After escaping a life of futility in Birmingham, Ozzy became one of those rare rock leaders you could identify with - and then, against all odds, became a national treasure. By: Alexis Petridis / The Guardian (headline: Ozzy Osbourne, the people's Prince of Darkness, took heavy metal into the light)
Translation: Telegrafi.com

As he himself would admit, the teenage John Michael “Ozzy” Osbourne did not look like someone with a bright future ahead of him. His childhood was troubled – he struggled at school, partly due to dyslexia, and was sexually abused by two older bullies – and his prospects, after leaving school at 15, were almost non-existent. Even his attempts at crime ended in farce. As he would later put it, he was “horribly useless” as a thief: a television he was trying to steal fell on him; acting in the dark, he inadvertently stole a selection of babies’ clothes – instead of the adult ones he had planned to sell at Aston’s in Birmingham. He was eventually caught and jailed for six weeks.

“Ozzy Zig Needs a Gig” was the message he left in the window of a local music store, and the key word seems to have been “need”: when he joined, as vocalist, a heavy blues rock band called Earth, he was left with no other options. Even Earth – who later became Black Sabbath – offered no clear ticket to fame and fortune: their idea of ​​career advancement involved loading up a van with gear, going to other bands’ gigs uninvited, waiting outside in the hope that a band would pull out and they would be the replacement.

And when Osbourne opened his mouth to sing, you didn't need to know about his miserable CV to know that life hadn't been fair to him. His voice was a desperate, irrational cry, best suited to the songs that defined rock 'n' roll, as Dr Feelgood's fellow frontman Lee Brilleaux described it: "Music about bad law and bad luck."

The creation myth of Black Sabbath - and by extension of heavy metal, the genre they almost invented - was all about a brilliant marketing move by drummer Bill Ward: if people would queue up to see horror movies, why not create a rock equivalent? In this respect, Black Sabbath were right on target - every musical element that made them legendary was present on the opening track of their eponymous 1970 debut album - but the music they created in response to Ward's idea seemed organic, not calculated. Black Sabbath sounded like a product of their environment: a grim, provincial, industrial world, where the drugs of the hippie counterculture had arrived but not the freedoms or opportunities enjoyed by London's bohemian elite. And they sounded like a product of their time. If one response to the end of the 60s' joy was the light, nostalgic melancholy of the best-selling album of 1970, Bridge Over Troubled Water, by Simon and Garfunkel, then Black Sabbath offered something else: music that seemed to drag on with rage, with a kind of nervous breakdown disguised as a post-drunken state, filled with dark thoughts, isolation, self-loathing and paranoia.

Their debut still bore traces of the heavy-blues band they had been - especially the second side of the album sounds like a version of [the band] Cream - but, by the album Paranoid By 1970, they had perfected a completely unique style. It was a hugely successful album – quadruple platinum in the US – but, like every one of the band’s early albums, it was panned by critics in a way that seems incredible today: “The worst of counterculture on a plastic plate ... horror ... boring and decadent ... idiotic and amoral exploration,” wrote American critic Robert Christgau of the band. This reaction set the tone for the disdain heavy metal would receive from “serious” rock critics for decades, but in a way it helped to turn the band into everyday people, connecting with a large audience of disillusioned teenagers (“the kid at the end of the street ... slumped in his room, snorted [tranquilizer]”). Tuinal ... finding justification for their own cancerous apathy", as one contemporary author described their admirers), without the help of the media.

Osbourne himself reinforced that image. Despite all the dark mythology surrounding the band - they apparently spent a good part of the early 70s explaining to journalists that they were not, in fact, Satanists - he appeared on stage in an unusual way. If you look at the footage in YouTube of the band's performance at the festival California Jam in April 1974, what is striking is the contrast between the way they sound - extremely heavy and dark - and the way Osbourne looks. Without any grim demeanor or sullen pose: he takes off his shirt, jumps up and down with enthusiasm, claps, raises his hands to the sky and waves his arms in glee. He behaves like an audience member who has been allowed on stage and can't believe his luck: in an era when rock stars were aloof and arrogant, this was a star who showed with every move that he was just like you.

Views from California Jam probably represent Black Sabbath at their peak. The following year, the album Sabotage ended the series of almost perfect albums: Paranoid, Master of Reality, Vol 4, Sabbath Bloody SabbathOsbourne had considered leaving the band during the recording of the album. Technical Ecstasy in 1976, which was a vague attempt to broaden their sound in the face of changing musical climates - he was tempted to form a new band called Blizzard of Ozz - but ended up being fired from the group after the release of the disappointing next album, Never Say Die!. The other band members blamed his problems with drink and drugs, while Osbourne insisted that he was no different from the others. Whatever the truth, Osbourne himself considered his departure to be the end of his musical career: he locked himself in a hotel room in Los Angeles, determined to spend the money on alcohol and drugs with the conviction that "after this I'll go back to Birmingham and on welfare".

