Revisiting the Ozzy Osbourne ode to Aleister Crowley, ‘Mr. Crowley’
Ozzy Osbourne, or the ‘Prince of Darkness’, is one of the ultimate titans of heavy metal. From the very moment he first burst onto the scene in the late 1960s, Ozzy has cultivated a hellraising persona that has seen him lay down many of the key foundations of metal. It goes without saying that the singer has set the standards of all the genre’s most lauded frontmen moving forward.
The most notable aspect of Osbourne’s work is the darkness that he imbues it with. Together with his bandmates in the original iteration of Black Sabbath, he understood people’s penchant for being scared, leading them to create a new form of rock music that was sludgy and ominous. As genuine artists, they backed this up with a satanic aesthetic and album covers that were equally as arcane as the haunting imagery of their 1970 debut album reflects.
Sabbath are the ultimate metal band, and the darkness that their first six records convey speaks for itself. From ‘The Wizard’ to ‘Children of the Grave’, this pulsating and authentic mass of darkness has been so influential that everyone from Electric Wizard to the Norwegian black metal bands have tried to emulate elements of their style.
Following the moment that Osbourne was invited to leave Sabbath in the late 1970s, he continued to build on the ominous feeling he’d established with his new band, The Blizzard of Ozz, in what proved to be a supergroup of sorts. It featured Uriah Heep’s Lee Kerslake, Bob Daisley and Don Airey of Rainbow, and the eminent Randy Rhoads from Quiet Riot. Their debut album, 1980’s Blizzard of Ozz, was a resounding success, and it featured a handful of tracks that remain some of Ozzy’s finest.
One of the most riveting is the album’s second single, ‘Mr. Crowley’, an atmospheric opus that was written about infamous British occultist Aleister Crowley. It was penned by Osbourne, Rhoads and Daisley, and notably, it starts off with the extended, prog-like keyboard solo by Don Airey and comes complete with one of Rhoads’s best performances.
“I just cleared [the band] out of the studio and said, ‘Come back in half an hour,'” Airey later recalled. “Ozzy came back, heard it, and said, ‘You just plugged into my head, man.'”
For the song, Osbourne was inspired by a book about Aleister Crowley that he had read, as well as a mysterious deck of tarot card he found in the studio when the band were just starting to record Blizzard of Ozz. Ozzy’s thoughts on the founder of the Thelemite religion are made clear in the opening lines of the track: “Mr. Crowley, what went on in your head? / Oh Mr. Crowley, did you talk to the dead? / Your lifestyle to me seemed so tragic / With the thrill of it all / You fooled all the people with magic / Yeah, you waited on Satan’s call”.
