{‘People yelled. Cried. Got sick’: 10 Extraordinary Wisdom from the rock legend’s New Memoir

“Here’s the thing, man,” muses the recently departed Ozzy Osbourne in his new memoir. “Why would anyone want guidance from me?”

Indeed, he created War Pigs and so many other heavy metal anthems. But, by his own admission, Osbourne was also a lawbreaker, a cheat and an addict, who regularly risked his and others’ lives and bit the head off a bat. (In his defence, he claims, he thought it was a toy.)

For all his mistakes and misdemeanours, however, Osbourne is portrayed positively in Last Rites: introspective, rational and hilariously blunt, and not just by rock star standards.

Osbourne passed away in July aged 76, less than three weeks after performing with the founding Black Sabbath. Like a dispatch from the afterlife, Last Rites documents his battles behind the scenes with a neurological condition, high-stakes spinal surgery in 2019 and ongoing complications.

But it wasn’t entirely negative, Osbourne notes, typically modest: he also voiced King Thrash in Trolls World Tour, and recorded a song with Post Malone.

Considering his golden rule as the “Prince of Darkness”, he writes: “I had seven decades of amazing life, which is a lot longer than I ever expected or likely deserved.” Here are ten takeaways.

1. Determination leads to success

Osbourne attributes 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 “huge sum” for a factory-worker parent in Birmingham.

Ozzy’s biggest remorse was that he never thanked him: “Without that PA system, I’d would still be in Aston.”

Aged 19, and fresh out of prison (for burglary), Osbourne formed his first band: the Polka Tulk Blues Band, named after his mum’s favorite brand of talcum powder. But they were consistently 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 created himself a set of new fingertips using an old Fairy Liquid bottle, then re-taught himself how to play,” Osbourne writes.

Later Ozzy showed the same determination and resourcefulness to get high, cultivating relationships with every crooked 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.”

2. Any habit can spiral

As a “top-tier” drug addict and alcoholic, Osbourne’s tastes had a tendency to intensify. One pint of Guinness resulted in nine more, then cocaine, then pills; an effort to quit smoking resulted in him smoking 30 cigars a day.

His only saving grace, 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 recounts being addicted to all manner of 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 decided it would be more cost-effective to hire a chef to make it for him. “Big mistake … After a few weeks, I became at risk for diabetes.”

Even his healthier habits became excessive. In Los Angeles, Osbourne got hooked on apples, and “none of that granny smith bullshit”: they had to be pink ladies, carefully chosen 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.”

3. Purchasing power isn’t driving ability

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 hit 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 absolutely no memory of ever going to High Wycombe.”

Sharon – still in LA, making her TV Show The Talk – found out, sold all of his cars and got him into AA. “That one bender cost me north of half a million quid.”

Four. Avoid risky behavior

In 2018, Ozzy was clean for half a decade, a few months off turning 70 and getting ready 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 relieve himself before returning to bed with his usual dramatic entrance. This time, however, he landed on 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. Always get a second opinion … and read the small print

In 2003, while filming The Osbournes, Ozzy had wrecked his quad bike, broken his neck and spent eight days in a chemical coma. The failed stage-dive into bed, 15 years later, shifted the metal holding his shoulders and spine together, requiring 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 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, sparking 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 regretted 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” 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. Always leave an impression

Ozzy is conflicted about Black Sabbath’s sinister 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 awestruck 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 pull a live dove out of his jacket pocket, having hidden it there for a poorly planned stunt about peace – and bite its head off. “The place went completely insane. People screaming. Crying. Vomiting.”

Osbourne adds that he was 36 hours into a 72-hour bender. “The poor dove didn’t deserve it,” but it did help with the marketing drive for his solo album, Blizzard of Ozz. “People thought I was an absolute fucking lunatic.”

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 deadly disease … has gotta be right up there.”

Seven. 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 had difficulty 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, waggling his tongue.

Meanwhile, “The closest I got to a sexy album cover was me in a werewolf costume,” Osbourne writes. They thought they’d learned their lesson: “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 obscure LA outfit called Van Halen. After he watched 20,000 jaws drop at Eddie Van Halen’s innovative 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 slaughtered us”.

8. 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 attractive chick.”

They eventually married (after Osbourne’s divorce)