He didn't love Satan. In fact, in his autobiography, "I Am Ozzy," he makes that perfectly clear. It was all theater, in the vein of Vaudeville-type horror and Bela Lugosi/Boris Karloff films. Artists have been plowing those same fields for centuries.
Alice Cooper, a devout Christian, plowed a similar field. I saw a recent interview with Cooper and he said that earlier pop icons, including Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope, who he was friends and golfing buddies with, recognized instantly where Cooper's schtick came from.
There's a hilarious anecdote by Ozzy in "I Am Ozzy" where he says that one night, a group of fans outside his hotel room door were sitting in a circle around a candle chanting some satanist gobblediegook. To the obvious pleasure of the chanters, Osbourne took a seat in the circle in front of the candle. The he started softly singing, "Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me!"
Lolololol! That was the end of the circle.
Ozzy was talented, innovative, crazy, hedonistic, a drug addict, an alcoholic and sometimes a madman, a husband and a father. But he was no Satanist, just a flawed human, like us all, barreling through life, trying to make sense of it all, looking for Salvation. I hope he's with God today.
Rocco, possibly for the first time ever, I’m saying a hearty amen to one of your posts.
Ozzy, Alice Cooper, Arthur Brown* and many others, were simply drawing on a long history of Gothic melodrama. The whole satanic schtick was never taken seriously in the UK; we got the joke. But, add booze and drugs to the mix, and the musicians would end up playing to the persona 24/7 instead of switching it off.
The fans and the critics both taking the stage persona too literally isw what killed the career of the brilliant actor Warren Mitchell. He was subtly taking the piss out of bigotry with his Alf Garnett persona... But bigots loved that character and the anti racists thought he needed cancelling for promoting racism, sexism and jingoism!
That’s kinda what happened with Ozzy. He was never a Satanist; he just felt that playing the role of a hellbound clown suited his music better than pretending to be like Cliff Richard.
So, if anything, Ozzy was taking the piss out of Satanists. He never actually ate a bat either; sensible people know it’s just a whale of a tale that Ozzy thought funny enough to riff on.
* A heavy influence on Cooper, Iron Maiden and others, the self professed “god of hellfire” is a frugal former hippy philosopher who, since setting himself alight and parading naked six decades ago, has mastered yoga and came up with Healing Songs Therapy.
So it was all schtick and just harmless carnival like fun for music loving impressionable young people? Of course those young people who sat in a circle paging Satan outside his door got the point and were no doubt in Church with their familes on Sunday morning. Wonder what the parents of these kids and other celebrity worshipping fools did with their collection Ozzy albums after they died or were lost to the depths of neopagan ,hedonistic decadence. Perhaps you feel Osborne performed a Darwinian service. Are you of the belief that when a pied piper like Osborne leads people to the depths of hell on earth, the world is better for eliminating such people from the mainstream of society?