It was just about this time last year that Sharon Osbourne announced that Ozzy was going to have to undergo neck surgery that was “going to determine the rest of his life” – an operation that came as a consequence of the one undertaken in 2019, when the iconic singer suffered a fall and re-injured his neck (previously broken in a 2003 quad bike accident that left Ozzy in a coma for “days”).
When Sharon Osbourne met up with The Guardian in a new interview, Ozzy’s wife and manager Sharon Osbourne that the metal plates screwed on Ozzy’s spine in 2019 had to be removed as they were starting to damage her husband’s spine:
“The screws had come loose, and were chipping away at the bone. And the debris had lodged under his spine.”
Ozzy reveals how prior to undergoing the June operation, the damage that the plates were causing often resulted in excruciating nerve pain:
“With the pressing on the spinal column, I got nerve pain. I’d never fucking heard of nerve pain! You know when you’re a kid, and you’re playing with snow and your hands get really cold? Then you go in and you pour on hot water, and they start getting warm? And you get those chills? And it fucking hurts? It’s like that.”
As the iconic singer explains, the pain would sometimes get so band that he got dangerously close to giving up the fight:
“It got so bad that at one point I thought: ‘Oh God, please don’t let me wake up tomorrow morning.’ Because it was fucking agony.”
Even so, the operation proved a success. Despite his ongoing battle with Parkinson’s disease and the fact that he was still in early recovery, The Prince of Darkness decided to surprise everybody and perform at the Commonwealth Games closing ceremony earlier this month.
As the couple explain, the decision was made a week before the event itself, even though Ozzy previously turned the offer down. Ozzy recalled:
“I said to Sharon: ‘I can’t fucking perform.’ She said: ‘Are you sure?’ And I thought about it, and I thought: ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna go for it.’ It’s one song – and I’ve sung it every fucking night for the last 55 years, so it’s not like I’m going to forget the fucking words!”
Gracing the stage alongside his friend and former Black Sabbath colleague Tony Iommi clearly gave Ozzy a new set of wings, as he had previously all but given up hope on performing ever again:
“Since I had my [first neck] surgery and everything got fucked up, it’s been three or four years since I’ve performed. And I was thinking it’ll never happen again. But that show’s given me a bit of hope.”
As Ozzy prepares to release his thirteenth studio album “Patient Number 9”, The Prince of Darkness thinks there’s still some mileage left in his career – the interview even mentions a “possible album with Iommi”, although no further detail is given.
Ozzy ends on a grimly determined note, stating:
“I’m saying to you I’ll give it the best shot I can for another tour. You have not seen the end of Ozzy Osbourne, I promise you. If I have to go up there and die on the first song, I’ll still be back the next day.”
