📍Lodge Road, Aston, Birmingham B6, UK
1948 – 1968“I was born John Michael Osbourne in December 1948, and grew up at 14 Lodge Road in Aston, a working-class district of Birmingham still scarred by wartime bombing, in a small terraced house with my parents, Jack and Lillian, and five brothers and sisters. My dad worked nights as a toolmaker at the General Electric Company, and my mum worked in a factory making car horns. There was never much money, and eight of us squeezed into that little house. I was hopeless at school, because of dyslexia that nobody knew about until I was in my thirties, and I was bullied, including by a boy in the year above at Birchfield Road school, Tony Iommi. Everyone called me Ozzy from my school days. I loved making people laugh, and I loved singing, especially after I heard the Beatles' She Loves You at fourteen; that's when I knew I wanted to be a musician. I carved the words Iron Void into the brickwork by our front door. I left school at fifteen and had all sorts of jobs: building labourer, trainee plumber, toolmaker, tuning car horns in a factory and working in a slaughterhouse, and I got into trouble and spent a few weeks in Winson Green prison. In 1968, I put an advert in a music shop, Ozzy Zig Needs Gig, and Geezer Butler answered it, and then Tony Iommi turned up, and with Bill Ward we became Black Sabbath, creating heavy metal in the industrial heart of Birmingham. I became the Prince of Darkness, and later a solo star and a television dad. My name is still carved by the door on Lodge Road, and Birmingham has named a bridge and a bench for Black Sabbath, so the city never forgets the boy from Aston.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today