He bit the head off a dove, and then a bat, before desecrating an American monument. Next came the lost of his guitarist in a freak plane accident. But behind these lurid headlines lurked a more sombre truth. In 2010 Ozzy Osbourne revisited the turbulent times that shaped him and his music. In remembrance of Ozzy, who has sadly passed away aged 76, we revisit the feature in full. “I was living in a total nightmare,” he told MOJO's Phil Alexander...
Le Parc Hotel in West Hollywood is an oasis of pastel colours and understated wealth that promises its clientele “the best of Los Angeles”. For one resident in the balmy summer of 1979 it provided a bolt-hole into which he could retreat and lose his mind.
Thirty-one-year-old Ozzy Osbourne had just been ejected from Black Sabbath, the band he’d fronted for a decade and the only proper group he’d ever been in. Guitarist Tony Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler had left drummer Bill Ward with the unenviable task of telling their singer that his increasing drug consumption had become an unacceptable liability.
“It was utterly heartbreaking,” remembers Bill. “Oz was my best friend in the band and what made it worse was that we were all as bad as each other, sitting in our hotel rooms with vases of cocaine and blaming everyone else. But telling Oz he had to go was too much for me. It took me years to recover from it.”
For Ozzy being fired unleashed a sense of injustice that soon turned into a daily routine of self-destruction that involved waking up any time after noon and phoning out for the day’s supplies – booze (gin, beer, brandy, Mateus Rosé), a “big bag of Womble dust” (cocaine) and, finally, food (pizza, most days). His suite remained devoid of daylight, the curtains tightly drawn, fast food containers and empty bottles sticking to the increasingly matted shag-pile carpet. The maid had long stopped coming, petrified of the wild-eyed stare of the long-haired guest who spent hours staring vacantly at the gas fire, and horrified by the sheer stench of the room. Ozzy’s aim was simple: to get catatonic by 4pm at the very latest.
“I was living in a total Steptoe nightmare,” he admits. “I genuinely thought it was all over. My father had died a couple of years earlier, I hadn’t saved any dough, and I thought, That’s it, time get the fuck back on the building site, so I just got utterly out of my tree every single day for three months.”
“I ran into Iggy Pop the other day. I hadn’t seen him since the MOJO awards a few years ago, but he’s fucking weird,” says Ozzy Osbourne in his trademark Brummie brogue. “He told me my hair smelled nice. I told him that it’s because I fucking wash it!”
In contrast to the “full-blown alcoholic drug-addict” of 1979, Ozzy today is a well-groomed picture of health. Having pressed flesh during his visit to MOJO HQ this May morning, he has repaired to the brasserie at London’s Covent Garden Hotel. Previously, an interview would have provided an excuse to kick off the day’s drinking – one particular occasion at an Irish country club ending with Ozzy insisting that we enjoy “a nightcap” of a bottle of Bushmills whiskey. Each. Today, however, Ozzy orders nothing stronger than a mug of English Breakfast tea.
“I’m clean and sober, but I’m far from fucking sane,” he points out. “I’ve got a head full of devils. When technology has the means of doing it, come and spend an hour in my head. You’ll come sliding back down my nose faster than a gram of bad coke.”
Colourful analogies are, alongside explosions of expletives, always part of any conversation with Ozzy. So too is a large dose of unflinching self-analysis. “People have preconceptions about me,” he continues. “But a lot of those preconceptions have nothing to do with the real me. Maybe The Osbournes changed some of that.”
The all-conquering TV series that ran for three years from 2002 transformed Ozzy from notorious hellraiser to cuddly ‘rock dad’, its success at times obscuring a musical career that has seen him sell upwards of 60 million albums. Ozzy likens the show’s success to “Beatlemania on LSD”, admitting that he took up to 42 different pills per day to cope with the anxiety and stress it caused. Those days, he says, are now over. Dealing with the promotion of his new album is comparatively easy. The album, Scream, is the 10th studio set of his solo career – a career founded on the bedrock of his 1980 debut album, Blizzard Of Ozz, and its successor, ’81’s Diary Of A Madman. Recorded in the wake of his scarified tenure at Le Parc, both albums define Ozzy’s music, the stories that surround them cementing his reputation.
“They’re such important albums to me,” he admits, “Without them I wouldn’t be here. I genuinely was living like the fucking Prince of Darkness when we made them, and then I met Randy Rhoads…”
Blond, petit and wiry, the stack-heeled, Randy Rhoads was born in Santa Monica on December 6, 1956, one of three siblings. His mother Delores – who had split from her husband William when Randy was 17 months old – ran the Musonia School Of Music in which her son grew up, graduating from classical acoustic guitar to electric via a battered semi-acoustic Harmony Rocket.
