The prog rock album Ozzy Osbourne said had no bad songs: “I blasted it everywhere I went”
While everyone can criticise Ozzy Osbourne all they want, you could never say the man didn’t know talent when he heard it.
Getting someone as great as Randy Rhoads on his first try is unheard of in the world of hard rock, but ‘The Prince of Darkness’ was never going to settle for merely good when working on his records. He needed people who could transcend any genre label that was put on them, and that all came back to how Osbourne looked at his own record collection.
Because, really, Osbourne was the last person to call the genre he played “heavy metal”. When Black Sabbath first formed, they were nothing more than a typical bluesy hard rock outfit, but the minute that they started making something even remotely scary, it was time for everyone to jump on the bandwagon and label them a metal act. Not really the label that most people would want if their main inspiration were acts like The Beatles.
From day one, Osbourne relied on the Fab Four to get him through the worst times of his life, and while not everything managed to reach their level, he at least had a few ballads that were reminiscent of those tunes. ‘Goodbye to Romance’ is still one of the prettiest songs he ever made, but even after being in one of the biggest heavy bands of his time, Osbourne also had love for the greatest names in prog as well.
After all, every single member of Sabbath were best mates with Rick Wakeman when he contributed to the album Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, but Genesis was on a completely different level. Wakeman could wear a cape onstage and look like some supernatural wizard, but Peter Gabriel was turning every show into a theatrical performance, and while that would never last in Genesis, he had bigger plans for what his solo career could be.
It took a while before the world came to him, but when listening to every one of his albums, Gabriel was slowly inching towards blending progressive music with the pop sound of the day. The drum sound everyone remembers from the 1980s came from him, and after ‘Shock the Monkey’ tested the waters, So introduced him to the world as one of the most avant-garde pop stars the world had ever seen.
Osbourne may have been busy making his own masterpieces, but he could tell that Gabriel had turned a corner with his songwriting, saying, “The album I just could not stop playing was So by Peter Gabriel. There’s not a bad track on there. ‘In Your Eyes,’ ‘Red Rain’, ‘Mercy Street’. [Those songs] sound as fresh today as they did then. For a whole year after it came out, I blasted it everywhere I went. It became a problem actually.”
But for all of the blockbuster albums that came out around that time, Gabriel managed to outdo both the pop charts and his old band at the same time. Genesis were already white-hot after Phil Collins became a solo superstar, but the deep cuts on the record like ‘Mercy Street’ and even the duet ‘Don’t Give Up’ tap into something much deeper than typical pop music. These were artists working at the top of their game, and Gabriel wanted to do everything he could to make sure that he realised his vision.
Osbourne might have been one of the many fans that considered the record a favourite, but Gabriel wasn’t looking to make an album that crossed genre boundaries. He was only following his muse, and when someone is making a record of this magnitude, all they can hope is that the songs last longer than they do.
