John Michael Osbourne, aka Ozzy Osbourne, might have been all of these things — but the reason why half the world is in mourning at his passing this week is because he was the devilfather of the long-haired head bang, the 100-watt wail, and the dark power pose of what came to be called heavy metal.
Ozzy and his band Black Sabbath arrived just at the right time.
The Vietnam War was at its most apocalyptic and brutal, the dark and violent cousin of Woodstock — the Altamont rock festival — had occurred just two months earlier, and the Manson Family murders in August of 1969 announced the hippy dream was descending into hell.
Even The Beatles’ flag of joy and sunshine was in tatters by the spring of 1970.
Black Sabbath was just what every sullen, oppressed white teenager living with nice middle-class parents needed.
The second album I bought after Sgt. Pepper, that great baroque pinnacle of flower power in 1967, was Black Sabbath, released in February 1970.
As a 14-year-old with a Saturday job cleaning holiday chalets, it took a while to save up for records, particularly ones you had to hide from disgusted and terrified parents.
But that was exactly the appeal of Black Sabbath — its dark, angry mirror, however plastic, was the reverse of the beautiful hand-crafted paisley hippy dream.
Hippies had become nice — God forbid — even my parents began to think they were actually not too bad.
But Black Sabbath were bad.
They dressed in black; they looked like they practised black magic.
Ozzy had a blood-curdling scream.
Tony Iommi’s guitar sounded like the air-slice of an axe through granite.
And the cover photo on their first album was a blurred image of a white-faced woman in a black cloak standing in a dying winter landscape, all filtered through a lens of watery blood.
The words ‘Black Sabbath’ appeared in the top left corner of the sleeve in a bastardised medieval font.
Cripes, it was creepy.
It was a perfect record to carry on the school bus and scare girls.
It was a talisman under my arm — warning everyone not to mess with me because I have the power to cast a spell on you and make you shiver with just one look.
It’s difficult to believe now, but this was a time when music had the power to define the look and the attitude of a whole generation.
My friends began to wear black.
I wore my sister’s long black leather coat and felt like a warlock walking down Burnham-on-Sea High St on a Saturday morning.
Five of us actually sat around a table with candles and a Ouija board and tried to summon the spirits of dead people.
We scared ourselves so much we stopped after one session, but we kept on listening to Ozzy because he channelled the darkness, even though we secretly knew he was pretending to be a master of the occult.
After Black Sabbath’s second album, Paranoid, came out later in 1970, I began to get bored with the theatre of it all and put my sister’s leather coat back in the wardrobe.
Ozzy went on to cement his legend status by biting the head off a dead bat during a live concert; getting kicked out of the band in 1979 because of his drug- and alcohol-fuelled unpredictability; and then incredibly, becoming a reality TV star beloved for his honesty and humour in dealing with his health problems and chaotic family life.
His death at 76 marks the end of a wild and extraordinary career.
For all his chaotic buffoonery, he was an innovator who set the spiked ball rolling for many who came after.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
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