This past July, just weeks before Ozzy Osbourne’s death, he and Black Sabbath took the stage at their final show, “Back to the Beginning,” at Villa Park in Birmingham, England. While the event was put on to give them a proper send-off, it also had a dual purpose: to raise money for charity.
Funds raised by the concert were set to be equally split between Cure Parkinson’s, Birmingham Children’s Hospital, and Acorn Children’s Hospice.
One month after the show, multiple outlets reported that “Back to the Beginning” had raised a massive $190 million – a claim that Ozzy’s wife and manager Sharon Osbourne quickly refuted.
“One of the things that’s frightening me is all this false press about [how] we’ve made $140 million and all of this, and I’m like, ‘God, I wish we could have, for one gig,’” she told Pollstar days before Ozzy passed away. “Thank you, Billboard, for getting it wrong. Just ridiculous.”
Now, Sharon has revealed just how much money the concert actually raised.
“If one show could have raised – I mean, [the media reported] it was up to, like $190million. It’s, like, any artist, just do one big show, film it and you can retire just on one show. No, it was nowhere near, and I wish that it was, but we are living in reality, in the real world,” she said during a new episode of “The Osbournes” podcast – the family’s first since Ozzy’s death.
When her son Jack Osbourne asked how much money “Back to the Beginning” actually earned for charity, Sharon clarified that it was around $11 million.
Thanking the event’s performers for their generosity, Sharon added: “We paid the cost of bringing everybody in, everybody out, accommodation, everything. No one got paid. Nobody asked for a penny. They gave their time, their efforts, everything for free. People were just, oh God, so generous.”
