(Credits: Far Out / Daniel Zappe)
Sat 17 January 2026 17:02, UK
It’s hard to think of anyone who could go out of their way to say they hated Ozzy Osbourne towards the end of his life.
There are many times when he was treated like one of the worst musicians that anyone could have ever seen in their children’s record collection, but looking at the final years of his life, he was one of the few artists who seemed glad to have made it to old age and been revealed to be one of the more lovable characters in hard rock. But that’s not to say that ‘The Prince of Darkness’ exactly hit it off with every single person he came in contact with or anything.
If you were to listen to any of the stories from his touring days, there’s hardly anyone who has many bad stories to say about the former Black Sabbath frontman. The list of grievances that many people have had with Sharon Osbourne might pile up a lot higher, but the fact that Osbourne never really had that much of an issue with many of the bands that he took out was a testament to the kind of person he was. He simply wanted to play rock and roll, and the rest of the world was more than happy to let him.
That’s not to say that everyone treated him right in the Sabbath camp. He was already facing an uphill battle before he joined when Tony Iommi suggested they get someone else, but even when the magic was undeniable, the fact that they were being robbed blind by their managers certainly wasn’t going to make for the best business meetings in between albums like Sabotage and Technical Ecstasy.
And to add insult to injury, it probably didn’t help that the band’s opening acts were getting more and more over-the-top. Most of Sabbath’s greatest performances usually let the music do the talking as Osbourne howls like a madman in front of the microphone, but getting Kiss to go out with them was never going to be a match made in heaven. But even if he was able to make peace with not taking the makeup icons out, Van Halen was where he truly started to get worried.
Sabbath were already going through a rough patch in their career, so having Eddie out there giving a clinic on guitar mastery wasn’t exactly what the rest of the band wanted to hear. No one could have predicted they had a guitar god as their support act, but even if Osbourne was cool with Eddie, he had a lot less love for what David Lee Roth was doing whenever he saw him off the stage.
Osbourne had already worried that ‘Diamond Dave’ was stealing his whole schtick, but seeing him without the lights on him was much weirder, saying, “[Eddie] was one of the greats. As for Dave Lee Roth, I never really hit it off with him. He was like Mr Showbiz. Always smiling. Never unhappy. He comes from a well-to-do family, I believe, maybe that’s why we had nothing in common. You also never knew if he was spinning you a load of bullshit or telling you something for real. One minute he’s saying he’s getting his law degree, and the next he’s a part-time paramedic.”
That was half of the mystique behind Roth’s personal life, but the fact that he couldn’t turn everything off was always going to be a problem for someone like Osbourne. Behind all of the dark personas, he was one of the most salt-of-the-earth performers that ever lived, so seeing someone with that much going on with them, even when he didn’t have a camera in front of his face, must have been jarring to witness.
Because when you look at all of Osbourne’s shows, he wasn’t going to be spinning some sort of tall tale about what he was doing off the stage. He could only be honest every time he performed, and while that did lead to some hairy situations when he did indeed bite the head off of a bat, it was all in a day’s work for one of the most endearingly insane musicians that ever lived.
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