The Prince of Darkness, Ozzy Osbourne, died on July 22, just weeks after his last ever performance.
As the nation mourns, many have remembered some of his most iconic moments, from his hilarious moments on The Osbournes to his enduring but crazy romance with his wife, Sharon.
Among the memories, many have recalled the time that he ripped a live bat’s head off with his teeth while performing on stage.
The moment was nothing short of legendary, but like most bonkers rock and roll stories, it has become layered with confusion and misremembered facts to an almost myth-like degree.
So what really happened? Was it a real bat? Was the bat alive? Did he really need a rabies injection afterwards?
Here’s what you need to know about one of the most bafflingly badass moments in rock and roll.
The infamous onstage incident happened during a live show at Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Des Moines, Iowa, on January 20, 1982.
The star was two months into a gruelling tour promoting Diary of a Madman, his second solo album.
A gross but captivating trend began on the tour – that certainly wouldn’t be allowed today – which saw Ozzy use his skills as a former abattoir apprentice, and chuck raw meat and animal parts into the cheering crowd.
‘I always liked old movies that used to have these custard-pie fights. It gave me this idea to throw, instead of pie, bits of meat and animal parts into the audience. I thought it was hilarious.
‘[They’d throw back] sheep testicles, live snakes, dead rats, all kinds of things,’ he said in The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne in 2020.
Fans had learned about this grisly tradition during the course of this tour, and came prepared to fight dirty.
One audience member chucked a dead bat at Ozzy, who thought it was a rubber toy, picked it up from the stage and ripped its head off.
But even Ozzy has been vague about the details of whether the bat was alive or not.
‘Immediately, though, something felt wrong. Very wrong. For a start, my mouth was instantly full of this warm, gloopy liquid. Then the head in my mouth twitched,’ said the singer in his 2010 autobiography, I Am Ozzy.
‘Somebody threw a bat. I just thought it was a rubber bat. And I picked it up and put it in my mouth. I bit into it,’ he said, revealing his sudden surprise. ‘Oh no, it’s real. It was a real live bat.’
In 2006, he also told the BBC that the bat was dead.
‘This bat comes on. I thought it was one of them Hallowe’en joke bats ‘cos it had some string around its neck,’ he said.
‘I bite into it, and I look to my left and Sharon was going [gesturing no].
‘And I’m like, what you talking about? She [says], “It’s a dead real bat”. And I’m… I know now!’
After the gig, he did have to have a rabies injection; in fact, he had to have several injections.
He told David Letterman they were ‘very painful’, adding: ‘I can assure you the rabies shots I went through afterwards aren’t fun.’
The concert goer who claims to have brought the bat to the gig claimed it had been dead for days when it was launched onto the stage.
‘It really freaked me out,’ bat-chucker Mark Neal, who was 17 years old during the concert, told a Des Moines Register reporter in 1982.
‘I won’t get in any trouble for admitting this, will I?’
He told the paper that the bat had been brought home by his little brother, and was alive and well two weeks before the concert.
The bat died within those two weeks after becoming a house pet, and Neal and his friends decided to pop the corpse in a baggy and bring it along to the gig, as a fun retaliation to the raw guts expected to be thrown from the stage.
Neal added that the bat was closer to rancid by the time it arrived at the gig and was unequivocally dead.
Bizarrely, this wasn’t the only time that the rock star was thought to have ripped an animal’s head off.
In March 1980, the star was set to release his album The Blizzard of Ozz, which was going to go up against Black Sabbath’s Heaven and Hell album with new frontman Ronnie James Dio, releasing a month after his.
While at a CBS sales convention in Los Angeles, a plan was in place for Osbourne to give a speech and then release three doves of peace.
Unfortunately, the singer had been drinking brandy all morning, and things went more than a little awry when he found himself irritated.
The rocker told rock biographer Mick Wall that a PR person at a meeting had been driving him up the wall, so he decided to freak her out by killing a dove.
In Wall’s book Black Sabbath: Symptoms of the Universe, Osbourne said he: ‘pulled out one of these doves and bit its [expletive] head off just to shut her up.’
‘Then I did it again with the next dove,’ he added, ‘spitting the head out on the table’.
‘That’s when they threw me out. They said I’d never work for CBS again.’
The star also told Sounds’ magazine’s Garry Bushell that the dove was already dead and it was all a prank.
‘I wanted to make a real impression. The scam is the bird was dead. We were planning to release it there, but it died beforehand. So rather than waste it, I bit its head off. You should have seen their faces.
‘They all went white. They were speechless. That girl in the pictures was screaming. Eventually, a bloke came up and said, “You’d better go.”
He added that the dead dove tasted like ‘tomato sauce.’
Following his death, animal rights group Peta actually paid tribute to the star, highlighting his work to protect animals during his life.
‘Ozzy Osbourne was a legend and a provocateur, but PETA will remember the “Prince of Darkness” most fondly for the gentle side he showed to animals – most recently cats, by using his fame to decry painful, crippling declawing mutilations.
‘Ozzy may have been the singer, but his wife, Sharon, and his daughter, Kelly, were of one voice when it meant protecting animals. Ozzy will be missed by animal advocates the world over.’
The singer predicted his epitaph would be about bats in a comment made in 1996: ‘Whatever else I do, my epitaph will be – Ozzy Osbourne born December 3, 1948. Died, whenever. And he bit the head off a bat.’
In 2001, he also complained that he’d be plagued by questions about the taste and why he did it until he was in the ground,
‘And then they’ll dig me up and ask me again!’ he joked.
The star reflected on his death several times in his life, confiding in one interview that he wanted his funeral to be a joyous occasion.
‘There’ll be no harping on the bad times,’ he told The Times. ‘It’s worth remembering that a lot of people see nothing but misery their whole lives, so by any measure, most of us in this country – especially rock stars like me — are very lucky. That’s why I don’t want my funeral to be sad, I want it to be a time to say ”thanks”.’
He also added that he didn’t want it to be a ‘mope-fest’ and wasn’t too bothered about what they played to send him off.
‘I honestly don’t care what they play at my funeral; they can put on a medley of Justin Bieber, Susan Boyle, and We Are the Diddymen if it makes ’em happy.’
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