Ozzy Osbourne's face appears on New Zealand's tallest building

Sky Tower in Auckland with a projection of Ozzy Osbourne — (Image credit: The Rock)

Ozzy Osbourne's face has been projected onto the side of New Zealand's tallest building, the 328-metre Sky Tower in Auckland.

The projection was put in place to celebrate the late icon's dominance of this year's Rock 2000 countdown, an annual poll in which listeners of NZ radio station The Rock select the best rock songs of all time.

Black Sabbath's classic War Pigs topped this year's poll (up from #19 last year), with the solo smash Mama I'm Coming Home at number 2, a position clearly driven by Ozzy's emotional rendition of the song at Black Sabbath's Back To The Beginning show in July (last year, the song was at number 150 on the Rock 2000 countdown).

Other Ozzy songs in the Top 50 included Crazy Train (#4), No More Tears (#10), Hellrasiser (#15) and See You On The Other Side (#29), while Sabbath's Paranoid (#13), Iron Man (#38) and NIB (#44) also made the final list.

Most remarkably, as if to conform that the results of these polls are driven by current events, rising star Yungblud's Villa Park version of Black Sabbath's ballad Changes was voted the seventh best rock song ever by Kiwi fans, well ahead of acknowledged classics like AC/DC's Highway To Hell (#138), Led Zeppelin's Stairway To Heaven (#57) and Lynyrd Skynyrd's Freebird (#35). We expect it to drop next year.

The Top 10 is as follows, and includes two local acts, Blindspott and Shihad.

1. Black Sabbath - War Pigs
2. Ozzy Osbourne - Mama I'm Coming Home
3. Blindspott - Nil By Mouth
4. Ozzy Osbourne - Crazy Train
5. Shihad - Home Again
6. System Of A Down - Chop Suey!
7. Yungblud - Changes (Live From Villa Park)
8. Metallica - One
9. Pearl Jam - Black
10. Ozzy Osbourne - No More Tears

This isn't the first time Sky Tower has played a role in rock music. In 2023, another local act, Black Smoke Trigger – who supported Iron Maiden man Bruce Dickinson on his 2024 UK tour - filmed a video for their single The Way Down in which guitarist Charlie Wallace bungee-jumped off the building while shredding.

@therockfm
♬ som original - letrasdorock

Artists

Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazine since 2014. 40 years in music industry, online for 27. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365. Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.

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