I'm A Celebrity: When did Jack Osbourne's rock star dad Ozzy bite the head off a live dove?
44 years later, the story is still crazy
I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! star Jack Osbourne is definitely not as wild as his rock star dad Ozzy Osbourne – who even bit the head off a live dove once.
Ozzy, who died aged 76 this summer, was the hard-partying frontman of heavy metal pioneers Black Sabbath. His behaviour became legendary, including the time he decapitated two birds with his teeth in a studio meeting.
So when and why did the rock star do this to the white doves?
When did Ozzy Osbourne bite the head off a dove?
In Mick Wall’s 1985 biography Ozzy Osbourne: Diary of a Madman, the author says Ozzy was expressing his dislike for a PR woman in a meeting when he bit the head off the dove.
Ozzy was over in Los Angeles as a solo artist at the the time (March 1981), speaking to his record label CBS. He’d arranged to deliver a quick speech before releasing three doves as a symbol of peace, but one individual in the room rubbed him up the wrong way.
“I just remember this PR woman going on and on at me,” he told Mick. “I pulled out one of these doves and bit its (bleep) head off. Just to shut her up. Then I did it again… that’s when they threw me out. They said I’d never work for CBS again.”
The Black Sabbath frontman later spoke to Sounds reporter Garry Bushell about the event. This time he offered another angle on the dove-biting, though.
“I wanted to make a real impression,” stated Ozzy. “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. Eventually a bloke came up and said, ‘You’d better go.'”
Apparently, the lifeless bird tasted just like tomato ketchup. Yuck.
Ozzy Osbourne and the bat
Less than a year after the dove debacle, Ozzy did the same thing to a live bat. He was performing on stage in the city of Des Moines, Iowa when a fan launched the animal in his direction.
Playing into his own myth, the Snow Blind singer proceeded to rip its head off with his teeth. He thought it was all a joke though, that the bat was made of rubber.
He told talkshow host David Letterman: “I get a lot of weird people at my concerts. Somebody threw a bat on stage and I thought it was one of these toy bats, so I picked it up, bite the thing’s head off and suddenly everybody’s freaking out because it’s a real bat.
“But I can assure you the rabies shots what I went through afterwards, aren’t funny. They’re very painful.”
In 2019, Ozzy launched a plush toy bat emblazoned with his name. It even had a detachable head! Now that’s how you embrace a legacy…
Read more: All the stars who’ve quit I’m A Celebrity and the reasons behind their exit
