{‘People shrieked. Cried. Got sick’: Ten Extraordinary Insights from Ozzy Osbourne’s Latest Book

“Listen up, man,” reflects the recently departed Ozzy Osbourne in his latest memoir. “Why would anyone want life advice from me?”

Yes, he created Planet Caravan and countless other metal classics. But, by his personal confession, Osbourne was also a criminal, a deceiver and an substance abuser, who routinely risked his and others’ lives and decapitated a bat. (In his defence, he claims, he believed it was a toy.)

For all his errors and wrongdoings, however, Osbourne appears favorably in Last Rites: self-aware, level-headed and savagely funny, and not just by celebrity standards.

Osbourne passed away in July aged seventy-six, less than three weeks after taking the stage with the original Black Sabbath. Like a dispatch from the afterlife, Last Rites chronicles his battles privately with Parkinson’s disease, risky spinal surgery in 2019 and ongoing complications.

But it wasn’t entirely negative, Osbourne adds, typically self-effacing: he also voiced King Thrash in Trolls World Tour, and recorded a song with Post Malone.

Reflecting on his guiding principle as the “Prince of Darkness”, he writes: “I had 70 great years, which is a lot longer than I ever expected or likely deserved.” Here are ten takeaways.

One. Where there’s a will, there’s a way

Osbourne attributes his career to his dad, who bought him a sound equipment on hire purchase for £250 – £2,000-3,000 in today’s money, and an “astronomical sum” for a factory-worker father-of-six in Birmingham.

Ozzy’s greatest regret was that he never thanked him: “Without that PA system, I’d would still be in Aston.”

Aged 19, and recently released from prison (for burglary), Osbourne put together his first band: the Polka Tulk Blues Band, named after his mum’s favorite brand of talcum powder. But they were always metal, in spirit if not yet in name.

Tony Iommi, the guitarist and “unofficial leader” of Black Sabbath, lost the tips of two fingers in an workplace mishap. Undaunted, “He just created himself a set of new fingertips using an old Fairy Liquid bottle, then retrained himself how to play,” Osbourne writes.

Later Ozzy displayed the same determination and enterprising spirit to get high, befriending every unscrupulous medical professional who’d write him a prescription. “At one point I had more friends who were dental anaesthesiologists than the average dental anaesthesiologist did.”

Two. Anything can be addictive if you’re an addict

As a “world-class” drug addict and alcoholic, Osbourne’s tastes had a tendency to intensify. One pint of Guinness led to nine more, then cocaine, then pills; an effort to quit smoking resulted in him smoking 30 cigars a day.

His only saving grace, Osbourne writes, was that he had “never, ever wanted to shoot up … Needles just terrify me, man.” More or less everything else was fair game, narcotic or no.

Ozzy describes being addicted to various drugs, of course, but also sex, fame, fast cars, Yorkshire Tea, English sweets, doodling, wordsearch books, “texting funny shit” to his mates and Peter Gabriel’s album So, which he played so much upon its release that his security guard was compelled to take stress leave.

At one point, Osbourne was eating so much ice-cream (vanilla and chocolate only, “sometimes strawberry”), he thought it would be more economical to hire a chef to make it for him. “Big mistake … After a few weeks, I became pre-diabetic.”

Even his better routines spiralled out of control. In Los Angeles, Osbourne got addicted to apples, and “none of that granny smith bullshit”: they had to be pink ladies, hand-selected from the high-end LA grocer Erewhon. At his peak, Osbourne was eating 12 a night. “I guess I’m a recovered apple-a-holic now.”

Three. Owning luxury cars doesn’t equal skill

Osbourne’s last bender was in 2012. “The first sign of trouble,” he writes, was when he purchased a Ferrari 458 Italia, then a second Ferrari 458 Italia, then an Audi R8 – despite never having learned to drive.

He sat his test in LA: a “piece of piss”, Osbourne writes. “All you’ve gotta do is navigate the block at this place in Hollywood and not hit anything. They don’t even make you park, never mind do a hill start.”

But once back in Buckinghamshire, the Californian driving licence went to Ozzy’s head. He started driving under the influence to High Wycombe to buy coke. “To this day, I have absolutely no memory of ever going to High Wycombe.”

Sharon – still in LA, making her TV Show The Talk – eventually got wind, sold all of his cars and got him into AA. “That one bender set me back north of half a million quid.”

4. Don’t try that stunt at home

In 2018, Ozzy was clean for half a decade, a few months off turning 70 and busy preparing for his final concerts, No More Tours II. (The first No More Tours tour, in the 90s, had been marketed as his farewell “before I realised there’s only so much time you can spend in your back garden wearing wellies”.)

