Sharon Osbourne says she knows who has the Black Sabbath studio, live, and unreleased tapes that vanished years ago. She made the claim in a recent interview with The Hits. She never named the person.
“There are Sabbath tapes that went missing years ago – studio tapes, live tapes, unreleased tapes. We now know exactly who has them: the same man who’s been stealing our money,” Sharon Osbourne said.
According to Sharon, the man has denied having the recordings. “He said he never had them, but we’ve found people with sworn statements they went to his office. He’s a hoarder of memorabilia – two warehouses full of albums. We’re right in the middle of that nightmare,” Sharon Osbourne said.
The family has fought over Black Sabbath recordings before. In 2025, the band’s first manager, Jim Simpson, announced plans to release demos from 1969, when the group went by the name Earth. Sharon shared a letter she sent to Simpson in November 2025, as Vice reports.
“As you know, the Band do not want these tapes released, not least as they haven’t heard them despite you saying you would provide copies long ago,” Sharon Osbourne wrote at the time. “You know that, as a band, Black Sabbath don’t take things lying down and you can be assured that if you go ahead with this against the Band’s wishes we will take any action where their rights are infringed, both here and in America.”
That fight is over. In April 2026, Sharon said the family settled with Simpson, and the four original members of Black Sabbath now own the demos. She has not linked her new claims to that case.
Black Sabbath began in Birmingham in 1968 with Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward. The band’s 1970 debut, Black Sabbath, and its follow-up, Paranoid, helped lay the groundwork for heavy metal.
Ozzy died on July 22, 2025. It came just weeks after Back to the Beginning, a farewell concert at Villa Park in Birmingham on July 5, 2025. That show brought the original Black Sabbath line-up together one last time.
