OZZY OSBOURNE
OZZY FOREVER
He’s been hospitalised, sliced open, incapacitated and close to death more than once. But as all-star new album Patient Number 9 proves, a defiant Ozzy Osbourne isn’t going out without a fight
WORDS: RICH HOBSON
PORTRAITS: ROSS HALFIN
O zzy Osbourne is out of his mind. Not in the ‘bite a head off a bat and piss on the Alamo’ way, but in a more present sense. He’s climbing the walls after being cooped up for close to three years due to a series of serious health issues and operations.
“It’s been fucking miserable, man,” he says, speaking over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. “I’m not good at this. I’ve never been this laid up in my life – Icould barely walk at one point.”
Ozzy’s problem dates back to his quad biking accident in December 2003, in which he sustained six broken ribs, a broken neck vertebra and a broken collarbone, necessitating the insertion of metal rods in his body. Though he seemed to make a full recovery at the time, even playing with a reunited Black Sabbath the following summer, he was left more vulnerable to injury. A fall in 2019 while he was recovering from a bout of pneumonia dislodged one of the steel rods, requiring him to undergo surgery to insert 15 screws into his spine. That’s when things went really wrong.
“The first guy who did my surgery cocked it up really fucking bad,” says Ozzy angrily. “I ended up in hospital for three months.”
The singer underwent further surgery earlier this year to correct the original operation. Ominously, his wife and manager Sharon Osbourne said the results of this last op would “determine the rest of his life”.
“The two operations they just did, which were supposed to be more intense than the first, were to repair his damage,” says Ozzy, who has also battled a life-threatening staph infection, severe flu and Covid in recent years. “One night I was in hospital – that’s it!”
It’s been a tough few years for Ozzy, something compounded by the pandemic, but thankfully his problems seem to be behind him for now. The last few times Hammer talked to him, he spoke with an air of resigned frustration, sounding every one of his 73 years. But today he sounds reinvigorated. Frustrated, yes, but there’s a steely determination to his voice as he reveals the work he’s been putting in to get fit again, ahead of his new album Patient Number 9 and next year’s much-postponed world tour.