Larry Marano/Getty ImagesThe world lost a heavy metal icon in December 2015 when Motorhead‘s Lemmy Kilmister died, and his loss was felt deeply by another metal icon: Ozzy Osbourne. As the Black Sabbath frontman tells Metal Hammer, he actually spoke on the phone with Lemmy the day he died.
“I phoned him on the day he died. I knew he was dying,” Osbourne remembers. “He didn’t even know it was me. I had to say to him, ‘It’s Ozzy, Lem.’ He just gurgled down the phone to me. I said, ‘Lemmy, for f*** sake, stay there, I’m coming.'”
“I said to Sharon, ‘F*** it, get in the car, we’re going around to his apartment,'” Ozzy continues. “And just as we were leaving she came up to me and said, ‘Don’t worry, he’s gone.’ And I went, ‘Oh God.’ I just sunk. It hit me really hard, I’m not going to pretend it didn’t.”
Two weeks after Lemmy’s death, Osbourne attended his late friend’s funeral, as did musicians such as Lars Ulrich, Dave Grohl and Slash.
“His memorial was something else as well,” Ozzy recalls. “I thought to myself, ‘Jesus, if he was looking down at this shower!’ There was a tray of drinks as you went into the church. I thought ‘This is Lemmy, alright!'”
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