How Ozzy Osbourne’s 1991 revival anthem came out of “messing around”
Musicians could at least do us all a favour and pretend like some of their greatest songs ever were laboured over. We don’t need to hear about their effortless genius, reminding us that we are nothing but useless mortals while they are songwriting gods who deliver musical brilliance with the simple wave of a pen.
Apparently, Paul McCartney wrote ‘Let It Be’ while tucked up in bed, sweetly dreaming of his late mother and a 15-year-old Lorde wrote and recorded the melody for Grammy-winning ‘Royals’ in the space of half an hour. Great, that’s really great. When I sleep, I dream of my teeth falling out, and when I wake up, it takes me half an hour to creak out of bed.
If you’re of the same level of frustration as me and also happen to be a Black Sabbath fan, well, it’s time to look away. It was tough enough to hear that maybe their greatest ever song ‘Paranoid’ was written as filler. It’s both mind-boggling and sobering to hear Geezer Butler explain: “We basically needed a three-minute filler for the album, and Tony came up with the riff. I quickly did the lyrics, and Ozzy was reading them as he was singing.”
One of the greatest rock songs of all time, written to fill three minutes of spare time. But it didn’t end there when it came to Black Sabbath alumni. Not even when Ozzy Osbourne spread his wings and embarked on a solo career did he take that relaxed attitude to songwriting and write his standout tracks from a session of silliness.
On the track ‘No More Tears’ from his 1991 album of the same name, Osbourne’s band of guitarist Zakk Wylde, drummer Randy Castillo, bass player Mike Inez and producer John Purdell were killing time in the studio, amusing each other with musical banter when they ended up stumbling on the arrangement.
Wylde explained, “We were just messing around in rehearsals. Mike started jamming that on the bass, then Randy started playing drums, and then John started doing that keyboard bit.”
But this was different to ‘Paranoid’. Where that track saw Sabbath at their reckless and imperious best, thriving off the unpredictability they harvested, in ‘91, Osbourne was now a sober musician for the first time in his career. He was approaching his creativity with a fiercer, more focused intent to ensure that his ‘90s revival wasn’t sloppy and misguided.
That ultimately influenced the lyrics, which on ‘No More Tears’ were darker than most, telling the macabre story of a stalker who torments women in a red-light district. The natural lightness of his band, who wrote the arrangement on a whim, offset Ozzy’s vocal delivery and gave it something of a duality that may not have existed had the famed singer come in with the lyrics first up.
The result was success for Ozzy, with the track selling over four million copies in America, which, considering his position in his career at the time, was a roaring success and ultimately proved that the relaxed, unpredictable feel of songwriting is what brought out the very best in him.
