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Ozzy Osbourne has said he was “probably one of the last people” to speak to Motorhead‘s Lemmy Kilmister before his death.
The hard-living rock icon enjoyed a close friendship with Osbourne and co-wrote a wide array of the Black Sabbath frontman’s solo tracks before he died from cancer in 2015.
Speaking to Planet Rock, Osbourne explained how he rang Lemmy one final time after being made aware of his failing health.
“I’d phone him up; somebody said he was not gonna make it, so I phoned him and I put him on the phone. And I couldn’t make out what he was saying. It was terrible,” he said.
The pair were also frequent tour mates – including a final run of shows in South America in 2015 which proved to be the first indicator of Lemmy’s ill health.
“I flew down to South America with him about six months before, and he looked terribly thin and gowned, and my heart broke for him,” Osbourne recalled.
“He tried to carry on as normal but it was one of the things where he knows you know but you didn’t want to say anything. But he worked right up to the very end. He said, ‘I could have probably lived another 10 years if I hadn’t smoked and didn’t live my lifestyle, but I lived my life the way I wanted to live it.’”
Elsewhere in the interview, Osbourne and his wife Sharon reflected on Lemmy writing ‘No More Tears’ on Ozzy’s 1990 record ‘No More Tears’ – a track which he is rumoured to have written in 15 minutes.
“It was done very quickly because Lemmy had done so much touring with Ozzy, and we lived in the same town, and he was a really good friend of both of us,” Sharon said.
“And he was probably the most well-read man I’d ever met in my life. Brilliant, he had a brilliant vocabulary, and I don’t think that many people realise that.”
Meanwhile, Ozzy is said to be halfway through work on the follow-up to 2020’s ‘Ordinary Man’ – which will feature appearances from Metallica’s Robert Trujillo on bass and shared drumming duties from Foo Fighters’ Taylor Hawkins and Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ Chad Smith.
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