It’s not even a year since Ozzy Osbourne left us and already there are plans to turn him into an AI-powered avatar.

That’s what Sharon Osbourne and son Jack promised at the Licensing Expo last week. They have entered into a partnership with a tech company called HYPERREAL (very deliberately all in caps and one word, it seems) to create, in Jack’s words: "the digital DNA of Ozzy Osbourne, voice, image and movement.”

“He will exist digitally as himself for as long as we have computers,” he said. “Technology has come such a long way to where it's almost drag and drop. You could shoot a template for a commercial ... literally prompt what you want Digital Ozzy to do in that commercial and you just drop it in. It's that simple now."

"You can ask Ozzy anything, and he will answer you in his own voice – and the answers will be what Ozzy would have said," added Sharon. "We're going to take it all around the world. People can talk to him and he will talk back."

If you find this idea all a bit disrespectful and in dubious taste (not to mention morality), then you’re not alone. Many fans voiced those very concerns in a Youtube livestream over the weekend. Osbourne Junior insisted, though, that “it’s gonna be so tasteful what we’re doing. It’s not gonna be fucking lame.”

“It’s really complex what we’re doing. This isn’t just like hooking up an image of my dad to ChatGPT. This is some high-level technology that we’re gonna be working with, and it’s gonna feel very real, and it’s kind of wild how it will be utilised.”

But is it what he would have wanted? “It’s really cool and it’s something that I think my dad would be into,” Osbourne explained. “We actually talked about it before he passed, about doing something like this… I know he would be into this.”

An AI Ozzy is not the only pop avatar that’s in the works. Kiss are working on their own avatar show – though of course several of their members are still alive to work with the motion-capture technology that was central to making Abba Voyage the huge success it’s been. But promises of an AI Elvis in last year’s Elvis Evolution show turned out to be a damp squib and the idea of a touring Amy Winehouse hologram was quietly put to bed after an initial fanfare in 2018.

"The things that you can do with it (the technology) are just endless," Sharon mused at the Licensing Expo last week. But does that mean you should do them?

No rock star had funnier stories, or was better at telling them, than Ozzy Osbourne.

In the early 2000s, in an interview with Q magazine, the legendary singer began the conversation by reminiscing about his boozy wedding to Sharon in 1982, and finished with a lovely story about meeting his hero Paul McCartney.

In between, he recalled his encounters with chimpanzees and elephants, with David Lee Roth and Van Halen, and with one of America’s daftest law enforcement officers.

Osbourne married Sharon (nee Arden) on 4 July 1982 in Maui, Hawaii.

“I was legless that day,” he said, unsurprisingly. “There were seven bottles of Hennessy [cognac] in the wedding cake. Nobody would eat it. I had a slice and was pissed for a week!”

In that period in the early ’80s, Osbourne’s theatrical stage show featured an actor with dwarfism who would be subjected to a mock hanging during the performance.

“His name was John Edward Allen,” Osbourne recalled. “And every night, we used to hang him on stage. After we played Goodbye To Romance, a ballad, I’d say, ‘Hang the bastard!’

“He had a harness that we hanged him from, but he carried a Swiss Army knife. I said, ‘What the fuck have you got that for?’ He said, ‘Sometimes the harness slips’. I said, ‘If you cut the fucking rope, you’ll fall to your death anyway!’

“After one show in some fucking Bible belt part of America, this cop came into the dressing room. He comes in like Robocop – the crash helmet, the goggles, the gun, the handcuffs. He says to me, ‘Those little fellas – do you hang one of those guys every night?’ I said yeah. He goes, ‘Where do you get them all from?’

“I pissed myself! I thought, ‘You gotta be fucking stoned! I had this vision of a truck filled with all these dwarves screaming, ‘No! No!’ This fucking guy honestly thought I collected them and hung one every night!”

The cover for Osbourne’s 1983 album Bark At The Moon – and the video for its title track – portrayed the singer as a werewolf.

“We filmed it in an old disused Victorian mental hospital,” he said. “It was fucking weird, man. The quality of the video was fucking two-bob, but the make-up was incredible. It was all human hair, and it took eight hours to do. I hated it. I’ve got as much patience as fucking fly. Believe me, it didn’t take eight hours to fucking rip it off!

“We shot the album cover at Shepperton studios, and I went to a restaurant looking like that. These two kids saw me and freaked out. It looked so real. The photographer wanted me to go outside and stand by a bus-stop, and I said, ‘If I do that I’ll give some old dear a fucking heart attack!’”

Another photo shoot from that period saw Osbourne posing with an elephant and a chimpanzee. Inevitably, this shoot did not progress without incident.

He explained: “We were on tour in California, and at the back of the venue there was a safari park. Sharon had this idea for me to do a photo session with this elephant and a monkey.

“So I get on this elephant’s shoulders and it walks over this bridge made of railway sleepers. Then its fucking foot goes through a rotten beam. This 9000-ton thing is leaning over, and when you’re up on there it’s like being on the roof of a house.

“Sharon’s going, ‘Smile!’ I go, ‘Sharon, the fucking thing’s falling over!’

“So I get off the elephant and they bring over this fucking chimpanzee and it freaks out when all the flashbulbs go off. It gets my thumb and bites into it. Sharon’s going, ‘Just fucking smile!’ And the fucking thing’s biting my thumb off!

“The woman trainer punched the chimp to get him off me. It was one of those fucking disaster days.”

