And whereas the metal scene is somewhere where “darkness and suffering are explored openly” the music itself “engages with fragility and limits of the body. To engage with that is to engage with life.”
Kahn-Harris’s new book, The Beautiful Death of Ozzy Osbourne: How Metal Teaches Us To Live, argues that the life and death of the Prince of Darkness can help us think about what it means to live fully and well. Something which Judaism also teaches us.
“The first things I heard about Ozzy was that he was the guy who bit the head off a bat. I must have been about nine or ten,” says Kahn-Harris, 54. “The first album of his I listened to was Paranoid, which came out in 1970. I borrowed it from the local library and found his voice unearthly but exciting.”
The Beautiful Death of Ozzy Osbourne by Keith Kahn-Harris. Harper Collins.[Missing Credit]
More than four decades later he watched the singer’s final performance, staged in his hometown of Birmingham. Suffering with late-stage Parkinson’s disease and other health conditions, he says Osbourne appeared defiant “confronting the fragility of life head-on, just has he had done in his music”.
Seventeen days later, on July 22, 2025, he was dead. “It was a good death. He had reached the apex of his career and against all the odds he had managed to say goodbye to his family. Dying when you’ve done what you want to do and when you’re loved is a pretty good way to go.”
The notion of a good death exists in Judaism, he notes. Abraham, for example, is said to have died “old and satisfied” after a long life and some theologians understand this as more than a reference to age but to a sense of completion, to having done one’s life’s work.
For Kahn-Harris, that sense of completion, of having fulfilled one’s earthly duties, was encapsulated a few days after Ozzy’s death when the Buckingham Palace band performed Paranoid, the title song Kahn-Harris first heard in the early Eighties. “He went from being a pariah to an icon. At the time of his death, he was held in genuine affection and publicly mourned by people who didn’t really care for his music.”
Was the singer influenced by his wife Sharon’s Jewish cultural background? Kahn-Harris is unsure. But he feels sure that Sharon herself would have been.
“Judaism’s perspective on morality and redemption is less rigid than Christianity’s, which is more black and white about what leads to eternal damnation,” he says.
“In his lyrics, Ozzy was clearly haunted by the idea of damnation, the sense that there was nothing more you could do to prevent it. In Judaism, we’re always in the game – our goodness or lack of goodness is situational, it can teeter in either direction at any point. There is a part of Sharon that perhaps appreciated this. After all, she had to live with a man who could be a nightmare – a man who hit her, had affairs and who consumed copious amounts of drugs and alcohol. But, having been a chaotic and absurd figure in his youth, he died having found a degree of respect and recognition that I don’t think he imagined was ever possible.
“And his final, farewell concert was one of the most moving brave and powerful things I have ever witnessed in my life. It felt furious, it felt vulnerable and it felt incredibly honest.”
The Beautiful Death of Ozzy Osbourne: How Metal Teaches Us to Live is published this week by Harper Collins
