The Black Sabbath legend’s announcement at 74 that he will never tour again marks an end to the rabble-rousing live career of a singular rock star
– there was something supremely unstarlike about Osbourne onstage. As Barney Hoskyns put it in Creem in 1982: “Though Ozzy never professed to being a ‘messiah of slum people’, neither was he a megalomaniac frontman. There was always a comic element to his performance that he recognised. He was just too dumbly honest, too honestly dumb. ‘All I am is a ham,’ he confessed.”
Ham is unfair. He seemed displaced. He often sang while clinging to the mic stand, like a sailor lashed to a mast in a storm, as if the force of the band behind him might wash him away. Long before symptoms of Parkin were apparent, he seemed to lumber around the stage: not for him the sprinting of Bruce Dickinson with Iron Maiden, or the priapic thrusting of Robert Plant.
But he was a rabble-rouser, too – famed for knowing, in the days before rigid stage times, exactly when the audience was febrile enough for Sabbath to take to the stage. He was a cheerleader and audience director. But he didn’t do it as though it was his right to have you respond – it was more like someone trying to lead a pub singalong. He just happened to be doing it to tens of thousands of people at 110 decibels.
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