Ozzy Osbourne: working-class Brummie who became rock royalty

(Image credit: Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images)

The teenage John “Ozzy” Osbourne did “not seem like someone with a glittering future ahead of them”, says Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. He had a troubled childhood in his native Birmingham and struggled at school. His prospects when he left at 15 “seemed non-existent”. He could not even make it as a burglar – some comically inept escapades ended in jail.

But on his release, he wrote “Ozzy Zig needs a gig” on a card in the window of a local music shop, says the BBC. The rest is rock-music history. But no one was more surprised at the success of what became Black Sabbath than Ozzy himself. Ozzy, who died this week at the age of 76, once said the thing he was most proud of was that his band was not the creation of some music mogul. It was just four ordinary guys who decided “let’s have a go” and “succeeded beyond their wildest expectations”.

The music they came up with in response to drummer Bill Ward’s idea that they should trade on the popularity of horror films and create a rock equivalent “arrived fully formed”, says Petridis. Their sound “felt organic, not calculated”, and was a “product of their environment: a grim, provincial, industrial world where the drugs associated with the hippy counterculture had arrived, but not the freedom or opportunities enjoyed by London’s bohemian elite”. Black Sabbath’s carefully cultivated image, dark mythology and tales of rock ‘n’ roll excess were belied by Osbourne’s performances. He was no “preening rock god”, or even the “prince of darkness” as he became known, but always looked “more like a member of the audience who had been allowed up on the stage and couldn’t quite believe his luck”.

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Flowers placed in Birmingham to honour late rock icon Ozzy Osbourne

Ozzy Osbourne: "It's all just a role I play"

Osbourne left an estimated net worth of $220 million, says Business Plus. He and his second wife, Sharon, enjoyed success with Ozzfest, a heavy-metal festival, and went on to front reality show The Osbournes, which earned the family $5 million per episode by the end in 2005. (It was, says The Economist, “The Simpsons come to life with tight leather trousers and a Brummie accent”.) It was here that Ozzy’s true personality was revealed, he said. “All the stuff on stage, the craziness, it’s all just a role I play, my work,” he told The New York Times in 1992. “I am not the Antichrist. I am a family man”. He was also, as his original manager, Jim Simpson, told the BBC, “one of nature’s good guys – one of the real innocents of this world”.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors (BSME) editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.