OZZY OSBOURNE (1948-2025)

Like Alice Cooper and, to a lesser extent, Elton John, there was something slightly preposterous about the Ozzy Osbourne that I encountered as a staff writer for Melody Maker during the 1970s. Ozzy, who died yesterday aged 76, struck me as a good-natured showman in those days, his Prince Of Darkness moniker a tongue-in-cheek portrait for a singer who was happy to act out any role if it advanced his career, however outrageous that may be, even one that involved biting the heads off bats, doves or any other small species that came to hand.

        Ozzy spoke with the pronounced Birmingham accent that never left him, no matter where he laid his hat. Hard, thick ‘Brummie’ made his speech rise in tone at the end of every sentence, as if everything he said was a question, and when he and Black Sabbath’s then manager Pat Meehan met me for lunch at a Chinese restaurant in London’s Lyle Street in early 1971, he struck me as utterly hilarious, a prisoner of his own good fortune – he’d arrived for the lunch in Meehan’s pale blue Rolls Royce Corniche – and quite unsure how to respond to the group’s sudden success. “Prince of Darkness?” he might have said to me. “Bugger that for a goime of soildiurs.”

        This was quite early in Black Sabbath’s career and, as I relate in my Just Backdated memoir, arrangements were made at this luncheon for me to accompany the group for a handful of dates on a forthcoming UK tour, during which I would interview them and review the shows. As it happened I opted not to interview Ozzy but, instead, guitarist Tony Iommi who struck me as the most loquacious, earnest and, probably, intelligent member of the group. This may have had something to do with an incident I witnessed in Manchester where, at the hotel in which we stayed, Ozzy over-refreshed himself in the late-night residents’ bar. Someone in the party, noting Ozzy’s comatose state, stuck a bedroom-style ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign around his neck which remained in place until he was helped to bed. “Best interview that Tony on the tour bus tomorrow,” I thought as I observed Ozzy being led unsteadily away.

        Heavy metal was never really my bag, so I wasn’t much of a Black Sabbath fan but I respected their achievements and professionalism, looking on from a journalist’s perspective as their success expanded in America when I worked there as MM’s US editor. I saw them play arena concerts in St Louis, Chicago and New York and acknowledged that they were the foremost performers in the genre they had chosen, an inspiration to a host of others, as can be seen from the many tributes paid today by Ozzy’s peers. I watched Ozzy inspire audiences in their thousands to reciprocate his peace signs and afterwards encountered him backstage or at parties thrown to celebrate the group’s success. He hadn’t changed a bit. He still struck me as a rather guileless innocent, carried along on the crest of a wave without really knowing why or how or where it might lead or, indeed, to care or even think very much about it all either. 

        It might have led to penury – Sabbath were early victims of what I might term “managerial materialism” – and mid-life death from substance abuse, and we have his second wife Sharon to thank for Ozzy’s renaissance in the 1980s and beyond. By this time, I had lost touch with Ozzy but I revisited his story to a certain extent when I commissioned Joel McIver to write Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, an exhaustive biography of the group for Omnibus Press, described by the Sun newspaper as “a brilliant insight into one of the country’s most famous bands”. I was happy to offer Joel my own experiences of the group and its materialistic management during his research. 

Ozzy soilduired on, eventually becoming a solo star and the principal actor in the family reality TV show which, I noted, portrayed the master of the house, that Prince of Darkness I once knew, as the naïve, childlike ingénue I always assumed him to be. 

        But I was probably wrong in this judgement. I read in today’s paper that he and Sharon are jointly worth £145 million. RIP Ozzy. 

ALBERT LEE, Borough Hall, Godalming, July 13, 2025

I have Ritchie Blackmore to thank for turning me into a fan of Albert Lee. Immodest, prickly and mischievous, Ritchie told me in 1971 that the only two guitarists who could play better than him were Jimi Hendrix and Albert. I wasn’t sure whether or not to believe him but I’d seen Ritchie practising scales and arpeggios, with and without a plectrum, backstage at a Deep Purple gig and deduced he was professionally trained and knew what he was talking about, so I made a point of checking out Head Hands & Feet, the band for whom Albert played in those days, for myself. 

