“That one album was great”: The classic punk album Ozzy Osbourne said “captured something”
Although their fanbases are notably separate, punk and heavy metal are kindred spirits as the two main genres on the heavier end of rock music. Punk, as represented by Sex Pistols and Ramones, was a style and aesthetic that valued simple chord progressions and disregarded melody and societal expectations. Meanwhile, as pioneered by Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath, heavy metal brought chugging pace and macabre intensity while maintaining a degree of instrumental dexterity.
If we trace punk and metal back to the 1960s, both arrived as a result of innovations in amplification techniques and instrumental approaches. Dave Davies, guitarist of The Kinks, claims to have stumbled upon the distorted sound that influenced punk and metal when attacking his amplifier in a moment of teenage rage in 1964.
The Kinks’ early producer, Shel Talmy, helped create a proto-punk sound in the early hit single ‘You Really Got Me’ in 1964 and produced a similar sound in The Who’s ‘My Generation’ the following year. Just a year thereafter, John Entwistle wrote ‘Boris the Spider’ for The Who’s second album, A Quick One. Although the bassist described the song as a joke, it became popular among hard rock fans, many of whom consider it the first metal song.
Punk, as a cultural phenomenon, began in 1974 and was led by Ramones in New York City. However, its direct genealogy spanned back to the late 1960s and early ’70s in bands like The Stooges and New York Dolls. At this point, British bands Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple unofficially formed the Unholy Trinity of heavy metal. As the 1970s progressed, a gulf widened between metal and punk.
As a fast-paced yet melodic style, often including intricate guitar solos, metal is generally a more complex form of music. Led Zeppelin maintained strong ties to the prog-rock movement thanks to its wealth of instrumental talent. When the UK punk scene arrived, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were initially dubious but came to appreciate the London group The Damned. “It had substance, and it also had a melody,” Plant once said of the band’s 1977 debut album. “It had so much drive about it. That was where things needed to go.”
Similarly, Lemmy Kilmister, the bassist and frontman of Motörhead, took a liking to Sex Pistols and even tried to teach Sid Vicious to play the bass for a few weeks. “It was what rock ‘n’ roll needed at that point in time,” Kilmister once reflected. “I never had time for the Clash and their pretend politics, but the Damned and the Ramones were great rock n roll bands. Motörhead fitted right in. We may have had long hair, but the punks understood us.”
Osbourne wasn’t quite so inspired by the punk wave. While he appreciated the anarchistic rock ‘n’ roll outlook, he claimed Black Sabbath started the craze. “Punk was a spinoff of Sabbath,” he said. “It was anti-establishment.” Indeed, Sabbath’s attitude was similar to that of the punks, especially as conveyed in the seminal protest song’ War Pigs’.
The Black Sabbath singer recalled enjoying Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols for its sneering anarchy but couldn’t get on board with much else. “The only band of them I liked was the Sex Pistols,” he said. “That one album was great; it captured something. But Johnny Lydon, whatever his name is, wants to stop talking and make some fucking music.”
In return, Lydon was never particularly interested in Black Sabbath and abhors Osbourne’s life choices. “Ozzy, now acting like a senile delinquent, is equally unimpressive. The sly innuendo of promoting drug abuse and catatonic stupidity offends me,” he once said, supposedly targeting the singer’s stint on the reality show The Osbournes. “Ozzy’s a working-class man, like me, yet he allows that to happen. By acting like he does all the time, he implies that we’re all stupid, the working classes.”
