Completed just days before his July 2025 death, Ozzy Osbourne‘s third and final book Last Rites is a compelling chronicle of the harrowing health battles he endured in the last half-decade of his life.
Simply put, it is remarkable how much Osbourne endured in order to be able to say a proper goodbye to his fans.
In between recounting the surgeries, near-death experiences and his struggle to return to the stage at the July 2025 Back to the Beginning concert, Osbourne also looks back at some of the major events of his life and career, with a new and wiser perspective.
Here are 10 of the most notable revelations from Ozzy Osbourne’s Last Rites book:
1. He Credits a ‘Steaming Hangover’ For His Best Live Performance Ever
“The best did I ever did – in my opinion anyway,’ was the Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington, 1984,” Osbourne declares. “The night before at the hotel, I’d be absolutely off-the-charts shitfaced. We’re talking peak human wrecking ball days.”
After noting that he quickly learned never to perform while drunk or wasted, he said the resulting hangover prepared him perfectly for the show. “I rolled out of bed in the afternoon, got shot up with Decadron, went on stage and absolutely killed it. It’s sod’s law. You over-prepare, and it’s shit. You wing it – going out there with a steaming hangover – and it’s amazing.”
2. He Was Forced to Fire an Overly Amorous Bandmate
Distraught over Randy Rhoads’ 1982 death, Rudy Sarzo left Osbourne’s band a few months later. He was replaced by former W.A.S.P. bassist Don Costa. “Don was a great player,” Osbourne notes in Last Rites. “The problem was he was nuts. And I mean really nuts. Like, he had a cheese grater screwed to the back of his bass, and during a gig he’d use it to grate the skin off his knuckles. And other parts of him. The pain must have been unreal… he never wore a shirt, just a pair of white jeans that would be splattered with his blood by the end.”
Osbourne also recalls Costa being “the horniest guy I’d ever met. He’d fuck anything. …His time with the band came to an end when he tried to make out with me at the back of the bus. It wasn’t a joke. He was in my business, trying to stick his tongue down my throat.”
3. One Written Word Cost Black Sabbath ‘One Hundred Million Pounds’
It’s safe to say Osbourne and his Black Sabbath bandmates regret not having somebody read their early contracts more carefully. “None of us in Sabbath had a clue,” he notes. “And the people advising us were often the same ones trying to rip us off. If I could go back in time and teach myself one legal term, it would be ‘perpetuity.” Thanks to that one word, we lost control of Sabbath’s publishing rights forever.”
Osbourne notes that he once made the mistake of asking his accountant just how much that word cost the group. After being given an estimate of 100 million pounds, Osbourne consoled himself by saying they wouldn’t have been able to handle it: “I don’t think all four of us would still be alive if that had happened.”
4. He Was AA ‘Friends’ With Matthew Perry
Osbourne bends the “anonymous” rules when discussing several celebrities he met through Alcoholics Anonymous. He recounts a series of events in which he wrongly thought he had offended fellow meeting-goer Eric Clapton, and also reveals that Friends star Matthew Perry used to attend meetings at Osbourne’s house.
“I felt so sad when they said he’d been found in his hot tub, unresponsive, with ketamine in his system,” Osbourne said of the actor,” who died in 2023. “He’d given everything he had to stay clean. But it wasn’t enough.”
5. Osbourne’s Account of Randy Rhoads’ Death is More Harrowing Than Ever
Osbourne offers a truly haunting first-person account of the March 1982 plane crash that killed guitarist Randy Rhoads. Adding to the confusion and terror of being woken up by the sound of an airplane crashing into the band’s tour bus was that Osbourne had not been told that they had stopped at an airstrip in the middle of a field to try and repair the air conditioner on the bus.
The bus driver had then taken a single engine plane for a pair of joy rides without permission, with Rhoads and makeup artist Rachel Youngblood aboard for the second. Osbourne takes you back to the terrifying moments when he was first awoken:
“How did we skid this far off the freeway?
Where are the other cars?
What did we crash into?
What’s everyone so upset about?
Why can’t I hear sirens?
Where’s the bus driver?
WHAT. THE. FUCK. IS HAPPENING?
…Sharon’s trying to do a headcount. I don’t know where Tommy (Aldridge) or Rudy (Sarzo) are.
We’re all going into shock, getting that dead, numb look in our eyes. Sharon’s taking off a shoe. Beating our tour manager Jake Duncan over the head with it, trying to get some sense out of him.
