When Stephen Rea was 15 in 1984, his father surprised him by offering to bring him from the family’s home in Northern Ireland to Brazil to see Ozzy Osbourne, Queen, and AC/DC at Rock in Rio. His mother, looking for a way to lower the cost of the trip, reached out to the Ozzy Osbourne Information Centre, Osbourne’s early Eighties fan club, to tell them that Stephen was an early member and to ask if there were any special packages for the fest. Sharon Osbourne’s assistant, Lynn, called her unexpectedly and offered the family free tickets if they could get to South America.
The concert was life-changing for Rea, who got to meet Osbourne there and forge a friendship that would last until the singer’s death this past summer. In 1996, Osbourne gifted Rea two leatherbound notebooks and suggested keeping a journal. Those remembrances formed the basis of Rea’s new book, Ozzy & Me: Life Lessons, Wild Stories, and Unexpected Epiphanies from Forty Years of Friendship with the Prince of Darkness, which comes out today. Osbourne’s son, Jack, wrote the book’s foreword.
Rea recorded his recollections up until this summer when he flew to Birmingham for Osbourne’s farewell show, the all-day benefit concert Back to the Beginning, in July. In an exclusive excerpt from the book, Rea captures the excitement of the day, when he was given the job of getting a poster signed by every artist at the concert and how that led to a special full-circle, face-to-face moment with Osbourne at the end of the night.
Back to the Beginning
Villa Park
Birmingham, England
July 5, 2005
IN FEBRUARY 2025, LYNN texted asking me to call her. The following afternoon, the Back to the Beginning show was announced for July 5. One final gig for both Ozzy and Sabbath at Aston Villa’s soccer stadium in Birmingham, a stone’s throw from where they formed a lifetime before. Joining them were a who’s who of rock acts, playing for free, paying homage to the original masters of metal, the likes of Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, and Alice in Chains. Lynn, who still worked for Sharon part-time, gave me the heads-up so I could book one of the last rooms at a hotel they were using, a seven-minute walk from the venue. Which I did.
Tickets went on sale at 4 a.m. New Orleans time, so I woke to screenshots from British friends who tried to buy them, the Ticketmaster site reading for one, “You are now in the queue. 120,597 people ahead of you.” I was trusting somebody, somewhere, would get me in.
A few weeks later I flew to Belfast. As it happened, Adam Wakeman, the keyboardist for both Ozzy and Sabbath, was playing in Northern Ireland with his side project, Jazz Sabbath. He put me on the guest list, and we had a drink afterward.
I said, “I bet you’re getting hammered for tickets for the show, right?” He chuckled. “I’m gonna do an Instagram post with all the crazy requests, blokes I haven’t heard from in years asking for seven.”
I told him I didn’t have a ticket, but was hoping to attend. He put down his pint and said, “I’m playing all day. I’m in the band. I’m onstage with both the all-star jams, with Ozzy, with Sabbath — and I’ve just spent a thousand pounds on tickets for my family.”
I froze, processing what he said. I blew out my cheeks. “Well, fuck-a-doodle-doo then,” I said. “I guess I’ll be listening to it from outside.” I grimaced, then gulped the rest of my beer.
That was Friday. All weekend I fretted, weighing up my options, calculating how much I’d pay to scalp. On Monday, I flew to London to stay with Lynn — I hadn’t seen her in three years, and the visit was planned before the announcement. We’d been catching up for hours before we even mentioned the show, then she said I didn’t need a ticket because she’d listed me as being on the crew. They would find jobs for me to do. Waves of relief washed over me like I’d been drenched by Ozzy’s water gun.
Lynn, forty years after Rock in Rio, was still my fairy godmother.
I LANDED IN BIRMINGHAM ON JUNE 29, rented a car, and picked up Lynn at her downtown hotel. She had been in the city a few days but was moving to the upmarket golf resort in the countryside where Ozzy and Sharon were staying, half an hour away.
Sharon and Kelly came down to say hello — I hadn’t seen Sharon since Moonstock in 2017, Kelly even longer, Voodoo Fest in 2015. We had a drink after dinner, then I drove to where I was staying. I spent the next day touring the special exhibitions in the city that tied in with Back to the Beginning, and it felt like something of a homecoming for me as well, as I visited my old haunts from when I worked there, thirty-five years earlier.
The next day, I was [enlisted as] a “runner” — picking up family and staff, buying supplies, carting stuff back and forth to Villa Park. Just like that, I was welcomed back into the fold, a trusted member of the Osbourne family. It was like I’d never been away. As [Alice in Chains and former Ozzy bassist] Mike Inez often said, “Once you’re in, you’re in.”
