In December 2022, I conducted my second (and, tragically, last) interview with Ozzy Osbourne, who died at age 76 on July 22, 2025.
In many ways, at least professionally, Ozzy had had a very good year. He’d followed up his critically acclaimed 2020 comeback LP, Ordinary Man, with Patient Number 9, which had just received four Grammy nominations — his most nominations ever for a single album — and spawned two back-to-back No. 1 rock radio singles. But he wasn’t going be satisfied until he was able to perform that material live. Even when I tried to pivot our conversation back to his latest achievements, being onstage again is all he wanted to talk about.
“I just wanna get back on that stage. I’ve gotta get back on that stage. It’s driving me nuts, not being able to,” he Ozzy lamented, speaking with me for to Yahoo Entertainment via Zoom from his Los Angeles home. “I can’t relax. I’ve always gotta be doing something. … I mean, I could say let’s call it a day, but I can’t stop. There’s nothing like a good gig, and there’s nothing like a bad gig — because a bad gig makes you wanna do a good gig, better than before! A great gig is better than any sex or drug. There’s nothing to compare it to.”
Ozzy, who had just turned 74 when this interview took place, had been spotted out and about looking frail and walking with a cane, but when he spoke about the possibility of performing again, he absolutely lit up with youthful energy. However, he admitted that he was feeling his age. “I can remember when I was 69 and thinking, ‘I wonder when I’ll start to feel old, when I’ll start to feel everything?’” he said ruefully. “And suddenly, when I turned 70, the floodgates opened. It was one thing after the other. … This is the longest time I’ve been sick in my life.”
Ozzy’s many health issues had understandably put him in funk, but when super-producer Andrew Watt approached him back in 2019 to guest on Post Malone’s single “Take What You Want,” that collaboration led to Ozzy’s first full album in a decade, the Watt-produced Ordinary Man. And that put a spring Ozzy’s step, so to speak. “It got me out of the shithole that I’d got into. I thought it was fun to do. It was a different kind of music, I suppose, but it kept my head above water,” he said. “Andrew was a good help. I mean, this kid can fucking sweat songs. … It just kept me going, because when I ain’t thinking about me and getting back on the stage, I had nothing else to think about. It was like my life raft.”
Ozzy had hoped to tour in 2023, which sadly did not happen, but he got his wish on July 5, 2025 — just 17 days before his death — at the all-star Back to the Beginning concert in his native Birmingham, England. There, he took his rightful place on his Prince of Darkness throne and performed six solo classics (including the sob-inducing “Mama, I’m Coming Home”) and four Black Sabbath songs with Geezer Butler, Tony Iommi, and Bill Ward, and got the send-off and flowers he deserved.
“It’s not a job, what I do. It’s a passion,” Ozzy told me in 2022, when speaking about his more than 50-year career. “I don’t have to get up at 7 in the morning to trudge through the day to go to work. It’s a pretty good life. … So, considering all the things I’d gotten away with over the years, I can’t really complain. … Even today, when I think of some of the things that I’ve done, I shiver, you know? Because I could have been dead. … You name it, I’ve been there, I’ve done it, and I’ve survived. It eventually caught me and bit me on the butt, but it ain’t killed me. And I ain’t gonna stop.”
Watch Ozzy Osbourne’s full charming interview above, in which he also discussed the 20th anniversary of The Osbournes, his rumored biopic, moving back to the U.K., and Taylor Hawkins playing on Patient Number 9.