Later in the ’80s, Osbourne adopted the big hair image popularised by the decade’s younger stars such as Mötley Crüe.

“I don’t know what the fuck I was smoking, or sniffing, but that image was outrageous! That fucking hairdo – I looked like I’d been cleaning fucking chimneys.

“It was very colourful in the ’80s. Back then, everybody looked like that. It was like Liberace meets metal.”

It was during this era that the Osbournes bought a home in rural Buckinghamshire, after an eventful period of house-hunting that included a viewing of a mansion owned by folk singer Roger Whittaker.

Osbourne recalled: “When we looked at Roger Whittaker’s house, I’d taken some colon cleanser the day before and I had to take a massive shit. I went into his toilet and by the time I was done the bowl was full. But there was no toilet paper, so I got up on tip-toe and wiped my arse on his curtains!”

Near the end of the Q interview, he talked briefly about his days in Black Sabbath and a disastrous 1978 tour that precipitated his departure from the band.

“It was the last tour,” he said. “Never Say Die. I quit but came back.

“We had Van Halen opening for us. Their singer David Lee Roth would watch me do my moves and then go on stage the next night and do what I’d done, so it looked like I was copying him!

“Sabbath was coming to an end. We were tired. We were fighting the world. The management were ripping us off and we were touring to pay our lawyers’ fees.”

He ended on a brighter note, recalling the first time he met a Beatle.

“Paul McCartney was great with me,” he smiled. “We were on the Howard Stern show. I was booked for 8.30 and my personal assistant Tony asked me, ‘Would you mind switching places with someone? I said, ‘Fuck off!’ He said, ‘Let me tell you who it is first. It’s Paul McCartney.’ I said, ‘It’s done!’

“That was the first time I ever met him. He was just a gentleman, fucking great to meet. I told him, ‘I owe my life to you – if it wasn’t for you I don’t think I’d be here.’

“The Beatles era was electrifying. I came from Aston in Birmingham and I used to think, ‘How the fuck am I ever going to get out of this shit-hole?’ Then I heard She Loves You, and it took me on a journey. I have the photo of me with Paul at home. It’s signed by Paul. The frame it’s in is solid gold. Cost me $42,000.”

To accurately describe Zakk Wylde’s playing style, his electric guitar tone, his ability to impress his Beyond Thunderdome berserker persona upon the instrument, you occasionally have appropriate the language of the cryptozoological.

It’s like he belongs to a different taxonomy from the rest of us, from somewheres mythical. And yet sitting here in a hotel bar on Denmark Street, London, at the epicentre of the city’s guitar culture, he is reassuringly human, flesh and blood, who like the rest of us runs on caffeine judging by the size of the espresso he is nursing.

Wylde is in town to talk about Engines Of Demolition, the long-awaited new LP from Black Label Society, which is once more a showcase for his hydrocarbon metal guitar sound, a sound he says is a product of everything he has listened to, of core inspirations such as Tony Iommi and country guitar icon Albert Lee, and those out-there players such as John McLaughlin and Frank Marino, technicians of sublime vision who took the instrument one step beyond.

And yet it has to be the product of something deeper than that; Wylde has had a crazy last four years. Much of it has been spent paying tribute to the late Dimebag Darrel and his brother, Vinnie Paul, in the Pantera reunion/celebration tour that finds frontman Phil Anselmo and bass guitar player Rex Brown joined by Wylde on guitar, Anthrax’s Charlie Benante on drums.

Night after night, he’s playing Dimebag’s riffs. Any downtime he had, he was writing his own, sketching out tracks for when he got back home.

“My whole thing is just writing and writing and writing,” he says, saying he started writing this record just before Pantera rehearsals. “From then to us sitting right now, that’s already over four years! But it went by like that. [clicks fingers]. Usually, when Black Label would do it, it was just one implosion of ideas, and we record it, mix it, and ship it out.”

Then there has been the emotional weight of losing his mentor. Wylde’s career will be inextricably linked to the late Ozzy Osbourne’s. It was with Ozzy he became a star, with whom he got to perform with one last time at last year’s epic Black Sabbath farewell show at Villa Park, Back To The Beginning. Shortly after, Ozzy would pass away, and once Wylde got back home to gather his thoughts he found he had one last song to write, for Ozzy.

Here he explains how that tribute came together, why he had to bring the Grail out of retirement to record it, and why music is all about the sharing of inspirations and carrying the torch for the next generation.

So much life has passed in those four years. With Ozzy passing, celebrating Dimebag and Vinnie, was there an extra emotional dynamic going into this record?

“No, its like I always tell people that are like, ‘Hey, Zakk, you got any advice for my son or my daughter? They’re an aspiring musician.’ I go, ‘Yeah, whatever music it is you love, that’s what you should be playing.’ It’s like why would you eat food you don't enjoy? I mean, unless me and you were on a diet ‘cos we work at Chippendales and we gotta be sexy. [Laughs] So we got we got to maintain a six-pack of abs at all times.

“But I mean, enjoy your life. You have to play music that moves you. If you love Led Zeppelin, and you love Black Sabbath, and you love the Stones, and you love all that stuff – you love Elton John and you love the Eagles – I mean, all the bands I’m mentioning, are the bands that move me. And when I hear it, I go, ‘Wow, this is magic. This is amazing.’”

Well I’m glad you mention the Stones because how you open this record, with Name In Blood, that little intro motif has a wee bit of Gimme Shelter going on.

