The album Ozzy Osbourne made Black Sabbath throw away: “He wouldn’t sing any of the songs”
It’s no big secret that Ozzy Osbourne wasn’t the easiest person to deal with throughout his career.
Even though he was one of the most lovable presences every single time he performed live, there were a lot of times when anyone would have got a headache trying to wrangle him in whenever he was hitting the drugs pretty hard. There was no telling what was going to come out of his mouth whenever he got too strung out, but Black Sabbath knew all too well that things needed to change after a while.
But the fact that ‘The Prince of Darkness’ re-emerged after being sacked from his own band is the real miracle. He didn’t want to be considered a has-been, but even if it took a lot of hard work on his part and that of his wife, Sharon, no one else in the metal community has really had a phoenix from the ashes moment quite like he did once ‘Crazy Train’ started becoming a massive hit.
His Sabbath bandmates could have been jealous at the time, but chances are that no one would have wanted to deal with him in the state he was in. Osbourne had already mentally checked out by the time the band finished with Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, and while Sabotage was still a great record with a lot of truly epic moments, things start to get a lot more uneven when looking through the final albums they made.
Technical Ecstasy is already one of the most spotty records in their discography, but even if Osbourne wanted to wash his hands of that one, Never Say Die was the first time where he didn’t even bother showing up half the time. The rest of Sabbath were convinced that they were in the market for a new singer after a while, but even when Osbourne came back to them after they started work on the record with Dave Walker, the fact that they had an entire album ready to go wasn’t all that important to Osbourne.
He needed to bring his own stamp to everything, and Tony Iommi remembered having to start from scratch and throw away an entire record to appease Osbourne, saying, “Ozzy left, we’d got another singer, wrote some songs with that other singer, and then Ozzy came back just a few days before we were leaving to go into the studio to record the album. But he wouldn’t sing any of the songs that we had written, so we had to write a complete other album, really. I booked a studio in Toronto, and we had to find some place to rehearse. So we had this cinema that we’d go into at 10 o’clock in the morning, and it was freezing cold; it was in the heart of the winter there, really awful.”
But even if Osbourne helped bring some personality to the record, it’s not exactly the best use of his talents at this point. Are there some highlights? Sure. The title track is fantastic by their standards at this point in their career, and ‘Johnny Blade’ is a kickass tune as well, but considering that ‘The Ozzman’ didn’t even stick around and had to relinquish vocal duties to Bill Ward, it wasn’t like he had a change of heart.
If anything, Never Say Die was just an example of Osbourne trying to get control of the band one more time before everything came crashing down. And while Osbourne was far more comfortable with making his own records in the 1980s, it’s not like he could have ever made the same kinds of vocal leaps that Ronnie James Dio was doing when they came out with ‘Heaven and Hell’ only a few years later.
The band had turned a corner, but the fact that they managed to throw away an entirely completed album was the real tragedy here. It’s one thing to keep those riffs on the shelf for the future, but when one person starts overruling the work of the entire band, there comes a point where someone needs to say something.