A prodigious talent, by 15 he had outpaced his music teacher and joined the school’s staff prior to forming his first band, Violet Fox, with his friend Kelly Garni. A year later, they formed Quiet Riot with singer Kevin Dubrow as Rhoads – armed with a distinctive neo-classic style – began to forge a reputation as one of Hollywood’s hottest guitar players along with Eddie Van Halen.
Quiet Riot secured a record deal with CBS Sony in Japan, for whom they recorded two patchy albums which remained unreleased in the US. While in ’83 a later line-up of Quiet Riot would enjoy a chart-topping album in the US with Metal Health, as the ’70s drew to an end the band had reached an impasse. When word got out that Ozzy was holed up at Le Parc and looking to recruit a new band, such was Randy’s status that his name was in the frame – introduced by fellow hopeful/bassist Dana Strum.
“I was terrified of auditioning people ’cos I’d only been in one band up until then and we were all mates,” admits Ozzy. “I was only a singer and I couldn’t even play triangle! I remember listening to five drummers banging away one after another and thinking, I’m fucked if I know whether any of these guys are any good. Then Dana said to me, ‘I know this guitar player that you should see.’ I said to him, I can’t, I’m too out of it.”
But Strum was insistent and, since Ozzy refused to leave his room, brought the softly-spoken, 23-year-old Rhoads to the hotel. “Dana turned up with a guy who looked like a little doll,” says Ozzy. “I went, He’s fucking gay! Randy was like, (affects camp voice) ‘You’re sooo weird!’ But he promised to come back the next day.”
“They turned up again and I wasn’t really paying attention to what they were doing so Randy said, ‘I feel a bit goofy just standing here, what do you want me to play?’ I didn’t really care so I just said, Any-fucking-thing you want. I’m not sure what he played exactly but I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘But I haven’t really played anything properly yet,’ said Randy. I said, Come back tomorrow, and I passed out on the couch.”
Despite their contrasting personalities, in November 1979, Rhoads agreed to follow Ozzy to England. Osbourne didn’t have a deal but along with his manager, Sharon Arden, he’d agreed to invest what cash he had left to record the new material he was hatching with Rhoads. Alternating between a flat in Chelsea and Bullrush Cottage, the house Ozzy shared with his wife Thelma and their kids in Staffordshire, Osbourne found his new guitar foil to be an encouraging presence.
“The difference between Randy and Tony Iommi was that when we were writing I had to fit the gap that Tony gave me. There was no tuning down for me. But Randy was a teacher so he’d say, ‘You know, you’re better off singing in this key.’ He was really patient with me and he taught me a lot.”
The next addition to Ozzy’s line-up emerged when the singer ran into bassist Bob Daisley at the Music Machine, Camden Town, at a gig by glam-metal outfit Girl (then signed to Jet, the label owned by Sharon’s father, Don Arden, who was also Black Sabbath’s manager). A veteran of Chicken Shack, Widowmaker and Rainbow, Daisley was intrigued by Ozzy’s gushing praise for his new guitar player.
Agreeing to meet at Osbourne’s house a few days later, Daisley was impressed with what he heard. Osbourne’s band was complete when German booking agent Ossy Hoppe recommended Uriah Heep drummer Lee Kerslake (key influences: John Bonham and Buddy Rich) as a suitable candidate.
“I said to the guys, OK only the best ideas will get through, and that’s how we worked,” says Ozzy of the band’s modus operandi, as the quartet repaired to Rockfield, the residential studio in Monmouthshire, to begin pre-production work.
“When we got there, there was a lot of drinking, a lot of drugging, although Randy wasn’t into that,” recalls Ozzy. “Rockfield’s an old farmhouse so we used to tell each other bullshit scary stories and have fake séances. There was this one guy called Spencer who was a roadie-cum-stand-in-drummer. I put a speaker under his bed and plugged it into a mike. I waited for him to fall asleep, then I’d go (adopts spooky voice) ‘Spencer! Spencerrrrr!’ He was terrified. Then there was a time when we went crazy and threw all these snooker balls through the window. He came running out. We just said, ‘Poltergeist!’”
