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Sun 27 September 2026 14:00, UK
Ozzy Osbourne never wanted to forget about his roots whenever he took to the stage.
The entire point of his music was to look larger than life and to show everyone that he was the almighty ‘Prince of Darkness’, but underneath all of those spotlights and stage makeup was a guy who simply loved rock and roll music and was more than happy to play it for anyone who would hear him. Even if he had a few moments where he faltered throughout his career, he knew he could count on his own rock and roll gods to keep him grounded every time he made a new record.
When Osbourne first started making records, though, he wasn’t the kind to make devilish music on principle. He was one of the biggest names in heavy rock and had idolised people like Led Zeppelin when he heard them for the first time, but there was a large chunk of his discography that was devoted to The Beatles from the moment that he first heard ‘She Loves You’ on the radio.
A lot of his career was about chasing after the same kind of tunes that the Fab Four were writing, but Black Sabbath took that hippie mentality and flipped it on its head. They were showing everyone that the idealism that everyone was talking about wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and while Osbourne did wish peace on everyone that came to see his shows, some of the biggest names in hard rock were offering up a different kind of ride.
Cream had already laid the groundwork for someone playing the heaviest notes possible, but Osbourne was more interested in what the raucous side of rock could do. Punk hadn’t started to rear its head by the time that Sabbath was coming out, but if the MC5 were the progenitors of the genre in America, Lemmy was the foundation of what English punk would become when he first formed Motörhead.
The bass-playing maestro was already one of the biggest background characters of rock and roll after roadie-ing for Jimi Hendrix and working on records by Hawkwind, but Osbourne saw more in Lemmy than just another singer. He was a guy who never forgot where he came from, and even when working with him years after the fact, Osbourne felt that Lemmy was the perfect snapshot of what a traditional rock star was supposed to be.
He didn’t suffer fools gladly, and that’s what ‘The Prince of Darkness’ liked so much about him, saying, “My rock god is Lemmy Kilmister. Lemmy was a guy; he shot from the hip every time. ‘That sucks’, or ‘I like that’. I’m good at starting lyrics, but I can’t finish them. And…he’d write a bunch of lyrics for my songs, ‘Mama, I’m Coming Home’. He was amazing! You look at people like Lemmy, and you think, ‘Oh, he’s a yob [a rude, noisy, and aggressive young person]’. But he was very well-educated.”
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And that’s the kind of nuance that you want out of your greatest rock and roll stars. Anyone can look at their favourite musicians and only hope to one day be able to live the drug-addled lifestyle as they did, but Lemmy had his head screwed on. He liked to have a drink or two or ten, but he also knew when the party was over and when to be more responsible about parts of his life, especially when he reconnected with his son later on in life.
So many other artists would prefer to live the life of a rock and roll pirate, but Osbourne’s interest in family is something that came from watching people like Lemmy. The bassist never settled down or had a proper family to call his own, but being able to let his guard down and be authentic is half the reason why the Sabbath frontman was able to do the same thing when it came to opening up about his home life. Because if Lemmy could get away with it and look cool, there was no reason to shy away from it.
