The creepiest of all time, according to Ozzy Osbourne
It was bound to take something extra scary to manage to spook Ozzy Osbourne back in the day.
No one gets the title of ‘The Prince of Darkness’ by accident, but even if Osbourne was one of the most easygoing rock stars in the world, he was already much more conditioned for scary music than the average listener who never went any heavier than Led Zeppelin in their record collection. But it turns out that the best way to unsettle the Ozzman was to make something so unbelievably strange that it becomes genuinely frightening.
Then again, Osbourne probably wouldn’t have asked to be one of the most sinister figures that the rock and roll world had ever seen when he first started. He was more than happy to sing the blues in Black Sabbath when the band were under the moniker Earth, but when Tony Iommi hit upon the dissonant tritone lick of their namesake track, it didn’t take Osbourne long to get into the role of this tortured man that was slowly crying out for help as a demon singled him out as the one to be condemned to hell.
That kind of song doesn’t exactly scream hit potential, but Osbourne wasn’t a snob about what he sang. Geezer Butler had a lot of ways to twist and turn Sabbath’s lyrics into something a bit more macabre than before, and while Alice Cooper was making a show out of the most unsettling imagery that the rock and roll world had ever seen, there was no telling whether the band were genuinely in league with Satan or working out some of their inner demons through their songs.
But somewhere after Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Osbourne realised that he needed another outlet. He hung around for a few more Sabbath albums, but this was really the moment where he felt the most camaraderie amongst the band for the last time. He was years away from becoming a solo star, but even when he was selling out stadiums on his own, that didn’t mean that other people weren’t going back to those early albums.
The entire New Wave of British Heavy Metal and everyone in the thrash scene would have called Sabbath an early influence, but the world of lounge pop was a bit of an oddball choice to be a fan of Osbourne’s work. And yet when The Cardigans did their own twee version of ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’, they remembered ‘The Prince of Darkness’ tracking them down just to tell them how spooked he was by it.
There’s nothing the least bit threatening about The Cardigans’ tune, but the fact that it has such macabre lyrics with a lighthearted structure is half the reason why it was so strange for Osbourne to hear, with lead singer Nina Persson recalling, “We were big [Black Sabbath] fans – for a heavy band there’s a real pop sentiment in the songwriting – and I think it’s interesting when a cover is a stretch away from your natural sound. As a woman, I thought singing a song done by very manly men gave it a wonderfully creepy aspect. Ozzy came to see us in Los Angeles and said it was the creepiest thing he’d ever heard, which coming from him is the biggest compliment.”
That’s not even the best pop-ified version of a song that they did. Throughout their back catalogue, there are always little hints of hard rock sprinkled into their work, and even if they would become known for songs like ‘Lovefool’, the fact that they could transform songs like ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ or do the same thing to Sabbath’s ‘Changes’ is both horrifying and hilarious all at the same time.
So while Osbourne did have to do a double-take when hearing a band like this were fans, it was never meant to take the piss out of him, either. They were genuine metal fans that happened to play a more playful form of music, but if this cover teaches us anything, it’s that all music is universal if you have a melody strong enough.
