OAN’s Brooke Mallory
12:58 PM – Monday, November 27, 2023
Ozzy Osbourne, the renowned 74-year-old rock star, has struggled with a variety of health issues since receiving a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis around 20 years ago, however, he remained upbeat in a recent Rolling Stone UK interview.
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“I’m getting pissed off reading the papers, and they’re saying things like, ‘Ozzy is fighting his last battle. He’s sung his last “Paranoid.”’ You know, I don’t even think about Parkinson’s that much,” Ozzy said.
In the interview, the reporter observed that he displayed “very little signs of the tremors” that are typical of Parkinson’s disease patients. Even so, the rocker still admitted that most of his life was behind him.
“I said to Sharon that I’d smoked a joint recently, and she said, ‘What are you doing that for! It’ll f—ing kill you!’” he continued. “I said, ‘How long do you want me to f—ing live for?!’ At best, I’ve got 10 years left and when you’re older, time picks up speed.”
The “No More Tears” singer and former reality television star underwent his fourth spine surgery in September 2019, addressing issues that he sustained from a fall that occurred back in 2019.
“It’s really knocked me about,” Ozzy said. “The second surgery went drastically wrong and virtually left me crippled. I thought I’d be up and running after the second and third, but with the last one they put a f—ing rod in my spine. They found a tumour in one of the vertebrae, so they had to dig all that out too. It’s pretty rough, man, and my balance is all f—ed up.”
Osbourne stated that while he is still recuperating from the operation, he would be open to performing again, but only if he was healthy enough to put on a strong performance.
“I’m taking it one day at a time, and if I can perform again, I will,” he said. “But it’s been like saying farewell to the best relationship of my life. At the start of my illness, when I stopped touring, I was really pissed off with myself, the doctors, and the world. But as time has gone on, I’ve just gone, ‘Well, maybe I’ve just got to accept that fact.’”
“I’m not going to get up there and do a half-hearted Ozzy looking for sympathy. What’s the f—ing point in that? I’m not going up there in a f—ing wheelchair. I’ve seen Phil Collins perform recently, and he’s got virtually the same problems as me. He gets up there in a wheelchair! But I couldn’t do that.”
Hopeful that one day he may “just do a few gigs,” he told the publication that his followers had been “loyal to me for f—ing years. They write to me, they know all about my dogs. It’s my extended family really, and they give us the lifestyle we have. For whatever reason, that’s my goal to work to. To do those shows.”
“If I can’t continue doing shows on a regular basis, I just want to be well enough to do one show where I can say, ‘Hi guys, thanks so much for my life.’ That’s what I’m working towards, and if I drop down dead at the end of it, I’ll die a happy man.”
Later in the Rolling Stone UK interview, Osbourne also mentioned fellow musicians that he had known for decades who had just passed, which brought the session to a close.
“I’ve been doing a lot of reflection while I’ve been laid up, and all my drinking partners, I’ve realized they’re all f—ing dead!” Ozzy asserted. “The graveyard’s full of them! You’re dead, and you’re dead, and you’re dead.”
“I should have been dead way before loads of them. Why am I the last man standing? I don’t understand any of it. Sometimes I look in the mirror and go, ‘Why the f— did you make it?!’ I’m not boasting about any of it because I should have been dead a thousand times.”
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