“Oh, with the intro? Totally, then when the band kicks in and stuff like that, yeah!”

It’s a reminder that this is a rock ’n’ roll record.

“Totally! Without a doubt. It’s just like when you listen to Keith Richards, his love for Chuck Berry, and that’s what moved him. And it’s him with all that love of Chuck Berry is coming out in his songwriting, and that is what inspires him. That’s a beacon of light – and that’s what'll guide you, man. So, yeah, I just think you have to play what you love and what moves you.

“Whatever trends are in or what’s popular, if you’re inspired by it, like, the Stones doing Miss You – disco was real big at the time – but Mick was like, ‘I love this stuff!’ There’s nothing wrong with that. If you’re inspired by something, and then you’re like, ‘I love it!’ You should do something like this. But if you’re only chasing it because you want to fit in, or think this is what’s popular...

“I mean, you look at AC/DC throughout all those years, whatever was popular, it didn’t even matter. They would just plow through plow through mountains – and it didn’t even matter. It’s like, ‘Are you guys aware of what’s going on around you?’ And they’re like, ‘No, we don’t need to know what’s going on around this. This is what we like, and this is what we're gonna do.’ It’s Like McDonald’s. We make the Big Mac and we make fries and we don’t care about doing sushi, you know what I mean!?”

Playing Dimebag’s riffs night after night, did any of his style rub off on you, in how you phrased things, or did it directly inspire you at all?

“I think what’s on the record is Dime’s enthusiasm and his energy, and his life force, because every night when you’re playing those songs, it’s Dime’s infectious energy that is in those songs. When he’d walk in a room, you could not notice it; you’d feel his life force when he walks into the room, and his light. But yeah, I think that’s in the writing. His energy is within the album.”

You shared so many influences shared that appreciation of groove. You guys were some of the first players to play country licks in a metal jam.

“Yeah, totally. I mean, it’s just like with Dime, a love of Eddie Van Halen, Randy Rhoads, and everything. It’s their energy they brought to the guitar playing.”

Albert Lee was such a huge influence in you when you were growing up.

“Totally, chicken pickin’ and stuff like that.”

Do you think it’s valuable for young metal guitar players to listen widely to other styles and try and find different things that inspire them, and bring that into metal? It helps them develop a style that’s their own.

“Without a doubt. The solo I play in Better Days & Wiser Times, that’s a David Lindley thing, like when you listen to David Lindley on all the Jackson Browne stuff, him doing the lap steel and playing pedal steel.

“When I was playing guitar, I’m not bending the notes, I’m just using a whammy bar, but it’s in a way of a David Lindley-type voicing, like a Running On Empty kind of thing. So, all the beautiful stuff that David Lindley does on the lap steel and anything like that, that’s an influence, too, because I’m like, ‘Oh, man, it’ll be cool to put something like this here. Not a ripping thing.

“It’s more of a melodic thing, like a singing kind of thing, and that’s how I approach it. That's why I’m not bending notes, ‘cos on a lap steel you can’t bend the notes unless you got the foot pedal. Everything you digest goes into your DNA.”

And these influences get passed on and passed on. Some young kid might check out David Lindley because you’ve mentioned him and then take something completely different from it.

“That’s the beautiful thing about life. Everybody, we all inspire each other. You should be a beacon of light for everybody, like Elvis was a beacon of light for Jimmy Page, and then Jimmy Page became a beacon of light to millions of other guitar players. But it was Elvis who was the spark for him, and then he passed it on, then whoever’s passing it on from there…

“It’s like how the Shadows inspired Tony Iommi, Tony Iommi inspired Dimebag, and now all these kids, 14-year-old kids, are being inspired by Dimebag. If you look at the lineage of where it went, it all started back with the Shadows, and Barney Kessel and all the guys that Tony Iommi liked.”

And if you take one of those players out, music is not the same, because it’s all filtered through these references and inspirations. Who influences you from an acoustic guitar point of view.

“It’s my love for Neil Young, Heart Of Gold, then the Stones’ Wild Horses. Obviously, Elton John, the Band, the Eagles.”

What acoustic were you playing on the record. It’s got a really sweet tone.

“Oh, actually, I got my Wylde Audio, I was using my prototype on this thing. We got the prototype right now, and probably this year we are gonna go into production with them. We haven’t done an acoustic yet. It’s going to be a single-cutaway, kind of like my Epiphone.”

It sounds great on the record. Is it a big-bodied dreadnought?

“Oh no, not that massive, just your normal acoustic, man. But I’m sure we’re going to be doing jumbos and all types of the small ones, the blues guitars.”

Has your rig changed much for this record?

“No, it’s just my Wylde Audio heads and everything like that. I just double-track them, especially for the heavy stuff. I always double-track the rhythms. And then for the clean stuff, I would just turn the amp down, turn the pedals off, and that’s your clean tone.

“I’ve got my Dunlop pedals, the Berserker distortion. So if I’m playing [the amp], it’s just like AC/DC distorted, like Highway To Hell, Back In Black, but for solos, I need that pedal on. Because it gives you more of the amp; it just sustains."

Did you double any of the solos?

“No, I’m trying to think… Anything that is doubled, that’s me and Dario [Lorina, rhythm guitar] playing together. But I'm not doubling any of solos. Usually solos, I’m just keeping them single now.”