He can’t get his words out.
‘What happened?’ Sharon’s screaming. ‘Where’s Randy? Where’s Rachel?’ He’s just pointing at the fire.”
6. Ozzy Finally Made Peace With Dio Replacing Him in Black Sabbath
After Osbourne was fired from Black Sabbath in 1979, he spent decades trading barbs in the press with Ronnie James Dio, who took over as the group’s lead singer. But in Last Rites he reports that he’s made peace with the whole situation:
“On reflection, getting fired from Sabbath was the best thing that ever happened to me – and it was certainly the best thing that ever happened to them,” he declares. “When they hired Ronnie James Dio to take over from me, they had something to prove. And I had something to prove. And that re-lit the fire inside all of us at a time when we all badly needed to feel that hunger again.”
Read More: Our Review of Ozzy’s ‘No Escape From Now’ Documentary
7. He Says He Didn’t Truly Become ‘Ozzy’ Until He Married Sharon
“My first wife had refused point-blank to ever call me Ozzy,” Osbourne notes. “To her, I was always John. Ozzy was just my nickname from school, a short version of Osbourne. …Before I met Sharon, Ozzy was like a separate identity. He was the person I became on stage…. the human wrecking ball. …But for whatever reason, once I divorced my first wife and married Sharon, John never came back. I asked Sharon about it once, why she never called me by my birth name. ‘I like you as Ozzy,’ was all she said. Now I’m Ozzy all the time.”
8. His Desperate Health Battles Led To Osbourne Getting Scammed Twice
The main revelation of Last Rites is that the health problems Osbourne had been battling over the last half-decade were much worse than fans knew. “All I wanted was to make it to that final show. And to walk again, I suppose,” the singer says of his “desperate” attempt to heal himself before the July 5 Back to the Beginning concer.
“I ain’t proud to say we got taken in by a couple of total quacks,” he writes. “First was a guy in Canada who said if we paid him $170,000 he’d put me through a new kind of CAT scan, which could show everything that was wrong with me. So Sharon wired him the money and we went over to his clinic. But the thing was just a regular X-ray machine. Then he gave me this box of ‘special medicine’ that was just a bunch of herbs and whatever, the same stuff you can buy on Amazon. What a con. At least we got our money back after Sharon went stage-five crazy on him.”
Osbourne also paid $100,000 for “something called a PAP-IMI machine, which can supposedly cure anything with electromagnetic waves.” After spending three hours a day on the machine for six days, he found out it hasn’t been proven to be safe, and in fact cannot be legally sold in America. “After all that, I was like, fuck it, I’ll stick to Tylenol.”
9. How Ozzy and Bill Ward Made Peace After Not Speaking for Nearly a Decade
As news and rumors of Osbourne’s failing health began to circulate, his Black Sabbath bandmates checked in on him one by one, including drummer Bill Ward, with whom Ozzy had been estranged for nearly a decade. “The blow up over the (2013) 13 album (which was recorded without Ward) had been the biggest falling-out we’d ever had. …{But] whenever we think any of us need each other for any reason, we have this camaraderie that just kicks in automatically.”
Osbourne then recalled his tearful first post-fight conversation with Ward:
“We may have all got ripped off, Bill,” I said, “but our lives were forever changed by what we did.”
“I know Ozzy, I know. We’re lucky guys,” he said. We can’t complain.”
“I love you, y’know.” I told him.
It went very quiet for a moment.
“I love you too, Ozzy. You fucking lunatic.”
10. Ozzy Finished The Book Just Two Days Before He Died
Living up to the promise of its title, Ozzy Osbourne finished writing Last Rites just two days before his death. The final chapter finds him basking in the joy of the Back to the Beginning show, and happy to be back in his home country.
He clearly realized the end could come at any point. “Death’s been knocking at my door for the last six years, louder and louder,” he writes. “At some point I’m gonna have to let him in.” But he’s still making plans – to go fishing, to make another album, to make use of his new home gym. He also had his final goodbye planned:
“As for what I want on my tombstone, that’s one of the subjects my family definitely won’t let me discuss. Between you and me though, I’m thinking something short and sweet. ‘I told you I wasn’t feeling well’ should do the trick.
Ozzy Osbourne Year by Year Photos: 1969-2025
Between Black Sabbath and his solo career, Ozzy Osbourne became one of the most famous frontmen in hard rock history. Here’s a look back.
Gallery Credit: Nick DeRiso
