The Beatles song Ozzy Osbourne thought was “fucking phenomenal”
In not much more than a handful of years, The Beatles had changed the world. When the news broke on April 10th, 1970, that the musical force that had turned the monochrome universe multicoloured, just like flicking on a light, had suddenly blown a fuse, the mourning took to the streets.
“Nobody will ever replace The Beatles,” one fan remarked, “It’s just one Beatles group. We grew up with them. They started when they were younger, and we were younger, and they belong to us in a way. There could never be another Beatles, never!”
One youthful fan dragged up by the bootstraps into a new bohemian world by the ‘Fab Four’ was Ozzy Osbourne, who once proudly proclaimed, “When I heard the Beatles. I knew what I wanted to do,” when speaking to Blabbermouth in 2019. “My son says to me, Dad, I like the Beatles, but why do you go so crazy? The only way I can describe it, is like this, ‘Imagine you go to bed today and the world is black and white and then you wake up, and everything’s in colour. That’s what it was like!’ That’s the profound effect it had on me.”
“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Osbourne says, sharing the first time that his ears were greeted by the dulcet tones produced by the Fab Four. “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 what he ended up doing was leading the precession of that mourning march. Black Sabbath embodied the dark winter that followed the summer of love, steering the world into a new cultural chapter in blistering style.
However, Ozzy would be the first to admit that they were running on the steam emitted by the Fab Four. Although they might have sounded markedly different, The Beatles were no strangers to heaviness and darkness, either—it’s just that it mostly arrived with an ethereal aura of lightness, too. In fact, these songs were often the ones from their gilded oeuvre that resonated most with Ozzy.
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.
One track imbued with this sense of mystery and magic is certainly ‘Eleanor Rigby’. It’s an anthem that holds a candle to civility, and that is a sentiment that Ozzy adored. “’Eleanor Rigby’ is f–king phenomenal,“ he commented when picking out the track as one of his favourites. “I don’t know why. I just know that every time I heard something from the Beatles, it made me feel better that day.”
As it happens, the track shares an unexpected kinship with Black Sabbath in the sense that it draws inspiration from a particularly dark classic piece that Geezer Butler was prone to doing himself. When Paul McCartney was crafting this mythological epic, he was listening to Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ on heavy rotation. This sense of transmitting the drama of the past into pop was something that defined both bands at their best.
With its sumptuous, syncopated melody and the beguiling entwinement of Albert Camus-esque lyrics, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ can easily be declared a songwriting masterpiece. And of all the masterpieces that the Fab Four mustered that moved the boys in Black Sabbath, this one had the greatest effect.
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