YOU could take the man out of Birmingham, but you could never take Birmingham out of the man.
Despite his millions — and his mansions in Los Angeles and Bucks — Ozzy Osbourne never forgot his humble beginnings at 14, Lodge Road, Aston.
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Remember his surprise appearance with Tony Iommi at the Commonwealth Games closing ceremony in 2022?
He told me afterwards: “Standing on stage in Birmingham, my home town, playing live — it doesn’t get better than that.”
Ozzy never lost his endearing Brummie accent, even ramping it up when he recalled the days of his youth.
As I sat with him in one of his vast living rooms, he told me: “Sometimes I go back to my old street.
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“I heard the guy who lives in my old house charges people 400 quid to stay the night.
“I remember sitting on the steps at Lodge Road as a child and thinking, ‘Isn’t this a long road?’. Now my drive is bigger than that road.
“I think, ‘My God, how did we live in that house?’. There were six of us kids, and mum and dad.”
Ozzy pretty much hated his time at Birchfield Road School, Aston, where Iommi was in the year above.
“I couldn’t hold a ruler,” he said before breaking into one of his infectious laughs.
But he told how, one day in 1963, he strolled down Lodge Road with his blue transistor radio.
“I heard She Loves You by The Beatles. That was it, I knew what I wanted to do.”
When considering Black Sabbath, Ozzy said: “We weren’t a creation of some big business mogul saying, ‘I know a singer from London and a drummer from Manchester’.
We were living in f***ing Birmingham, something I’m not ashamed of.
Ozzy
“We were four local lads who lived in the same area and had a dream, and it became bigger than our wildest dreams.”
When they started out, Ozzy said the music scene was “all about ‘If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair’.
“But we were living in f***ing Birmingham, something I’m not ashamed of.”
Thinking of all the riches that followed, he added: “We’ve all gone our separate ways and we’re not four crazy kids from Birmingham any more. We have wives, kids, families, houses.”
But he never lost touch with where he came from.
“Egos will kill you. I just try to be as normal as I can,” he affirmed.
“I remember when I was an ordinary bloke.
“When my mother put food on the table, we didn’t go, ‘Oh, we can’t eat that, it’s got too much gluten or fat content’.
“We just ate what we got. I never got the chance to say, ‘I don’t like cabbage’.”
On July 5, Ozzy returned to Brum for one last show in his old stomping ground.
You could see how much it meant to the city’s favourite son when he told the Villa Park crowd: “Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
“You’re all… special. Let’s go crazy, come on!”
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