In a deeply moving posthumous excerpt from his final memoir, Last Rites, the late Ozzy Osbourne has offered his own powerful, emotional account of his final concert. In his own words, the night he described was not a somber farewell, but a “celebration” where he was “uplifted” by the “waves” of love from the crowd.
The excerpt, published via The Times, details Osbourne’s perspective on the historic “Back To The Beginning” show on July 5, just 17 days before his passing. He admitted to being nervous about his voice, but said that as soon as he saw the 42,000 fans in the stadium, the emotion “really hit me.”
“I’d never really taken it on board that so many people liked me — or even knew who I was. It was overwhelming, man, it really was,” he wrote.
The most emotional moment of the night for him came during his solo hit, “Mama, I’m Coming Home.”
“I was having a ball. But I choked up when I started ‘Mama, I’m Coming Home’,” Osbourne recalled. “I mean, it’s Sharon‘s song, y’know? One of her favorites. Lemmy [Kilmister] wrote it with the two of us in mind… But the feeling I had was about more than that. It was my last hurrah. I’d made it to the stage after six traumatic years, after losing the ability to walk or do anything on my own. It was just the whole thing, all of it coming together.”
He continued, describing the profound connection he felt with the audience in that moment.
“I just couldn’t hold in my emotions any more. Out in the crowd, everyone was holding up the lights on their phones,” he wrote. “Someone said in the papers it was like I was attending my own wake, which would be a very metal thing to do. But it didn’t feel like a funeral. It felt like a celebration. There was so much love in that stadium, coming at me in waves. I had tears streaming down my face, but I felt so uplifted. The crowd noticed I was struggling, and they started singing back the words. I’ve been so lucky to have had so many wonderful fans. God bless you all.”
He added that his Black Sabbath bandmates were “as nervous as I was about me doing two sets in a row,” but that the reunion “couldn’t have gone better,” calling the crowd’s chanting during “War Pigs” “electrifying.”
