Ozzy Osbourne

The Black Sabbath legend's announcement at 74 that he will never tour again marks an end to the rabble-rousing live career of a singular rock star.

It could seem like watching a body-swap comedy, in which a builder from Birmingham had been transplanted into the body of a rock star right as a show began and was trying to put on a rock star pose. He often sang while clinging to the mic stand, like a sailor lashed to a mast in a storm, as if the force of the band behind him might wash him away. When your past includes biting the heads off live doves and urinating on the Alamo, you are unlikely ever to live it down, or to settle into a quiet life tending to your begonias. Ozzy claps to the beat. His career was a triumph of defiance and resilience, overcoming huge vulnerability – even though others suffered along the way. That’s not to excuse so much of his monstrous behaviour – including the As Barney Hoskyns put it in Creem in 1982: “Though Ozzy never professed to being a ‘messiah of slum people’, neither was he a megalomaniac frontman. It didn’t matter: they were words for Osbourne to inhabit, whether he was recounting [Black Sabbath](https://www.theguardian.com/music/blacksabbath) emerged at the end of the 1960s. His voice had none of the rich, bluesy tone that dominated in British rock singing when Certainly, though, in both the 2011 documentary God Bless Ozzy Osbourne and The Osbournes, the TV series that turned him from moral threat to cuddly hero, you could always see the frailty only just below the surface. The irrepressible 74-year-old former Black Sabbath frontman has dealt with decades of drug and alcohol addiction; coped with Parkin syndrome, a form of Parkinson’s; and the