On March 22, 1980, the four-piece moved from Rockfield to Ridge Farm Studios, Surrey – ostensibly to begin work with producer Chris Tsangarides before electing to use in-house engineer Max Norman. “I always judge how good things are by whether the hairs on my arms stand up,” says Ozzy. “And Randy’s playing in the studio had that effect on me.”
Musically, the LP showcased Rhoads’ innovative playing, his baroque flurries punctuating Goodbye To Romance (Ozzy’s open letter to his former Sabbath bandmates), the eco-worrying Revelation (Mother Earth) and acoustic instrumental interlude Dee (a tribute to his mother Delores). Lyrically, the songs amplified Ozzy’s larger-than-life personality. The maniacal laugh that kick-starts Crazy Train suggested over-the-top mischief, juxtaposing the personal (“Mental wounds/Not healing”) with the political (a post-War Pigs view of Cold War détente), while the melodramatic Mr Crowley, about famed British occultist Aleister, further reinforced the singer’s reputation for devilry.
“To be honest, everybody was into Crowley in those days. Apart from me,” shrugs Ozzy. “I just wrote a song along the lines of, ‘Who the fuck were you? What the fuck were you about?’ Because I didn’t really understand half of it.”
The most misunderstood of all nine tracks was Suicide Solution. The tune would come back to haunt Ozzy when, after the suicide of John McCollum from a .22 calibre gunshot wound in October 1984, McCollum’s parents brought a case against Osbourne and CBS records, claiming that the instrumental breakdown two minutes into the track includes lyrics not listed on the album’s sleeve which state, “Get the gun and try it! Shoot! Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!” The initial case was dismissed and a second appeal at the Californian Court Of Appeal upheld the verdict of the first, the court stating: “Musical lyrics and poetry cannot be construed to contain the requisite ‘call to action’ for the elementary reason they simply are not intended to be and should not be read literally.”
Ozzy’s view was equally pragmatic. “Listen, it’d be a pretty bad career move for me to write a song saying ‘Grab a gun and kill yourself.’ I wouldn’t have many fans left,” he winces. “Anyhow, that track was about me drinking myself to death. Look at the lyrics. ‘Wine is fine but whiskey’s quicker/Suicide is slow with liquor/Take a bottle drown your sorrows.’ I knew even then I had an alcohol problem.”
While Ozzy had managed to assemble a new band, his former colleagues in Black Sabbath had already re-grouped with singer Ronnie James Dio and released Heaven And Hell on April 25, 1980, six days after Ozzy finished recording at Ridge Farm. The album had hit the UK Top 10, proving Sabbath were still a viable force without their ex-frontman, leading to bouts of points scoring in the press by both parties.
“There was definitely a rivalry there and we all said a lot of stupid things,” admits Ozzy today. “But it was like a divorce. It’s always like that with your ex-wife-to-be. There’s always that period where you go, You have the cat, I’ll have the dog, but then you end up calling each other fucking assholes. I was shit scared. I’d slipped off my pedestal big time.”
Ozzy’s insecurity was worsened by the prospect of a first tour under his own name. “We weren’t going to get played on the radio, so we had to do it by playing live. That’s what we did in Sabbath, and that’s what we decided to do this time but I was terrified,” he admits.
-
READ MORE: Black Sabbath’s Best Albums Ranked
Initially, Ozzy had wanted to name his new band Blizzard Of Ozz, harking back to his time in Sabbath when he’d planned to release a solo album in ’76 under that name with members of Cumbrian outfit Necromandus as his backing band. Sharon Arden made him think differently. “Sharon just said, ‘Do you really want people to say, “Who the fuck are that band?” Or do you want them to say, “We’re going to see Ozzy”?’ She was right. It was a case of using my name because my name meant something.”
As a result, Blizzard Of Ozz became the album’s title just as Ozzy signed a deal with Jet Records, following Don Arden’s decision to stop managing Sabbath. An appearance at the Reading Festival on August 24, 1980, was duly announced, and then swiftly cancelled. After final rehearsals at Shepperton Studios, the band finally hit the road to coincide with the album’s September release.
“Sharon had talked to me about going out and headlining straight away. She thought it would be some kind of statement. The very first official gig that I did as a solo artist was at the Glasgow Apollo and, fucking hell, I realised I didn’t have enough material so I had to do Sabbath songs!” says Ozzy. “But it was a first step and in the end it felt like a monumental step to be back out there and playing.”
Osbourne’s optimism was confirmed by a string of 34 sold-out shows, Ozzy and Randy’s stage antics recalling David Bowie and Mick Ronson’s fret-biting double act. The tour’s success saw record sales of Blizzard Of Ozz boom, the album hit the UK charts at Number 7, two places higher than Sabbath’s previous effort.
