{‘People shrieked. Cried. Threw up’: Ten Extraordinary Insights from Ozzy Osbourne’s New Autobiography

“The truth is, man,” ponders the recently departed Ozzy Osbourne in his latest memoir. “Why would anybody want guidance from me?”

Yes, he gave us Planet Caravan and countless other metal classics. But, by his own admission, Osbourne was also a lawbreaker, a cheat and an substance abuser, who often risked his and others’ lives and bit the head off a bat. (To explain, he claims, he believed it was a toy.)

For all his errors and misdemeanours, however, Osbourne comes off well in Last Rites: self-aware, rational and savagely funny, and not just by celebrity standards.

Osbourne passed away in July aged seventy-six, less than three weeks after performing with the founding Black Sabbath. As if a message from the afterlife, Last Rites documents his battles privately with Parkinson’s disease, risky spinal surgery in 2019 and ongoing complications.

But it wasn’t all bad, Osbourne adds, characteristically self-effacing: he also provided the voice for King Thrash in Trolls World Tour, and made a song with Post Malone.

Reflecting on his golden rule as the “Prince of Darkness”, he states: “I had seven decades of amazing life, which is a lot longer than I thought possible or likely deserved.” Below are 10 takeaways.

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

Osbourne credits his career to his dad, who purchased for him a 50-watt PA system on hire purchase for £250 – thousands of pounds in today’s money, and an “astronomical sum” for a blue-collar father-of-six in Birmingham.

Ozzy’s biggest remorse was that he failed to express gratitude: “Without that PA system, I’d never have left Aston.”

At nineteen, and fresh out of prison (for burglary), Osbourne formed his first band: the Polka Tulk Blues Band, named after his mum’s preferred brand of talcum powder. But they were always metal, in spirit if not yet in name.

Tony Iommi, the guitarist and “de facto head” of Black Sabbath, lost the tips of two fingers in an industrial accident. Not to be dissuaded, “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 resolve and resourcefulness to get high, befriending every unscrupulous medical professional who’d write him a prescription. “At one point I had a larger circle 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 habits had a tendency to escalate. One pint of Guinness resulted in nine more, then cocaine, then pills; an effort to quit smoking ended with him smoking 30 cigars a day.

His sole redeeming quality, Osbourne writes, was that he had “never, ever wanted to shoot up … Needles just terrify me, man.” Virtually 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 decided it would be more cost-effective 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.”

3. You can buy the Ferrari(s). It doesn’t mean you can drive

Osbourne’s last bender was in 2012. “The first sign of trouble,” he writes, was when he bought a Ferrari 458 Italia, then a second Ferrari 458 Italia, then an Audi R8 – despite not knowing how to drive.

He sat his test in LA: a “easy task”, Osbourne writes. “All you’ve gotta do is drive around the block at this place in Hollywood and not crash into 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 cost me north of half a million quid.”

4. Don’t attempt dangerous acts

In 2018, Ozzy was five years sober, 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 taken to 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 hit 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.”

5. Consult others and review contracts

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

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

Together with the Covid-19 pandemic, this caused postponement, 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 quite a statement.”

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

Osbourne’s other major mistake was not checking the small print of his first contract with Black Sabbath. Not comprehending the term “in perpetuity” lost the band their publishing rights, which were signed over 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.”

6. Make your mark

Ozzy is conflicted about Black Sabbath’s devilish 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 run out 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 bite its head off. “The place went completely insane. People shrieking. Crying. Throwing up.”

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

Decades later, when Covid hit, Osbourne was disturbed 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 dodged, not catching some mutant virus … has gotta be right up there.”

Seven. Pick warm-up bands with care

For all its occultish 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 struggled when metal started to shift towards spectacle.

Picking 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, flashing 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 overshadow 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 futuristic 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 destroyed 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 attractive chick.”

They eventually married (after Osbourne’s divorce)