The Ozzy and Sabbath sound checks were Thursday, forty-eight hours before the gig. It was the first time I’d seen Ozzy in the flesh in seven years, since our last meeting at that show in Texas. He’d suffered a string of health issues since then and was fighting Parkinson’s.
He was pushed in a wheelchair to a hydraulic ramp underneath the stage, transferred to a Gothic throne, then lifted up. We walked out front to hear him run through “Mama, I’m Coming Home” with Zakk [Wylde] on guitar and Mike Inez on bass. It was a charged song anyway, but watching Ozzy, listening to his vocals, his hand shaking as he gripped the mic, made my eyes well. When Sabbath took the stage, Mike walked out to join me.
“Dude, what were you thinking when you said you might not come?” he asked. “You couldn’t have missed this for the world.”
He was right. For the next two days, backstage was like the craziest high school reunion ever. Guitarist Jake E. Lee and I re-created a photo of us together, him grimacing and pulling my hair, taken thirty-nine years earlier. Band members I hadn’t seen in decades, roadies I once shared a bus with, music journalists I’d gotten drunk with . . . Everyone and anyone who passed through the Land of Ozz descended upon Villa Park in Aston, the neighborhood where he grew up. No egos, no drama.
I WAS GIVEN A JOB ON show day: Sharon had a poster she wanted auto-graphed by every musician performing in the show. I grabbed it and left her dressing room — Guns N’ Roses had just finished sound-checking, and guitarist Slash was heading back to the hotel.
I held the poster out along with a Sharpie and told him what it was for. He took the pen, laid the poster on a flight case, then paused, his hand hovering over it.
“Is this really for Sharon?” he asked, looking me in the eye.
“I assure you, it really is,” I replied. He nodded and signed it, the first to do so. I spent the day running up and down stairs and back and forth across the stage and along corridors tracking down bands, and the members of both supergroups. The dressing rooms were spread over a vast area, with so many acts and solo stars and crew and production, every bathroom and nook and cranny and cupboard under the stairs had a famous rocker lurking inside. I went into Sabbath’s dressing room to get their signatures. I chatted with Geezer and Tony as we did it, Geezer making fun of my accent and my soccer team, inviting me to come visit him in the States, Tony saying he remembered me from the Nineties, Bill shirtless, warming up, all casual and relaxed, as the clock ticked down to showtime.
Finally, in to see Ozzy, [Ozzy’s assistant] Michael unfurling the posters for him to sign as I slid them along, me marveling at how lucky I was, back in the fold only days previously, but trusted to be one of only a handful allowed to visit the inner sanctum of rock royalty as they prepared for the pinnacle of their professional lives. I locked Sharon’s poster in the car for safe keeping. It had maybe 80 signatures, out of around 90 artists who would be performing. The only one in the world, a unique piece of heavy metal memorabilia. What a special role, to be the bloke who got those autographs.
I saw little of the other bands’ sets. But there was no way I was missing Ozzy — five solo songs, four with Sabbath. Team Osbourne, those who had worked for him for decades, watched from the VIP platform out front. He sounded superb, visibly moved by the outpouring of love from tens of thousands of fans who flew from all around the world to be part of history.
To our amazement, Ozzy came to the afterparty — we thought for sure he’d be physically and emotionally spent. From his perch in an oversized leather chair, he saw me and pointed, so I walked over.
I shook his hand. “Ozzy, that was fantastic tonight. You sounded brilliant,” I said.
He gave a half smile and shrugged. “Yeah, it wasn’t bad, was it?” he said. For Ozzy, the most self-critical person I ever met, never happy with how he sounded, it was as self-congratulatory as I ever heard. We chatted a moment, but I didn’t want to monopolize his time and moved off.
Then from 10 feet away, I realized that with me gone, he was exposed to dozens of liggers [a British term for people who flock to celebrities] that he didn’t know. I said to [Metallica and former Ozzy bassist] Robert Trujillo he should go over and protect him from strangers. He did, then immediately beckoned me back to join them both, Robert talking about when he joined the band in 1996, and how I was there in Japan.
“He was only a kid when I met him,” Ozzy said to Robert, and grinned. Just a kid. A fan. Then a roadie, and for the last two decades, a ligger. Here, though, at his last show, I was all of those things and more. In this private moment between us, I felt like his friend.
SEVENTEEN DAYS LATER, AT 12:17 P. M., I was in New Orleans when Lynn rang on WhatsApp. Her name flashed on my phone, and I jumped up to move into the living room beside the router for better Wi-Fi reception.
“Hallo!” I said, excited to hear from her.
“Where are you?” she asked. I told her. “Good, you’re at home. I’m calling with the worst possible news.”