1981 proved a pivotal year for Ozzy. On a personal level, he was in the throes of splitting up with Thelma, his long-suffering wife of 10 years whom he would divorce that year, as he and his manager Sharon began a tempestuous relationship. February saw him feverishly trying to complete his second album, Diary Of A Madman – a more melodic affair, again recorded at Ridge Farm with Max Norman – before flying to the States for the launch of his first album on March 27, which was due out via his recently inked deal with CBS.
Believing that the label were more interested in Adam Ant, Sharon had a simple plan to garner attention: Ozzy would attend a label function in LA and make a grand entrance by freeing two doves from his jacket pocket and flashing peace signs. Arriving at the CBS meeting at 11am, Ozzy found himself “pissed and bored” and went a step further, freeing one dove but biting the head off the second.
“I don’t really know what happened,” he admits today. “I didn’t really realise what I’d done or why I’d done it. I suppose I thought it would be funny but no one else seemed to find it funny at all.”
The resulting photos show Osbourne glassy-eyed and spitting feathers from his mouth as a label employee looks on with disgust. A spread of the shots ran in British weekly magazine Sounds, dubbing the singer “The Vilest Man In HM”. In the wake of this controversy, Ozzy began his first solo US tour at the Towson Centre in Maryland on April 22. Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake were gone – the result of contractual and personal disputes – replaced by bassist Rudy Sarzo (formerly of Quiet Riot) and Tommy Aldridge (ex-Black Oak Arkansas). The recording of Diary Of A Madman, meanwhile, was complete. The mixing, however, was not.
“I was on the road in America and I was in a fucking phone box mixing the album. I had a tape of Diary Of A Madman and I was saying, Less bass on this, more vocal on that track, and so on,” says Ozzy. “It wasn’t the best mix in the end because of that.”
Touring commitments saw Ozzy play over 90 shows between April and September in the US, Stateside sales of Blizzard… hitting half a million by June. Back in the UK, in August the band played the Heavy Metal Holocaust festival at Port Vale Football Club as special guests to Motörhead, confirming Ozzy’s popularity back home. The release of Diary Of A Madman on November 7, 1981, gave little pause for breath as the band toured Germany before Ozzy collapsed from nervous exhaustion.
By the time he returned to the US to play San Francisco’s Cow Palace on December 30, the band’s live show had also grown, reflecting Madman’s epic qualities (the set now resembled a fortified castle, Ozzy’s fringed jacket replaced by red chain-mail armour) and boasting a host of outlandish elements including a giant mechanical claw, a hanging midget and Osbourne’s take on a slapstick favourite.
“I’d always liked custard pie fights so I decided to do that on-stage… with meat!” he cackles. “Then it got out of control pretty quickly. It got put on one of the posters: ‘Bring your own offal’. It started off with a few sausages and bacon, and then we got snakes, giant marsh frogs and even a sheep’s head.”
His plan backfired spectacularly on January 20, 1982, when, while on-stage at the Veterans Auditorium in Des Moines, Iowa, he bit into what he thought was a plastic toy. “I thought it was a rubber bat so I picked it up and just bit into it. Then I began to feel my mouth filling up with this fucking liquid that tasted fucking terrible…” he winces.
Unclear as to whether the bat had actually bitten Ozzy before he’d killed it, the doctor’s advice involved guarding against rabies with a daily series of injections. “Having rabies shots feels like someone injecting a golf ball in your arse,” muses Ozzy. “Then you feel it melting and trickling down inside your leg. It’s like when you get a dead leg at school and you can’t stand on it. I had a shot in each hip, one in each butt cheek and one in each arm. It was fucking terrible. I ended up crying it was so bad.”
Less than a month after his Iowa experience, the Diary Of A Madman tour snaked through Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia and into Texas. The dove and bat headlines attracted further pressure, this time from religious groups.
“We were somewhere in Texas and I called the receptionist at this hotel to get a doctor to look at my vocal chords,” Ozzy remembers. “I went downstairs into the coffee shop which was full of people and sat right in the middle of it. Fifteen minutes go by, a guy in a suit comes in with his briefcase, sits right opposite me and says, ‘Are you Mr Osbourne?’ I said, Yeah I am, thinking he was the doctor, and he started going, (adopts fire-and-brimstone voice) ‘Put Jesus in your life! Put Jesus in front of you!’ All of a sudden all the other fuckers in the coffee shop started shouting, ‘Repent!’ I had this security guard who was an ex-Vietnam vet, so he wades in and starts punching the shit out of everybody. Meanwhile, I was on my hands and knees crawling out the fucking door!”
