Mike Piscitelli and Mike Fleiss spent a few years on the road with the late Brummie rock legend Ozzy Osbourne while filming this excellent documentary. The insights they gleaned are eye-opening, to say the least, from vocal warm-ups and rituals, to paparazzi intrusion to the complete excess of a stadium band who created the blueprint for heavy metal music.
Although this incredibly detailed portrait is a loving one, rarely does it pull its punches. The pranks Osbourne become notorious for, for example, stopped being cute and funny, the more addicted he became to drink and drugs. And as Jessica, Louis, Aimee and Jack, some of his kids, attest here, he was often not the best dad. Then there’s utter debauchery on tour: you know it’s never good when Motley Crue’s Tommy Lee is finding his shit -related antics a bit much.
He even admits on camera to nearly killing Sharon, and both are remarkably calm and candid about it. “The shutter had come down on his eyes”, Sharon chillingly says. “He said, ‘they’ are saying I have to kill you”. Ozzy, for his part, doesn’t remember the incident at all, having blacked- out completely afterwards. It’s a really sour, sobering moment.
Yep, he was a character, all right, but a more reflective, older Ozzy says that it was both a means to cover up a lack of self esteem and a result of being a dumb kid in his early twenties when he first became successful.
“I don’t believe he was ever sober”, Kelly ruminates. The turning point came when Sharon had cancer. Ozzy knew he had to find sobriety, which, as Kelly now acknowledges, “is extremely hard. It was how I coped as well”.
Times were not always easy for the famous family. Jack says that the MTV series ‘The Osbournes’ “was just an excuse for everyone to laugh at alcoholism ripping a family apart”. Yet, the love between them is palpable, despite the extreme highs and lows. The family footage and the live footage of Sabbath alike is glorious.
It’s a complex, racuous, moving film about coming from working- class hardship, and navigating the bumps along the way into becoming rock royalty’s first dad. And top tip: don’t bring live bats to a show.
Hit The North 