No one ever really expected Ozzy to die. Not on paper. Not in rumor. Not in the quiet moments between albums or after cancelled tours. He had already survived everything that was supposed to take him down: the drugs, the fame, the press, the demons. Even time itself seemed to hesitate. So when he walked onstage at Villa Park for what the world called his final concert, it didn’t feel like a farewell. The stadium pulsed like a living thing. Bodies pressed together, a tide of leather, studs, eyeliner, and nostalgia. But this wasn’t some retro act. This was a cult of the eternal. And when the lights dropped and the smoke hissed out from the underworld, he emerged and all the fragility that his body had acquired in the latest years seems to fade away. He was Ozzy. Tall. Still. On his all-black throne. No bat in mouth. We didn’t want the 1970s back. We didn’t want the wild, manic, headbanging madman. We wanted this Ozzy, the one who had stared death down so many times it now sat politely in the front row, clapping.

He opened with “I Don’t Know.” The irony wasn’t lost on anyone. He always claimed to be the accidental prophet, but somehow, his voice still carved through the night. Clear, distorted, untouchable. A spell. And then came the moment. The lights trembled. A guitar riff like lightning cracking stone. “Crazy Train.” If there was ever a national anthem for the damned and the divine, this was it. 

Crazy but that’s how it goes 

And God, the way he said it. He didn’t pace. One boot in this world, one in the next. The body may have slowed, but the presence he had on the stage made him look like he’d become something more than flesh. A channel for everything he ever was: the factory boy from Aston, the Sabbath frontman, the drugged-out madman, the MTV anti-hero, the legend knighted by a culture that once tried to burn him. He somehow still had a huge amount of force. Not the energy of youth, but something purer. An aura. 

Maybe it’s not too late to learn how to love and forget how to hate 

When he sang it, the crowd erupted, knowing now more than ever the weight of those words, of that testament Ozzy was leaving. That lyric, screamed for forty-five years, now rang out like a final truth. As if all the rage and rebellion of metal had found its ultimate purpose: not destruction, but redemption. Because the world Ozzy came from the post-war gloom, the factory soot, the broken dreams, and it never really went away. It just changed clothes. Now we have algorithmic despair. Climate dread. Violence dressed in techwear. But Ozzy had always known that madness was the undercurrent of modern life. He just dared to scream it into melody. And so he gave us one more ride. And we went willingly. All of us. Baptised in distortion, in noise, in tears. 

I’m going off the rails on a crazy train

He declared it like a preacher holding court in hell’s own tabernacle. The screens behind him showed fragments of his past. Sabbath playing in shadow. Sharon wiping sweat from his brow. Footage of Ozzfest crowds from the nineties, moshing like their lives depended on it. And then silence, just held breath.

“I love you all” he said.

“Forever.” 

That was it. No encore. No curtain call. The kind of exit you’d expect from a god, or a ghost, or whatever bleeds in between. People didn’t cry, not right away. They stared, gutted and spellbound, like witnesses to something that shouldn’t have been allowed. 

Maybe immortality does exist. Maybe it wears black and sings about madness, apocalypse, and the sick ache of love. Maybe Ozzy didn’t give a final concert. Maybe he cracked the sky open one last time, then vanished into the noise he came from. 

And now the train keeps screaming through the dark. But its conductor is gone.