Life was good, as demonstrated by his advanced bed. Osbourne describes it as having “a “bigger brain than ChatGPT”, with two remotes for him and Sharon to each adjust their separate sides and “motors, wires and gear wheels”.

Ever since he was a boy – and through his marriage, much to Sharon’s displeasure – Osbourne had always leapt into bed with a flying leap. One night in 2018, he got up to use the bathroom before returning to bed with his usual dramatic entrance. This time, however, he landed on the floor, hard.

“To this day, I don’t understand how the fuck I could have missed it … It’s like having a Sherman tank parked in the middle of the room.”

Five. Always get a second opinion … and read the small print

In 2003, while filming The Osbournes, Ozzy had wrecked his quad bike, broken his neck and spent eight days in a chemical coma. The failed stage-dive into bed, 15 years later, dislodged the metal holding his shoulders and spine together, requiring intrusive surgery.

Though Osbourne was advised to get a second opinion about having surgery, he wound up going ahead with a specialist he dubbed “Dr No Socks … ’cos he didn’t wear any”. For years after the procedure, he had a difficult recovery and suffered serious illnesses such as sepsis and pneumonia.

Together with the Covid-19 pandemic, this forced the delay, then the cancellation, of No More Tours II, fueling online rumours of Osbourne’s death. At one point he was in intensive care. “I’d never taken so many drugs in my life, which was fucking saying something.”

Though Ozzy did not blame Dr No Socks, he regretted not getting a second opinion, he writes. “It’s hard to imagine it could have turned out any worse.”

Osbourne’s other big regret was not checking the fine print of his first contract with Black Sabbath. Not understanding the term “in perpetuity” lost the band their publishing rights, which were transferred to “a bloke called David Platz, who died in the nineties”, and since then his children.

Once Osbourne asked his accountant how much that mistake had set him back. The accountant answered hesitantly, and only after being pressed, that it was roughly £100m. “I had to go and sit down.”

Six. Be memorable

Ozzy is conflicted about Black Sabbath’s sinister reputation, and his own as the “Prince of Darkness” (“not that I knew who the fuck John Milton was”).

His first musical love was Cliff Richard; later, he was starstruck meeting Phil Collins. Of the teenage girls who used to flee of Sabbath gigs screaming, he writes: “You’ve gotta remember, a lot more people went to church back then.”

Nonetheless, when asked by Sharon to “make an impression” at a big meeting with his American label in 1980, Osbourne’s response was to take out a live dove out of his jacket pocket, having stashed it there for a poorly planned stunt about peace – and decapitate it. “The place went absolutely fucking nuts. People screaming. Weeping. Vomiting.”

Osbourne adds that he was 36 hours into a 72-hour bender. “The poor dove was innocent,” but it did help with the promotional campaign for his solo album, Blizzard of Ozz. “People thought I was an absolute fucking lunatic.”

Decades later, when Covid hit, Osbourne was shaken by the risks he’d run with the dove and then the bat in Des Moines (though, again – he thought it was a toy). “Of all the bullets I’ve ever avoided, not catching some mutant virus … has gotta be right up there.”

Seven. Pick warm-up bands with care

For all its dark stylings, Black Sabbath was “the kind of band that went on stage in our jeans and leather jackets”, Osbourne writes – “a male band … for male audiences”. They had difficulty when metal started to shift towards spectacle.

Choosing Kiss to open for their mid-70s tour was a mistake, Osbourne writes, remembering their Spandex jumpsuits, bared nipples, extravagant facepaint and “half a ton of explosives”. Sabbath bassist Geezer “almost had a heart attack” at Gene Simmons, 7ft tall in platforms, waggling his tongue.

Meanwhile, “The closest I got to a sexy album cover was me in a werewolf costume,” Osbourne writes. They thought they’d understood the issue: “You wanted your support act to be good, but didn’t want to upstage yourself. You wanted Status Quo, basically.”

Instead, for their 1978 tour, Sabbath wound up booking a little-known LA outfit called Van Halen. After he watched 20,000 jaws drop at Eddie Van Halen’s innovative performance of Eruption, Osbourne remembers “going back to our dressing room in silence and just sitting there, staring at the fucking wall”. Every night of the tour, Van Halen “just slaughtered us”.

Eight. Choose a partner who embraces your true self

Osbourne met Sharon through her father, Don Arden, Black Sabbath’s original manager. When Paranoid came out, in 1970, she was about 18 and working as his receptionist.

Sharon’s first memory of Ozzy, he writes, was when he came into the office “with no shoes on”. His first memory of her was thinking, some time later, “Wow, what a good-looking chick.”

They eventually married (after Osbourne’s divorce)