November 28, 2008. Copyright 2008, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Shock rocker-turned grandfather Ozzy Osbourne beats the odds to reach 60
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, November 28, Graphic News:  By all accounts he's lucky to be here. On his own admission, the former lead singer of Black Sabbath should be dead. Decades of hard drug-taking and alcohol abuse -- he was once so violently drunk he tried to strangle his wife, Sharon -- have given way to a premature old age. Every day he takes drugs of a different kind, to combat the effects of a syndrome similar to Parkinson's disease, with which he was diagnosed three years ago. Then there was the accident with the quad bike. Osbourne and his family had just found a whole new audience via the reality TV show featuring their daily lives, when, a year into the series, Ozzy overturned the bike in the grounds of his Buckinghamshire home. He was crushed by the machine and, apparently, stopped breathing before being saved by a quick-thinking bodyguard. Such was his high public profile at the time that fans old and new sent his recently released duet with daughter Kelly -- a re-hash of the old Black Sabbath number Changes -- to the number one slot that Christmas. Just when it might have been over, Ozzy scored a career first by topping the singles charts.
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His personal survival is due, in no small part, to his second wife. The daughter of Ozzy's first manager, Don Arden, Sharon picked up where her fatherÊleft off, Don having dropped Ozzy and his troubled habits. Osbourne's behaviour in the 1970s reads like a cliche of rock star excess: trashed hotel rooms, cocaine dependency and publicity stunts that seemed designed to offend and outrage, most famously the head-biting routine of, on one occasion, a dove and, on another, a bat. He later joked that, while he had to have rabies vaccinations afterwards, "the bat had to get Ozzy shots!" The self-styled Prince of Darkness inevitably stirred up Christian opposition with his lyrics about hell, his themes of horror -- the title of his solo album, Diary of a Madman, was borrowed from a Vincent Price film -- and a live album called Speak of the Devil. Osbourne has always denied being a satanist and has twice been cleared of inciting youngsters to kill themselves through songs like Suicide Solution. And the protests that greet his work are more than matched by platinum sales. As he says to his critics: "I have never had an empty seat. I've always sold out, so who's saying it's all over?"
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His rehabilitation is widely acknowledged to have come through marriage to Sharon, well-known as a former judge on the TV talent show, The X Factor, and the birth of their three children, Aimee, Kelly and Jack -- all now in their twenties. Osbourne had two children, Jessica and Louis, with his first wife, Thelma, and also adopted her son from an earlier marriage. It is his first-born, Jessica, who made him "Granddad Ozzy". As well as the family home in rural England, the Osbournes have their house in Beverly Hills -- where the cameras moved in for the MTV documentaries -- and a lifestyle the young John Michael Osbourne, growing up in poverty in Birmingham and leaving school at 15, could barely have imagined. The survivor has a lot to celebrate.
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