A Year After Ozzy Osbourne’s Death, Birmingham Launches Ozzy Day

One year after Ozzy Osbourne’s death, Birmingham has declared its first Ozzy Day — a series of guided walks, exhibitions, and pop-up performances across the city that raised him. Sharon Osbourne spoke to BBC Radio WM ahead of the event, offering a plain, unsentimental portrait of the man behind the icon.

“He was authentic,” she said. “He never tried to be anything other than what he was, and he would tell you the truth about everything.” She recalled a figure who could argue viciously and then dissolve the tension with something so absurd that both would end up laughing. Her description carried none of the usual rock widow pageantry — just a clear sense of the person who, in her words, was “funny and charismatic and real.”

The day’s anchor is the city itself, which Ozzy never stopped claiming. “This is the home of metal,” Sharon said. “It’s Ozzy’s home, it’s where he was born, what he loved — and [Ozzy Day] wouldn’t work anywhere else.” That loyalty to place underpins the celebration, turning a memorial into something stubbornly local.

The anniversary arrives not long after the Back to the Beginning concert at Villa Park, which packed a generation of metal artists onto one bill and raised money for Cure Parkinson’s, Acorns Children’s Hospice, and Birmingham Children’s Hospital charity. Sharon confirmed that the charity work will continue. “We will continue that until we find a cure for Parkinson’s,” she said, “because people don’t realise it’s more and more prevalent.” Ozzy was diagnosed with the disease in 2019.

Her final instruction for remembering him was simple and in his own voice: “As Ozzy would say, ‘when you want to remember me, just yank up the music really loud, as loud as you can get it, and just head bang.’”