        Suitably impressed – an understatement really – I interviewed Albert twice for MM later that year, once for one of those guitar supplements when he talked about his technique and the guitars he preferred, and again in 1975 when he was a member of Emmylou Harris’ Hot Band, having taken over the role occupied by James Burton who’d gone off to back Elvis in Vegas. By now I’d realised that what Burton was to the US, Albert was to the UK, the foremost player in the country rock and rockabilly idiom.

Albert went on to play in one of Eric Clapton’s stage groups and put the band together that backed The Everly Brothers when they reformed in 1983. He also showed up for the recording I attended of a live LP by Chas & Dave (Chas Hodges was a member of HH&F) at Abbey Road’s Studio 2 which had been turned into a pub for the occasion and, if I remember rightly, Eric showed up to jam along too. Since then Albert has made many distinguished guest appearances, notably at the Concert For George (Harrison) at the Royal Albert Hall in 2002, and led his own bands, one of which was called Hogan’s Heroes and recorded a gig at the New Morning club in Paris that was released in 2007 as a 2-CD package I nowadays play a lot.

A few years ago, Albert gave a master class in nearby Guildford, sponsored by Andertons Music, the city’s guitar shop, at which he demonstrated his skills on the signature red Ernie Ball Music Man guitar that he uses these days, having long ago abandoned the 1950s Telecaster that he played for years. 

        Which brings me to last night at the Borough Hall in Godalming where Albert performed as the leader of a quartet alongside brothers Ali (keyboards) and Iain Petrie (bass) and Tim Hilsden (drums). Well, he’s still an absolute wizard on guitar but there’s something strangely disturbing about seeing him play in a hall that held around 300 people – there’s wasn’t an empty seat in the house but that’s not the point – for which tickets cost just £30 a pop. It may be that Godalming was amongst the smallest venues on his current UK tour but that doesn’t alter my view that a musician of Albert’s stature and pedigree ought to be on a much bigger stage with tickets a good deal pricier.

        Much of the show featured tracks from Albert’s 2024 album Lay It Down, with which I am unfamiliar, and elsewhere, as expected, he demonstrated excellent taste, drawing from a well of songwriters like Gram Parsons, Carl Perkins, John Stewart, Jimmy Webb and Richard Thompson. His playing remains extraordinary, all those runs and licks that defy analysis as he zips up and down his fretboard, pulling off and hammering on, often playing what I might call mini-chords, a combination of strings, usually the top two or three, picked simultaneously. He conjures up a gorgeously full tone, especially on the lower strings, fresh and, at times, very sharp, very crisp, very deep. What’s more he makes it look effortless and, as ever, comes across as the humblest of men, giving keyboard player Ali plenty of opportunity to shine and even sounding a bit sheepish when he name-drops. 

        “I was at this party at David Geffen’s house,” he began before performing ‘Highwayman’, a long-time feature of Albert’s repertoire. “I was to talking to Jackson Browne, whose girlfriend at the time was Joni, and Jimmy Webb. We decided the party was dull and headed off to Jimmy’s house in the hills where had two grand pianos, nine-foot long, in his living room. Jimmy played a song, then Jackson, then Joni and then they tuned to me. Crikey! I honestly didn’t know what to play.” It was at moments like this that made me think Albert, and not some parvenu playing a stadium tonight, was our real rock royalty. 

        Albert played piano on this lovely, slightly otherworldly, Jimmy Webb song about reincarnation, but was soon back on guitar for a furious ‘Tear Stained Letter’ that preceded the final song in the set, ‘Country Boy’, the signature song he wrote with Tony Colton and Ray Smith of HH&F that in 1983 was a hit for Ricky Skaggs. It featured the hottest licks of the night and brought the house down, in fact, but Albert returned for a couple of encores: a moving rendition of Glen Campbell’s ‘A Better Place’ and, to send us on our way, an all-out rave up on Jimmy Burnett’s ‘Tear It Up’. 

        The only flaw in an otherwise impeccable show was the sound balance. The drums were on the loud side and at times threatened to drown out Albert’s guitar which, after all, was what we had come to hear. Perhaps in a larger venue there would have been on-stage monitors and a mixing desk out front. 

