One of the last figures of the Heavy Metal, Ozzy Osbourne, that was nicknamed the “Prince of Darkness”, died Tuesday morning from Parkinson’s disease, only two weeks after his last concert.
The birth of an icon
Ozzy Osbourne, his real name, John Michael Osbourne, was born on December 3, 1948 of workers’ parents, in Marston Green, an industrial city of the center of England. He is the fourth child of a siblings of 6, and all live in poverty.
At the age of 15, he decides to leave school and then chained jobs, especially that of plumber, however, tired of doing too little money for too much work, he changes in crime which earned him several detour in sight, and even a stay of 6 weeks in prison during which he himself tattooed his mythical tattoo, the ‘ozzy “, along his phalanx.
When he left, he decided to get into music, and meet a childhood friend, Terrence Butler, known as “Geezer” whose group The Approach he joined as a singer. The group later merges with another group, Polka Tulk, in which Tony Lommi and Bill Ward play. Together, they therefore form the Earth group, which he later renamed Black Sabbath after seeing a screening of an Italian horror film The three faces of fear, entitled in English Black Sabbath.
Black Sabbath singer and solo career
During the ten years when he is an active member of the group, he will take part in eight albums, notably in the well -known and international success: “Paranoid”, which contains among other things the songs War pigs or Iron Man. During the release of their first album in 1970, the success was immediate and the crowds at their concerts intensified. Black Sabbath forges a passive in the collective imagination as a founding pillar of his own genre, with his own identity.
Osbourne will not be for nothing to the success of the group, having composed and/or wrote among the greatest successes of the group such as War pigs,, Iron Man,, Paranoid,, Rock N’Roll Doctor or Never Say Die.
However, he will be excluded from the group in 1979, by Tony Lommi’s decision, because of his excessive consumption of alcohol and drugs, which will have the effect of diving more in his addictions.
One day, when the daughter of the president of the Black Sabbath label comes to ask him to repay her debt, the latter ends up helping him and will end up becoming his wife and the mother of three of her children.
It was under the impetus of the latter, that he goes to Sony Music with two doves as a sign of freedom. Nevertheless, drunk, he releases them, and grabs one, which remained hung on his leg, and simply tears off his head with his teeth. This event will help fuel the legend that forms around the character of Ozzy Osbourne, which is also nicknamed “Madman”, the mad man in French. Sony agrees to integrate Osbourne and recommend that he recruit experienced musicians to record his own albums. He will recruit Randy Rhoads on guitar, Bob Daisley on bass, and Lee Kerslake on drums.
He will be accused throughout his career, of disseminating subliminal messages in his music in particular in suicide, as in the case of John McCollum found dead when he was a piece of osbourne in which a passage called “grabs this gun, shoots, shoots”. In addition, he will be accused in particular by parents, of having a bad influence on adolescents, to which he will answer being satisfied if “leads the teenagers to rebel a little”.
The Osbournes and its last years
In 2001, the same year as the release of his album Down to Earth, a reality TV series called The Osbournes Start. The latter follows the daily life of the family, in everyday life, although it turns out that the episodes were written in advance. The series gives celebrity to his wife and two of his children. And for good reason, The Osbournes will become the biggest success of MTV.
Confirmed as international rock star, he will multiply in his last years collaborations, notably with Slash, of which he will be one of the many artists who sang on the eponymous album Slash.
Sometimes controversial, Osbourne will have despite his eccentric personality, marked the world of music, and influenced by his artistic talent, hundreds of millions of people around the world.
