At the height of his excess, his nine lives took top billing. But as Ozzy Osbourne liked to point out, he’d also had two separate births.
Born John Michael Osbourne in Aston, Birmingham, on December 3rd, 1948, decades later, he would describe himself as a “kid who was afraid of everything”; a poverty-stung petty thief whose lack of washing facilities meant he “felt like a peasant”; a class clown who joked to deter bullies and defang the sadness he said walked alongside him for 76 years.
But that first life ended on the fateful day in 1968 when Osbourne pinned a classified ad to the noticeboard of a Birmingham music shop (‘Ozzy Zig needs gig’). That act set in motion Ozzy’s ascent as the singer for Earth, soon renamed Black Sabbath, the band that fired the starting pistol for heavy metal: an unholy new genre that in the hands of guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward was the auditory equivalent of falling anvils.
