The 1978 album Ozzy Osbourne called his “worst piece of work”
It’s practically a miracle that Ozzy Osbourne could manage to remember his days with Black Sabbath after a while.
Despite being known as one of the world’s biggest party animals in his prime, ‘The Prince of Darkness’ was an absolute natural when he entered the studio, whether that was coming up with a melody over the top of Tony Iommi’s riffs or somehow forming an entire song out of riffing a few lines on tunes like ‘Fairies Wear Boots’. But after his time was spent in Sabbath, Osbourne had no problem saying that there were more than a few pieces of their discography that he would rather forget.
After all, Osbourn already thought that his time with the band had been exhausted years before he had left. He had felt that Sabbath Bloody Sabbath was the best record that he made with the band before leaving, and even though they squeaked by alright, there were bound to be a few moments where he wanted to be anywhere other than jamming when he walked into the recording studio.
Sure, Sabotage is a great album, but when you look through the song lyrics and more than half of the recording sessions, half of the record was about them being angry at their record company. It did result in some of the gnarliest riffs ever made, like ‘Symptom of the Universe’ and ‘Hole in the Sky’, but things start getting more than a little bit spotty when you look at the last two albums that Osbourne made with the group.
There’s nothing wrong with Technical Ecstasy from a raw musical perspective, but when you know what the band is capable of, it was always going to be considered a step down. Osbourne said that Iommi wanted the band to sound like other acts like Queen, but aside from the terrible album cover and half-baked songs, Osbourne had a lot more vitriol towards Never Say Die than anything else they had made.
The title track is a classic in Sabbath’s catalogue, but considering the band had hired another singer around this time before Osbourne came back didn’t bode well for the sessions. This was the sound of a band going through the motions, and Osbourne wasn’t even going to try to defend the work that he did on the record when he finally started his solo career.
He was already making Blizzard of Ozz shirts by the time the band were cutting these tracks, and when they were finished, Osbourne couldn’t hide the fact that he created one of his worst records, saying, “The success started to infiltrate into the personal members of the band. It got to the point where if we didn’t fly around the world twice and land in some obscure studio, it wasn’t going to be the best album”.
The last album I did with Sabbath was Never Say Die and it was the worst piece of work I’ve ever had anything to do with. I’m ashamed of that album. It’s disgusting.”
You can definitely hear some of the budget coming out in the fact that they added horns to the arrangements, but there’s still more than a few gets on here. As I said, the title track is still a fantastic way of putting a bow on the Osbourne era of the group, and even if he didn’t think that the songs were worth much, ‘Johnny Blade’ is one of the best tunes of Sabbath’s later period and the clearest hint of where Osbourne was going to go in his solo career only a few years later.
But since the last two tracks don’t even feature Osbourne at all and leave it to Bill Ward to close up shop on vocals, the writing was on the wall that he had to go. There was no sense in beating a dead horse anymore, and Osbourne had finally felt like he had taken the band as far as he could behind the microphone.
