OZZY OSBOURNE Trivia — 100 Entries
100 sourced facts about OZZY OSBOURNE.
Trivia
Osbourne brought Scream to Japan on 13 October 2010, playing the Tokyo International Forum. It was his first Japanese date in eight years, since 2002. He opened with "Bark At The Moon" and followed it with "Let Me Hear You Scream", the lead track from the new album. New guitarist Gus G and drummer Tommy Clufetos each took a solo, and the second half moved through "Iron Man", "No More Tears" and "Paranoid". During "Crazy Train" he put on a cap thrown from the audience and carried on singing; by the end the show had run well past its scheduled length and song count.
The 2010 visit also brought Osbourne's first appearance at Loud Park, the Japanese metal festival. He headlined its fifth edition, playing Kobe World Kinen Hall on 16 October and Saitama Super Arena on the 17th. Scream, his first album in three years, had been released in Japan on 23 June that year.
Ozzfest, the festival Osbourne ran with Sharon, reached Japan for the first time on 11 and 12 May 2013, at Makuhari Messe in Chiba. The festival had begun in the United States in 1996; Slipknot headlined the first day and Black Sabbath the second. At the time of the announcement, the Japanese site Ongaku Natalie reported that this would be Black Sabbath's first visit to Japan in a line-up including Osbourne.
The second Ozzfest Japan took place on 21 and 22 November 2015 at the same Makuhari Messe halls. Black Sabbath and Korn were announced as headliners, and Sharon Osbourne said the appearance would be Black Sabbath's last in Japan. In a later announcement, the second day's headliner was changed from Black Sabbath to Ozzy Osbourne & Friends.
Blizzard of Ozz was the name of a band before it was the name of a record. It is what Ozzy Osbourne called the group he put together with Bob Daisley and Randy Rhoads after leaving Black Sabbath, and early promotional material treats it that way. Jet Records issued the album with Osbourne alone on the sleeve and his name in large type above the phrase, and it has been counted as his first solo album ever since.
Osbourne has said he assumed his career was finished when Black Sabbath fired him. He told Classic Rock that he spent three months getting wrecked, never going outside, never even opening the curtains. What ended it was a visit from Sharon Arden, the daughter of Sabbath's manager Don Arden, who told him to sort himself out and offered to manage him. Once she was involved, he said, things started moving, and he gave her the credit for getting the album out of him.
The search for a band began with a notice pinned to the board at Mates, a rehearsal room in Los Angeles. Months went by with nothing settled, and then the Californian guitarist Randy Rhoads turned up; Osbourne described the moment as being like God entering his life. The two of them then left the United States for the first writing sessions, held at Osbourne's family home in Stafford in the West Midlands.
Assembling the rhythm section took longer than finding the guitarist. In her 2005 autobiography Extreme, Sharon Osbourne wrote that hiring former Uriah Heep drummer Lee Kerslake and former Rainbow bassist Bob Daisley was a last resort, arrived at after other players including Cozy Powell had priced themselves out of contention. She also wrote that she could see the moment she saw the four of them together that the dynamic was not going to work, but that they were already too far along to change it.
Recording for Blizzard of Ozz started on 22 March 1980 at Ridge Farm Studios, in the Surrey countryside. The sessions ran through March and April, and Jet Records released the album in the United Kingdom on 20 September 1980, where it peaked at number seven.
In January 1980 Osbourne spent a few weeks rehearsing at Iketshall in Suffolk with Randy Rhoads and Bob Daisley, before drummer Lee Kerslake completed the line-up. A cassette of the trio jamming on a blues number during that spell surfaced in 2026, forty-six years later, in a Suffolk attic belonging to David Jolly, a friend of the singer at the time. Daisley told Sky News that he recognised the recording as soon as he heard it, and that since the band already had several finished songs by then he could not say whether they were loosening up around a drummer's audition or simply messing about.
Randy Rhoads was exacting about precision in the studio. On most of the solos he recorded with Osbourne he doubled his parts, playing every note of a difficult passage a second time in exactly the same way and layering the two takes together. The solo on "Crazy Train" was tracked that way, and the doubling is part of why the recorded sound is so distinctive.
