The forgotten 1960s band Ozzy Osbourne absolutely loved: “Sent chills in my spine”
The entire road to Ozzy Osbourne becoming a legend was never going to be easy.
Birmingham wasn’t necessarily the hub of rock and roll stars when Black Sabbath first formed, and even when ‘The Prince of Darkness’ was ousted from the band, it took him a while before he had the right people in his corner to work on his solo career masterpieces like Blizzard of Ozz. But that kind of drive always came from Osbourne listening to people who kept moving forward with every single record they made.
Because when you look at the kinds of bands that Osbourne was listening to back in the day, not all of them were what you would consider heavy by any means. There were certainly people like Led Zeppelin who played a big role in bringing them an audience in their early days, but a lot of the earliest British invasion bands were much more interested in making bluesy music than anything that had to do with the darker side of life.
The Kinks may have been the one outlier there, but Osbourne was more transfixed on what bands like The Beatles were doing. The Fab Four broke down more doors than virtually any other rock and roll band, and Osbourne felt like he was getting his eyes opened to what music could be when he heard their first albums. But there was a lot more for him to explore when looking at the bands that weren’t from Liverpool.
There were certainly bands like The Stones that made rock and roll sound nasty, but Osbourne did have a thing for bands that had a certain atmosphere about their sound. He did have a soft spot for American bands that made music sound thick as all hell, but when Dave Clark Five came on the radio, you could hear the beginnings of what rock and roll stars were supposed to sound like when they sang.
Sure, ‘Glad All Over’ doesn’t really have the best vocal performance in history, but that wasn’t the point. Osbourne felt like he was hearing a person talk about their own problems when he first heard that song, and even when looking at the band years later, he felt that the Dave Clark Five remained one notch above everybody else when looking at their evolution as a rougher rock and roll outfit.
They tend to get forgotten when looking through the best bands of the 1960s, but Osbourne was convinced that they were the band that he belonged in, saying, “I wanted to be a member of that group. Even the drummer looked sexy, you know. Dave Clark was ahead of anyone else. I wanted to be a member of the Dave Clark Five. I remember being at a school dance and ‘Glad All Over’ came on and it sent chills in my spine. People don’t realize how big they were. They were absolutely huge.”
And it’s not like The Ozzman isn’t in good company as well. Eddie Van Halen also considered the band a favourite when he was hashing out his first tunes, and even when a young Tom Hanks was falling in love with The Beatles, he knew that he had something that sounded a little bit tougher whenever he turned on Dave Clark Five.
We should probably hold off on calling the band one of the first hard rock acts, but when looking at who they inspired, Dave Clark Five did at least have a hand in shaping rock and roll into something different. They weren’t afraid to make music that had a little bit more grit behind it, and if their brand of music could get on the charts, there was nothing stopping Osbourne from bellowing like a banshee whenever Tony Iommi kicked off some of his heaviest riffs.