----

The photo above was taken by my friend Jeremy Hamerton whose mobile phone is superior to my own (and who owns 27 guitars). 

JUST BACKDATED HITS THE 2,000,000 MARK

Sometime in the last 24 hours my Just Backdated music blog notched up its two millionth hit. It reached one million in October, 2020, taking seven years to do so, as I launched Just Backdated at the end of 2013. That it’s taken under five years to clock up the second million indicates growth, the be-all-and-end-all of our capitalist society, though I’ve never been convinced that more and more and bigger and bigger is the best way for humanity to survive. 

But I digress. At this rate it’ll hit the three millionth mark towards the end of 2027, assuming I’m still around to keep it going, but lately I’ve been toying with the idea of somehow monetising it. In 12 years of posting on Just Backdated, I’ve given away 1,069 articles on music, the vast majority newly written by me simply because I enjoy writing. A few, probably less than 5%, are extracts from books or reproductions of pieces I wrote previously, mostly for Melody Maker. A tiny handful feature the work of others. I don’t adhere to a fixed quota; sometimes a week or two might go by without a post from me, other weeks I might write two or three. It all depends on what I’ve read, or what I’ve heard, or what I’ve seen, or if there’s something in the air that I feel like writing about. (The next post will probably be about the guitarist Albert Lee, whose concert in Godalming I’m attending this coming Saturday.) Increasingly, I find myself writing about musicians that have passed on whom I knew or whose music I admire. 

I long ago realised that becoming a writer, be it about music or anything else, is a lifetime’s work. Just because writers pass retirement age doesn’t mean they automatically stop writing for a living and take up gardening or bowls. Writers simply carry on because it’s what they do, and, as the years roll by, I for one have come to realise that continuing to write is the best way to keep the brain in decent shape. Freelance editing assignments, however, are becoming thin on the ground these days, an inevitable consequence of advancing years. 

Quite how I might monetise Just Backdated I haven’t a clue and it might well be beyond my technical ability. I’m making inquiries about how it could be done – I’m fortunate to have a computer-savvy daughter whose mind I’ll tap – but in the end I might still abandon the idea if it proves unworkable. Either way, it’ll be cheap. That said, I’ve realised that if each time anyone ever read something on Just Backdated, all two million of them, I was paid just one penny, I’d be £20,000 in credit now. 

But back to the posts on JB and, as before when a landmark has been reached, I’ll list those that are the most popular and comment on any changes amongst them. Firstly, there’s a new number one: my treatment for a proposed book by Mandy Moon, daughter of Keith, which I would ghost-write (but which never happened), takes over at the top (with 52.5k hits) from my review of The Who’s CD of their show at the Fillmore East in 1968 (49.7k). I thought the Fillmore piece would never be surpassed but I was wrong; however, these two posts are streets ahead of anything else. 

        Jimmy Page (17.6k) is at numbers three and seven but, as ever, The Who still dominate the list. Interestingly, posts about John and, especially, Keith, outperform posts about Pete and Roger. Nice to see Marianne Faithfull creeping in at number 20, the first female ever to make the Top 20, no doubt a result of her leaving us, and also my story about the 1968 North Of England Beer Drinking Championships, a rare non-music post, holding its own at number 16. 

MOON GIRL: My Life in the Shadow of Rock’s Wildest Star 52.5k

THE WHO Live At Fillmore East, 1968         49.7k

JIMMY PAGE: Boleskine House, Tower House & More 17.6k

JOHN, PAUL & KEITH, Santa Monica, 1974         14k

JIMI HENDRIX AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT, 1970 8.3k

DEEP PURPLE: Trouble in Jakarta         7.5k

JIMMY PAGE: The Day Jimmy Met Robert 6.71k

KEITH MOON’S LIVING ARRAGEMENTS 5.61k

PALAZZO DARIO” The Palace That Tommy Bought         5.58k

WHO UK TOUR 2014         5.16k

THE WHO: My Hidden Gems Album 4.53k

KEITH MOON & THE PYTHONS         4.29k

LAUNCHING DEAR BOY 4.15k

THE WHO: Hyde Park London, June 16, 2015 3.59k

JOHN ENTWISTLE Obituary (1944-2002) 3.44k

THE NORTH OF ENGLAND BEER DRINKING CHAMPIONSHIPS         3.08k

THE OX: The Last of The Great Rock Stars (Book Review) 2.97k

UNDERTURE: Keith’s Great Triumph         2.85k

PRETEND YOU’RE IN A WAR: Who Book Review 2.84k

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: Saturday Night Live, 1980 2.8k 

