Ozzy Osbourne revealed during an interview with Planet Rock that he was probably one of the last people to speak with Lemmy before he passed away from cancer in 2015.
“I called him; someone had told me he didn’t have much time left, so I called him. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, it was awful,” Osbourne recalls.
Ozzy and Lemmy frequently toured together, including a series of shows that passed through South America in 2015 with a show at Monsters of Rock which, unfortunately, did not feature Lemmy's performance, one of the first indications that he was not well.
“I traveled with him to South America about six months before and he was terribly thin and my heart broke when I saw him,” Ozzy recalls, “He tried to carry on normally, but it was one of those things where he knew you knew [that he was unwell], but he didn’t want to say anything. He tried to work until the end and said, ‘I probably could have lived another 10 years if I hadn’t smoked so much and hadn’t lived the lifestyle I had, but I lived the life I wanted.’”
In another interview, this time for Raised On Radio , Ozzy and his wife, Sharon Osbourne, recalled the compositions that Lemmy wrote for the solo album No More Tears : “He was probably the most cultured man I’ve ever met in my life. Brilliant. He had a brilliant vocabulary, and I don’t think many people realize that.”