The title "Crazy Train" came out of a chugging noise leaking from Randy Rhoads's effects pedal. Bob Daisley has explained that both he and Rhoads collected model trains and were railway enthusiasts, and that on hearing the sound while the piece was still untitled he said it was like a train, but a mad one - a crazy train. Rhoads brought in the signature riff; Daisley supplied the chord pattern for Rhoads to solo over.
The garbled voice at the end of "Crazy Train" is a studio engineer saying "an egg" through an oscillator. Osbourne had asked him what he had eaten for breakfast that morning, and the answer ended up on the record.
The dry rattle in the intro of "Crazy Train" comes from a vibraslap, an oddly built percussion instrument: a wooden ball and a box of metal teeth joined by a U-shaped wire. The same device turns up in songs a long way from metal, among them Jimi Hendrix's "All Along The Watchtower" and Cake's "Short Skirt/Long Jacket".
"I Don't Know", the opening track of Blizzard of Ozz, begins with the sound of a large brass gong recorded and played backwards. The same sound returns towards the end of the song, this time the right way round.
A deck of tarot cards lying around the studio is what set "Mr. Crowley" going. In his liner notes for the 1997 compilation The Ozzman Cometh, Osbourne wrote that he had read several books about Aleister Crowley, found him a very strange figure and had wanted to write about him for some time; while the band were recording Blizzard of Ozz there happened to be a pack of tarot cards Crowley himself had designed sitting in the room. The song came out of that.
The keyboard figure that opens "Mr. Crowley" was written by Don Airey, who was in the band at the time. Told that an intro was wanted, Airey threw everyone else out of the room, asked for half an hour and built the part with engineer Max Norman. When Osbourne came back and heard it, he said it was as though Airey had plugged straight into his head. Airey received no writing credit, and has said he holds no grudge about it: the band was a financially precarious gamble at that point and he saw himself as a musician helping out.
The word "polemically" that appears near the end of "Mr. Crowley" comes from a habit of Aleister Crowley's own. Crowley would sometimes sign books and autographs "Polemically Yours, Aleister Crowley", and that is what prompted Bob Daisley to put the word into the lyric.
The second single drawn from Blizzard of Ozz was "Mr. Crowley", and it was not the studio version but a live recording, taped at the Mayflower Theatre in Southampton on 2 October 1980 during the band's first British tour. The UK pressing was backed with "You Said It All" from the same night, a song that appears on no album, while in the United States the release took the form of an EP that added a performance of "Suicide Solution" from the same show.
The word "solution" in "Suicide Solution" means a liquid mixture rather than an answer: the song is about drink. Two accounts of its subject stand side by side. Osbourne has said it was about AC/DC's Bon Scott, recalling a dressing room where Scott had poured himself something close to half a pint of whiskey, and a phone call from his sister a few weeks later telling him Scott had drunk himself to death. Bob Daisley, the bassist who wrote the lyrics for the album, has said instead that he wrote the words about Osbourne, who had his own drinking problem at the time. Speaking to Mojo in 2010, Osbourne himself described the track as being about drinking himself to death.
"Suicide Solution" became the subject of litigation in the United States. On 26 October 1984 a nineteen-year-old named John McCollum shot himself in his bedroom while listening to Osbourne's records, and in October 1985 his parents sued the singer and his label, singling the song out. The case was dismissed in August 1986 and the appeal was rejected in 1988, the court holding that the lyrics did not explicitly encourage suicide and that music is protected by the First Amendment. Two further suits of the same kind were brought by other families and were also dismissed.
The title "Goodbye To Romance" was lifted from a line in the Everly Brothers' 1957 record "Bye Bye Love". Osbourne was a keen listener to early pop acts of that kind, and The Beatles were among his favourites.
"Goodbye To Romance" is about the split from Black Sabbath itself. Bob Daisley has described Osbourne at the time as depressed and unsure of himself, his confidence badly damaged by the sacking. Daisley wrote most of the words, and wrote them deliberately to encourage the singer and turn him towards what came next; the title and some of the lines were Osbourne's.
"No Bone Movies" is a song about disliking pornographic films. Bob Daisley, who wrote the lyric, got the idea after going to an adult cinema with Osbourne and Randy Rhoads; Rhoads called what they were watching a "bone movie", a phrase Daisley had never heard before, and he built the song on it. It is also the only track on Blizzard of Ozz co-credited to drummer Lee Kerslake, because the rest of the album had been written before a drummer was chosen.