BLACK SABBATH DIDN’T INVENT HEAVY METAL

Emotionally charged reviews of Black Sabbath’s Farewell Concert – their third ‘final’ show, following those in 1999 and 2017 – at Birmingham’s Villa Park on Saturday bestow upon them the accolade that they invented heavy metal music. This was further emphasised by members of the distinguished supporting groups, most of whom are headliners in their own right, claiming they owed their careers to the Sabs. 

Bollocks, I say. If heavy metal is characterised by a repetitive, relatively simple guitar riff, often distorted and accentuated on the on beat by bass and drums, then we have The Kinks to thank for its origination. In my biography of Deep Purple, first published in 1983, I attempted to define the genre and explain its origins, writing as follows: “The roots of hard rock, which would come to known as heavy metal, lie in the harsh, riff-based songs recorded by various British bands that emerged in the mid-sixties, groups like The Kinks (‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘All Day And All Of The Night’), The Who (‘I Can’t Explain’ and ‘My Generation’) and, to a lesser degree, The Rolling Stones (‘Satisfaction’) and The Yardbirds (‘Shapes Of Things’ and ‘Evil Hearted You’). Even The Beatles were not immune to the trend, with both ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Birthday’ – both Paul McCartney compositions – on their ‘White’ album betraying distinct HM leanings. 

        “It was the sound of a strained electric guitar riff played at great volume through a fuzz-box, a machine that distorted the notes into a blur of sustain that was repeated ad infinitum until sheer repetition dulled the senses into eventual submission. At least that’s what had happened by the time it came to be known as heavy metal. 

        “The riffy groundwork by The Who and Kinks was taken a stage further by Cream and The Jeff Beck Group and further still by Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin, the group he formed in 1968 after the dissolution of The Yardbirds. Page added the vocal wail of Robert Plant to his own distorted guitar and toughened up the rhythm section so that drums would explode at appropriate breaks. Though Led Zeppelin would vary their stylistic output considerably, ‘Whole Lotta Love’, the song that kicks off their second album, is the perfect example of heavy metal music at its most cohesive and ingenious, the blue print for a type of music that countless groups would follow in the seventies.” 

        Unless I’m mistaken the first use of the phrase “heavy metal” famously occurred in Steppenwolf’s ‘Born To Be Wild’, the lyric of which mentions “heavy metal thunder” in reference to sound of a motor cycle. This was released in 1968, about eight months before Led Zeppelin’s first LP which contained the riff-laden ‘Communication Breakdown’ and a year and bit before Led Zeppelin II which opens, as I wrote above, with ‘Whole Lotta Love’.

The release of Black Sabbath’s first LP in early 1970 occurred after the Steppenwolf and two Led Zeppelin LPs, and although Sabbath became standard bearers for heavy metal by continuing to mine its motherlode throughout their career – unlike Zeppelin who prodigiously developed and varied their output – it is for this reason that is it inaccurate to suggest they invented the HM genre. Indeed, one review of the Villa Park show I read mentioned that an all-star band, including Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, actually performed ‘Whole Lotta Love’, thus slyly suggesting Zep were to be commended – or to blame, depending on your point of view – for creating HM. 

None of which is to take away from the Black Sabbath’s achievements or the pleasure they have given their fans over the years. Ozzie can’t really sing any longer and was obliged for health reasons to remain seated during Sabbath’s performance on Saturday but he is to be commended for giving it his all on a day that was packed with emotion. The other three Sabs seem to have lost nothing of their skills, however, but at this stage in the game it would be sacrilege for them to continue with another singer. 

But they didn’t invent heavy metal.