The Hand Of Tomorrow’s Grave solo, with that ascending line, it’s got this tension between the diatonic and the pentatonic, and it’s like you’ve got the booksmarts with the diatonic then the streetsmarts with the pentatonics…

“Basically, I’ll base everything off the pentatonic, but if you really think about me and JD [John DeServio], JD went to Berkeley and everything like that, but we always talk about the pentatonic scale as the most lyrical scale because you sing in pentatonic. You don’t sing really in diatonic. But no, if a diatonic fits, I’ll throw it in there, but, most of the time I try to base everything off of pentatonic, just ‘cos I like the sound of it.

“But not only that, when I first started with Ozzy, I was like, ‘Well, how am I gonna sound like me?’ Because Yngwie was the last meteor to hit the planet, guitar-wise – where everybody gravitated to. He upped everybody’s technique.

“Everybody in Berkeley, they were opening up wings of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Paganini, all because of Yngwie. but the whole thing is like, ‘Oh, if you don't want to sound like Yngwie, don’t do three notes a string, and don’t do harmonic minor, and don’t do arpeggios. No sweep picking, and no diminished.’

“And so it was like, ‘All right, well, if you don't want to sound like Eddie Van Halen, then don’t do taps.’ It’s almost like take these things off the table. Don’t put stripes on your guitar if you don’t want to look like Eddie. Don’t put polka dots on your guitar if you don’t want to be like Randy Rhoads. Eliminate everything on the list, what not to do.”

And that left you with the pentatonics.

“Yeah. And I said, ‘Well, I’ll just pick them, almost, like, John McLaughlin from Mahavishnu Orchestra. You know, when you’re listening to Jerry and Jan Hammer and John, when they’d be like [widdle noises]. It is a different sound from three notes a string.”

It makes the guitar sound like a non-western instrument.

“Yeah, and when you listen to that Mahavishnu stuff, those scales, it’s a different sound. Not only that but I love Frank Marino, and Frank Marino is a perfect example of pentatonic scales and blues as a Formula One race car.

“Because lot of people who are blues, they’re slow, like Red House, and BB King. They’re not these lightning fast licks played at Formula One race car speed. Whereas that’s Frank Marino. You listen to that [Mahogany Rush] Live album. His guitar playing is just otherworldly. I mean, it’s phenomenal.”

You also studied jazz for a little bit.

“I’ll listen to Pat Martino. I’ll listen to Joe Pass, just listening to them while I’m playing, like, Voodoo Child E minor. I’ll just be noodling without an amp on while I’m listening on my phone, just while I’m having my Odinforce, drinking a cup of java, and I’ll hear them playing licks then I’ll just try and incorporate something that sounds like it.

“It’s a butchered version of it but it’s trying to incorporate it within what I do, within a rock thing, so it sounds passable and you can make it fit.”

You don’t have to master Joe Pass but you can step into his shoes for a few bars and it can make the solo really jump out.

“For me, when you get that window of where the solo is, just construct the solo, like Stairway to Heaven or Hotel California, where it’s part of the song. Or like Randy Roads’ Crazy Train – whether it’s me playing it, Jake [E Lee] playing it, Gus G, Joe Holmes, Brad Gillis, you gotta play Crazy Train the way Randy wrote it.”

What was your favourite Randy solo to play?

“I mean, I love them all, but the solo in S.A.T.O. is just amazing. Obviously, everyone gravitates towards Mr Crowley, and Crazy Train, and things like that, but, like, the solo to S.A.T.O. – and Diary [Of A Madman], Revelation (Mother Earth) – is lights out! It’s crazy. It is crazy, ambitious, and so out of the box. It’s like nothing you’d ever heard before.”

That Ozzy Osbourne gig was perfect for him. It was the making of him and of Ozzy as a solo artist.

“I mean, it’s incredible, him being in Quiet Riot, ‘cos they were more of like a pop-rock band. Without Ozzy as a foil, Randy would have never been able to do Diary Of A Madman, Revelation (Mother Earth), like, all that stuff. The classical elements in his playing would have never fit in Quiet Riot. It was not what that band was. And it worked perfect with Ozzy because of him coming from Black Sabbath. Perfect.”

And he brought that classical guitar influence to mainstream metal.

“Obviously, Ritchie Blackmore and Uli Jon Roth were doing all the classical stuff, between [Deep Purple’s] Highway Star and [Scorpions’] Catch Your Train. Like, Randy’s influenced by Ritchie Blackmore, obviously, between all the stuff he did with Jon Lord in Deep Purple, all that classical stuff, and Ritchie Blackmore was killing it!

“Then Uli Jon Roth with the Scorpions? Forget about it! It’s classical, arpeggios, diminished – and he would use harmonic minor, too. But then Randy, it was that classical element in there as well.”

As a big fan of Johnny Cash and the Cramps, who both played in institutional facilities, I wanted to ask you about your first gig with Ozzy, because it was at Wormwood Scrubs, a high-security prison.

“Well, the only thing I was worried about was I was the closest thing to Pamela Anderson that these guys were ever gonna be seeing again! Hopefully, I pass the audition, and they’re not gonna leave me here. [Laughs]”

What do you remember of the show. Was there not serial killers supporting you or something?

“No, it was just like us up there jamming these songs. The room was about the size of this. It was a little cafeteria. The guards were in there, and then you had all the inmates in there. It was almost like something out of the Blues Brothers. ‘We’re on a mission from God!’