"Dee", the forty-nine-second acoustic instrumental on Blizzard of Ozz, was written and played by Randy Rhoads alone, for his mother Deloris. It is in the key of D. Osbourne has said that when Rhoads asked whether he minded putting a classical piece on the album, he told him not to ask - it was his record too, so he should go ahead. An album that was nothing but headbanging from start to finish, in Osbourne's view, was not an album at all.
The title Diary of a Madman was taken from a 1963 horror film of the same name starring Vincent Price. Bob Daisley has said he thought it would make a good title for an Osbourne album, given the singer's reputation as one of rock's madmen. The title track existed before the album had a name.
The lyric to the title track of Diary of a Madman was written by Bob Daisley, and he wrote it about himself. Daisley has said he had his first nervous breakdown at sixteen and has always been a sensitive person, and that the song came out of the idea that people are often their own worst enemy. Randy Rhoads brought in the rough shape of the music; the title was Daisley's.
Osbourne could not get to grips with the shifting metre of the title track at first. Bob Daisley has recounted that when the band played it to him at rehearsal he threw the question back at them - who did they think he was, Frank Zappa? - and that they had to walk him through it, marking where he sang and where he did not. He warmed to the song once he had the shape of it, but his first reaction was that it was not for him.
The little boy on the cover of Diary of a Madman is Louis Osbourne, the singer's son from his first marriage.
Bob Daisley finished the words to "Over the Mountain" at Ridge Farm while Diary of a Madman was being recorded. He has said the music came together earlier, during rehearsals in London, but that he spent a long time without knowing what the song should be about. He did not want a conventional love lyric, and felt that the aggression and weight of the music ruled out anything light, so he settled on something more philosophical and deliberately cryptic.
The decision to record Diary of a Madman in England came down to money. Quiet Riot drummer Frankie Banali told Songfacts that the plan had been to make the record in Los Angeles, but that Jet Records had already spent heavily flying Osbourne between London, Los Angeles and New York in search of musicians, and was unsure what his future held. Recording in England was cheaper because the label then had to fly only one man over - and that man was Randy Rhoads.
The four letters of the title "S.A.T.O." appear nowhere in the lyric. According to Sharon Osbourne they stand for Sharon Arden, Thelma Osbourne - Arden being her maiden name, as the daughter of the record industry figure Don Arden, and Thelma Osbourne being the singer's first wife. The song had originally been called "Strange Voyage"; Bob Daisley, who wrote the words, has said that Osbourne and Sharon renamed it after he and Lee Kerslake were put out of the band.
The introspective lyric of "S.A.T.O." was inspired by a letter written in 1261 by the Buddhist monk Nichiren, known in English translation as "A Ship to Cross the Sea of Suffering".
Most of the lyric to "Flying High Again" came from Bob Daisley, who has said the idea grew out of a conversation about drugs he had with a straight-living acquaintance while playing in Australia. Osbourne told Spin in 1986 that he was an addict when songs like this one and "Snowblind" were written, and that it struck him one night that he was singing a song for drugs and a song against them back to back. He concluded that it was fine, because it was where he had been when he wrote it, and that it was part of his life.
Osbourne has said that of all the guitarists he worked with, Randy Rhoads was the most musically trained: he could write, he could read, he could play, and he taught at his mother's school. What he singled out beyond that was patience - Rhoads worked with him rather than leaving him to sing over something already finished.
Randy Rhoads died on 19 March 1982, aged twenty-five, when a small plane came down while the band was travelling in Florida. The aircraft had been buzzing Osbourne's tour bus; on one pass a wing struck the bus and the plane crashed into a nearby house, killing Rhoads, the pilot and the tour's hairdresser. Rhoads had played on Osbourne's first two solo albums and no others.
Tribute, the double live album issued in 1987, was dedicated to Randy Rhoads. Osbourne chose the live recordings for it with the help of Rhoads's mother. "Flying High Again", "Goodbye To Romance", "Mr. Crowley" and "Crazy Train" are among the performances included.
