{‘People screamed. Wept. Got sick’: Ten Extraordinary Wisdom from Ozzy Osbourne’s Latest Memoir

“Here’s the thing, man,” reflects the late Ozzy Osbourne in his recently released memoir. “Why would anyone want life advice from me?”

Yes, he delivered War Pigs and numerous other heavy metal anthems. But, by his personal confession, Osbourne was also a criminal, a cheat and an substance abuser, who often risked his and others’ lives and decapitated a bat. (In his defence, he claims, he thought it was a toy.)

Despite his errors and wrongdoings, however, Osbourne is portrayed positively in Last Rites: self-aware, level-headed and hilariously blunt, and not just by rock star standards.

Osbourne died in July aged 76, less than three weeks after performing with the original Black Sabbath. Like a dispatch from the afterlife, Last Rites documents his battles privately with Parkinson’s disease, risky spinal surgery in 2019 and successive complications.

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

Considering his guiding principle as the “Prince of Darkness”, he writes: “I had 70 great years, which is a lot longer than I thought possible or probably deserved.” Here are ten takeaways.

1. Determination leads to success

Osbourne credits his career to his dad, who bought him a 50-watt PA system on installment plan for £250 – thousands of pounds in today’s money, and an “astronomical sum” for a factory-worker parent in Birmingham.

Ozzy’s greatest regret was that he never thanked him: “Without that PA system, I’d never have left Aston.”

Aged 19, and recently released from 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 workplace mishap. Not to be dissuaded, “He just invented 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. Any habit can spiral

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 attempt to quit smoking resulted in 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.” 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 listened to 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 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 became excessive. 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 former apple-a-holic now.”

Three. 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 never having learned to drive.

He took the exam in LA: a “piece of piss”, 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 made him overconfident. He started drinking and driving to High Wycombe to buy coke. “To this day, I have no recollection 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. Avoid risky behavior

In 2018, Ozzy was clean for half a decade, a few months off turning 70 and getting ready for his farewell tour, No More Tours II. (The first No More Tours tour, in the 90s, had been billed 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 control 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 stage-dive. 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.”

Five. Seek multiple views and check details

In 2003, while filming The Osbournes, Ozzy had wrecked his quad bike, broken his neck and spent eight days in a medically induced 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 wound up going ahead with a specialist he dubbed “Dr No Socks … ’cos he didn’t wear any”. For years after the procedure, he struggled to recover and suffered major health issues 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 hold responsible Dr No Socks, he regretted not getting a second opinion, he writes. “It’s hard to imagine it could have ended up 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” cost 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. Be memorable

Ozzy is ambivalent 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 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 “stand out” 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 shrieking. 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 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.”

7. Select support acts wisely

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 struggled 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, 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 upstage yourself. You wanted Status Quo, basically.”

Instead, for their 1978 tour, Sabbath ended up hiring 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. Find a spouse who accepts your identity

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 finally wed (after Osbourne’s divorce)