It’s been five years since the music world mourned the loss of Motörhead icon Lemmy Kilmister, and now in a new interview Ozzy Osbourne has reflected on the final days of the rocker’s life.
Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne recently sat down with Planet Rock as part of the stations ‘My Planet Rocks’ series — a programme that asks musicians to play their favourite songs and unpack their influences. The appearance saw The Osbournes reminisce on Lemmy’s final days and his influence on Ozzy’s 1990 record No More Tears.
During the interview, the Osbournes were asked about the mythos surrounding Lemmy lending a hand in the lyric penning process of the album. The interviewer asked the pair to shed light on the hallowed tale in which Lemmy was rumoured to have written the lyrics to ‘No More Tears’ in 15 minutes.
“It was done very quickly because Lemmy had done so much touring with Ozzy, and we lived in the same town, and he was a really good friend of both of us,” Sharon mused. “And he was probably the most well-read man I’d ever met in my life. Brilliant, he had a brilliant vocabulary, and I don’t think that many people realize that.”
Check out ‘No More Tears’ by Ozzy Osbourne:
In addition to his work on ‘No More Tears’, Lemmy contributed lyrics to album tracks ‘Mama I’m Coming Home’, ‘I Don’t Want to Change the World’, ‘Hellraiser’, and ‘Desire’.
Ozzy Osbourne then went on to reveal that he was “probably one of the last people to speak to [Lemmy],” recalling the final, harrowing phone conversation he had with Kilmister.
“I’d phone him up; somebody said he was not gonna make it, so I phoned him and I put him on the phone. And I couldn’t make out what he was saying. It was terrible,” he shared.
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When asked whether Ozzy and Sharon were aware of Lemmy’s deteriorating health, Sharon revealed: “Everybody knew he was ill.”
She continued, “He’d lost an awful lot of weight… Ozzy will tell you the story of when he toured with Ozzy in South America…?”
Ozzy and Lemmy played a few shows together in May of 2015 as part of The Prince of Darkness’ Ozzy And Friends tour.
“I flew down to South America with him about six months before, and he looked terribly thin and gowned, and my heart broke for him,” Ozzy recalled of the experience.
“He tried to carry on as normal but it was one of the things where he knows you know but you didn’t want to say anything. But he worked right up to the very end. He said, ‘I could have probably lived another 10 years if I hadn’t smoked and didn’t live my lifestyle, but I lived my life the way I wanted to live it.'”
