THE HAMMER INTERVIEW

Manager, wife, mother, trailblazer – the world of metal would look very different without her

WORDS: ELEANOR GOODMAN . PICTURE: RANDALL SLAVIN

PRESS/RANDALL SLAVIN

Few people have shaped metal like Sharon Osbourne. For more than 45 years, she’s successfully steered the career of her husband, Ozzy Osbourne, but that’s only one of her many achievements. By creating Ozzfest in 1996, she became responsible for some of the most stacked bills in the genre’s history, and gave a platform to rising bands such as Slipknot and Limp Bizkit, who would go on to runaway success. With The Osbournes, she helped pioneer modern reality television, turning her family into unlikely TV stars and ultimately taking metal to the White House.

It was inevitable Sharon would go into showbusiness, because she was born into it. She learned her trade from her father, a notorious hardman manager nicknamed ‘The Al Capone Of Pop’, but broke away from him when she started working with Ozzy following his dismissal from Black Sabbath. She would go on to marry him, but also save his life, putting an end to his fears about being a washed-up has-been by turning him into a solo star who became bigger than his former band.

Throughout Ozzfest, The Osbournes, Ozzy’s return to Sabbath, and a career in TV, Sharon’s remained fiercely loyal to her husband, even though their relationship has sometimes been fraught. Modern metal wouldn’t be the same without her. And, she says, she’s grateful to have lived through its evolution.

“The 70s and 80s were just incredible. And to be in the music industry at that time when there was so much true talent around… People were pioneers. It was like the movie industry in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. It will never be that way again, and the music industry is not the same,” she says. “I read something the other day, and it said, ‘I know that I’m old, but at least I lived in the world when it was a great place to live.’”

Your dad was a manager in the 60s. What were your first memories of music and being around musicians?

“It was just normal. I was born into the industry because my father was in the industry, my mother was in the industry, and going back over 100 years, my grandmother was. So I’m a sort of industry brat. I was sent to drama school at the age of 10. It’s all I knew. I didn’t have the normal family, where parents would plan birthday parties and how great it was going to be at Christmas. My dad was working at Christmas, and we’d be on the road with him.”