Ozzy Osbourne faces his mortality and surprises Post Malone fans with comeback record Ordinary Man
After a Parkinson’s diagnosis and nerve-damaging fall, Ozzy Osbourne gets emotional facing his mortality and finds new fans with Post Malone and Travis Scott.
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Ozzy Osbourne briefly buries his head in his hand as he watches his life flash before him.
In the video for Ordinary Man, the title track of his new hit solo record, the 71-year-old rocker and reality television legend is seated in a deep chesterfield chair in a darkened home theatre as a condensed biopic screens in front of him.
There are images of his childhood home in Birmingham, hugs with his parents, life on the road with Black Sabbath, clowing around his wife Sharon and their children, sprawled out of it on a bed and performing in front of tens of thousands of loyal fans.
Ordinary Man is an honest and confronting song about Osbourne facing his own mortality and he is clearly emotional as his friend and duet partner Elton John sings “I don’t wanna say goodbye, When I do, you’ll be alright, After all, I did it all for you,” in the second verse.
The Prince of Darkness has come perilously close to saying goodbye to this earthly realm more times than your ordinary man.
Drug and alcohol addictions almost killed him. In 2003, he suffered a broken neck vertebra, collarbone and ribs and had to be resuscitated after a quad bike accident on his Buckinghamshire estate in the UK.
He managed to keep a diagnosis of Parkin 2, a form of Parkinson’s disease, secret for a “long, long time” until a series of illnesses and misadventures over the past year, including a nasty fall at home, forced tour cancellations and a public disclosure of his condition.
While he has good days and bad days with his Parkinson’s, it is the ongoing nerve damage and chronic pain from neck surgery after his bathroom fall which almost stole his sanity.
“It’s just slow. Everyone thinks I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s at the same time as the neck surgery but I’ve known about the Parkinson’s for a long, long time … I’ve been dealing with it for years,” he says from his Los Angeles home.
“But the surgery a year ago went into my neck and all the nerves got screwed up and it’s very painful.
“All I (could) do was wade through the day in agony and think. I suppose the album indirectly was like a journal, if you like, about the things that I was thinking about. I mean, it’s pretty straight forward.”
It has been a decade since Osbourne released a solo record and it wasn’t on his to-do list as he spent months in crippling agony, unable to get back to his beloved concert stage and perform.
His daughter Kelly, no doubt worried and concerned about her father, suggested working on a new album to lift his spirits and distract him from his pain.
She introduced her dad to her friend Andrew Watt, one of the hottest producers in the world right now, and he helped bring in Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan and Red Hot Chili Pepper’s drummer Chad Smith to work on the sessions. Other shredders on the record included Slash and Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello.
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Watt also hooked up Osbourne with reigning chart stars Post Malone and Travis Scott. The metal god added his signature vocals to Posty’s rap rock banger Take What You Want, alongside Scott, from his chart-topping Hollywood Burning record. Malone returned the “favour” on It’s A Raid for Osbourne’s album.
Their first collaboration sparked a litany of hilarious reactions, some ironic and others from young music fans unaware of the Black Sabbath frontman’s status as one of hard rock’s most legendary and worshipped idols.
“Who tf is Ozzy Osbourne ???!??! This is why I love Post Malone for shining light on unknown artists,” read one post.
But Osbourne is quick to point out he was equally unaware of Malone or Scott or Watt before they became recording buddies.
“Andrew Watt, I’d never heard of him, I’d never heard of Post Malone. Kelly told me about them, they’re her friends. I did the song with Post and Andrew said ‘Why don’t we do an album?’ You wanna do that? Yeah, so we did an album, it just came out of nowhere, you know. I didn’t have any burning plans, I just got in there and did it, you know,” he says.
“I don’t keep up with what’s going on; in 10 years, the music industry has changed so much. I don’t know how anything works anymore.
“But yeah the Post Malone fans asking ‘Where do you keep finding all these other singers?’ I’ve only been doing it 50 years! This Ozzy Osbourne has got a big future.”
Old mate Elton John popped into his head because it occurred to Osbourne the sound of the Ordinary Man song was reminiscent of the Rocketman’s signature soaring piano ballads.
But the well of inspiration for the album wasn’t limited to Osbourne’s existential outpourings. He points to the record’s song Eat Me as to the freewheeling process producer Watt encouraged in the studio.
Osbourne had been chatting to Watt about the story of German cannibal Armin Meiwes, who advertised on a fetish site for someone prepared to be killed and consumed. He received many expressions of interest, with Berlin engineer Bernd Brandes agreeing to the criminal plan. Meiwes is serving life in prison.
“What a weird f … ing thing to do. It’s one thing to go ‘I want someone to eat’ and then you get seven different people go ‘oh, I’ll do that’,” Osbourne says.
“And I was talking about how you can’t go to many Californian restaurants that sell meat anymore. It’s all bulls … here, anything with a nose or a butthole, you can’t eat now. Two years ago it was all low carb food, now it’s veganism.”
Ordinary Man struck a resounding chord with his fans – and maybe some new ones from Post Malone’s crew – reaching No. 3 on the US and UK charts and No. 4 in Australia.
With the prospect of return to the stage still uncertain, both on a physical level and also due to the shutdown of the concert industry by the COVID-19 pandemic, Osbourne was planning to get back into the studio.
He may have to wait a little longer than expected with his producer Watt recuperating after contracting the virus and suffering pneumonia.
“It’s one of them things, which is the story of my life, when I don’t think about what I’m doing, I generally do my best,” he says.
“It got me out of my head, stopped me worrying it’s all the end, that I’m never going to be able to tour again. I got me going again and in actual fact, it was the best medicine I’ve had.”