If a single individual could be said to embody the attributes of heavy metal, it would be Ozzy Osbourne, who has died aged 76 after suffering from Parkinson’s disease and other disorders. In a career stretching across six decades, Osbourne became a star with Black Sabbath in the 1970s, launched a hugely successful solo career in the 1980s, turned himself into a heavy metal entrepreneur in the 1990s with his travelling Ozzfest rock festival, and in 2002 became an unlikely but wildly successful reality TV star, thanks to the MTV show The Osbournes.
The Black Sabbath repertoire included songs with titles such as Paranoid, Evil Woman, Hand of Doom and Children of the Grave. The atmosphere was darkened further by the guitarist Tony Iommi’s fondness for tuning his strings lower than usual, and lyrics (mostly written by the bass player Geezer Butler) that alluded to the occult and mental illness, sung in Osbourne’s urgent high-register whine. His voice was not pretty but it was impossible to ignore as it sliced through Sabbath’s dense sludge of drums, bass and fuzz-toned guitar. “Sabbath never set out to be legendary,” Osbourne said in 2005. “The only thing we set out to do was scare people.”