Blizzard of Ozz came out in the United States the following year, 1981, and reached number twenty-one on the Billboard chart. By the time the band finished touring it had sold a million copies, and Guitar Player magazine voted Randy Rhoads Best New Talent of 1981.
"Crazy Train" never reached the Hot 100 in America. It spent a single week bubbling under the chart at number 106, a placing entirely out of proportion to its influence: Blizzard of Ozz passed a million US copies within two years of release and went on to sell more than three million.
"Crazy Train" finally entered the Billboard Hot 100 after Osbourne's death, debuting at number forty-six on the chart dated 2 August 2025. It was the song's first appearance on that chart, more than four decades after its 1980 release.
"Crazy Train" did not get an official music video until forty years after it came out. An animated clip appeared in September 2020 as part of the fortieth-anniversary campaign for Blizzard of Ozz, featuring hand-drawn versions of Osbourne and his band; after Randy Rhoads's guitar solo, the animated Rhoads floats up to heaven while his bandmates watch.
"Crazy Train" was used in Mitsubishi car commercials in 1999 and in an advertisement for the Honda Pilot in 2012. The instrumental also provided the beat for "Let's Go", the 2004 Trick Daddy track featuring Twista and Lil Jon that reached number seven in the United States.
The theme used for MTV's reality series The Osbournes was not Osbourne's own "Crazy Train" but a cover recorded by Lewis Lamedica. The song had also been taken up by Pat Boone, the former gospel singer who lived next door to the Osbournes, on his album In a Metal Mood - a lazy, lounge-styled reading complete with a whistle and backing singers cooing "choo, choo".
The title "Bark at the Moon" came from the punchline of a joke Osbourne used to tell. In his liner notes for The Ozzman Cometh he wrote that he took the phrase straight from that punchline, that he already had the vocal line in his head, and that Jake E. Lee brought the riff - it was the first song the two of them wrote together.
In the video for "Bark at the Moon" Osbourne plays a mad scientist who brews a potion and turns into a werewolf. Directed by Mike Mansfield, it was his first concept video, and the transformation preceded Michael Jackson's in "Thriller" by about a month - though the same effect had already been done in the 1981 film An American Werewolf in London. Osbourne said the make-up took eight hours, that the shoot took place in an old mental hospital, and that in one of its rooms they found a pickled foetus in a jar.
Bark at the Moon lists Osbourne as sole composer of every song, which is not what happened. Jake E. Lee and Bob Daisley both wrote on the record and both went uncredited, under an arrangement with the label. Daisley told Songfacts that because of conflicts with publishing companies he and Lee agreed to give up credits and royalties in exchange for flat payments.
Speaking to Ultimate Classic Rock in December 2013, Jake E. Lee said most of the writing on Bark at the Moon was done by himself and Bob Daisley. He recalled playing the riff for the title track and Osbourne - who already had the album title in mind - immediately deciding that this was the song it would belong to. Osbourne would arrive with ideas of that kind and then drink, and either pass out or leave, after which Lee and Daisley stayed in the studio and fleshed the songs out. Lee remembered the working relationship warmly and said Daisley wrote all the lyrics.
In a 2019 interview with the Japanese music site BARKS, Jake E. Lee said that Bark at the Moon was mixed not by Max Norman but by Tony Bongiovi, a cousin of Jon Bon Jovi. He hated the result at the time, finding it thin and filtered, but said that with the years he had come round to thinking it a good album. He described the follow-up, The Ultimate Sin, as having been given a very pop sound by Ron Nevison, whose credits include Heart, and said a remix could make that record considerably heavier.
In the same 2019 BARKS interview, Jake E. Lee said that Osbourne's side had twice approached him about working together again. Both times he answered that all he wanted was his name on the credits of Bark at the Moon, and both times the conversation stopped there. It was not about money, he explained, but about having it recorded that he wrote the album. He also said he had not spoken to Osbourne since around 1987, and that he had been due to attend a Black Sabbath reunion show as Kevin Churko's guest before Sharon vetoed it.
"So Tired", the ballad on Bark at the Moon, carries a string section arranged by Louis Clark, best known for his work with the Electric Light Orchestra. A minor hit in Britain, it was one of Osbourne's first successful ballads and encouraged him to mix slower songs in among the rockers on later albums, a line that runs through to "Mama, I'm Coming Home" and "Road To Nowhere".
