Ozzy Osbourne - Mama, I’m Coming Home

To the Prince of Darkness,

This one hurts. I don’t know your thoughts on the fandom and adoration that must surely have come with your work. I don’t know if you saw music as something you simply must do, and any idolisation as such was worship of the medium, rather than yourself, which would make a letter like this a bit of an inconvenience, I’m sure. I like to think the energy of the crowd was the praise you lived off, the chanting of lyrics and a sea of waving arms, eyes squeezed closed in desperate preservation of the moment. My assumptions mean little now, in the grand scheme of things. But, in the wake of your passing, I can’t help but need to put forward the thoughts that have been battering my mind in the few days since.

I was fourteen years old when I first heard one of your songs. Late to the party, by the standards of many rock and metalheads, but I suppose it’s never too late to have your world changed, right? A free CD from Metal Hammer magazine span in the world's jumpiest stereo system, played at volumes that drove my parents insane because I liked that it did. Slipknot, Amon Amarth, Opeth – then something else. Something entirely different. The opening riff to Crazy Train is ingrained as deeply in my brain tissue as looking both ways before crossing the road, your vocals an impossible to match refrain of howling near-insanity. It was spectacular. That first listen that did it; overwriting what I thought I knew about heavy metal and music in general in my juvenile state and firing me out of a cannon down a road of self-discovery. 

From there, it was a terminal velocity deep dive into the past. Blizzard of Ozz was essentially tattooed onto me; every Black Sabbath album considered holy (or unholy) scripture I recited on bus rides and in private moments. I argued with friends that even the worst tracks on Black Rain were worthy of inclusion in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (they weren’t, but I would be damned if I didn’t fight for them back then). Eventually, I grew into a man who loved music more than most things. Yearned to make it his living as well as his passion, a dream I consider myself truly honoured to have managed to achieve, even if my prior visions of becoming a musician myself never fully materialised. I lived and breathed heavy metal and rock and roll, and I still do. One song on one free CD, that was all it took.

Such a small moment to create such an enormous chain of events. I mean, how do you even quantify the life, the existence of a man who, with no hyperbole intended or spent, heavy metal quite simply wouldn’t occur without? I suppose you simply don’t quantify it. You don’t draw lines around it or put it in however many boxes. You look at it in terms of what happened as a result. The influenced and the inspired – those who would not have picked up a guitar, or drafted their very first lines of awful poetry, or screamed at the top of their lungs into imaginary microphones, desperate to unleash those thoughts made power by the act of music; they are the people you created. You were a catalyst. Hell, you were the whole chemical reaction, exploding in the lab of a mad scientist who knew he was going to change the world forever with what he had fashioned out of what were previously unassuming parts. We are the unassuming parts creating new reactions, smashing together in the hope of having the same creative legacy or, for many an individual, hoping just to experience and pass on the joy and horizon-broadening moments you gave to us.

You laughed in the face of those who would demonise you. Rock and roll royalty, past and present, were wide-eyed and handwringing in your presence and, by all accounts, you treated them as equals and peers. There isn’t a set of horns thrown, a face-full of greasepaint applied, or a riff thundered out that doesn’t make its way back to you, in some way. The world of rock and metal owes a debt to you that couldn’t be repaid in this lifetime or the next. I owe a debt to you that could not possibly be repaid with a letter singing your praises. But it’s the very least I can do right now. It’s one small way of continuing to immortalise you – and if enough of us do it, for long enough, you continue to change the world for those who were unlucky enough to see you do it. Rest in peace, Prince of Darkness. We will miss you with all of our hearts.

Forever your faithful servant,

Eddie Hull