To conjure an image of England on Thursday 16 October 1969 you could do worse than compressing all of Withnail and I into one day. The country was crippled by strikes. The bubble-gum pop track ‘Sugar Sugar’ was number one. And the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus had just aired.
At Regent Sounds Studios in London’s Denmark Street four musicians from Birmingham recorded seven songs in 12 straight hours then went to the pub. Their name had been Earth, and before that The Polka Tulk Blues Band. When the album hit the streets the following year, on Friday 13 February, they were Black Sabbath.
On the microphone was 20-year-old John ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne. He had grown up in Aston playing on bombsites, left school at 15 after suffering sexual abuse from two boys, and worked as a labourer and in a slaughterhouse. At 17 he was in prison for robbery (‘I was no good at that. Fucking useless.’) But by 18 had placed an ad reading ‘Ozzy Zig Needs Gig – has own PA’, met bassist Terence ‘Geezer’ Butler, and joined the band that would make him famous.
The album shifted the tectonic plates of music. Its title track ‘Black Sabbath’ hammered a pile driver through speakers more used to the skippy, jangly sounds of the 1960s. The opening tritone riff (the Devil’s interval) delivered a deep, doomy, industrial punch from instruments tuned down to make them bigger, fuller and darker. And over it all Osbourne’s banshee, nasal vocals brayed prophetic lines of a ‘big black shape with eyes of fire… watches those flames get higher and higher’.
Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin had released debut albums in 1968 and 1969 respectively. Their hypnotic new sound was hard rock. Like Black Sabbath they were rooted in blues and jazz. But it was Osbourne’s band which sculpted a foreboding, menacing, thunderous soundscape that gave them the laurels for pioneering heavy metal.
Black Sabbath followed up with the album Paranoid. Its opening track was the bombastic, operatic, jarring ‘War Pigs’, followed by the quintessentially angst-filled and headbangable title track that was to become the band’s calling card. Osbourne sang on six more albums before being fired in 1979 for drug- and alcohol-induced unreliability.
Undeterred, Osbourne launched a solo career which became legendary for the big-haired and musically outstanding guitarists Randy Rhoads, Jake E. Lee and Zakk Wylde. While Osbourne never quite looked comfortable on stage stomping about yelling ‘Let’s go fucking crazy!’, it did not stop the fans loving his intensity and the pounding energy of songs like ‘Bark at the Moon’, ‘I Don’t Know’ and ‘Mr. Crowley’, which all became stadium classics.
In 1982 Osbourne was performing in Des Moines, Iowa when a fan threw a rubber bat on stage. Osbourne – always ready for antics – snatched it up and bit off its head. Only then did he realise it was a real bat, and spent the evening after the gig in hospital getting a rabies shot. The moment sealed his reputation for pushing rock’s boundaries to places others left well alone.
The notoriously tough Don Arden had managed Black Sabbath for a while and, now Osbourne was solo, Arden’s daughter, Sharon, took over managing him. A few months after batgate they married, and eventually had three children: Aimee, Kelly and Jack.
He was something of the accidental rock star
The Osbournes settled in Los Angeles. In 1989 he went on a bender that ended in him being charged with attempting to murder Sharon. However, he could not remember anything and the couple patched it up. The family later shot to surprise stardom with him as a befuddled dad in the hit MTV reality show The Osbournes, which aired from 2002 to 2005.
Health problems began after a quad bike crash in 2003 that broke his neck. Repeated surgery followed, and an announcement of Parkinson’s in 2020. For the last six years Osbourne has been largely immobile, but on Saturday 5 July 2025 he performed at the sellout ‘Back to the Beginning’ concert at Aston’s Villa Park, singing five songs from his solo career and ending with a four-song reunion of all original members of Black Sabbath. A roster including Metallica and Guns N’ Roses completed the day’s all-star lineup honouring Black Sabbath as the ur-fathers of heavy metal. Video tributes came from artists as varied as Elton John and Dolly Parton.
John Osbourne – iconic pioneer of heavy metal – died at his home in Buckinghamshire aged 76 on Tuesday 22 July. He sold over 100 million records, split evenly between Black Sabbath and solo work. He was something of the accidental rock star, never having the poise or pose of a Robert Plant or Freddie Mercury. But he had Brummie authenticity in spades. ‘All aboard!’ he would roar wild-eyed as one of the most famous galloping guitar riffs of all time scythed into the crowd. His genius lay in having everyone believe he rode the Crazy Train all the way, while in reality he held down a lifelong, iconic music career to which he was unwaveringly committed. RIP Ozzy. Exit, pursued by a bat.
