'I've stuck by my husband Ozzy Osbourne for over 50 years for one simple reason'

Black Sabbath’s final ever performance will draw more than 45,000 heavy metal fans from around the world to Villa Park to hear frontman Ozzy Osbourne in “perfect” voice tonight.

He may be 76 and suffering from Parkinson’s, but his Back to the Beginning celebration will make history for all the right reasons, insists wife Sharon.

“We are doing it to say goodbye as he feels like ‘I have never said goodbye to my fans. I want to say goodbye properly,’” she tells The Mirror, disclosing that he’s been having singing lessons.

"There won’t be any head banging. Not anymore, but his voice is still absolutely perfect.”

Still devoted to the star, who she married 43 years ago this week, Sharon, 72. adds: “Even if you don't like his music you can't not like Ozzy – he just draws you in."

Her husband’s manager since 1979, Sharon met Ozzy - who will continue recording, although he won’t perform again live - in 1970 when he walked into the music management offices of her father, the late impresario Don Arden.

Just 18 then and manning the telephone switchboard for Don, who looked after American greats Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, Sharon, 72, remembers their meeting as if it was yesterday.

"When I first met Ozzy he was in pyjama tops, open toe sandals and a tap around his neck as jewellery,” she laughs. "We have been together for over 50 years. I have stuck by him because I love him. It is simple. I understand him and why he does the things he does.

"I have always felt I could not do it without his talent and I always feel I am on his coat tails. So it takes two. The combination has worked and still does.

"I know him so well. It takes years and years to know someone, so I know him inside out, backwards and the same he does with me."

Despite his hellraising image, Sharon says Ozzy was hopeless as a young star when it came to sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

A former petty thief, from working class roots in Aston, Birmingham, aged 17, Ozzy was jailed for two months after breaking into a clothes shop and stealing women's stockings.

Music saved him from crime, but Sharon recalls: "Ozzy got fired from Black Sabbath for doing drugs. They were all doing them, but he could not handle them. He would be on the floor peeing himself and the others would still be having a great time. He could never handle it.

"Once they were in a city, let's say Detroit, they were in this hotel and they were all very tired. The tour manager gave them the keys to the room and Ozzy goes to the room and wakes up at 6pm and he is like ‘Oh the gig, I have got to get there,’ but he did not know where it was and he could not get through to anybody.

"He had slept the entire day through and they could not find him. He had gone into somebody else's room. The door was open and he went in."

Caring for Ozzy, who also sustained terrible injuries, including a broken neck vertebra, broken collarbone and six broken ribs in a 2003 quad bike accident at his Buckinghamshire property, is now a full-time job for Sharon.

She says: "It is very hard for him since he had his accident. He has had seven operations in five years and major operations.

"When he had his first operation they had him on like 64 pills a day, different things he needed. I remember I went in there one day and he said ‘Hi darling. How are you? You have just missed Elvis Presley.’ I was like ‘really?’ and he said ‘yeah, we had a great talk. He is doing great. We had this whole conversation’.

"It was because he was on so many different painkillers. It was just horrendous and we decided he can never handle his own medication."

Also supporting him with his health issues are daughters Aimee, 41, Kelly, 40, and son Jack, 39, as well as an Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, who has been by his side since the star quit booze more than 11 years ago.

Sharon says: "Ozzy has still got his sponsor Billy and my son is sober. We have never had alcohol in the house. My son has been clean and sober 20 years now."

Ozzy’s crazy days of binge drink and drug taking, which famously threatened his marriage to Sharon in September 1989 when he one night attempted to strangle her, are now a distant memory.

Recalling the attack, Sharon says: "I remember everything about that. It is like tattooed in my brain. He was on a roll with the drugs and the booze and all week he had been a bit violent, fiery. I always knew. The pestle and mortar in the kitchen, he was using it in the kitchen to grind up pills, all different types.

"He used to hide his drink in the oven as he knew I would never find it. I knew that day it was building. That night he was upstairs and I was downstairs and suddenly he came down with just his undies on.

"He goes ‘We have got something to tell you?’ I was like ‘we?’ and he said ‘we have decided. I am going to have to kill you’. I was like ‘alrighty then’ and it was like whoosh. He got me on the ground and was strangling me.

"On the coffee table we had an alarm and it went straight to the cops and it would ring really loud. I had it extra loud, as we were living in the country and often I was on my own, as there was nobody around. So I pressed the alarm and within two minutes the cops came.

"I blacked out. All I kept thinking about was the kids. They handcuffed him and it is the usual alcoholic thing ‘she is this...and that’. When they took him away I had this weight lifted off me.

"He got himself a lawyer and he said he would go into rehab for six months and the judge said he had to stay there for six months. It terrified me and the kids."

Despite the attack, Sharon helped Ozzy battle his demons, saying: "I had nothing in my name, so if I wanted a divorce I would have nothing.

"He then started to write long letters and I missed him. No matter what, I loved him, so what am I gonna do? When he came back he had been six months without booze or drugs, so he was very quiet and sheepish."

As well as the attack, Ozzy has, reportedly, had multiple affairs over the years with various women, including a Russian teenager, and an English masseuse and cook who worked for the family. But the couple have always reconciled.

And Sharon says Ozzy missed her life mad when work took her away from their LA base for stints on shows like The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent. "He hates living on his own,” she says.

Explaining his dalliances, she adds: “When he is on tour he is in a hotel room on his own. And you don't have to go out looking when you are a rock star, it (temptation) is everywhere."

Glad that she made X Factor, judging alongside Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh, Sharon says our "be kind era" means it would be impossible to make it today, as it would be dubbed cruel.

She agrees with current thinking that you should protect vulnerable stars, but adds: “When somebody comes in dressed as a jockey and says they are going to sing Madonna, well that is different."

She is glad she and Ozzy pulled the plug on their own MTV series, The Osbournes, back in 2005, saying the rise of the reality TV genre was damaging their children.

"We stopped doing it because of the kids. They were earning too much money and they got too much attention and they were living a life which was basic bullshit," says Sharon.

"It was parties here and parties there. They were flown all around the world. They were too young and it was bullshit. They went from a school in Buckinghamshire in their uniforms to Los Angeles and they could get into any club they wanted. They were too young, but they would let them in because of who they were. Fame and money is very hard to handle."

The Osbournes was pivotal to other celebrities wanting to make their own ‘at home with’ series.

But Sharon insists she doesn’t envy the Kardashians, who reportedly made $100 million per season for their series, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, which ended in 2021.

She says of their show: "You can t say it is about a normal family, as it is all about fashion and sex. I have never watched a full episode.”

Glad to have had such a colourful life, Sharon is also very aware of how precious her time with Ozzy now is.

She says: "Time is the most precious thing we have. You can't buy time. The days drip by, but the years fly by and suddenly you wake up and you are old. But I like getting old, as I feel I have got wisdom."

And has she ever had eyes for anyone other than the Black Sabbath legend? "I would say George Michael if he was straight,” she laughs. “I mean, everyone loved George."

• Earth: The Legendary Lost Tapes, released on July 25, contains tracks by Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward recorded at Zella Studios in Birmingham in 1969.

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