As if Billy Corgan is not busy enough, helping run NWA wrestling, planning a Smashing Pumpkins’ summer tour of Europe, and taking care of his growing family, he has made time for an intriguing new podcast/vlog series called The Magnificent Others, where he interviews people that he admires in the music industry, and gives a platform for who he sees as the biggest movers and shakers of the last fifty or so years.
It’s an opportunity for him to highlight people whom he particularly admires as artistic pioneers and outliers (thus the name of the series) and sees as missing in the grand cultural conversation, to some degree or another. The series has included greats like Gene Simmons from Kiss and Tom Morello from Rage Against The Machine. One of his most recent ones was with Sharon Osbourne, wife and manager to Ozzy Osbourne, who has been helping Ozzy out since the Black Sabbath days.
She’s a character, bold but sweet, a no BS type of person, who yet cares a lot for her husband, her family, and the fans who have followed Ozzy Osbourne for years. The world was most notably introduced to her in the TV series The Osbournes, which ran for three seasons.
What does Sharon Osbourne think of Billy Corgan's new podcast?
This was a venture, she shares in the interview with Smashing Pumpkins vocalist Billy Corgan. It was not so much a move to gain attention to Ozzy’s music, but which, though she has some regrets about it considering some of her children’s hesitations, took on a sort of life of its own.
Billy Corgan is a good interviewer and obviously has a long-lasting relationship with Sharon, and he starts out the interview by setting it in post-war UK, where Sharon would play as a child on old bombed-out lots in her neighborhood. Corgan asks her about her father, who was a big music manager who managed such pioneering acts as Gene Vincent, who David Bowie said his character Ziggy Stardust was created after.
Sharon’s trajectory takes her from not only being Ozzy’s manager, during and after Black Sabbath, but as his wife and the mother of his children. Sharon reveals that Ozzy had doubts once he was fired from Black Sabbath, that he didn’t feel like he was anything without the band, but Sharon had enough faith in him for the both of them.
Conflicts with her father arose in her life around the management of Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne, wounds that only healed years later when her father started getting ill in his old age, and Sharon, Ozzy, and the family took him into their American home.
There was humor and pathos throughout the interview, most notably when Sharon shares her biggest mistake as Ozzy’s manager: not saying yes to a role for Ozzy as a pirate in the hit movie series, Pirates of the Caribbean.
The saying goes, if you want to get something done well, find somebody who’s already really busy. And Billy Corgan is forging his way forward while subtly promoting his own music and brand by spearheading an interesting interview series that is getting tens of thousands of views. It was about an hour and a half long interview, but it was super intriguing throughout.
Sharon and Billy’s personalities and the way that they carried themselves through the interview were plenty compelling, and it whets the whistle for some other great interviews to come.
Billy Corgan is certainly one of the “Magnificent Others” of our day, and he champions America’s spirit of freedom and industry, at one point, making fun of K-Pop and the way that they treat music and artists as a sort of factory "production line", instead of nurturing real artists, like he wants to highlight on his show.
He and Sharon have some harsh and prescient words about the music industry as it’s run right now, too. For any music lover and admirer of Billy Corgan and friends’ work, it is a treat of a podcast. It’s readily available on YouTube and other places if you want to check it out.