As he sits on the sofa, in a black T-shirt, black joggers and black trainers, greying hair tied back, he periodically slumps forward on his black cane, speckled with silver stars, that had aided his crooked gait as he entered the suite. “Sharon had them put in a bracket at the back, to hold me up,” says Ozzy, his speech halting, one of the effects of Parkinson’s. You have not seen the end of Ozzy Osbourne.’ Photograph: Pamela Littky/CPI Syndication
‘I’ll give it my best shot for another tour. God, if he falls or trips on a wire…” So she took no chances. On the night, Sharon admits she was “very nervous. “I said to Sharon: ‘I can’t fucking perform.’ She said: ‘Are you sure?’ And I thought about it, and I thought: ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna go for it.’ It’s one song – and I’ve sung it every fucking night for the last 55 years, so it’s not like I’m going to forget the fucking words!” Six days, turned it around, booked the flight, got everybody together.” “They called six days before the gig and said: ‘Do you think Ozzy could do it now?’ And I said to him: ‘Can you do it?’ He said yeah, and that was it. News of that event caught the attention of the team in Birmingham. “And he looked fine,” says Sharon, 69, smiling with visible relief. He appeared in photographs and videos with legendary comic-book artist Todd McFarlane, who’s directed a video and created a comic to accompany Ozzy’s new solo album, Patient Number 9. Then, in July, Ozzy showed up at Comic-Con in San Diego. But saying that, if my wife said we’ve got to go and live in Timbuktu, I’d go That was a lot of dough!” I want to be back. She bought Ozzy a ruby-encrusted skull ring, he bought her a ruby necklace, although “the fucking thing was tiny! For $150,000. It made this summer’s 40th wedding anniversary (the couple met when she was working with her dad, Don Arden the fearsome manager of Black Sabbath), all the sweeter. “And, of course, we had to say no.” She knew better than anyone her husband’s perilous physical condition. According to wife Sharon, with him at Claridge’s, the Games organisers first approached the couple about a performance six months ago.
Until very recently, hope was in thin supply. “And I was thinking it’ll never happen again. It’s his first trip to the UK in, he says, eight years. “Since I had my surgery and everything got fucked up, it’s been three or four years since I’ve performed,” Ozzy tells me when I see him, two days later, in a suite at Claridge’s in central London. “IT’S GOOD TO BE BACK!” The sold-out crowd of 30,000 cheered at the appearance of the surprise headliner, reciprocating the love.Īs comebacks go, it was as short – one-and-a-half songs, give or take – as it was remarkable.
“I LOVE YOU ALL, BIRMINGHAM!” roared a cloaked and reliably long-haired Ozzy, jiggling on the spot, teeth as diamond-white as his mascara was coal-black. Photograph: Karl W Newton/Rex/Shutterstock Prince of Darkness: performing at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham this summer. Then came 1970’s Paranoid, their biggest hit. He rose up through the stage on a hydraulic platform as his old Black Sabbath bandmate Tony Iommi cranked out the sludgy riff of the group’s anthem Iron Man. Yet somehow, against the odds, as Alexander Stadium reverberated to the synthesised squeak of bats, Ozzy Osbourne entered the building. Then, this June, yet more surgery.įor the reformed wildman, these health conditions combined to make a trip to the toilet a challenge, let alone a transatlantic jaunt for a gig. Two staph infections in his right hand (“After fucking shaking God knows how many hands, you’re gonna get something!”) Depression. Surgery to fix his neck, after a bathroom fall in January 2019, already fragile after he broke it in a quad-bike accident on his Buckinghamshire estate in 2003. The Parkinson’s disease that makes him unsteady on his feet. Now he’s sold over 100m albums and has 8.3m monthly listeners, still, on Spotify.īut the 73-year-old’s current state of health seemed a challenge too far.
THE FEW THAT REMAIN LYRICS TV
The hard-rock hero has always seemed indestructible, surviving years of drug and alcohol abuse (he’s now nine years’ sober) and only growing more famous along the way – not least as a result of The Osbournes, the MTV show that was the first reality TV sensation 20 years ago. But even a week before, there seemed no way that Ozzy Osbourne would be capable of making it back to the place of his birth from Los Angeles, his adoptive home of more than two decades.
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