Roger Waters has once again made it clear that he has no intention of walking back the controversial remarks he made about Ozzy Osbourne, insisting he feels no regret despite the uproar they caused and the prolonged feud that followed with the Osbourne family.
The former PINK FLOYD bassist revisited the issue during a recent appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored, where host Piers Morgan challenged Waters on the apparent contradiction between his outspoken advocacy for empathy and human rights and the harsh tone he used when speaking about the late BLACK SABBATH icon.
Waters’ original comments surfaced shortly after Osbourne’s death in July 2025 and quickly ignited backlash across the rock and metal world. Speaking at the time, Waters said: “Ozzy Osbourne, who just died, bless him in his whatever state that he was in his whole life. We’ll never know. Although he was all over the TV for hundreds of years with his idiocy and nonsense. The music, I have no idea. I couldn’t give a f**k.”
He added: “I don’t care about BLACK SABBATH, I never did. Have no interest in biting the heads of chickens or whatever they do. I couldn’t care less, you know.”
The remarks drew an immediate response from Ozzy’s son Jack Osbourne and soon escalated into a very public war of words. Ozzy’s widow Sharon Osbourne later fired back during the return of the family’s podcast, unleashing a scathing rebuttal aimed directly at Waters: “He has no charisma, okay? He looks like Frankenstein. The guy is sick in the head… Nobody likes him. This is not just us. Nobody likes this man unless you’re a fas*ist. He’s one of those… He’s just pathetic.”
The feud took another turn weeks later when the Osbourne family released a T-shirt depicting Ozzy urinating on a copy of The Wall, emblazoned with the phrase “another prick in the wall.”
During his appearance with Morgan, Waters was asked whether his original remarks conflicted with the values he often promotes. Addressing the criticism, he said (as transcribed by thePRP): “Those comments, I’m not denying that I said them, came in the middle of a long interview… Do I have to like every rock group there ever was in the world or people who bite the heads off bats?”
When Morgan pressed him further, asking whether he “had to trash [Ozzy] in such a personal way so soon after he died?”, Waters replied: “Obviously I had no idea that Sharon Osbourne would be watching a podcast by a very well-known and respected cartoonist in-conversation.”
When asked directly if he would apologize to Sharon Osbourne for the pain his words may have caused, Waters replied: “Obviously I had no idea that Sharon Osbourne would be watching a podcast by a very well-known and respected cartoonist in-conversation.”
However, when Morgan broadened the question to include an apology to the Osbourne family as a whole, Waters declined: “not really.”
He then addressed Jack Osbourne specifically, adding: “Well Jack. Jack Osbourne [laughs]. If he wants to have a chat, I’ll have a chat with him, I promise you, and I won’t be nasty to him. Well, I’m, you know, yeah, I’m sorry you lost your dad, Jack, but this is like, you have conversations about things and about people, ‘what do you think?’ Well, ‘not a lot.’ I was honest.”
“I said I didn’t like BLACK SABBATH… I’ve listened to some of it since. And the music is perfectly kind of acceptable. It was all the kind of histrionics of I don’t like people who bite the heads off bats. I just don’t. I think it’s disgusting, and I’ve said that again now. I know he’s dead, and he can’t come back and go, ‘Yeah, I’m sorry I bit the heads off bats,’ if he ever did. Who knows whether he did or not? I don’t want to talk about it.”
Pressed one final time on whether he had any regrets over his remarks about Ozzy Osbourne, Waters concluded: “I regret nothing in life, except that I haven’t been more successful in getting people to understand how important it is that we as a human race recognize and empathize with all of our brothers and sisters all over the world and make certain that they have equal human rights, one with another, under international law. The Osbourne family? No, I’m not that interested in them.”
Reeder, the visionary behind Metal Addicts, has transformed his lifelong passion for metal into a thriving online community for metal aficionados. As a fervent devotee of black metal, Reeder is captivated by its dark, atmospheric, and often unorthodox soundscapes.