Anything’s easy after that.

“Every other gig was tame after that one. Wormwood Scrubs! [Laughs] Like I say, I was just hoping they don’t leave me behind. This was before I had the beard.”

Playing with Ozzy, you might expect to end up in Wormwood Scrubs, not playing it…

“But it was definitely exciting. I remember that one. And I remember my first one in Pensacola, Florida, the first arena show. I’m just thinking, No Rest For The Wicked, in 2028, it will have been 40 years ago.”

Looking to the future, you obviously enjoyed the Pantera shows. Do you think you guys might record something together?

“Well, I mean, Phil’s busy right now. He’s doing a Down thing, and then he has En Minor. I think he’s doing a Scour thing, too. So Phil’s doing that. I think Rex is still writing, and he’s doing another Rex Brown record, and then, obviously, Charlie has Anthrax, so he’s been doing that, and then, obviously, we got the new Black Label, so I don’t know.

“I don’t know. But you never say never. Because it’s just like, we could all [be sitting there] one day, Philip might just call and go, ‘Guys, why don’t we get together, and we’ll do something, all of us – and we’ll get two other of our buddies in here, and then we’ll do a band.’ You know what I mean?

“So yeah, you never know. Like the Eagles or whatever! They have six guys in a band or something like that, and everybody’s singing or whatever. We could do something as like The Traveling Wilburys or something! [Laughs] Nah, you know what I mean, call it something different.”

Finally, tell us about the Ozzy tribute on the record. How did that come together?

“I had the music but I wrote the lyrics after we laid Ozzy to rest. It was when I came home, and I sat in the library at our house. I was just sitting there with the fireplace going on, and there was actually one of Ozzy’s books up there, Last Rites, and I ended up writing the lyrics.”

And you used your Bullseye Les Paul Custom, the Grail?

“Adam Fuller, who does the records with us, Adam was like, ‘Well, Zakk, for the solo, you should get the Grail and play it on this thing, man – ‘cause it’s Ozzy’s Song, so it makes sense.’ The first song I ever wrote with Ozzy is Miracle Man, and obviously, this is the last thing in tribute to him.”

• Engines Of Demolition is out now via MNRK Heavy.

Every Ozzy Osbourne fan has their own favourite Randy Rhoads solo. Some might choose the crystalline perfection of Crazy Train, all composed order and narrative logic meets wild Friday night thrills, kind of like a rollercoaster with a first-class safety record.

Others might choose Suicide Solution, often augmented in concert with an extended guitar solo. That stately paean to an occultist, Mr Crowley, has to be in the conversation, too, and let us throw in a vote for the fretboard incandescence of Believer.

But Zakk Wylde, as the late Prince of Darkness long-standing guitarist – a player who had to succeed not only Rhoads but Jake E. Lee and Brad Gillis. too – brings us a unique perspective on things, and as we are sitting here with him on London’s Denmark Street, with Wylde in town to talk about the new Black Label Society album, Engines Of Demolition, we had to ask him.

First off. He had some thoughts on what it was like to perform Rhoads’ solos – to perform any of the recorded material from his predecessors in the Double-O’s band. You’ve got to be faithful to the source, and recognise that the solo is part of the song.

“Randy Roads’ Crazy Train, whether it’s me playing it, Jake playing it, Gus G, Joe Holmes, Brad Gillis. You gotta play Crazy Train the way Randy wrote it,” he says. “Because it’s part of the song. It’s like Ozzy has to sing the melody line, because otherwise it’s not the same and people are like, ‘What song is this!?’”

From stepping out in Quiet Riot to assuming his role as the Prince of Darkness’ hot-shot guitarist, Rhoads’ playing style underwent a radical transformation. He had a freedom to shape an all-new sound.

It is often said that Rhoads saved Ozzy’s career; the right man, the right time, with the sound that gave electric guitar its most exciting talent since Eddie Van Halen (with whom there became this tangible sense of rivalry, not least among their respective fanbases). And all that is true. Ozzy was at a low ebb. Out of Black Sabbath, running out of road. Enter, Randy Rhoads, and salvation.

But Wylde says it goes both ways. Ozzy’s burgeoning solo career teased the darkness out of Rhoads’ playing; it made him the player he was, and this new direction invited Rhoads to dig into his classical vocabulary to reinvent metal guitar, to be more out-there than he ever would have been in Quiet Riot.

“I mean, it’s incredible, him being in Quiet Riot, ‘cos they were more of like a pop-rock band,” says Wylde. “Without Ozzy as a foil, Randy would have never been able to do Diary Of A Madman, Revelation (Mother Earth), like, all that stuff. The classical elements in his playing would have never fit in Quiet Riot. It was not what that band was. And it worked perfect with Ozzy because of him coming from Black Sabbath. Perfect.”

So then, what was, or rather what is Wylde’s favourite Rhoads solo? He puffs out his cheeks but there’s little hesitation…

“I mean, I love them all, but the solo in S.A.T.O. is just amazing,” says Wylde. “Obviously, everyone gravitates towards Mr Crowley, and Crazy Train, and things like that, but, like, the solo to S.A.T.O. – and Diary [Of A Madman], Revelation (Mother Earth) – is lights out! It’s crazy. It is crazy, ambitious, and so out of the box. It’s like nothing you’d ever heard before.”

It was something that we would hear again, throughout the ‘80s – or at least we would hear players attempting to copy Rhoads’ style.