During the shoot for the "So Tired" video a piece of glass lodged in Osbourne's throat in a scene where a mirror shatters. He had to postpone some shows, but recovered fully. In the same video he plays all of the main characters himself.
Osbourne told Rolling Stone in 2019 that The Ultimate Sin is his least favourite of his solo albums. His objection was not to the songs but to how they were captured: everything felt and sounded the same, he said, and there was no imagination in it. If there were one record he would like to remix and do better, he added, it would be that one. The criticism was aimed at the album's producer, Ron Nevison.
The Ultimate Sin reached number six on the Billboard 200 and was certified platinum by the RIAA on 14 May 1986, then double platinum in October 1994. As of 2019, however, it was out of print physically and available only through streaming services.
The writing for The Ultimate Sin was done while Osbourne was in the Betty Ford Center. Jake E. Lee told Guitar World in 1986 that he set himself up with a drum machine, a small home studio and a cheap Charvel bass and wrote more or less complete songs. He deliberately left melodies and lyrics alone, expecting Osbourne to change them, and instead put down riffs, verses, choruses, bridges, solo sections and the drum and bass parts he had in mind. He handed over around twelve pieces that way, of which roughly half ended up on the album.
"Shot In The Dark", the biggest hit on The Ultimate Sin, takes its title from the 1964 Pink Panther film A Shot In The Dark. The song is credited to Osbourne and Phil Soussan, the bassist who was with him for that album alone. Soussan had written it years earlier and, being English, was a fan of the Pink Panther pictures; his original words had more to do with the film, and Osbourne rewrote them into something far more sinister.
The video for "Shot In The Dark" was directed by Andy Morahan, whose credits include Guns N' Roses' "November Rain" and several George Michael clips including "Faith". Its story has Osbourne taking possession of a girl who comes to his concert; the actress playing her was a cheerleader for the Los Angeles Rams, and Dweezil Zappa appears as one of the concertgoers.
"Miracle Man", from No Rest for the Wicked, is aimed at the television evangelist Jimmy Swaggart. Bob Daisley, who wrote the lyric, originally named Swaggart outright but decided the song would land harder if it did not. Swaggart had launched a campaign against rock music in 1985, after a teenager killed himself while listening to "Suicide Solution", and used every opportunity to attack Osbourne. In 1987 Swaggart was caught with a prostitute and admitted an addiction to pornography.
The video for "Miracle Man" was shot in an English church, with pigs brought in for the occasion. According to Osbourne the playback was so loud that all sixty of them relieved themselves at the same moment. He was wearing a brand-new pair of suede boots at the time and said he never wore them again.
"Bloodbath In Paradise" is about the crimes committed by Charles Manson and his followers in 1969. No Rest for the Wicked is the closest Osbourne came to a concept album, its songs shaming the wrongdoing of one subject after another - Jimmy Swaggart in "Miracle Man", his own fans for idolising him in "Hero", and Manson here.
Zakk Wylde learned that Osbourne was auditioning guitarists from Howard Stern's radio show, went for it and got the job. He went on to serve three separate stints: 1987 to 1992, 2001 to 2009, and from 2017 until Osbourne's death in 2025. The break in 2009 came about because Osbourne had begun to worry that his songs were starting to sound like Wylde's own band, Black Label Society.
No More Tears was the first album Osbourne made sober, after more than twenty years of drink and drugs. The change reached the packaging: for the first time there was no demonic reference in the title or the artwork, breaking a run that had included The Ultimate Sin, Diary of a Madman and Talk Of The Devil. Osbourne appears on the cover with angel's wings.
Motörhead's Lemmy Kilmister co-wrote four songs on No More Tears: "Mama, I'm Coming Home", "I Don't Want To Change The World", "Desire" and "Hellraiser". He wrote the words to "Mama, I'm Coming Home" in under two hours one afternoon. Osbourne told Mojo that Lemmy wrote lyrics the way other people dash off a message, and that what came back was extraordinary.
