Ozzy Osbourne’s son, Jack Osbourne recently broke his silence on the ongoing speculation around the identity of the act that was disinvited from Back To The Beginning – the historic all-star event in tribute to Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath – after a dispute over money.
The concert took place in Birmingham, England on July 5th last year and it brought together some of the biggest names in rock and metal, with all participating artists agreeing to waive their standard performance fees. The money taken in by Back To The Beginning was later donated to several charities.
Speaking on the Hate To Break It To Ya podcast, Jack Osbourne stated that fans are wrongly guessing who turned down the “Back To The Beginning” event—none of the online guesses are even close, including Wolfgang Van Halen, who actually wanted to participate but couldn’t due to touring commitments.
“Everyone’s online speculating who it is, and I have not seen a single accurate (guess). Not even close. I saw something that it was Wolfgang Van Halen and it was absof*ckingutely not. Wolf wanted to be there so badly and it was just a clash in schedule (he cancelled due to touring commitments) and hey, he was getting a paid gig versus an unpaid gig. Go do the paid gig.
Here’s the caveat (for Back To The Beginning): it was like listen, we’ll pay for your crew, we’ll pay your hard costs, but no one is, no one’s getting paid. But, what ended up happening was a lot of crew donated their time. So, they were like, ‘No, we’re not charging for this….’ because a lot of the crews we’d all worked with for years anyway.”
He explained the event had no performer fees—only production costs like crew expenses were covered—and many crew members even volunteered their time. However, one band demanded extremely high costs (in the hundreds of thousands of dollars) just to appear without a fee, which he found frustrating.
And the one band, I will say at this point, it was in the high hundreds of thousands of dollars what they said their hard costs would be. For them just to show up without any talent fee. It was very frustrating.”
