“Bubbles?! Oh come on, Sharon! I’m fucking Ozzy Osbourne! I’m the Prince of fucking Darkness. Evil! Evil! What’s fucking evil about a buttload of fucking bubbles?!” Before his death on 22 July, countless words were written about the life, lengthy career, and music of John Michael “Ozzy” Osbourne, devoted dad and heavy-metal icon, wild man and wise soul, slob and survivor, idol and everyman. To that record, he added countless more of his own during his 76 years in interviews and various TV appearances. But those immaculately jumbled and oft-quoted sentences about bubbles—addressed to his wife and manager during preparations for one of his gigs—probably capture Ozzy’s dichotomous essence best of all.

To those who have followed his career as a singer, musical pioneer, and performer since his emergence at the dawn of the 1970s, Ozzy Osbourne really was popular culture’s Prince of fucking Darkness. His songs have scored so many black-laced fantasies that if the devil has all the best songs, it’s probably because half his playlist comes from Ozzy’s back-catalogue. But for a whole other audience—those who first encountered him through The Osbournes reality-TV show between 2002 and 2005—Ozzy was something else entirely. A loveable but chaotic family man who may have seemed like a potty-mouthed lunatic, but only because the TV cameras kept getting in the way of what he really wanted to do when he was not onstage, which was to slump on the sofa and watch mindless TV.

Ozzy’s first band, Black Sabbath, were almost the first band I ever saw live. Almost. In February 1972, I was in my first year at boarding school on the English south coast. Sabbath were coming to town and I’d already been bitten hard, first by their 1970 hit single “Paranoid,” and then by their magisterial third album Master of Reality. A few of the older kids were going to the show and said I could tag along if the headmaster gave the okay (which, unsurprisingly, he did not). So, I spent the evening sulking and playing their albums on my portable turntable instead. The next morning, someone I had disturbed told me that my music was the loudest, heaviest, and most evil cacophony on earth.

Black Sabbath’s diabolical reputation arose in response to the band’s name (lifted from Mario Bava’s 1963 portmanteau horror film), the gothic artwork on the sleeve of their debut album, the heavy, doomy, sludgy sound of their early records, and lyrics like this:

Now I have you with me, under my power,
Our love grows stronger now with every hour,
Look into my eyes, you will see who I am,
My name is Lucifer, please take my hand.

In later years, Ozzy admitted that the closest the band ever came to black magic was a box of chocolates (the Black Magic brand remains one of Britain’s best-loved confectionary staples). Likewise, Sabbath’s primary lyricist Geezer Butler always insisted that the songs were meant to warn about Satanic worship, not celebrate or encourage it. Nevertheless, I preferred to believe the Satanic legend, as did my school-friends, as did pretty much everyone else, regardless of whether they loved the band or hated it.

Black Sabbath’s career was one of the most unlikely, miraculous, and yet richly deserved success stories in modern rock. To the untrained ear, their first record’s combination of thick distortion and minor chords might sound almost perversely unappealing. And yet, it was perfectly suited to its own historical moment. By the time Sabbath arrived on the hard-rock scene, the peace and love of the late 1960s had become another mass-market cash cow, the Vietnam War was raging senselessly on, and the Manson family had spent the weekend before Woodstock wallowing in blood and blaming the Beatles. Western culture really did feel like it was at a spiritual crossroads and Black Sabbath were the traffic cops waving Beelzebub through the intersection.

So, god-fearing protesters began picketing Sabbath’s shows almost as soon as the band started gigging, convinced that breathing the same sulphurous air would lead innocent youth through the gates of hell. Some of these protesters were cunning, too. During an interview with the UK music magazine Sounds in 1981, Ozzy recalled, “There was this bird once who I thought I’d pulled. I thought she was a bit funny ’cos she didn’t smoke or drink. When she got back to the hotel room, she started on about being a redeemer and how I was polluted and how she was gonna save my soul. ... She learnt how to fly in less than a minute.”

Myths and legends duly sprang up around Ozzy, from the sublime-but-false (he sacrificed virgin groupies to Lucifer in his dressing room) to the ridiculous-but-true (he bit the head off a bat onstage—“It was like eating a Crunchie wrapped in chamois leather,” he reported). And then there were the crazies who decided Sabbath’s lyrics were some kind of prophetic sign, just as Manson had done when he listened to the Beatles. “You remember that guy from New York, Son of Sam, who was killing all the chicks?” Ozzy asked Rolling Stone in 2004. “When they got into his apartment, he supposedly had the lyrics to ‘After Forever’ written on his wall. I thought, ‘Fuck me, are we going too far?’”

In 1997, Ozzy told Uncut: “I had this guy rang me up from Texas all the time. First of all, the guy said I was his father—fucking hell, he was nearly as old as me! Then he sent me a photo of this tomb that he’d built—and he said he fully believed I was gonna go down to this place and spend the rest of eternity with him.”