock’s most idiotic plane crashes, when he agreed to go for a joyride while the tour bus aircon was fixed, with the bus driver at the controls. The driver-cum-pilot buzzed his own bus and hit it. Even at Villa Park, all these years later, there was still a long tribute to Rhoads, the man Ozzy credited with helping to save his career.
Ozzy Osbourne and his wife and longtime manager, Sharon Osbourne (Photo: Joe Klamar/AFP)
Ozzy’s excesses in the 80s – the biting heads off assorted winged beasts, urinating on the Alamo, the general sense of a man beyond normal expectations – might have killed his career a decade earlier, but each fresh outrage served only to promote him, blurring the lines between reality and the persona he adopted on albums such as Diary of a Madman and Bark at the Moon.
Not all the music from his solo career could stand against Sabbath, but once he achieved solo stardom, he never let go, and did anything to maintain it, including the TV show that made the rest of his family stars. Certainly, Sharon, the daughter of the legendarily tough artist manager Don Arden, revived Ozzy’s solo career, and the show suggested she was the power in the family, Ozzy moving through his life with befuddlement. But befuddlement doesn’t make you as rich and famous as Ozzy was, so who knows who the driver was.
Ozzy Osbourne lived his life the way he sang his songs: incapable of guile, and with the nakedness of his troubles unhidden. That’s why Villa Park was filled with tens of thousands of fans, and with generations of bands he had inspired. Heavy metal is a genre replete with lies: no one is really shouting at the devil. But in Ozzy Osbourne’s voice one heard truth – not certainty: Dylan brought ambiguity to rock, Ozzy brought puzzlement – the truth of a man who sounded as though he heard his audience’s fears and sang those terrors back to them.