Even in his final weeks, Ozzy Osbourne stared mortality in the face with brutal honesty and characteristic dark humour. In the final chapter of his forthcoming memoir Last Rites, completed shortly after his farewell Back To The Beginning concert on July 5, the metal legend revealed he was living with a “life-or-death” heart condition in the days leading up to his passing. Ozzy died of a heart attack at his Buckinghamshire home on July 22, just 17 days after that show.
“It’s never silly little things,” Ozzy writes of his late-life health struggles. “It’s always life-or-death.” The Black Sabbath icon goes on to explain that a severe sepsis infection he contracted in 2023, following the last of several gruelling spinal surgeries, had left him with a “dodgy heart valve” and arrhythmia, a condition that disrupts the heart’s rhythm. “The valve is 80 percent blocked, apparently,” he notes. “The sepsis also gave me something called arrhythmia, when your heart can’t keep time, like a drummer in a bad pub band, so cheers for that.”
Doctors refused to operate due to the high risk posed by his Parkinson’s medication, which required blood thinners. “Meanwhile, the thinners mean if I ever fall over, I’d bleed out in about five seconds,” he adds. “I’ve honestly lost count of the ways in which getting old sucks.”
It was the latest in a relentless series of health battles that had dogged Ozzy since 2018, when a staph infection in his fingers marked the start of a steep decline. A fall in 2019 exacerbated injuries from his infamous 2003 quad bike accident, triggering multiple major surgeries. He publicly revealed his Parkinson’s diagnosis in 2020, and ongoing complications forced him to cancel his No More Tours II farewell tour before retiring from the road in 2023.
Despite all this, Back To The Beginning, staged at Villa Park in Birmingham, near his childhood home, was a triumphant final act. It was his first time performing with the original Sabbath lineup since 2005, and he also delivered a solo set to an emotional 42,000-strong crowd.
Ozzy passed peacefully 17 days later. Tens of thousands lined the streets of Birmingham to pay tribute as his cortège passed through the city on July 30, before a private funeral.
Last Rites, announced just days before his death, now stands as his final statement, a raw and unfiltered reflection on a life lived on the edge and a body battered by decades of chaos. It’s released October 7 via Sphere Publishing, and promises to be as uncompromising as the man himself.
