Sharon Osbourne is open to reviving Ozzfest so long as bands are “realistic” with their fees
Sharon Osbourne has said that she’s open to reviving Ozzfest as a travelling festival, provided that bands are “realistic” with the fees they’re asking to perform at the event.
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For the uninitiated, Ozzfest operated as a travelling heavy-metal festival between 1996 and 2010, before it transitioned into a one-off style event from 2013. The last Ozzfest took place in 2018, with the Osbournes citing “greedy” management as the reason the event was shuttered after more than two decades.
In a new episode of The Osbournes podcast, the family discusses the possibility of resurrecting the festival, with Ozzy asking: “Not just one [at] the fucking Forum, but a whole Ozzfest [tour]?,” to which Sharon replies: “Yeah, sure. Of course.”
When Kelly notes: “it always comes down to – are the bands and managers going to be realistic” in terms of their booking fees, Sharon concurred, adding: “It’s great. That’s what we wanted – everybody to do spin-offs and do their own festivals, and it’s great. It’s great for fans; it’s brilliant. But why is it when it comes to us that everybody thinks that we are trillionaires, and so that every manager who wants their band on our festival wants one of the fucking trillions they think we’ve got to put on the festival?”
Ozzy then suggests bringing in smaller “bands that nobody have really heard of” instead, a proposition Sharon disagrees with, saying: “You can do it for a baby stage, but you still need the headliners.”
“It’s always great to have the baby stage, I mean, that’s what it’s all about – breaking new bands. That’s why we did it.”
“It’s very hard for acts who are not known to suddenly go and be in front of 50,000 people on a main stage at a festival and understand what they’re meant to do,” she continued.
“It’s very intimidating. You could have maybe five thousand people at that baby stage, and then to go from five to fifty to sixty thousand people, and it’s really, really hard for baby bands. They’ve got to pay their dues anyway. That’s what it’s all about.”
During the podcast, Sharon also touched on the launch of Ozzfest-inspired festivals in the US in recent years, saying: “Well, it’s the same bands just going around and around and around. But that’s what’s so good, because we started something, people have taken it, and it’s still great for the genre. It’s really good.”
Watch the full episode below.
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