Apparently Ozzy Osbourne has been dealing with Parkinson’s Disease longer than he’s let on.
Back in January, Osbourne revealed on Good Morning America that he had been diagnosed with PRKN 2, a “mild form” of the disease, saying “…I had a bad fall, I had to have surgery on my neck, which screwed all my nerves up. And I found I have a mild form of… [Parkinson’s disease].” That led people to believe that the revelation was recent.
However, in a new interview with the Los Angeles Times, he revealed that the diagnosis actually happened in 2003. Said Osbourne:
“I’m not dying from Parkinson’s. I’ve been working with it most of my life. I’ve cheated death so many times. If tomorrow you read ‘Ozzy Osbourne never woke up this morning,’ you wouldn’t go, ‘Oh, my God!’ You’d go, ‘Well, it finally caught up with him.’”
Osbourne is currently on medication to ease his tremors, which the new interview relates has the side effect of short term memory loss.
The diagnosis was just one of the myriad of issues forcing Osbourne to reschedule dates on his No More Tours 2 farewell tour last year. He had been virtually bed-ridden for much of 2019 following a bout of pneumonia and a fall in his home that aggravated a 2003 ATV injury and led to nerve-damaging neck surgery.
“It’s been a pretty incredible, interesting career,” Osbourne notes in the LA Times interview. “People have written me off time and time again, but I kept coming back and I’m going to come back from this.”
Further along in the interview, Osbourne goes in depth about his new album, which he says:
“got him out of his misery” and opened up a creatively fruitful moment for the former Black Sabbath frontman. “I was coming up with a song a day. Normally, we would go, ‘Let’s just live with this track for a few hours,’ which ended up being days, which ended up being weeks. This was just bang, bang, bang.”
He also mentioned that there may be an Ozzy biopic in the works, though he wouldn’t go into too much detail about it.
Osbourne releases his 12th studio album, Ordinary Man, on February 21. The rocker plans to hit the road starting this May for the rescheduled North American and European legs of the aforementioned farewell tour.