Ozzy’s notoriety would reach even greater heights on February 19, 1982, when, in the eyes of Middle America, he would surpass himself by desecrating a national monument
“I’d finished a bottle of Courvoisier at around seven in the morning…” he begins, recalling the events that led to the singer being arrested for relieving himself on The Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, on February 19, 1982. Having drunk himself awake, Ozzy met up in the hotel bar with photographer Tom Sheehan and journalist Alan Jones, there to cover the Diary Of A Madman US tour for Melody Maker.
“Ozzy was ordering an orange juice and a double brandy every time,” remembers Sheehan. “He’d place the brandy near me as if he wasn’t drinking it, but he got quite pissed. When we decided to go out to do photos he went to get changed.”
Returning to the bar, Ozzy was now dressed in his female wardrobe assistant’s outfit. “Then he stopped off at the hotel shop to buy a straw hat and a handbag and we left,” laughs Sheehan. Minutes later the party arrived at The Alamo, famed fortress defended by Texans against the Mexican army, and began taking photos.
“Ozzy seemed to be having quite a good time,” recalls Sheehan. “Then, after a few frames, he says, ‘I need a piss!’ I told him we’d finish and be back in the hotel in a few minutes, but he couldn’t wait.”
“I need to have a piss, I saw this wall and I pissed on it. I didn’t know what it was,” counters the singer. A passer-by, however, had seen Ozzy’s gratuitous act and alerted a nearby Texan ranger.
“This big Texan cop comes round the corner and sees me and starts shouting. Then he said, ‘How you feel if I pissed on Buckingham Palace?’ I said, I wouldn’t give a fuck, mate, because I don’t live there. That was it. Off to the police station I went in this cop car. I got thrown in a cell with a load of murdering fuckers.”
Ozzy did indeed share a cell with a man who was still covered in the blood of his recently murdered wife but was allowed to play that night’s show before being banned from San Antonio. The ban was lifted 10 years later.
Ozzy Osbourne can still feel the numbness of realisation. He can still smell the burning fuel. And, when you talk to him, it is almost as if he can still feel the shattered glass under his feet as he awoke on that tour bus on the morning of March 19, 1982. The day Randy Rhoads died.
The night before, the band had played the Civic Coliseum in Knoxville, Tennessee, and set off for Orlando, Florida, immediately after the gig where Ozzy was due to play the Rock Super Bowl XIV with Foreigner and UFO. Having consumed two bottles of gin, Osbourne passed out at “around six or seven” in the morning.
At approximately 8am the bus arrived at Flying Baron Estates, a privately owned airstrip a mile west of Leesburg, Florida, framed by three colonial-styled mansions. The airstrip was also headquarters for the bus company and spares were required. Their driver, Andrew Aycock, a qualified pilot, parked 15 yards in front of one of the houses, then borrowed a red-and-white Beechcraft Bonanza F-15 from one of the hangars.
On his first trip he took keyboard player Don Airey and tour manager Jack Duncan for a joyride. The second trip saw Randy Rhoads and the band’s hairdresser, Rachel Youngblood, on board. Eye-witnesses saw the plane swoop over the bus three times. On the fourth pass its left wing struck the bus’s left side, catapulting the plane into a tree and on into the garage on the west side of the house where it burst into flames. Ozzy and Sharon, asleep at the back of the bus, were roused by the jolt.
“I looked down the bus and the windscreen was all of a twist. There was glass everywhere, and there was this smell. I said to Sharon, We’ve had a crash on the freeway,” recalls Ozzy. “So I get off the bus and I’m thinking, Where the fuck are we? And nobody could speak. Sharon gets off the bus and starts going crazy so I go to the fridge and get a bottle of beer, like every alcoholic does. I was still loaded from last night but everything seemed weird. Sharon says to Jack Duncan, ‘Where is Randy and where is Rachel?’ And she gets her shoe off and hits him over the fucking head with the fucking shoe. He points to the house and I thought, Oh fuck, ’cos it looked like a fucking inferno.”