But he hadn't counted on the intervention of Sharon Levy, a powerful woman who was sent to Los Angeles by her father Don Arden - Black Sabbath's manager - to keep an eye on the singer. The two not only became romantically involved, marrying in 1982, but also orchestrated the dramatic relaunch of Osbourne's career.

The lucky accident was Osbourne meeting a virtually unknown guitarist named Randy Rhoads. According to Rhoads, Osbourne was so drunk at the audition that he hired him after just hearing how he tuned his guitar. The idea was to embrace the kind of negative attention that Black Sabbath had once tried to avoid. By the early 80s, heavy metal was already a very successful genre. As its popularity grew, so did the attention paid to the themes of the songs that Black Sabbath had once addressed. In the US, right-wing conservatives and Christian fundamentalists in particular created an entire “industry” by interpreting the absurd lyrics of metal songs as a real threat, reading them literally and giving them meanings that were clearly not intended. If heavy metal was now considered a real danger to public morals, and not just escapist entertainment, then - by Osbourne and Sharon Arden's logic - the genre had to represent this anger.

The enthusiastic leader who looked like one of us emerged from the stage. In came Ozzy Osbourne, the Prince of Darkness in the version that bites the head off a pigeon during a meeting with a record company, and then repeated the scene at a concert in Des Moines, Iowa - this time with a live bat; out came the one who took off all his clothes and put his testicles in a glass of wine during a dinner with German record company executives; and, in the meantime, urinated on the Alamo Cenotaph.

It wasn't entirely clear whether Osbourne was acting on some clever self-promotion plan or was simply a raging alcoholic doing absurd things because he was drunk, but either way, the controversy that accompanied him skyrocketed his fame - helped by the fact that his first two albums as a solo artist, Blizzard of Ozz on 1980 and Diary of a Madman in 1981 - were much better than anyone who had followed Osbourne towards the end of his tenure with Black Sabbath would have expected. His voice, surprisingly, had not been affected by the abuse he had inflicted on his body. Rhoads was a guitarist of extraordinary talent; his classical training - most evident on the song Diary of a Madman - moved their style away from the blues-dominated hard rock of the 70s, foreshadowing the direction heavy metal would take in the 80s. The songs they created were more diverse than their image might suggest: the most obvious influence on Goodbye to Romance were Osbourne's favorite Beatles at their psychedelic peak.

The albums and scandals had made Osbourne so famous as a solo artist that he seemed untouchable. Nothing seemed to be able to dent his success. Not Rhoads' death in a plane crash in 1982, not the apparent decline in the quality of Osbourne's albums, not even his growing problems with addiction. He sounded refreshed with the arrival of guitarist Zakk Wylde in No Rest for the Wicked (1988) and with No More Tears (1991), but in the meantime he was arrested for attempted murder after strangling Sharon, his wife, during an alcohol and drug crisis.

He then emerged from rehab - with his marriage, surprisingly, still intact - but remained an inconsistent recording artist for the rest of his life. Truly great albums - including Down to Earth (2001), which often remains underrated, with Zakk Wylde and Robert Trujillo (pre-Metallica) on bass - stands alongside lackluster efforts like Ozmosis (1995), overloaded with production, and with material that falls somewhere in between, as is the case with the Black Sabbath reunion album, 13, produced by Rick Rubin. You could never accuse Osbourne of lacking courage or experimentation - whether it was when he experimented with the program auto tune IN Patient Number 9 (2022), or when he performed an extremely faithful version of John Lennon's incredibly sensitive song, Woman, in the album Under Cover (2005). Again, the fluctuating quality of his work did not affect his status at all. His fame was further enhanced by the television spectacle The Osbournes, which elevated him to the rank of a "national treasure" - something that was once unimaginable, in the years when his audience was considered drugged with Tuinal and ravaged by cancer apathy. And, perhaps most importantly: under Sharon Osbourne's tutelage he fully embraced the title of "Godfather of Metal," leading a whole generation of younger artists to perform on the annual tour. ozzfest - and, finally, it was the touching farewell to the concert Back to the Beginning, just three weeks ago. The sheer number of artists who showed up to pay their respects at Villa Park was extraordinary: it spoke volumes about the respect the metal community had for the band and its leader.

As much as heavy metal has changed and evolved over the past 56 years, it's incredibly difficult to imagine what it would have been like if Black Sabbath hadn't existed. Every artist who has chosen to work in the genre since - and many who aren't part of it - carries some of Black Sabbath's DNA, and likely always will. It's equally difficult to imagine Black Sabbath having the same impact without Ozzy Osbourne. "I always thought that whatever I had was temporary," he wrote in his autobiography. I am ozzy, a sentence that probably refers to his desperate years before Sabbath. The truth turned out to be quite the opposite. /Telegraph/

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