Less than three weeks ago, Ozzy Osbourne took to the spotlight for his much-anticipated final show – rising from the stage on his bat-winged throne at Birmingham’s Villa Park to belt out classics such as Iron Man and Paranoid as he reunited with his band Black Sabbath for the first time in eight years.
The plaudits following the gig were incredible and as his son Jack told him afterwards, ‘Dad, you’ve got to see these reviews – they’re all amazing.
Everyone loved the show and your performance.’ Ozzy, however, remained nonplussed. As Jack laughingly recalled to me just days after the event, Ozzy replied with his typical blunt wit, ‘Lot of f***ing good that does me. I’m retired now!’
It was Ozzy Osbourne at his inimitable best – uncompromising, brutally honest and just a touch sweary.
And while he had been plagued with health problems in recent years, the news of his death yesterday, at the age of 76, still came as a tremendous shock.
Speaking with Weekend magazine in his last interview prior to Ozzy’s passing five days after that show, Jack couldn’t disguise his admiration for his dad after his barnstorming performance.
‘Dad’s great and his mood’s really high,’ he remarked. ‘He’s in a really good spot right now.’ Of Ozzy’s recent health issues, Jack added, ‘Listen, everyone gets old, everyone slows down as you age – it’s part of the journey. I just try and support him as much as I can. We all do.’
In a statement issued by the Osbournes after his death, they remarked that during his final moments, ‘he was with his family and surrounded by love’.
And indeed Jack similarly told me that for the self-styled ‘Prince of Darkness’, love was very much the order of the day.
‘People had been reaching out to me and my family,’ he said. ‘It’s just been a lot of love.’ Jack’s sister Kelly’s partner Sid Wilson proposed to her after the show (‘F*** you, you’re not marrying my daughter!’ Ozzy joked) and Jack’s mum, Ozzy’s indefatigable wife and manager Sharon, was thrilled if exhausted, having helped organise the massive event.
Watching his dad up on stage was, Jack admitted, ‘very emotional. Just to see him up there doing his job was great. We were all tearing up.’
Jack was speaking with Weekend magazine ahead of his appearance on the forthcoming ITV series Cooking With The Stars, and his touching memories of Ozzy’s own culinary endeavours naturally came up.
It’s perhaps little surprise that the man who once famously bit the head off a dead bat on stage (‘I thought it was rubber,’ Ozzy explained) was not exactly a whizz in the kitchen.
But he could make, ‘really good chips from scratch,’ said Jack, who added that he had a particular recollection, ‘of one summer when he just made a lot of beans on toast for us’.
Some of Jack’s fondest memories, however, were of touring with his rock star father.
‘My regret as a parent is that I don’t travel with my kids as much as I travelled with my dad,’ he said, referring to his daughters Pearl, 13, Andy, ten, and Minnie, seven, by his first wife Lisa Stelly, and three-year-old Maple by his wife of two years Aree Gearhart.
‘I think that was such an amazing aspect of growing up. We were always on the road with my dad and going to different places and experiencing the world.’
Indeed, Jack was outlining the many projects his dad still had in the pipeline. Not only did Ozzy have a memoir entitled Last Rites in the works, but the family was also in the process of filming the BBC series Home To Roost – a project announced three years ago that promised to follow Ozzy and Sharon as they returned to their home in Buckinghamshire after 20 years of living in the US.
In words that seem incredibly poignant now, Jack was chatting about his parents’ future plans and how they were going to, ‘do spring and summer in England and autumn and winter in the States’.
Moreover, Jack also spoke excitedly about his work as co-producer on the much-anticipated biopic on his father.
‘Right now it’ll take place over the Sabbath era and early 1980s,’ he noted, and unlike recent biopics such as the sanitised Freddie Mercury film Bohemian Rhapsody, everyone agreed that the drugs, groupies and mayhem of Ozzy’s life should all feature, as well as Ozzy and Sharon’s ‘epic love story’, as Variety magazine describes it.
‘We’re definitely going for a more adult rating for the film,’ Jack remarked. ‘This is by no means going to be a fluff piece.’
Oppenheimer’s Florence Pugh has been touted as a prospective Sharon and Jack had proposed Trainwreck’s Bill Hader to play Ozzy, to which the man himself first replied, ‘Who?’
When Jack showed him photos of the actor, Ozzy looked at them and added a slightly less guarded, ‘F*** off!’ Lee Hall, who wrote the Elton John biopic Rocketman, has submitted a draft script. ‘Right now we’re going through a rewrite with Craig Borten, who wrote Dallas Buyers Club,’ Jack said.
While his cause of death currently remains unknown, Ozzy has faced many well-publicised health challenges over the years.
In addition to his Parkinson’s diagnosis in 2019, a fall at his home the same year necessitated seven operations in five years when the impact dislodged the metal rods in his spine – put there after a quad bike accident in 2003 in which he almost died.
When I interviewed Ozzy after his 2019 fall he admitted, ‘The pain… God almighty, it’s constant, and I’m not good at being sick.’
But Jack, 39, who has gone through notable health issues himself having been diagnosed with MS at 26, was determined to remain upbeat about his father when we spoke.
‘I think the moment you start getting into an area of feeling sympathy and getting emotional, it’s not good for anyone. He’s here, he’s healthy,’ he said. ‘He’s able to do his job when he can and that’s the most important thing.’
With the passing of the rock legend, thoughts inevitably turn to Ozzy’s own rock – his wife of 43 years, Sharon, 72 – as well as to their children, Aimee, 41, Kelly, 40, and Jack (Ozzy also had two children by his first wife Thelma Riley – Louis and Jessica).
As we saw in their reality show The Osbournes, which catapulted them to fame during the early 2000s, nothing draws the clan closer together than difficult, heartbreaking times.
As Jack told me prior to his father’s passing: ‘Absolutely we’re still close. Everyone’s over here in the UK today. It’s family first.’
After Ozzy’s final gig two and a half weeks ago Jack said his dad ‘had a big old smile on his face’. The show was nothing short of a triumph and, Ozzy’s smile, said Jack, ‘was a combination of: I’ve done it and it was better than I expected’.
How touching that he should have gone out on a professional high, surrounded by the family he so dearly loved.
