The Passing of Ozzy Osbourne. A Personal Reflection.
It’s… taken a while to write this while being able to maintain my own style. I’ve been writing about music for what feels like eons, (and seems probably longer for those who’ve been reading my various epistles, monologues, soliloquies, missives, and rambling rants of passion!), on various digital platforms, and all of them I’d like to believe have contained my unique humour as something to place my personal stamp on such things, and thus a pause has been needed for the initial level of collective grief to have subsided, respects paid etc, before I could write about this the way I wanted.
When a celebrity dies, it touches people from all walks of life, even though many, or rather most, will have never encountered the person in real life. There’s a technical term for it: a parasocial relationship! Who knew? My first real experience of this phenomenon was actually someone who I had met though, and also an ozzy, Steve Irwin. Having visited Australia Zoo some years earlier, I remember being sat in the local rock bar, The Giffard Arms, quite possibly listening to Sabbath when that news came through as a text on my phone.
What?
It’s spelt “Aussie”??
Oh, my bad! Moving on!
The collective devastation was palpable, and the outpouring of sorrow something that 
brought people together across the globe. As the news broke on 22nd July 2025 that the proclaimed Prince of Darkness had taken his leave, merely a few days after his last concert, I saw this again only perhaps in an even greater magnitude. Living in Wolverhampton, just a stone’s throw away from Birmingham probably amplified this, for while there’s a fierce maintaining of individual identity from its larger neighbour here, Ozzy was still regarded as one of our own too. I suppose some things transcend distance, and indeed time and space. Black Sabbath and Ozzy as his own creation have endured since the late 60s, spanning decades and generations. Coming from a three-bed council house which accommodated seven of us at one time, in the rough end of Crewe, I found solace and inspiration in both the music and the success of a band who’d made it out of their humble beginnings.
It seems somewhat superfluous to attempt to describe Ozzy and Sabbath’s music and style. If you’re reading this, you’re already aware of what they and he were about. To be fair, there’s also such a selection to pick from that I’d need far too many pages for my publisher to print! For myself, I’ve used “So Tired” from ‘Bark at the Moon’ on a mixed tape of angst and a love for someone who remained unavailable, “Fairies wear Boots” from ‘Paranoid’ as an entertaining in-joke (although we may have spelt it “Faeries”!), and I’ve even bellowed “War Pigs”, also from ‘Paranoid’ a few times to underline my own anger at certain political ideologies at unsuspecting people in a karaoke who are used to hearing me sing James’s “Sit Down”! I will however say this: Along with Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin they (and he) pioneered the sound that became the baseline for heavy metal, and then from this the inordinate amount of subgenres were birthed, or spawned, or extruded…. ah you get the idea!
Coming from a somewhat Godsquad family (the more astute of you will have picked up on that from the population of my aforementioned abode! It wasn’t just Monty Python who thought every sperm was sacred!) Sabbath and their association with all things occult were another entertaining way for many of us growing up through the 70s and 80s to rebel from such things. Years later, the mother unit still despised my ‘Motorhead’ “Bastards” tee-shirt, and my metal cassettes and later still the albums, as they were a source for me to begin to find my own identity in a world where buying in (quite literally at times given the expectation of tithes!) to an ideology/mythology wasn’t considered optional! At the risk of sounding like Yoda, frowned upon they were! A lot! And thus, I loved every one of them!
I suppose, that’s the only real way to sum up Ozzy, Sabbath, and indeed other musicians who’ve passed, like Lemmy, John Lord etc. They’ve played such a part in our lives that, they’re akin to an errant Uncle or Aunt who’s led you astray from where you were, shown you something exciting, forbidden maybe, possibly dark, mysterious, rebellious and fun. They’ve given us outlets when we’ve needed them, as well as created inlets to discover friends, lovers, and new family in both darkened dank pubs and clubs where the décor is oft low beams, possibly with coffin-shaped tables and gothic chairs and inverted crosses, but as well as these there’s stadium venues too where the shared experiences will remain with the audience forever, such as the like of those who were at Villa Park July 5th.
It feels like I, or rather we, if I may be so bold as to presume to speak for the collective communities, have lost that family member, and whilst it’s true that he will live on every time you press “play” and hear his music, that doesn’t dull the sense of loss any more than a photograph of a long gone loved one does. Ozzy was one of the fathers of the music we love. Perhaps that’s it? Perhaps now there’s a sense we’ve been left as orphans? Maybe, for some of us his exploits gave us a father figure we wish we’d had rather than the one we got, whereas for others, he can be the aforementioned uncle instead? Or maybe I’m just romanticising through my own personal attachment? I don’t know.
What I do know is this:
He will be missed… RIP Ozzy.