The "mama" of "Mama, I'm Coming Home" is not Osbourne's mother but his wife Sharon; "Mama" was his pet name for her, and he uses it the same way in 1981's "Flying High Again" and 2001's "Running Out of Time". In his liner notes for The Ozzman Cometh he wrote that he had carried the melody around in his head for a couple of years without finishing it until he was working with Zakk Wylde on No More Tears, and that the phrase itself was what he always said to his wife on the phone towards the end of a tour.
Zakk Wylde wrote the music for "Mama, I'm Coming Home" at the piano and worked it up with Osbourne on that instrument. When it came time to record, he tried transposing it to twelve-string guitar - an instrument more associated with folk rock - and it worked. That is the version that was recorded, and it is what makes the introduction instantly recognisable.
Apart from "Close My Eyes Forever", his 1989 duet with Lita Ford, "Mama, I'm Coming Home" is Osbourne's only US Top 40 hit. No More Tears sold more than four million copies in America and gave him a foothold in the 1990s; he was forty-two when it came out.
The sepia-toned video for "Mama, I'm Coming Home" was among the first Samuel Bayer directed. He shot Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" around the same time.
"Mama, I'm Coming Home" was released in 1991, a few months after the start of the Gulf War. Writing for the album's thirtieth-anniversary reissue in 2021, Osbourne said he had heard that American soldiers were sending the song to their wives, and that soldiers still loved it.
Carrie Underwood covered "Mama, I'm Coming Home" for her 2022 Apple Music Sessions EP. Underwood said she had always been an Ozzy Osbourne fan and that the song was one of her all-time favourites, adding that it had always felt to her a lot like a country song and that she had wanted to record it for a long time.
Osbourne's first Grammy came for the version of "I Don't Want To Change The World" on his 1993 live album Live And Loud, in the Best Metal Performance category. He won the same award again in 2000, this time with Black Sabbath, for "Iron Man" from their Reunion album.
The tour behind No More Tears was called the No More Tours tour, because Osbourne intended to retire afterwards and spend his time with his family. It did not take. He grew bored, and two years later he was back on the road with a tour called Retirement Sucks.
The title track of No More Tears grew out of a rehearsal-room jam. Zakk Wylde told Songfacts that Mike Inez started playing the figure on bass, Randy Castillo came in on drums, and John Purdell added the keyboard part on top. The song is credited to Osbourne, Wylde, Castillo, Inez and producer Purdell.
Osbourne credited producers Duane Baron and John Purdell with holding No More Tears together. Writing for the album's thirtieth-anniversary reissue in 2021, he said everything had been planned before they went into the studio: a writer carries a mental picture of how a song should sound, and sometimes the result surprises you for the better and sometimes it disappoints, but the two of them did an extraordinary job. Every song was worked on at length, he added, with extra time spent getting things right.
"Road To Nowhere", the closing track of No More Tears, looks back over Osbourne's own life. It was written just after he had given up more than twenty years of drink and drugs, and he credited his wife and manager Sharon with keeping him alive. He wrote it with guitarist Zakk Wylde and drummer Randy Castillo.
"Perry Mason", from Ozzmosis, is named after the fictional lawyer created by Erle Stanley Gardner in a series of 1930s novels and played on television by Raymond Burr from 1957 to 1966. The music was written by Zakk Wylde and keyboard player John Sinclair; Wylde told Songfacts that Sinclair was jamming on something, he joined in, they built the climb and the riff out of it, and Osbourne started singing over the result.
The video for "Gets Me Through", the first single from Down to Earth, was finished shortly before the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Because it contained images of fire and blood, MTV sent it back and refused to air it until it had been re-edited to be less raw; Osbourne's team cut a new version and the network showed that instead. It was directed by Jonas Åkerlund, who has also worked with U2 and Madonna.
The tour behind Down to Earth was to have been called the Black Christmas tour. After the attacks of 11 September 2001 it was renamed Merry Mayhem, and it opened on Halloween that year. Osbourne was in New York City on the day of the attacks: he and Sharon were there so that their daughter could go to a Michael Jackson concert at Madison Square Garden the night before.
"Dreamer", from Down to Earth, had been written about three years before it appeared, and took on a different weight when the album arrived in October 2001, a month after the September attacks. Osbourne compared it to John Lennon's "Imagine" and named it his favourite song on the record. He also told The Sun that he had asked Paul McCartney to play bass on it, and that McCartney declined on the grounds that he could not improve on what was already there.