Rhoads left us all too soon, dying in a plane crash in 1982, aged just 25, but he inspired a subsequent generations of players who decided that it was maybe worthwhile sitting down to learn their scales after all – to think about modalities, and harmony, and the kinds of techniques that would be necessary to bring these highfalutin ideas to bear on the fretboard.

As Wylde says, Rhoads was not the first to introduce classical ideas to rock guitar. He simply took it further, and did something new with it.

“Obviously, Ritchie Blackmore and Uli Jon Roth were doing all the classical stuff, between [Deep Purple’s] Highway Star and [Scorpions’] Catch Your Train,” says Wylde. “Like, Randy’s influenced by Ritchie Blackmore, obviously, between all the stuff he did with Jon Lord in Deep Purple, all that classical stuff, and Ritchie Blackmore was killing it!

“Then Uli Jon Roth with the Scorpions? Forget about it! It’s classical, arpeggios, diminished – and he would use harmonic minor, too. But then Randy, it was that classical element in there as well.”

Wylde could appreciate it, he could play it, but the classical approach was not for Wylde. He just had to learn how to play the solos. As soon as he got the gig with Ozzy, he needed to be his own man and find his niche at a time when the world’s most high-profile players – e.g. Mr Yngwie Malmsteen – were turning on the neoclassical afterburners. It’s not like Wylde does not know which diatonic scale goes with what; it’s that he prefers the pentatonic.

“I mean, if a diatonic fits, I’ll throw it in there, but I try to base everything off of pentatonic, just ‘cos I like the sound of it,” he says. “When I first started with Ozzy, I was like, ‘Well, how am I gonna sound like me!?’ Because Yngwie was just... He was the last meteor to hit the planet, guitar-wise.

“He upped everybody’s technique, everybody in Berklee, they were opening up wings of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Paganini, all because of Yngwie! But I was like, ‘Oh, if you don’t want to sound like Yngwie, don’t do three-notes-a-string, and don’t do harmonic minor, and don’t do arpeggios, no sweep picking, and no diminished.”

And no tapping, either. That was Eddie Van Halen’s thing. Ditto stripes on the guitars. And no polka dots on the guitars – that was Rhoads’ thing. Wylde was searching for his own identity.

When he got his cream 1981 Les Paul Custom, aka “the Grail”after landing his gig with Ozzy, he took a look in the mirror and realised it was not that unlike the 1974 Alpine White Custom that Rhoads used to play.

He had an idea. He put it in for a custom graphic finish, wanting Saul Bass’ spiralised artwork for Hitchcock’s Vertigo. What he got was a bullseye. A happy accident all things considered, and though retired since 2016. The Grail would be brought out of retirement on Engines Of Demolition, with Wylde using it for the solo to his tribute to his old boss and friend, Ozzy’s Song.

“I used it for the last song. I ended up using it on the solo on Ozzy’s Song,” says Wylde. “Adam Fuller, who does the records with us, Adam was like, ‘Well, Zakk, for the solo, you should get the Grail and play it on this thing, man – ‘cause it’s Ozzy’s Song, so it makes sense.’ The first song I ever wrote with Ozzy is Miracle Man, and obviously, this is the last thing in tribute to him.”

Black Label Society’s Engines Of Demolition is available to pre-order, out 30 March via Napalm.

• Zakk Wylde says it's possible that the Pantera tribute lineup could record music together

Swedish indie band The Cardigans have been quiet for some time – they last released an album back in 2005. But they’re playing some comeback gigs this summer and singer Nina Persson has been talking to the Guardian about one curious aspect of their career: their penchant for Black Sabbath covers.

They did two, in fact. Sabbath Bloody Sabbath on their 1995 breakthrough album Life, and Iron Man on the follow-up, First Band On The Moon. Why asked why they chose to cover Sabbath, Persson explained: “We were big 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 (Osbourne) 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.”

And they weren’t the end of The Cardigans’ dabblings in the world of hard rock. They covered another Ozzy song – his Blizzard Of Ozz single Mr Crowley - and Thin Lizzy’s The Boys Are Back In Town as B-sides in the mid-1990s.

Persson also talked about her experience with dealing with cervical cancer in the Noughties.” Until I was around 30, I’d hardly ever had a cold, so it was really weird at that age to face something with a possibly deathly outcome. My cancer was operable – I didn’t have to deal with chemo and stuff or get very very ill.”

“I think the consolation prize for any kind of suffering is that you can appreciate things – art, for example – in a different way. You realise these things can happen to anyone. I’ve had 15 or 20 years of thinking ‘I’ve beaten cancer’ but now I’m over 50 I’m thinking: it can totally happen to me again.

The singer said back in 2023 that the Cardigans wouldn’t add to their catalogue, but Persson did mention it may be a possibility once more. “We have logistics issues – families, day jobs – but do toy with the idea of making new music, whether as the Cardigans or in a different form. We’re all capable of making great music, and lately it’s been inspiring to see people like Suede from the 90s making new material. It’s not cringey middle-aged dudes looking hard in leather jackets,” she insisted. “It’s really good stuff.”

Zakk Wylde has revealed that his “Grail” Les Paul Custom came out of retirement to make a starring cameo on the new Black Label Society album, Engines Of Demolition, as he put the finishing touches to his tribute to the late Ozzy Osbourne – and it brought his career with the Prince of Darkness full circle.

