just scammed this from the Guardian - what a star!

Ozzy rules

His TV show is taking America by storm, he's dined at the White House, and now the queen wants him to play at her concert. Not bad for an ageing heavy-metal rocker from Birmingham. Nick Kent tries to make sense of the Ozzy Osbourne phenomenon while Alexis Petridis tunes in to The Osbournes to see what all the fuss is about

Wednesday May 15, 2002 The Guardian

Eyebrows were suddenly arched in stark amazement throughout the British Isles - and have stayed that way ever since - when news first filtered out that Queen Elizabeth II's golden jubilee concert this June would feature an added attraction - a live performance from Ozzy Osbourne, a heavy-metal singer from Birmingham best known the world over for having partaken in such dubiously extra-musical feats as drinking his own urine and biting the head off a live bat. While one can foresee no problems for Her Majesty hob-nobbing on her night of nights with Mick Jagger and Elton John and hearing them reminisce about singing old Barbra Streisand songs with her recently deceased sister on the golden isle of Mustique, how exactly is she going to communicate with the dull-eyed lord of black metal, an individual who - in the words of his first bass-player, the elegantly-named Geezer Butler-- used to walk around Birmingham shopping centre as a young man "in a long brown gown, a skinhead haircut, a chimney brush over one shoulder, no shoes on his feet and a pair of plimsolls tied to a dog-leash"?

In reality, Osbourne's inclusion in the up-coming jubilee celebration list of participants is an inspired PR move on the Queen's part. By the time the concert takes place, The Osbournes - a reality TV fly-on-the-wall look at the singer's bizarre family life - will have started being broadcast on MTV's European cable channel and Britain will have probably become just as hopelessly addicted to the weekly show as the 8 million viewers it currently attracts in America.

The show features four principal players - Ozzy, his business-savvy wife Sharon and their teenage offspring Jack and Kelly. As a family, they're probably as dysfunctional as the royals but a lot easier to like. They swear a lot more for a start. More to the point, it's virtually impossible not to feel genuine affection for Ozzy, if only for the fact that he projects an air of almost singular cluelessness in whatever social situation he seems to find himself in.

This sense of lovable ineptitude has served Ozzy well throughout his long career: indeed, it has been his very essence as a popular entertainer for more than 30 years now. He first attracted attention for himself in the late 60s as the lank-haired singer for heavy metal pioneers Black Sabbath, although it became quickly evident from records and live concerts that Ozzy's vocal approach was less concerned with conventional issues such as melodic resonance and staying in tune and more committed to simply replicating the sounds of an old cat being strangled.

The quartet released nine studio albums throughout the 70s and sold millions of copies, particularly in America where much of their audience seemed to be under the impression that Osbourne and his cronies were machiavelic devil-worshippers. Nothing could have been further from the truth: John "Ozzy" Osbourne was just another working-class eccentric with an extremely fragile nervous system who became more insecure the more famous he became and who quickly fell prey to excessive drug and alcohol abuse. By the late 70s, he was becoming fat and losing what little vocal power he had formerly managed to sustain. In 1979, Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi kicked him out of the group, calling him a shiftless, washed-up drug addict.

As Osbourne, who is now 53, has often confessed, his musical career would have crumbled into oblivion there and then, had it not been for the dogged persistence and inspired business acumen of Sharon Arden, the daughter of former Black Sabbath manager Don Arden. The latter has a lavish, well-deserved reputation as a hard case in the music-business.

At the outset of the 80s, iron-willed Sharon broke off all communication with her father and began managing Ozzy herself. She basically bullied him into forming a new band, the Blizzard of Oz, featuring younger metal musicians with big hair and tattoos. They toured America relentlessly and Ozzy soon had more platinum records as a solo act to hang next to his Black Sabbath collection. As Sharon had quickly realised, all metal fans have a soft spot for Ozzy. They know he can't sing as well as Robert Plant - indeed he's often barely able to sing at all when involved in a live perfomance - but they still love him for the array of human frailties he tends to project.

By the end of the 80s, he had become a bona fide music-business franchise. A new year would dawn and there would inevitably be a new Ozzy album with a new improved backing band. Sometimes the music would be grunge-impacted or even influenced by screaming thrash-metal but Ozzy's clueless wail would always act as a reassuring constant. In the 90s, Sharon - who became his wife in 1982 - created a travelling music festival for heavy metal fans known as Ozzfest. It was headlined by her husband - sometimes with a re-formed Black Sabbath in tow - and supported by the most talked-about young acts working within the ear-bleeding genre.

The festival's ongoing success has netted the Osbourne family untold millions to store alongside the bumper revenues harvested from record sales, as well as the $20m (£14m) just handed over by MTV for two new series and a reported $3m advance for an autobiography. Even George Bush wants to jump on the bandwagon; a startled-looking Ozzy with hair dyed blood-red was photographed conversing with the president at a recent White House dinner.

It's difficult to begrudge him his success, for certainly in one sense, he deserves it. The Osbournes works for the same reason that most of Ozzy's musical career has been so memorable - the man is genuinely side-splittingly funny to behold, whether staring blankly at a television set or waddling around on a concert stage like a weasel with a hernia feebly exhorting the crowd to "go fucking crazy". The Queen may even find herself bursting into involuntary spasms of laughter when first coming face to face with the ageing prince of darkness. A knighthood - arise, Sir Ozzy - is surely lurking in the forthcoming scheme of things.

· Ozzy Osbourne is interviewed in The Guide in Saturday's Guardian. The Osbournes starts on MTV on Sunday, May 19 at 10pm. Ozzfest is at Castle Donington on May 25.

-- Anonymous, May 15, 2002

Answers

Roll on Christmas

N.I.B

;-)

-- Anonymous, May 15, 2002