The video for "Dreamer" was directed by Rob Zombie, who toured with Osbourne on the Merry Mayhem tour that same year.
The wah-drenched solo Zakk Wylde played on "Gets Me Through" placed eleventh on Guitar World's 2015 list of the greatest wah solos of all time. Wylde also has his own signature wah pedal, made by Jim Dunlop.
The "black rain" of the Black Rain title track is a metaphor for oil. The song sets out Osbourne's own view of the war in Iraq as a conflict driven by it.
Osbourne's tenth studio album was to have been called Soul Sucka. Negative reaction from fans led him to publish a list of alternative titles and put it to a vote, and the name that came out of it was Scream. The song "Soul Sucker" remained on the record.
The talk box that gives "Soul Sucker" its character came from a suggestion by guitarist Gus G. He told Musicradar that it was one of the last songs they did, that the riff was decent rather than great, and that while discussing how to improve it with co-producer Kevin Churko he proposed running it through a talk box, being a Peter Frampton devotee. It sounded good, and Churko then suggested saying the words "soul sucker" through the box, which worked better still.
"Let Me Hear You Scream", the first single from Scream, was premiered in the United States inside an episode of CSI:NY broadcast on 14 April 2010. It scored a prison riot; executive producer Peter M. Lenkov, who wrote the episode, said they had been looking for something high energy and irreverent to sell the madness of the scene. Osbourne, who had served time in a British prison for burglary before he turned eighteen, said that when he heard where the song was going, he thought it was a subject he knew something about.
Scream was the first Osbourne record to feature Gus G, the guitarist from Firewind, who had come in as Zakk Wylde's replacement. The lead single "Let Me Hear You Scream" was his first release with the band.
"Latimer's Mercy", from Scream, is drawn from a real Canadian case. At a press conference launching the album in Canada, Osbourne explained that the song follows the Saskatchewan farmer Robert Latimer's decision in 1993 to end the life of his severely disabled daughter; Latimer was convicted of second-degree murder. Osbourne told Canada's CanWest News Service that it must be a very difficult thing to have a child born with no quality of life and to watch her go through pain.
The title track of Ordinary Man is a duet with Elton John. Osbourne said that while writing it he was reminded of an old Elton song, mentioned to Sharon that he wondered whether Elton might sing on it, and the request was granted - Elton both sings and plays piano on the track. Drummer Chad Smith told SiriusXM that once the song had a piano part they went looking for a good piano player and settled on Elton, that he and Andrew Watt travelled to Atlanta to record him, and that only afterwards did someone suggest having him sing a verse.
When "Ordinary Man" entered Billboard's Mainstream Rock airplay chart at number thirty-four on 29 February 2020, it marked Elton John's first appearance on that chart since "Runaway Train", his 1992 collaboration with Eric Clapton. The twenty-seven-year gap was the longest in the chart's history at the time, beating the twenty-six years previously held by Queen's Brian May.
Elton John's record lasted two and a half years, and it was broken by another Osbourne song. When "Patient Number 9", featuring Jeff Beck, debuted at number twenty on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Airplay chart, Beck's previous entry on the same tally had been in 1994, on a cover of Jimi Hendrix's "Manic Depression" recorded with Seal. The gap of twenty-eight years and four months surpassed Elton John's twenty-seven years and five months.
Ordinary Man entered the charts at number three on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States it was his highest placing since Black Rain in 2007, shifting 77,000 equivalent album units in its first week, 65,000 of them actual sales. In the United Kingdom number three made it the highest-charting solo album of his career, beating the number seven reached by his 1980 debut Blizzard of Ozz.
"It's A Raid", from Ordinary Man, came out of something that actually happened to Osbourne. He told an album playback that while Black Sabbath were making Vol. 4 at a house in Bel Air, California in 1972, he got too warm and pressed what he took to be an air-conditioning button; it was in fact a police alert. With drugs lying around the place he panicked, shouted "it's a raid" and hid in a bathroom until the police had gone. The song is a duet with Post Malone.
