On April 24, 2025 — 72 days before Ozzy Osbourne‘s Back to the Beginning farewell concert in Birmingham, England — the Black Sabbath singer sat in his backyard in Los Angeles and wept, convinced there was almost no chance he’d make the show. After a nasty fall in 2019, a cascading series of health crises had left him living in near-constant pain and largely unable to walk. He’d also recently survived a life-threatening bout of sepsis that resulted from a hospital stay for pneumonia. On top of all of that, he had a cracked vertebrae, causing him even more pain, and he was too weak to survive an operation to repair it.
“The problem now is getting to England,” he said in a raspy voice, as his wife Sharon sat by with tears dribbling down her face. “It’s fucking soul-destroying. I’ve got to be there. I have to be there. There’s no two ways about it. I have to be there. I’ve been sick now … this is fuckin’ year seven. As I’m getting further into this thing, it’s getting worse. It’s fuckin’ crippling me. I can’t walk. I can’t bend down.… If I’m sitting here and I’m not there, I’m going to be doubly pissed off. This fuckin’ medical thing!”
This stunningly intimate moment was captured by director Tania Alexander’s camera crew for the upcoming documentary Ozzy: No Escape From Now, which lands on Paramount+ tonight. It follows Osbourne and his family from 2021 all the way to the triumphant Back to the Beginning show. Along the way, you see Osbourne work with producer Andrew Watt on his 2022 LP, Patient Number 9, assemble a supergroup of metal icons for his 2024 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, spend time with his family, and push his body to the limits as he attempts to recover from his ailments and gain enough strength to perform at Back to the Beginning. (Spoiler alert: He makes the show, plays a triumphant set, and dies just 17 days later. It’ll go down as one of the greatest final acts in rock history.)
The documentary is packed with fascinating moments. Here’s a look at 11 things we learned.
During his convalescence, Ozzy watched a lot of television. He mostly enjoyed programs about murderers, World War II, and Vietnam. Surprisingly, he also viewed a lot of interviews with the late metal singer Ronnie James Dio on YouTube. “It was like, ‘Why are you watching Ronnie?’” Sharon Osbourne says. “He goes, ‘I feel sorry for him. I feel terrible.’ He never really listened to any of those [Black Sabbath] records at all. He never knew Ronnie. The first time he met him was when he tried to stab him at the Rainbow … with a fork. He never really knew the guy and never knew his music. So he feels really bad. So he watches Ronnie James Dio interviews and I’m like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’”
On Osbourne’s 2018 farewell tour, he developed staph infections on his neck and thumb. He was put in a hospital and given an antibiotic drip. While recovering, he fell walking to the bathroom in the middle of the night. They rushed Ozzy to a chaotic ER and waited a long time to see a doctor, who told them he was merely bruised and should go home. The next day he couldn’t move his arms, and was brought to a different hospital. “They gave him a proper MRI,” says Kelly Osbourne. “And they found he broke his fuckin’ neck. It’s insane to me they let him out of the first hospital.”
“I watched my dad go from being able to sit up,” says Kelly, “to, I’m sorry to say this, but I can’t think of anything else, having posture like fuckin’ Gollum.” Sharon eventually canceled the farewell tour after repeatedly postponing the dates, and Ozzy continued to steadily deteriorate. His back pain became all-consuming. “It’s a pain that no matter what you do, it’s always there,” he said. “When you’re in a certain amount of pain, it affects your thought pattern. You can’t enjoy anything.”
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It’s unclear when exactly this happened, but Ozzy recalled waking up at 2 a.m. and attempting to tackle the assailant before he escaped out the window. “We didn’t know this, but previously people had been into the house, and they’d gone in through another window while we were away,” Sharon says. “They were coming in just to look at the place. It is really, really horrible. The thing is they came into the bedroom when I was asleep and took the rings from aside the bed. It’s weird thinking you’re asleep and someone is right by you and you don’t wake up. It’s horrible.”
“I’m taking antidepressants now since I was getting ready to off myself,” he says. “I’ll go there in my head and then go, ‘What are you fuckn’ talking about?’ Knowing me, I’d be half-dead after setting myself on fire and I wouldn’t die. That’s my luck.”
“[Watt] makes Ozzy forget his situation for a few hours,” says Sharon of the producer, who’s also worked with the Rolling Stones, Lady Gaga, and many more. Ozzy agreed. “The making of the album saved my ass,” he said. “I’m the luckiest man in the world to do what I do because people have fuckin’ jobs they have to do and they absolutely hate. I don’t hate my job.”
“He’ll never get over that,” says Kelly. “Ever. Ever ever ever. It hurt him more than anything anyone can put into words. It destroyed him. Those were his brothers. Those were his extended family and all he knew.”
Ozzy didn’t have the strength to sing during the 2024 induction, so a supergroup featuring Billy Idol, Wolfgang Van Halen, Chad Smith, Steve Stevens, Jelly Roll, Robert Trujillo, Maynard James Keenan, and Zakk Wylde stepped up to fill in. “I was going, ‘What the fuck is wrong with me?’” he says. “That feeling of wanting to get up there and perform myself broke my heart. I nearly said, ‘Let me have a go.’ But I knew I’d be on the floor in two fuckin’ seconds. A voice inside was saying, ‘Get the fuck up there. What the fuck is the matter with you?’ I’ve got a little demon inside me.”
“I spent some time in the middle of the night last night looking online for these bionic legs and things,” Ozzy says. “Then I stopped and thought, ‘What if I fall over?’ But I was thinking, ‘That would be great, the real Iron Man.’ They’re coming out with some interesting stuff now.” (In the end, he narrowly avoided missing the ceremony entirely due to a blood clot. He was only cleared to fly to Cleveland at the last minute.)
“The first call I made was to Metallica,” Morello says. “I thought, ‘If you could anchor this thing with Black Sabbath, Ozzy, and Metallica …’ And they were very eager to do it. Once Metallica was locked, you’d start calling people. And people pick up the fuckin’ phone, dude, when you’re like, ‘There’s one more Sabbath show, all four original members, Ozzy’s last show, Metallica is playing as well, you can hear their jaws unhinging and dropping to the floor.”
From Rolling Stone US