And she said that Ozzy was dead.
AFTER A FEW HORRIBLE DAYS IN Louisiana I couldn’t take it anymore and booked a flight to London. I wanted to feel useful and be with everyone. We could all be together again in England — a reunion none of us expected or wanted.
In the days leading up to it, on multiple occasions we slipped up, so used to being with each other as part of another world, and instead of saying “the funeral” or “the service,” we called it “the gig,” or “the show.” Ozzy would have laughed at that, one final intimate performance.
My daughter turned 18 the day he was buried. She was born because of Ozzy — if I had not been in London for his birthday party in 1995, I wouldn’t have met her American mother. I canceled my flight to North Carolina I’d booked to celebrate with her. One last time, I was forced to reschedule a trip because of an unexpected Ozzy obligation.
I’m not going to write about that week — the Osbournes have lived in the public eye, but they deserve to grieve in private. However, I’ll tell you two things that happened.
On the morning of the burial, I was shook awake at 6 a.m. by a hotel security guard. I was asleep in my underwear in the corridor, nestled against a fire exit door.
“Sir, can we help you find your way back to your room?” he asked.
“Yes please, that would be great, thank you,” I replied, fighting to get off the floor.
I guess I got up during the night to pee, and opened the door to the hall instead of the bathroom. I’d had a couple of beers, though certainly not enough to get blackout drunk — but I had hardly slept in five days, was jet-lagged, emotionally overwrought . . . it all must have been too much.
I told Jack [Osbourne] what happened. “You did a Dad!” he said, and laughed. Ozzy was notorious for getting hammered, then sleepwalking in hotels, ending up in the lobby or the wrong room. At least I was wearing underwear. I often sleep naked, and I imagined getting arrested for indecent exposure and missing Ozzy’s funeral because I was in jail. I would have regretted it forever. Ozzy would have loved it, I’ve no doubt.
Then, around 40 hours after the service, Jack came into the kitchen at Welders House, where I was emptying the dishwasher. Of Ozzy’s kids, I’ve always been closest to him, and we kept in touch even when we went years not seeing each other.
He said, “Stephen, I’d like to do something for you. Can I write a foreword for your book?”
Less than two days after the burial, he was thinking about helping others. That’s the Osbourne way. That’s how his mum is. And how his dad was, even the last time I saw him.
Ozzy and Stephen Rea. “Our final meeting in his hotel suite, just two weeks before he died, the
day after Back to the Beginning. I cried the whole time. More than 40 years after our first
photo together, our last.”
Melinda Varga
THE PHONE DINGED IN MY HOTEL room. A summons to Ozzy Osbourne’s penthouse suite.
It was 10:36 a.m. on the day after the final show capping a mind-boggling 57-year career. I was packing up, getting ready to check out, at the end of one of the best weeks of my life. It was a text: “Ozzy wants to see you before they leave, so maybe come up at 11:30 or so.”
I was as shocked as I had been 40 years earlier, when Ozzy invited me and my parents to breakfast the day after Rock in Rio. I busied myself stuffing my case, not stopping to think about it. I knew it would overwhelm me. In the lobby, Lynn was having tea with a friend. I stopped and put my hand on her shoulder. “He wants to see me. Will you come?” I asked, my lip trembling. She looked at me, stood, and held my hand as we went to his room. We knocked and were ushered inside.
“Ozzy — look who it is. This guy worked his arse off yesterday,” said Sharon, still in her pajamas.
I cried the whole time I was with him. I don’t know why. I suppose I felt 15 again, honored that even though he was surrounded by a galaxy of rock stars and his family and friends and God knows who else, he thought about me.
“Stephen, stop it. You’re going to get me going if you don’t,” said Kelly, hugging me.
Ozzy was on his iPad. He feigned to whack me around the head, as if to slap some sense into me, but he knocked over his tablet instead. I’d texted Melinda asking her to snap a candid photo of us together, and she took a bunch. I’m so grateful she did, the moment captured forever, our final meeting, four decades and six months after that first picture together in the hotel bar in Copacabana.
Ozzy and I embraced and I sobbed on his tracksuit top. He turned back to his screen, and I knew he was embarrassed by my childish blubbering. I said goodbye.
“Call if you ever need anything,” he said. “We’ve known each other a long time, Stephen Rea.”
From OZZY & ME: Life Lessons, Wild Stories, and Unexpected Epiphanies from Forty Years of Friendship with the Prince of Darkness by Stephen Rea foreword by Jack Osbourne. Copyright © 2025 by Stephen Rea. Foreword © 2025 by Jack Osbourne. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, LLC.
