Clara’s Verdict
Rock memoirs tend to arrive airbrushed. Last Rites does not. It finds Ozzy Osbourne at the point where the myth and the man finally have to sit in the same room: a triumphant farewell tour cut off at the knees, a body in open revolt, and a lifetime of gloriously bad decisions to account for. Asked whether he would change any of it, knowing what he knows now, his answer amounts to an emphatic no; a clean, sober, sensible version of him, he reckons, would simply never have been Ozzy. That unrepentant honesty is the engine of the whole book, and it makes for a listen that looks bleak on paper and turns out to be strangely life-affirming in the ear. It is the rare celebrity memoir that gets funnier as the subject matter gets darker, and I mean that as high praise.
About the Audiobook
The story opens in triumph. At sixty-nine, Osbourne is on a farewell tour, playing sold-out arenas to rave notices around the world. Then, in a matter of weeks, everything falls apart: a hospital stay for a finger infection snowballs until he is forced to abandon the tour, and all public life with it, while facing near-total paralysis from the neck down. Last Rites is his never-before-told account of that descent into hell, delivered with the bitter hilarity the publisher promises and the book, to its great credit, actually provides.
Around the medical catastrophe he circles back through an extraordinary life and career: the turbulent marriage to Sharon, his regrets over the Black Sabbath reunion, his friendships with Slash and Zakk Wylde, and the harrowing final moments he spent with Motorhead’s Lemmy Kilmister. What emerges is a convincing case for how a man once billed as ‘The Prince of Darkness’ and ‘The Godfather of Metal’ became something closer to a modern folk hero and national treasure. The appeal was never really the darkness; it was the survival, and the refusal to dress anything up. Unflinching is the right word, but so is life-affirming: by his own account he has been all around the world, done good and done bad, and he is not ready to go anywhere yet.
The Narration
Ian Danter narrates the ten hours and fifteen minutes, and he takes on one of the hardest jobs in audio: voicing a man whose actual speaking voice is among the most recognisable in music. Sensibly, the performance goes for spirit rather than impersonation. Danter keeps the telling conversational and quick on its feet, letting the anecdotes tumble out the way the best pub stories do, and giving the darker hospital passages room to breathe without ever milking them.
Pacing matters enormously in a memoir that can swing from a tour bus to a hospital ward inside a single chapter, and the transitions here are handled with real care. At a shade over ten hours the length feels right: enough room for a life this crowded, not so much that the momentum sags. One early reader remarked that they could almost hear Ozzy himself telling the story as the pages went by, which strikes me as the highest compliment a reading like this can earn.
What Readers Say
A note of honesty on the figures first: the rating stands at a formidable 4.8, but it rests on a single rating at the time of writing, so the written responses tell us far more than the number does. Happily, they are unanimous in their enthusiasm. One reader called it a thoroughly worthwhile account of a most unusual life, noting that it concentrates largely on the post-Sabbath years and is told with humility, a great deal of humour and what feels like genuine honesty, closing with the final concert at the Villa ground in Birmingham; the same reader admitted to wishing the family had been able to add a brief closing word of their own.
Another described the book as emotional, funny and quietly inspiring all at once, and was simply sorry to reach the end. A fan of many decades was delighted to find touring anecdotes they had never come across before, including a confessed addiction to Pink Lady apples, sitting alongside real heartbreak over the loss of Randy Rhoads; their verdict was that it is hilarious, introspective and at times devastating, with his love for family, friends and music shining through everything. The pattern could not be clearer: this is landing exactly as intended with the people it was written for.
Who Should Listen?
Anyone with a Black Sabbath record in the house belongs here, obviously. But the reach goes well beyond the faithful. If you like memoirs in which humour is a survival tool – the kind that finds a laugh in a hospital corridor without pretending the corridor is not there – this delivers again and again. It suits listeners who want their life stories unvarnished and their storytellers unrepentant, and it will fascinate anyone who only knows Osbourne from television and wonders what four decades of devotion were actually about. The easily shocked should think twice, because the life described was excessive by any measure and the telling does not tidy it up. Everyone else is in for one of the most affecting music memoirs of recent years.
Hear it for yourself: Listen to Last Rites free with an Audible trial and let him make his own case, no apologies included.