Despite the state of shock that appeared to paralyse the travelling party, Ozzy was one of the first to realise what was happening. “I thought, I’m going to have to fucking go in the house, there might be kids in there,” he recalls. “By this point the garage was ablaze. So I run over to the house and there’s this old guy in there. It turned out he was deaf, and he reaches for a shotgun. I’m screaming at him through the door, Come out! But he’s just looking at me with his gun in his hand and he shouts back, Get out! Get out of my house! Eventually he opens the door and he sees the fucking flames and he runs out.”
Remarkably, Randy, Rachel and Aycock were the only fatalities. As the police sealed off the crash site the travelling party headed to the nearby Hilco Inn, incapable of absorbing what had happened. Rhoads’ death plunged Ozzy back into the state he’d been in after his sacking by Sabbath. “I thought that it was all over again,” he admits. “It was as if someone really didn’t want me doing this any more.”
His sombre state in the days after also led him to reflect on the impact Randy had had on him. “On that last journey he said to me, ‘I want to go to UCLA to get a degree in classical music.’ I said, All right, if that’s what you want to do. He said, ‘To be honest I don’t want to do the rock’n’roll thing.’ I said, Are you fucking joking? We’re just beginning to crack the ice! In a few years you can buy your own university. But that was Randy. It was all about the music for him.”
An inquest would later find that Aycock’s pilot’s licence had expired. He was also found to have cocaine in his blood stream. Randy’s blood contained nothing stronger than nicotine.
Randy’s funeral service was held at the First Lutheran Church in Burbank, California, on March 24, 1982 with Ozzy acting as a pallbearer. While the singer began to retreat into himself once again, Sharon adhered to the old adage that the show must go on. “Sharon took it really badly,” nods Ozzy. “She couldn’t look at a picture of Randy, or listen to the records or talk about him. But she said to me at the time, ‘Randy wouldn’t want you to stop now.’ That gave me a lot of strength.”
After a two-day audition in LA involving four guitarists, 30-year-old Gillan guitarist Bernie Tormé got the job. After a few days of rehearsals, Ozzy returned to the stage on April 1 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Tormé lasted eight shows before quitting on April 11, stating that “the emotional pressure” of the tour made it impossible for him to continue. Ozzy was fulsome in his praise of the guitarist’s attitude and remains so today. “To be honest, I owe him my life,” he says. “Although everything sounded like Purple Haze because he was Jimi Hendrix mad, he got me back on the bus. I don’t know if I could have done that without him.”
Tormé’s position had always been temporary, and a second guitarist, Brad Gillis of Night Ranger, had been travelling with the band, watching the show every night and learning the set. When Tormé left Gillis stepped into the breach, playing his first show at Broome County Arena, Binghamton, New York, on April 13, 1982.
A brief moment of respite came on July 4 when, en route to Japan, the Osbourne party stopped off in Maui and Ozzy and Sharon got married. Too incapacitated to enjoy his own stag night, the groom spent his wedding night sleeping in a hotel corridor.
Now that they were married, Sharon wasted no time in securing her husband’s future by buying him out of the restrictive contract which he’d signed with Jet and her father. As a contractual obligation, Ozzy delivered Talk Of The Devil, aka Speak Of The Devil, a live album of Sabbath covers recorded at The Ritz in New York that September 26 and 27.
“Randy had barely been buried and the label wanted to release these live tapes of him,” he smarts. “I refused. I told them I’d deliver a live album but it would have nothing to do with Randy. So I recorded two nights, a bunch of bullshit Sabbath covers. I don’t recognise that album. I wasn’t there for the mix. I just delivered the tapes and that was it. I don’t give a fuck about that album.”
Ozzy’s state of mind was reflected in his appearance – he shaved his head in protest. “Even though we stayed on the road, I just didn’t think I could do it any more,” he says. Yet somehow, he did.
In effect, Talk Of The Devil marks the end of the first chapter of Ozzy’s solo career, providing the coda to the most turbulent period in his life. Since then he has continued to achieve phenomenal success but he is the first to admit that nothing quite measures up to his work with Randy Rhoads.
“I still think of Randy all the time. You can measure how good he was by the fact that we were together for such a short space of time but people still talk about him and listen to those records,” he says, reflecting on the success of Blizzard Of Ozz and Diary Of A Madman – global sales of which are now seven and five million respectively.
“When I look back, that period told me it was worth carrying on, that I could still do things,” concludes Ozzy. “It was an emotional rollercoaster ride and I’d hate to go back there. But it was also the best of times because, like Dylan said, when you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose. And he was right about that.”
This article originally appeared in MOJO 201.
Photo: Scott Weiner/MediaPunch/Alamy