It’s a ceremony fit for royalty.
A regal carriage. A procession through crowd-lined streets. A brass band playing. And throngs of devoted, likely tearful, admirers paying their respects as the coffin passes.
It’s time to say goodbye to the Prince of Darkness.
On Wednesday, such a tribute is planned for Ozzy Osbourne, a founder of the pioneering heavy metal band Black Sabbath, in Birmingham, England — his hometown — ahead of a private family funeral. As part of the event, which is scheduled to start at 1 p.m. (8 a.m. Eastern), Osbourne’s family is to visit the Black Sabbath Bench, a tourist attraction that has become a place of pilgrimage.
It’s the third time this month that fans have descended on Birmingham for an Ozzfest of sorts. On July 5, they flocked here for Osbourne’s final concert at a soccer stadium just a few minutes from his childhood home. Last week, the black-clad, tattooed throngs returned after the singer died at age 76. Now, they’re back for his funeral procession.
Some had rushed across borders to make it in time. Niclas Sundsborn, 53, a maintenance worker from Sweden, said that after learning about the procession on Tuesday, he and a metal-loving friend had each spent about $1,300 on plane tickets to fly to Britain. Sundsborn said that his own family “probably think I’m mad” for spending that much, but that Osbourne was “an icon.”
In Britain, mourners typically take to the streets in large numbers only for the death of queens or kings. After John Lennon died in 1980, some 20,000 fans gathered in Liverpool for a vigil, but few other artists have provoked such devotion. There was no procession for David Bowie’s death, in 2016.
Holly Tessler, a lecturer in the University of Liverpool’s music department, described the mass public mourning for Osbourne as “unprecedented” for a musician in Britain.
It’s also rare for Birmingham. Carl Chinn, a historian who has written several books on the city’s history, said that the last time large-scale crowds had gathered there to collectively mourn was in 1914, when people hoped to glimpse the coffin of Joseph Chamberlain, a prominent statesmen and former lord mayor.
Chamberlain was the first lawmaker to “steadfastly and proudly” advocate for Birmingham on a national scale, Chinn said, adding that Osbourne and his Black Sabbath bandmates had effectively done the same globally with their music.
That partly explains why Birmingham has taken his death so hard, Chinn said. Osbourne, who grew up in one of the city’s working-class districts and worked in a slaughterhouse before he co-founded Black Sabbath in 1968, was one of the city’s own.
“This has been an outpouring of Birmingham patriotism,” Chinn said.
Some in crowd on Wednesday said they were still processing the reality that Osbourne was gone. Goose Giroud, 37, a pilot, said that she had met Osbourne just two weeks ago at a Comic Con in Birmingham. At the event, she recalled, Osbourne had pulled her close and signed her arm — a mark that she had made into a tattoo.
“We all thought he had more time,” Giroud said.
Alex Marshall is a Times reporter covering European culture. He is based in London.
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