Ten Things You Didn't Know About Ozzy Osbourne

  • While at school, Ozzy appeared in productions of the Gilbert & Sullivan operas HMS Pinafore and The Mikado.
  • The initials in the Ozzy song S.A.T.O. stand for Sharon Arden (then his manager, and future wife) and Thelma Osbourne (his first wife).
  • There’s supposedly a backwards message on the song Bloodbath In Paradise. It has Ozzy saying, ‘Your mother sells whelks in Hell’. This was a send-up of the famed line from The Exorcist (you know the one, about sucking cocks in Hell).
  • Ozzy was a plumber’s apprentice when he was 15 years old. He also worked as a car horn tuner.
  • Nathaniel Pearson, a geneticist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, discovered in 2010 that Ozzy really does have a gene that allows him to metabolise substances other people would find difficult to deal with. That’s why he’s still alive, despite the booze and drugs shenanigans.
  • Ozzy has three children with Sharon and two with first wife Thelma. But he also has an adopted one, Elliot Kingsley, Thelma’s son from a previous marriage.
  • When Ozzy left Black Sabbath the first time he played live was under the band name of Law. They played two ‘secret’ gigs, in Blackpool and Cromer, before revealing themselves as Blizzard Of Ozz.
  • On the cover of 1982’s Speak Of The Devil, Ozzy is seen with what seems to be blood around his mouth. It was, in fact, raspberry jam.

(Image credit: Getty Images)
  • Ozzy got the title of his album Diary Of A Madman form the 1963 horror movie of the same name, starring Vincent Price. This movie opened the same year as the Boris Karloff classic from which Black Sabbath took their name.
  • Ozzy’s nephew is celebrity hairdresser Terry Longden, who starred in the reality TV show The Salon. His mother, Gillian, is Ozzy’s sister.

The Ozzy Osbourne Quiz

Malcolm Dome

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021