“Pass the torch”: the band Ozzy Osbourne called successors to Black Sabbath
Every generation of rock tends to move in cycles. Even though some artists like to claim that they will be around forever and then no one can beat them at the top of the heap, it’s only a matter of time before that kind of confidence starts looking like old men trying to blend in with the times. Black Sabbath had a huge slew of imitators waiting at their feet when they debuted, but Ozzy Osbourne considered these shock rockers as the ones who truly picked up the mantle where Sabbath left off.
When the Birmingham band debuted, though, everyone seemed to be running scared of what they were doing. There had been groups that were mining the blues from years before, but with Osbourne behind the microphone and Tony Iommi’s demented riffs, this was the blues if it were being played by Satan, complete with the ‘devil’s tritone’ being used at will on different tracks.
It’s not like they were afraid to play around with their imagery a little bit, as well. Their debut already looks like something that would have come out of some strange cult ritual, and given that Iommi would sometimes wear a cross around his neck while playing, it didn’t take people long to make the leap that these were Satanic musicians looking to indoctrinate children into their sick little world.
But Sabbath wasn’t looking to scare concerned parents around the world or even try to perform some occultist ritual. There had been overt references to Christianity in some of their songs as well, like on ‘After Forever’, but if that shock value worked for a group that wasn’t trying, imagine what it would be like if people saw an act that was meant to be terrifying from the minute they walked onstage?
Right after Sabbath formed, Kiss made waves on the other side of the world by putting on war paint before they went onstage. While the get-up looks insanely goofy by today’s standards, seeing Gene Simmons dressed up as a Demon was fairly intimidating before most of us realised that underneath it all, he was only a disgusting human being.
Still, Osbourne had to admit that the Sabbath set standard had been passed to Kiss once songs like ‘Detroit Rock City’ started storming the charts, saying, “It’s like I’m passing the torch and obviously I’ll probably pass the torch. I mean, we started Black Sabbath, and then it went to Kiss. It’s from that to this; it’s all the same fucking, it’s all the same jacket with a different star.”
It’s not like Simmons would have it any other way once they went out on the road with Sabbath in the mid-1970s, telling Vh1, “Ozzy Osbourne said, ‘That’s when I knew that Sabbath’s days were over’. Because once you let the opening band spook you, it’s only a matter of time.” They had the heavy tunes to back it up as well, like how they could sprinkle in tunes like ‘Parasite’ in between the most straight-ahead power pop like ‘Rock and Roll All Nite’.
But whereas Kiss has gone through enough merchandising and shameless self-promotion to make people roll their eyes a few times over, Osbourne’s legacy as ‘The Prince of Darkness’ has seemed to endure. He may have a reality show to his name and has been through some of the strangest detours any rockstar has had to take, but only Osbourne can still conjure up the same level of doom that Sabbath had in their prime.
