On July 23, the world awoke to news that legendary rockstar Ozzy Osbourne had died aged 76.
Kicking off his music career in 1968, Osbourne Skyrocketed to fame in the ’70s as the lead singer of Black Sabbath and soon became known to fans around the world as The Prince of Darkness.
There’s no doubt that he will go down as a legend in rock and roll history – but certain moments from his career will likely be remembered more than others.
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Back in the early days of his career Osbourne was known to perform some wild acts on stage, and we mean really wild.
So, to honour the memory of one of music’s greats, we’ve rounded up some of his most memorable moments to look back on.
He bit the head off a bat
Probably the most infamous of all of Osbourne’s outrageous moves is the time he bit the head off a bat.
In 1982 during a concert in Iowa, 17-year-old fan Mark Neal threw a dead bat onto the stage and Osbourne, assuming it was a toy, picked it up and ripped it’s head off with his teeth.
After the show he headed to a medical centre for a series of rabies shots.
In his memoir he recalled that the bat left “the worst aftertaste you could ever imagine” in his mouth.
…and a dove
It seems biting the heads off of dead animals was just a thing Osbourne did in the early ’80s.
The day the album Blizzard of Oz was set for release back in 1981, Osbourne headed into a meeting with CBS records where he bit the head off not one, but two doves.
Three months after the incident, in an interview with journalist Garry Bushell, Osbourne revealed that he had planned to release the doves as a sign of peace, but found out the birds had died before he had the chance.
“So rather than waste it I bit its head off,” he explained.
“You should have seen their faces. They all went white. They were speechless. That girl in the pictures was screaming.
“Eventually a bloke came up and said, ‘You’d better go’.”
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While one biting the head off one dove seems enough to send anyone into a spiral, it wasn’t until Osbourne took his teeth to the second that the CBS team drew the line.
“I did it again with the next dove, spitting the head out on the table, and [the woman] fell on the floor screaming,” he recalled during an interview with Wall.
“That’s when they threw me out. They said I’d never work for CBS again.”
He put on a real show at dinner
During the tour for Blizzard of Oz, Osbourne and his bands mates went out to dinner with team members in Germany.
While not too much is known about the evening, we do know it didn’t end well.
Reportedly after taking a slew of substances, Osbourne climbed atop the dinner table and performed what several outlets have labelled a “Nazi strip-tease”.
Once he was completely naked, the singer urinated into one of the dinner guests’ wine carafe.
He was not welcome back in Germany for a number of years.
He threw meat at the audience
Now we’re not sure why Osbourne did this, but what is even more bizarre is that his fans ate it up (see what we did there?).
During his Diary of a Madman tour Osbourne would bring a giant catapult out onto the stage for the sole purpose of hurling meat at his audience members.
It became such a popular bit, that fans began to bring pieces of meat to the concert themselves.
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“I always liked old movies that used to have these custard-pie fights. It gave me this idea to throw, instead of pie, bits of meat and animal parts into the audience,” he said in the documentary The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne.
“I thought it was hilarious. [They’d throw back] sheep testicles, live snakes, dead rats, all kinds of things. Someone once threw a live frog onto onstage. It was the biggest frog I’d ever seen, and it landed on its back.”
He snorted a line of ants
During a 2024 episode of the This Past Weekend with Theo Von podcast, Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee recalled the time Osbourne snorted a line of ants.
Lee explained that the act was an attempt from Osbourne to prove to a group of rock stars that he was in fact the wildest of them all.
When Von asked if it really happened, Lee said that the story was “full-on true”.
“I know people ask that all the time. They’re, like, ‘Dude, really?’,” he said.
“I’m, like, abso-f—ing-lutely. You can’t make that s— up.”
He was invited to the White House
In 2002 Osbourne and his wife Sharon were invited to one of the most esteemed events held at the White House – the Correspondents Dinner.
It was during George W. Bush’s tenure, with the president quipping during a speech, “Ozzy, mum loves your stuff.
In a room of around 1,800 people Osbourne reportedly got very drunk and ended up jumping around on his dining table.
At one point, Bush was heard muttering, “This might have been a mistake”.
READ MORE: How The Osbournes introduced the world to a new side of Ozzy Osbourne
And even the royal family were fans
Now this might not be wild in the same sense that every other act on this list is, it’s more so wild that Osbourne was even invited to the event in the first place.
But no one was more surprised than the rock star himself.
When Osbourne was invited to perform outside Buckingham Palace for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002, he thought it was a joke at first.
“My wife told me and I thought ‘you’re pulling my leg’,” he recalled in an interview with the Press Association ahead of the event.
“Heavy metal at the palace? I’m not sure whether the Queen is a fan, but obviously she must be.”
In that same interview, Osbourne said that he will be on his “best behaviour” during the appearance.
”I’m on my best behaviour. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in the Tower.
“I mustn’t drop my trousers, no bad language or perhaps a trap door will open.”
He described the moment as the pinnacle of his career at the time.
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