The worst lyrics Ozzy Osbourne ever heard in his life: “Who the hell sat down and wrote this shit?”
From the day that he sang his first notes on a Black Sabbath album, there was no one who was competing with Ozzy Osbourne.
‘The Prince of Darkness’ moniker hadn’t quite come into view yet, but even for a band that was influenced by the blues, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone during that time that had the same kind of frightening tone to their voice like Osbourne did when he cranked out ‘Paranoid’. But a lot of the greatest parts of his career came from him studying under some of the greatest rock and roll singers who had ever lived.
The Beatles were definitely a big deal for him when he was a kid, but Osbourne was also looking to find something a little bit heavier when he made his own music. Birmingham wasn’t a place that was crawling with hippies and preaching about peace, love and understanding by any stretch, so when Sabbath first debuted, it’s not really a shock that they were showing the darker side of what Flower Power was all about.
That is, when you could actually figure out what Osbourne was singing half the time. Geezer Butler was the one coming up with most of the lyrics for the band during this time, but a lot of his thoughts were a little too cerebral for what the average rock and roll fan was looking for. The band didn’t want to write the traditional sex and drugs songs as everyone else did, and that extended into Osbourne’s solo career as well.
He wanted something that sounded incredibly dark every single time he sang, but there were a few times when he could phone it in as well. The last records he made with Sabbath in the late 1970s had a few lines that would have made Spinal Tap cringe, and there are more than a few clunkers in Osbourne’s catalogue, but ‘The Ozzman’ realised when he was truly listening to some terrible lines.
With all due respect meant to him, Osbourne didn’t seem to be someone overburdened with intelligence by any stretch, but he still had standards when it came to what he was singing. His songs needed to have a message or at least be something that he could have been impressed with, and when looking at the words from some of his heroes, he didn’t think that he was breaking new ground doing his own version of ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’.
The Jeff Beck song is still considered a rock and roll classic for most people, but Osbourne wasn’t exactly thrilled when looking at the lyric sheet when recording it for his album Under Cover, saying, “I thought, ‘If Jeff Beck can do it, I can do it.’ But the lyric is the biggest pile of shit you’ve ever heard in your life. I thought, ‘Who the hell sat down and wrote this shit?’ So I told Sharon, ‘Do not put that track on the album. It’s a joke.’”
You can chalk up a lot of that to the hippie sentiment that was still happening around the time it was recorded, but the fact that Beck couldn’t find someone else to sing the song was a big telltale sign. Rod Stewart always enjoyed singing with Beck, but the idea of him continuing to make music that had lyrics about flies in your pea soup and opening up a beach umbrella while you’re watching TV would have been enough to make the best showmen of all time walk out on a session.
And if you’ve ever written a song that managed to make ‘The Prince of Darkness’ scared to be seen with it, you’ve truly hit on something sinister. Then again, the quality of the lyrics is the result of what happens when working with a legend like Jeff Beck. Here is one of the greatest guitarists that the world has ever known, and hearing him sing those lines is what happens when no one tells him that it’s not good enough.
