Just two weeks ago, I was still immersed in the Back to the Beginning concert experience. Goosebumps covered my skin as the intro to “War Pigs” echoed through the arena and Ozzy Osbourne emerged slowly on stage, seated upon a grand throne. That moment was nothing short of iconic — Ozzy Osbourne will forever remain a towering figure in music history. He brought his final concert to a close with the majesty of a true king. It was a fitting farewell — complete, powerful, and without a single regret. Rest in peace, Ozzy Osbourne.

The night Ozzy Osbourne went to dinner with the US president nearly turned into the biggest disaster of his career.

Yet somehow, thanks to the mix of goofy charm and outrageous good luck that had protected him throughout his career, he turned it into a triumph. As always Ozzy, who has died aged 76 after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease, was reckless, self-destructive… and got away with it.

His invitation to attend the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2002 was predictably improbable. The heavy metal superstar was being honoured for his animal welfare work.

Ozzy couldn’t quite believe it himself. True, he and wife Sharon were famous for their menagerie of pets, seen on their pioneering reality TV show The Osbournes. And he’d recently joined animal activists Peta to campaign against the fur trade.

But if the former Black Sabbath frontman was famous for one thing above all, it was for biting the head off a bat during a concert in Iowa, in 1982. He always insisted it was a drunken mistake – a fan threw the bat at him and, thinking it was a rubber toy, he ripped it apart with his teeth. When he realised what he’d done, he cut short the gig to get a rabies jab.

‘Whatever else I do,’ he used to lament, ‘my epitaph will be, “Born December 3, 1948. Died, whenever. And he bit the head off a bat”.’

So his presence at the dinner as a guest of President George W. Bush and wife Laura was unlikely to say the least. And although American news reports of the night described Ozzy as a ‘recovering alcoholic’, there wasn’t much recovery going on: as he sat down with Fox News journalists, he grabbed a bottle of red and downed it in three long draughts.

By the time the compere announced his presence, Ozzy was in party mood. He leapt up and greeted the 1,800 guests with a scream of ‘Yeeehaaa!’ – then climbed on the table and did it again.

As the boozed-up star collapsed back into his seat, the president began to pay tribute. ‘The thing about Ozzy is, he’s made a lot of big hit recordings – Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Face In Hell, Black Skies and Bloodbath In Paradise,’ Bush said. And then came the punchline: ‘Ozzy, Mom loves your stuff.’

The room erupted. The night was saved. Ozzy, who nearly got himself thrown out by security moments earlier, emerged the hero of the event.

A few months later, he was one of the opening acts at the Queen’s Golden Jubilee celebrations. That was the night Brian May played a solo on the roof of Buckingham Palace. Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys were headliners.

But the biggest surprise of the night was hearing Black Sabbath’s Paranoid booming down the Mall, and a bellow like an injured bullock: ‘Finished with my woman cos she couldn’t help me with my mind! People think I’m insane because I am frowning all the time!’

That was Ozzy. He was the wildest man of rock, a working-class Brummie boozehound and ex-jailbird, whose speech was so slurred and foul-mouthed that half of what he said on TV got bleeped out and the rest needed subtitles.

And he remained a showman to the very end, performing his final gig less than three weeks ago from a black throne carved with giant bats’ wings to a delirious audience of hard-rock faithful at his beloved Villa Park.

Born in Aston, Birmingham, he was one of six children in a house with no inside toilet.

At school, unable to read (he was later diagnosed with severe dyslexia), he was regularly beaten by teachers with shoes or lengths of wood. He responded by causing mayhem: in a metalwork class, he once heated a copper penny with a blowtorch and placed it with tongs on the teacher’s desk, waiting to see him pick it up.

At 15, he left with no qualifications, only to be sacked from a series of dead-end jobs for stealing, skiving or doing drugs.

The only one he enjoyed was working a dawn shift in an abattoir, because that meant he could get to the pub in time for lunchtime opening. Always a practical joker, he liked to fill his pockets with cows’ eyeballs and drop them into people’s pints. An afternoon’s drinking was followed by a night in a club, dancing to soul music till 5am, and then – fuelled by amphetamines – heading back to the slaughterhouse.

Sacked from the abattoir for attacking a fellow worker with an iron pole and putting him in hospital, Ozzy turned to burglary, stealing clothes and a TV set from a shop. He knew enough about fingerprints to wear gloves… but chose a pair with one thumb missing. ‘Not exactly Einstein, are we?’ said the copper who arrested him.

Unable to pay his £40 fine, he was sentenced to three months in jail, serving his time in Birmingham’s notorious Winson Green.

When he got out in 1966, he bought an amplifier on hire purchase and put an advert in a guitar shop window: vocalist seeks band for gigs. He couldn’t play an instrument, but he didn’t want to go back to jail and he couldn’t think of anything else to do.

That’s when his luck changed – and never left him. A former schoolmate, Tony Iommi, was putting together a group with a couple of mates, and needed a singer. Tony, it turned out, was a brilliant rock guitarist, despite an accident in a sheet metal factory that lopped off two fingertips.