"Eat Me", from Ordinary Man, was prompted by the 2001 Armin Meiwes case in Germany. Osbourne read about it in The Sun and found it funny set against the health-conscious eating habits of Los Angeles, where, as he put it, everyone had gone vegan-mad. He wrote the track with his regular Ordinary Man collaborators: producer Andrew Watt, songwriter Ali Tamposi, Guns N' Roses bassist Duff McKagan and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith. It opens with Osbourne playing bluesy harmonica.
The video for "Scary Little Green Men", from Ordinary Man, casts the actor Jason Momoa as Osbourne, stepping up to the microphone in a black leather duster and miming along. Momoa is a committed metal fan who told Metal Hammer that he builds his characters out of metal songs - Conan was largely Pantera, Aquaman mostly Tool and Metallica's Kill 'Em All. The song itself came from Osbourne watching a television programme about extraterrestrial life, and carries a melody he had been trying to place in a song for years.
The video for "Under The Graveyard", the first single from Ordinary Man, is a short drama with Jack Kilmer playing the young Osbourne and Jessica Barden playing Sharon. Jonas Åkerlund directed it in Los Angeles. It follows Osbourne's descent into drink and drugs after Black Sabbath sacked him in 1978, and his eventual rescue by Sharon. Osbourne said it was hard for him to watch because it took him back to the darkest period of his life, adding that Sharon was there to pick him up and believe in him then, and that it was not the last time.
Ordinary Man grew out of "Take What You Want", Osbourne's guest appearance on a Post Malone track. Andrew Watt, who produced that song, took charge of the album as well and brought in Duff McKagan of Guns N' Roses on bass and Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers on drums. Osbourne described the method as jamming during the day and working the songs out in the evening, and said that although he had told Sharon he ought to make a record, privately he did not think he had the strength for it - and that Watt pulled it out of him.
Eric Clapton, who plays on "One Of Those Days" from Patient Number 9, is a Christian and was troubled by one of its lines. Osbourne tried altering it to accommodate him, but none of the alternatives worked and the original wording stayed. Osbourne made clear that the song is not an anti-Christian one.
"Degradation Rules", the second single from Patient Number 9, won Best Metal Performance at the 2023 Grammy Awards, where Patient Number 9 also took Best Rock Album. Tony Iommi, Osbourne's Black Sabbath bandmate, plays guitar on the track. He is not credited as a writer, but told Rolling Stone that he had written it and sent it to Osbourne, who added the vocal.
The overlapping voices at the start of "Patient Number 9" are all Osbourne, improvised. Producer Andrew Watt has said that the long introduction left a stretch with no Osbourne in it, so he asked the singer to talk over the track; Osbourne did the whole thing in one take. He then suggested a second voice might be interesting and laid down another, and finally asked to fill in the gaps with a third. Three takes in a row, with no deliberation, and that is the intro.
Both guitar solos on "Patient Number 9" were played by Jeff Beck. Producer Andrew Watt has said that when Beck asked how to approach them he simply told him to rip on the first, heavy one and stay melodic on the second, over the acoustic guitar at the end. Beck re-did his solos four or five times, sending them back with the message that he could make a part better; Watt said he never had to say anything, because Beck kept raising his own bar. The song went to number one on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Airplay chart - Beck's first chart-topper there.
Osbourne was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist on 19 October 2024, his second induction after Black Sabbath in 2006. Jack Black of Tenacious D gave the induction speech, recalling how at thirteen, dithering in a record shop, an older rock aficionado told him the album he needed was Blizzard of Ozz. Osbourne accepted from a throne fitted with a huge pair of bat wings, announced that he was not going to bore anyone with a long monologue, and kept it short: without meeting Randy Rhoads he did not think he would be sitting there, and his wife Sharon had saved his life.
Osbourne's last appearance on a stage was at Back To The Beginning, held at Villa Park in Birmingham on 5 July 2025. He sang from a black throne. His solo set was five songs: "I Don't Know", "Mr. Crowley", "Suicide Solution" and "Crazy Train" from Blizzard of Ozz, plus "Mama, I'm Coming Home", played by a band of Zakk Wylde, Mike Inez, Adam Wakeman and Tommy Clufetos. Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward then joined him for four Black Sabbath songs - "War Pigs", "Iron Man", "N.I.B." and "Paranoid". Osbourne died seventeen days later, on 22 July.