Just 17 days before Ozzy Osbourne died of a heart attack at age 76, he gave one final performance with Black Sabbath alongside Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward at Villa Park in the band’s hometown of Birmingham, England, in front of a 42,000-person crowd.
In Birmingham, backstage was also filled with emotions, which Osbourne revealed in his posthumous memoir Last Rites, from connecting with special guests paying tribute to him and Black Sabbath, including Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, Slayer, Tool, and more. Osbourne also teared up when he was reunited with members of Black Sabbath’s old road crew and wardrobe assistant Martha, and others in attendance.
Another moment that made Osbourne cry later in the night was during his solo set. After playing “War Pigs,” “N.I.B.,” “Iron Man,” and “Paranoid” with Sabbath, Osbourne performed four more of his solo songs.
“We got through ‘I Don’t Know,’ ‘Mr. Crowley,’ and ‘Suicide Solution,’ no problem at all,” recalled Osbourne in Last Rites, which accompanies the recent BBC documentary Sharon & Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home and the Paramount+ film No Escape From Now.
“I was having a ball,” Osbourne added. “But I choked up when I started ‘Mama, I’m Coming Home.’”
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By 1990, as Osbourne was working on his sixth solo album No More Tears, he co-wrote several tracks on the album with friend, Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister, which included the Grammy-winning “I Don’t Want to Change the World,” along with “Hellraiser,” “Road to Nowhere,” “Desire,” and the hit power ballad “Mama, I’m Coming Home.”
Co-written along with Osbourne’s longtime guitarist, Zakk Wylde, “Mama, I’m Coming Home” was inspired by the realization that he would be dead if he hadn’t gotten sober and was dedicated to his wife Sharon, who stuck by him through all his crazier days.
Times have changed, and times are strange
Here I come, but I ain’t the same
Mama, I’m coming home
Time’s gone by, it seems to be
You could have been a better friend to me
Mama, I’m coming home
You took me in and you drove me out, yeah
You had me hypnotised, yeah
Lost and found and turned around
By the fire in your eyes
“It’s Sharon’s song, y’know? One of her favorites,” said Osbourne in the book. “Lemmy [Kilmister] wrote it with the two of us in mind. That alone was enough to bring tears to my eyes.”
But Osbourne said all the emotions swelled during that final concert because it was a “last hurrah” for him. “The feeling I had was about more than that,” shared Osbourne. “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.”
Osbourne added, “I just couldn’t hold in my emotions anymore. Out in the crowd, everyone was holding up the lights on their phones. 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.”
Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
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