The Grail was the electric guitar Wylde wrote Miracle Man on, the first song he ever wrote as Ozzy guitarist when he made his debut on 1988’s No Rest For The Wicked. It had, however, been out of commission for 10 years. Wylde had been exclusively playing guitars from his own gear brand, Wylde Audio, on the record.

But when it came time to put a solo on the song, Adam Fuller, Black Label Society’s engineer, suggested that maybe this was one track that demanded a different approach – a guitar that spoke to the history between Wylde and his former boss.

“I used it for the last song. I ended up using it on the solo on Ozzy’s Song,” says Wylde, speaking to MusicRadar. “Adam Fuller, who does the records with us, Adam was like, ‘Well, Zakk, for the solo, you should get the Grail and play it on this thing, man – ‘cause it’s Ozzy’s Song, so it makes sense.’ The first song I ever wrote with Ozzy is Miracle Man, and obviously, this is the last thing in tribute to him.”

Wylde had been writing for Engines Of Demolition ever since he set out on the Pantera tribute tour in 2022. Between each leg of the tour – any chance he’d get – he would squirrel away ideas for songs, riffs, lyrics, then he’d get BLS back in session and get them finished.

“Usually, when Black Label would do it, it was just one implosion of ideas, and we record it, mix it, and ship it out,” says Wylde. “But now it was, like we would go out for a year, I’d come back, and it’d be, like, a quarter of a bunch of songs.

“I’d write some other riffs, and go, ‘Maybe we’ll get the guys to come back out and we’ll track some more stuff.’ And then I’d write an acoustic thing or whatever. ‘Oh, well, bring the guys back out and we’ll put some stuff on this one.’”

And so it went on. Wylde says the years went by a flash. By the summer of 2025, the Pantera tribute tour was still going strong, bearing down on Villa Park for Ozzy and Black Sabbath’s farewell show, Back To The Beginning on 5 July. Wylde was pulling a double shift, playing with Pantera, then with Ozzy.

When he finally got home, maybe they could get the album mixed down and Fuller would do a mastering job on it and then that would be that, the long-awaited follow up to 2021’s Doom Crew Inc. would be complete.

Ozzy’s death on the 22 July changed that. Wylde had some music but it wasn’t until after Ozzy’s funeral that the song came to him.

“I had the music but I wrote the lyrics after we laid Ozzy to rest,” he says. “It was when I came home, and I sat in the library at our house. I was just sitting there with the fireplace going on, and there was actually one of Ozzy’s books up there, Last Rites, and I ended up writing the lyrics.”

The Grail is a guitar with a lot of history. It has had a life. This is the guitar that fell out of the back of a truck, survived thanks to the indestructible nature of a Gibson 'Chainsaw' guitar case, ended up in pawnshop, was then in the ownership of someone who recognised it was Wylde’s and sold it back him three years later. Kismet.

Wylde acquired the Grail after he landed the Ozzy gig and Gibson added him to its artist roster. Would it have been easier to have asked Gibson for a Les Paul? Maybe. But Wylde had his designs set on a particular Les Paul, the 1981 Custom owned by his friend Scott Quinn.

He told Guitar Player that Quinn worked at Garden State Music at the time and was up for a trade. Wylde had just the thing.

“Scott, a huge John McLaughlin fan, said that if I could get him a double-neck, he’d trade the Grail for it,” said Wylde. “Gibson hooked me up, and I made the trade.”

Wylde set about customising it, adding a set of active EMG humbuckers to it after one of his guitar students turned him onto electric guitar pickups.

There was nothing wrong with the guitar but when you are taking a spot in Ozzy’s band that was first occupied by Randy Rhoads – who famously favoured an Alpine White ’74 Les Paul Custom that had aged to a deep cream colour – you need something to differentiate yourself.

Wylde put the guitar in for a custom graphic finish. He had Saul Bass’s psychedelic art for Hitchcock’s Vertigo in mind. Unfortunately, the artist Wylde found was not a big film buff. It came back with a bullseye finish and it turned out to be a happy accident.

“I realised it was pretty cool anyway, and I’ve made it a signature look ever since,” he told Guitar Player. “Most of the records I did with Ozzy featured this guitar.”

Engines Of Demolition is available to pre-order, out on 27 March via Spinefarm. Black Label are on tour in the US from February. See Black Label Society for more details.

Sharon Osbourne has revealed her plan to relaunch Ozzfest, the long-running travelling heavy metal festival led by her late husband Ozzy.

In a new interview with Billboard, Osbourne explains: “I’ve been talking to Live Nation about bringing [Ozzfest] back recently. It was something Ozzy was very passionate about: giving young talent a stage in front of a lot of people.

“We really started metal festivals in this country. It was [replicated but] never done with the spirit of what ours was, because ours was a place for new talent. It was like summer camp for kids.”

In its heyday, Ozzfest bills featured heavyweight acts including Slipknot, Pantera, Marilyn Manson, Tool, Incubus, Linking Park, Papa Roach, Limp Bizkit, Megadeth, Motörhead and many more.

Ozzy headlined with his solo band and with the reunited Black Sabbath.

“All of the creative direction for visuals at Ozzfest was mine,” Sharon Osbourne tells Billboard. “I can’t sing a note — I’m tone-deaf — but I can be creative, and I like to create things.”

She also says that the new Ozzfest could be up and running in 20227 and would go beyond metal: “I’d like to mix up the genres,” she explains.

