Ozzy Osbourne

The West Midlands has long been hailed as the home of heavy metal, and this is largely thanks to one of its most coveted exports, Black Sabbath and their frontman, John Michael Osbourne, more commonly known as Ozzy Osbourne.

Born in 1948 in Marston Green, Warwickshire, Osbourne was brought up in the Aston area of Birmingham. He picked up the nickname Ozzy whilst in primary school, and it would be a moniker stuck, with all the playfulness and hellraising that he would become known for perfectly fitting with the name.

Osbourne left school at 15 and had many jobs, including trainee plumber, car factory horn-tuner, as well as a grim stint in an abattoir. Not coming from money, he dabbled in petty crime during this period and even spent six weeks in Winson Green Prison. By this time, Osbourne already knew that he wasn’t cut out for the life that his family or society wanted him to have, with his anti-establishmentarian actions preceding the icon that was to be born in the not-too-distant future. This thought came from an experience he had the year prior. At 14, he first heard the most exciting act of the day, The Beatles, and like many others of his generation, it changed his life and reset its course.

Looking back on that momentous experience, he has credited the Liverpool band’s 1963 cut ‘She Love You’ as the song that changed his life, explaining that thereafter: “I knew I was going to be a rock star the rest of my life.”

One of the other figures of Ozzy’s generation galvanised by the ‘Fab Four’ was Geezer Butler, and in 1967 he formed his first band, Rare Breed, and before too long, he recruited Osbourne as the vocalist. They were shortlived, though, and after only two shows, they called it a day. The pair then played in Polka Tulk Blues alongside future Black Sabbath bandmates Tony Iommi and Bill Ward, whose blues rock outfit Mythology had just split up.

The quartet renamed themselves Earth, and after they were mistakenly booked for a performance in the place of a band of the same name, they again decided on a rebrand. Settling on Black Sabbath in August 1969, based on the horror film of the same name, everything was now in place for the band to take the world by storm, with Ozzy at the tip of their Obsidian spear.

Espousing the customary sharpness that comes with hailing from Birmingham, Sabbath noticed how audiences loved to be scared, so they actively endeavoured to create ominous music, which would be their making. When Butler told Osbourne of seeing a strange dark figure at the end of his bed after reading a book on the occult, together the pair wrote the lyrics to ‘Black Sabbath, their first song in this new and oppressive style, a significant turning point.

The band released their self-titled debut in 1970, and although it was widely dismissed by the media, the project laid the foundations for all the brilliance to come. They dropped their second album, ‘Paranoid’, later that year, and featuring cuts such as ‘War Pigs’, ‘Paranoid’ and ‘Iron Man’, they asserted themselves as one of the most exciting of the day. After this moment, they went from strength to strength, with Osbourne’s primal wail becoming a defining feature of their work.

By the release of 1973’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Osbourne and his bandmates were bonafide icons. Typical of the time, this tremendous critical and commercial success brought with it a degree of hellraising that seems inconceivable by today’s standards. Unsurprisingly, the drugs and alcohol opened up faults within the interpersonal relationships of Black Sabbath, and after much turmoil, Ozzy was ejected from the band on April 27th, 1979.

However, Osbourne was not done there, and he was about to show the world just how multi-faceted he was and the natural tenacity that had carried him his whole life. He formed the group The Blizzard of Ozz later that year, featuring members of Uriah Heep and Rainbow, with its most eminent member coming in the former of the young Randy Rhoads, the former axeman of metallers Quiet Riot. The pair started a formidable songwriting partnership crafting cuts such as ‘Crazy Train’ and ‘Mr. Crowley’, with the band’s self-titled album released to universal acclaim in 1980.

Afterwards, Ozzy would go from strength to strength, continuing to deliver brilliant music and insane extra-musical anecdotes. By the end of the 1980s, with one headless bat to boot, he was known universally as ‘The Prince of Darkness’, and the rest was history.