Ozzy Osbourne was a singer, songwriter and one of the most recognisable figures in the history of heavy metal. Born in Birmingham in 1948, he founded in 1968, with Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward, the band that would become Black Sabbath — the group that, with heavy slow riffing and an atmosphere of foreboding, effectively invented the genre. His nasal, high-pitched voice, far from the blues-rock singing of the day, became inseparable from that sound across the eight albums he cut with the group between 1970 and 1978. Fired from Sabbath in 1979 over alcohol and drug abuse, he reinvented himself in a solo career that outsold what he had done before. Blizzard of Ozz (1980) and Diary of a Madman (1981), with guitarist Randy Rhoads, are founding records of 1980s metal; Rhoads's death in a plane crash in 1982 marked him permanently. He carried on with Jake E. Lee and then Zakk Wylde, created the Ozzfest festival alongside his wife and manager Sharon Osbourne, and in the 2000s reached an entirely new audience through the family's reality show. He died in 2025, weeks after a final concert with Black Sabbath's original line-up in Birmingham, the city where it all began.
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