Ozzy and the birthday he wanted to “join the Rolling Stones”
The December 3a date that for decades had seemed almost indestructible in the rock calendar, marks today a birthday to remember, rather than celebrate. Yet when it comes to Ozzy Osbourne, there always seems to be something to celebrate. The “Godfather of Darkness”, passed away last July 5thwould have turned 77 today, and the most authentic way to evoke him is to return to his humor punctuated by a Birmingham accent. For example, while Ozzy was preparing to blow out a round number of candles and was busy with the series of shows “No more tours II“, the British newspaper “The Sun” published on June 8, 2018 a question and response built to play on the theme of his seventieth birthday imminent. The tour, which brought the former Black Sabbath back to European stages with a regularity that seemed to challenge the first signs of physical fragility, would see him at the Download Festival on the following 10th June and then – among other dates – on 17th June in Florence, in what turned out to be his last Italian concert ever. Invited by the English newspaper to imagine how he would face the milestone of 70 yearsOsbourne replied with the spirit that always dismantles any emphasis:
“Guess I’ll have to join the Rolling Stones!”.
It was a joke, but also the synthesis of an idea of music born from the never hidden admiration towards the groups that had preceded and inspired him, from the beloved Beatles to the Stones who represented a model for him.
2018 was the season of the last real tour of his life. “No more tours II”, which began as an ironic follow-up to the first fake retreat in 1992, should have continued until 2020, but the succession of postponements, first due to Covid and then due to a long sequence of hospitalizations, operations and complications, unwittingly transformed the concert of December 31, 2018 into the final stage of a live journey that for decades had been its natural home. Everything that came after was a broken epilogue. From a lightning appearance at the opening of the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham in August 2022, a brief performance at the NFL Kickoff a few weeks later, and the “Back to the Beginning” event with his final solo show and final concert with Black Sabbath on July 5, 2025, Ozzy has been a needbut also of a duty to the fansas well as one career triumphal celebration.
Opened by that joke about the Rolling Stones, the interview with “The Sun” seven years ago contained a fixed point for Osbourne, who had reiterated several times: “My career will end only when they nail the lid of the coffin.”. Upon Ozzy’s passing, which occurred a few weeks after his last event, Josh Homme of Queens of The Stone Age also pointed out a certain poetic coincidence: “I think it was a poetic conclusion to a career that you couldn’t take your eyes and ears away from. I mean, I could watch Ozzy do anything. Well, almost anything. But, you know, even if he was squeezing an orange I’d think, ‘We have to watch to the end. There’s something more than the juice coming.’ Let me explain. I really think it’s a classic. I think his passing was poetic, and I feel sorry for the family, because it’s a huge loss, I think, too. You know, I think David Bowie’s death was poetic too.
Ozzy was, and continues to be, celebrated by a transgenerational audiencealso by the many who became fond of him for having embodied the wildness of life as a rock star, while still managing to survive his excesses for a long time, and for having become an icon thanks to the reality show “The Osbournes”a cultural phenomenon that in the early 2000s transformed it into the most unlikely and discussed television figure on the pop scene. Not to mention the anecdotes and stories which have multiplied over the years and which every artist or famous person continues to tell about Ozzy, from the iconic bat bitten on stage, to the snuffed ants and the horse with which the musician spoke for hours while under the influence of acid. Ozzy Osbourne’s life was thus transformed into mythologyeven before his passing.
Although he never stopped attracting attention, curiosity and affection thanks to his image, Osbourne was nevertheless aware that he had also become the symbol of a musical genrefirst with Black Sabbath and then as a soloist, without ever having stopped feeling, at least in part, like a boy from Birmingham in love with the Beatles. From the first dazzling listen to “She loves you” by the Liverpool quartet, thanks to which as a young man he chose the dream to pursue, Ozzy’s existence has been a tale of deviations, accidents, falls and rises, which took shape between endless tours, in the television lounges of his Californian home and finally in his last tiring returns to the stage. From whatever perspective you look at it, the “Prince of Darkness” leaves a legacy made up of decades of sounds, images, symbols and contradictionsbut above all by the ability to laugh at himself even when history had already consigned him to eternity.
