“Timeless”: Ozzy Osbourne’s favourite album by a solo artist
Engine-voiced serial animal maimer Ozzy Osbourne might be known as the Prince of Darkness, but he is always looking for music that illuminates the future in some bright new way. With Black Sabbath, the fury of rock on the heavier side of life murdered the waning flower power of the 1960s. The band provided for the next generation what The Beatles provided for Ozzy: “Imagine you go to bed today and the world is black and white and then you wake up, and everything is in colour,” he said of the impact of the Fab Four.
He never once hardened from that position over the years. As the softer cuts from Sabbath and his solo work proved, Ozzy was never anywhere near as obsessed with darkness as his nickname would have you believe. After a childhood of traumatic sexual abuse, he sought solace in music—sometimes that was sheltering in its shadier side, other times it was about embracing the liberty of light.
Thus, it is perhaps no surprise that The Beatles and imagination crop up among his favourites once again when it comes to a solo artist standing out there alone and bearing all to beautify the world for the masses. When picking out the singer-songwriter record that he loves the most for Forbes, the famed bat beheader went for the spiritual bent of John Lennon’s 1971 solo classic, Imagine.
“I must have played this album thousands of times over the years,” Ozzy explains. “The songs – ‘Imagine,’ ‘Jealous Guy,’ ‘Gimme Some Truth’ – are just timeless, which is the sign of what a great songwriter John Lennon was.” And with this album, in particular, he also proved himself to be a man with a point to make. It was a visceral, cutting, and vital point at that.
However, it is more about how he makes these points rather than their profundity or pointed edge that Ozzy most admires. As the Diary of a Madman rocker explains: “Lennon was a poet, a rebel and had an incredible passion, all of which are so evident on this landmark album. I cannot believe that we will be celebrating its 50th anniversary next year.” Thanks to the stark elements behind Imagine, it is still as important as ever, with Lennon using his status to ensure that it transcended society at large.
Whether you love the album as much as Ozzy or loathe it like Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, who found the point to be rather platitudinal and stupidly idealistic, you can’t argue about the fierce passion on display. While the “sugar-coated” politicism is open to questioning, the record is anything but a half-arsed hand-in from a man who has already earned his millions and made his point—it is filled with the welter of hungry unrest. Triumphantly, he wraps this all up in some of the most seamless melodies ever written.
Ozzy describes Lennon’s demand for change – whether personal, political or something more nebulous – as a “driving force for humanity”. It was adoration from the get-go for him. “I remember it like it was yesterday,” Ozzy reminisced when thinking back to his first mind-bending meeting with the music of Lennon. “I was walking around with a transistor radio on my shoulder. And ‘She Loves You’ came on. And I don’t know, it just went, ‘Bang! And that’s what I want to do! Wouldn’t it be great?’”.
And that love sustained until the end. “The world stopped for me,” Ozzy said when he found out about Lennon’s murder. “I can’t even describe how I felt. But the amount of joy and hope that he gave people was just remarkable.” Ozzy is a prime example of the type of kid who needed that hope—and there were many others in the heady counterculture days, but Lennon persevered with the notion of being a paragon of hope for the outsiders of the world even after the end of The Beatles.
Imagine is, in many ways, his statement of that intent, and the blips of bitterness and anger that also blight its legacy are a symbol of his human fallibility in pursuit of hopeful progress.
