In late 1984, a 15-year-old metalhead named Stephen Rea was living in Northern Ireland, hunting down concert bootlegs by mail and reading every music magazine he could find. His god was Ozzy Osbourne. So when he saw that a massive festival called Rock in Rio was happening that January in Brazil with Ozzy, Queen, and AC/DC all on the bill, it might as well have been on the moon, until his father stunned him by offering to take him.
To shave the cost, Rea’s mother wrote a letter to Osbourne’s fan club, the Ozzy Osbourne Information Centre, asking whether there were any ticket packages for a paid-up young member. As recounted in Rea’s 2025 memoir, the letter laid it on with maternal pride: her son was member number 00090, one of Ozzy’s biggest fans who bought every LP, single, and scrap of merchandise tied to the man.
A major surprise
She didn’t expect much. What she got was a phone call. Sharon Osbourne’s assistant, a woman named Lynn, tracked down the family’s number (which the mother hadn’t even included) and called. If you’re serious about getting to Brazil, Lynn told her, don’t worry about a thing once you arrive. Just get yourselves to Rio.
What happened in Rio bent the whole trajectory of Rea’s life. “They give me a backstage pass,” he recalled in an interview with 101WRIF. They put him on Ozzy’s tour bus to and from the shows and stood him at the side of the stage for both performances. And then came the moment that still undoes him forty years later: Ozzy invited the teenager and his parents to breakfast on Copacabana Beach. No security, no handlers, no entourage. Just Ozzy Osbourne and a starstruck family from Belfast. “I had a week in Brazil with my hero,” Rea said.
Osbourne also handed the kid a gift that turned out to matter more than either of them could have known: two leatherbound notebooks, with instructions to keep a journal of his adventures. Rea filled them. Across the 1980s and ’90s, as that Rio trip blossomed into a real friendship and Rea grew up to become Osbourne’s assistant road manager, the notebooks captured a thousand backstage moments that would otherwise have evaporated. Decades later, they became the backbone of his memoir, Ozzy and Me.
Lifelong friendship
The friendship lasted the rest of Osbourne’s life. When Black Sabbath played their farewell show, “Back to the Beginning,” in Birmingham in July 2025, weeks before Osbourne died, Rea was there, listed on the crew by his old fairy godmother Lynn so he wouldn’t have to scalp a ticket. He watched Ozzy, visibly frail with Parkinson’s, grip the mic with a shaking hand and sing. “It was a charged song anyway, but watching Ozzy, listening to his vocals, his hand shaking as he gripped the mic, made my eyes well,” Rea wrote in the excerpt Rolling Stone published.
It’s the kind of full-circle story that sounds invented, except it’s thoroughly documented—in a published memoir, in interviews, in a 1988 photograph of Ozzy, Geezer Butler, and a young Rea grinning together. A mother wrote one letter hoping to save a few pounds on tickets. Four decades later her son was standing at the side of the stage, watching his hero one last time, holding notebooks the man had given him when he was fifteen.
