Ozzy Osbourne
Ozzy Osbourne
John Michael "Ozzy" Osbourne is an English singer, songwriter and television personality. He rose to prominence in the early 1970s as the lead vocalist of the band Black Sabbath. Osbourne was fired from Black Sabbath in 1979 and has since had a successful solo career, releasing 11 studio albums, the first seven of which were all awarded multi-platinum certifications in the US. He has reunited with Black Sabbath on several occasions, recording the album 13 in 2013. Osbourne's longevity and...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionMetal Singer
Date of Birth3 December 1948
CityAston, England
I'd rather see twenty thousand smiling faces than twenty thousand crying people.
I have a night off on Halloween. It's Halloween for me every night. Let everybody else be Ozzy for the night. People go out dressed as me.
None of us is perfect. Everyone has got a skeleton in the closet that they don't want people to find out. I just let it go, with a bit of humor.
I feel joy when I do a great show. I get fun out of making other people happy. I'm a terminal people-pleaser. I suppose that's why I'm a frontman.
I just suddenly thought, people really get off on being scared. They pay money to see green foam come out of people's mouths.
I'm not trying to twist people's heads around. I'm not trying to say, "Believe in me."
We were always told we were one step behind Deep Purple, one step behind Led Zeppelin, one step behind everybody. Our manager didn't want to let us know how popular we were. It's only after we did Ozzfest that people started telling me stuff. I thought they were taking the piss. People would come up to me and go, "Respect.
With time, people forget to say, "Darling I love you." just that word...
I'm not a big fan of TV. It's an unavoidable situation being Ozzy Osbourne, people want you to go on chat shows, and I'm not good at it. I don't feel comfortable doing it.
Black Sabbath wasn't like the Bon Jovis of the time. We were just a bunch of guys that were against the grain of society. And we sung about things that people thought back then.
People say to me, you have not got stage fright. And if I haven't got stage fright, then I'm going to be comfortable within myself, and then something - I've always been that way and so I'm fighting to get away from that fear.
I'm one of these people that always looks on the bad side of the fence.
It's just human nature - isn't it? - to be more attracted to something that's taboo. If someone tells you not to smoke, you wanna smoke. If they say, 'Don't do drugs,' you wanna do drugs. That's why I've always thought that the best way to stop people taking drugs is to legalise the f**king things. It would take people about five seconds to realise that being an addict is a terribly unattractive and pathetic way to be, whereas at the moment it still has that kind of rebel cool vibe to it, y'know?
There was a cinema called The Orient outside the community centre where we rehearsed in Six Ways, and whenever it showed a horror film the queue would go all the way down the street and around the corner. 'Isn't it strange how people will pay money to frighten themselves?' I remember Tony [Iommi] saying one day. 'Maybe we should stop doing blues and write scary music instead.'