The bad blood between Sharon Osbourne and Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson remains potent, years after their infamous clash at Ozzfest 2005. Sharon has recently revisited the details of her deliberate sabotage of Maiden‘s set during the festival’s final show, an act of revenge for what she viewed as Dickinson‘s disrespect towards the tour and her husband, Ozzy Osbourne.
In a recent conversation with Metal Hammer, Sharon recounted the scheme, confirming that Ozzy himself was unaware of her plans until after the fact. She organized an effort to disrupt Dickinson‘s performance, which included pelting him with projectiles and cutting the band’s sound.
“I love Iron Maiden, it’s just the singer because he was so horribly disrespectful,” Sharon stated (via guitar.com). “But if you’re going to take Ozzy’s money, and play before him every night of a festival, and you’re bad-mouthing him to the crowd, you’ve got to pay. So I had him pelted with cans of baked beans that were open, and cut his sound.”
She elaborated that Ozzy respects the band members, separate from the singer. “Ozzy only has respect for the guys in Maiden. And he didn’t even know what Bruce was doing. I never told him, until the night that it happened when it was the last show, and he just looked at me and goes, ‘You’re terrible.’”
During that chaotic final Ozzfest set in 2005, as eggs and other debris rained down, Dickinson defiantly addressed the crowd and the disruption: “You may have noticed a few wise as*es that decided they would go down to the supermarket and buy a few f**king eggs and start throwing them at us down in the front. I guess they thought it would be funny. Well, this is an English f**king flag and these colors do not f**king run from you a**wipes.”
The feud clearly lingered. In a 2022 interview with Consequence, both Ozzy and Sharon commented on Dickinson, though with notably different tones. When asked about being potentially underrated compared to singers like Dickinson, Ozzy offered a measured response:
“Bruce Dickinson is a great singer, but as a person, I’ve worked with him, and he’s not very nice,” Ozzy said. He added, “I don’t sing for a judge. I sing for my fans… My goal is to turn my f**king audience on. And that’s what I try to do. I’m not interested if someone thinks I’m a f**king joke. That’s fine. That’s their opinion.”
Sharon, however, unleashed a far more scathing assessment in the same interview, doubling down on her actions from 2005 and her opinion of the Maiden vocalist:
“Bruce Dickinson is a f**king prick. Well, no, he’s not a prick because a prick’s nice. He’s a f**king a**hole,” she declared. “Because the situation is he was on a tour called Ozzfest. And Ozzy Osbourne was paying him every night to perform… And every night he would go onstage and say bad things about Ozzy… But the last gig was [just outside of] L.A. And I thought, ‘You motherf**ker, now you’re gonna get it.’”
She proudly recalled involving her chemotherapy nurses in the pelting: “And so I had about 20 people in the audience and a lot of them were nurses from Cedars Sinai… And they all came down, and they f**king pelted the sh*t out of him. And my thing is, you play, you pay!”
Sharon further accused Dickinson of professional jealousy and lacking Ozzy‘s originality and public recognition: “The thing about him is that he is just so jealous. And always has been of Ozzy… Bruce Dickinson could walk into anywhere and nobody would know who the f**k he is… He’s a faceless singer to the general public… Ozzy is original and Bruce isn’t and that’s what eats Bruce away.”
As of her latest comments, it appears Sharon Osbourne stands firmly by her actions and her harsh assessment of the Iron Maiden singer.
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