In addition, Osbourne reveals she is also working with Live Nation on a tour in which Black Sabbath’s music will be performed by classic orchestras.

Nuno Bettencourt reveals he quiet quit his set with Jake E Lee at Black Sabbath tribute show Back To The Beginning in order to let the former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist take the limelight.

Speaking to Guitar World, Bettencourt said they were playing Shot In The Dark, or at least he was scheduled to be playing on it, when the Extreme guitarist decided that, all things considered, Lee had it covered. This was a moment the spotlight could belonged to him

“ I didn’t tell anybody I was doing it – but I just walked off the stage,” says Bettencourt. “I wanted Jake to have his moment without another guitar player stealing his thunder.”

Whether it was Lee, Randy Rhoads, Zakk Wylde, Gus G or whoever, the Ozzy Osbourne gig was always a single-player game. Coming from a band like Extreme, in which Bettencourt’s electric guitar has the run of the place, he understood that implicitly.

“We all came from one-guitar bands. We didn’t want rhythm guitarists,” says Bettencourt. “I wanted Jake to have his one moment up there by himself, so I just left. And Jake nailed it.”

If Back To The Beginning was the all-star all-dayer to end them all, then Lee’s performance was one of redemption – it was the ultimate comeback. It was only in October 2024, when Lee was shot three times while out walking his dog, Coco, in Las Vegas. He is lucky to be alive. He also hadn’t been in contact with Ozzy for a number of years but when Back To The Beginning’s musical director Tom Morello called the answer was always going to be yes.

That said, it wasn’t easy. Not only was Lee recovering from being shot, he is dealing with arthritis. Like former Deep Purple guitarist Steve Morse, Lee has had to reimagine his playing in recent years. His self-confidence has taken a knock.

Bettencourt says that Morello contacted him saying that Lee was not sure he wanted to play the solo to The Ultimate Sin – would he do the honours instead? But there was no way Bettencourt was going to agree to that.

“We all know that, as legendary as Jake is, he’s struggling a little bit, as we all do as we get older and don’t know what’s going to happen to our hands and bodies,” he says. “I told Tom, ‘Give me his phone number right now.’ I texted Jake and told him, ‘You are fucking Jake E. Lee. There’s no way in hell I’m taking that solo. You’re going to play that solo. And not only that, I’ll double it with you, and we’ll do it together. Whatever happens, it’s going to be fucking incredible,’ and that’s what we did.”

Bettencourt and Lee got on like a house on fire. Game recognises game. But Bettencourt did have a bone to pick with Lee. He was “so fucking humble” for a player who took on the hardest job in rock-and-metal, following Randy Rhoads.

“I told him, ‘You’re fucking Jake E. Lee!’ Not only did he replace Randy, but he took Ozzy to another place,” says Bettencourt.

You can read Bettencourt’s interview in the latest issue of Guitar World – subscribe and save.

Ex-Megadeth bassist David Ellefson was one of over 1,000 musicians who joined together for a version of Paranoid a week or so back in Mexico City as Latin America’s rock and metal community paid tribute to the late Ozzy Osbourne.

The happening took place at the Rockland festival at the CDMX Arena. It was the brainchild of the organiser Rodrigo Renovales, who brought together 200 bassists, 200 singers, 200 drummers and so on to create a wall of noise unlike no other.

That enormous ensemble played 26 songs throughout the evening, celebrating the legacy of Latin American rock and playing tracks by Caifanes, Fobia and La Cuca. But there was also time to pay tribute to those icons we have lost this year, including Ace Frehley of Kiss and, of course, Ozzy.

Ellefson was effusive about the event afterwards on Instagram, saying: “Performing Paranoid at Rockland in front of 12,000 excited fans alongside 1,000 musicians as we honoured the late, great Ozzy Osbourne at the Arena CDMX was an experience unlike anything else. The energy, the passion, the unity - absolutely unparalleled. Only in Mexico do you find a concept this bold and this powerful. That was truly one of the most fun things I've ever done.”

"With performers ranging from age 5 to 83, I fit comfortably somewhere in the middle — and the energy from every corner of that stage was absolutely electric. Grateful to have been part of something so massive, so joyful, and so truly rock 'n' roll. I'm truly honoured and incredibly appreciative of the invitation to perform with all of you.”

The bassist played at the Back To The Beginning show in July and, appearing on the Logan Show podcast a few weeks after Ozzy’s passing, reflected on that day. "I think there's a few things that we can all agree on," he said. "It's so much better to celebrate someone's life… 'Cause look, Ozzy knew he was dying. We all knew the day was coming here. I think we all thought it was going to be some time off in the distance — not so soon. That was, of course, shocking.”

“But to celebrate with him rather than just this heavy mourning after the fact. The fact that we got to celebrate with him - all of us, not just those of us who are at the show, but everybody around the world - it just showed the significance of what he meant to all of us.”

Yungblud has responded to criticism of his performance at the MTV Video Music Awards.

You may recall that the 28-year-old singer – known to his mum as Dominic Harrison - teamed up with Joe Perry and Steven Tyler, Nuno Bettencourt and Black Sabbath’s keyboard player Adam Wakeman for a three-song medley tribute to Ozzy.

This irked Darkness guitarist Dan Hawkins no end – he described it on social media as: “Another nail in the coffin of rock n roll. Cynical, nauseating and more importantly, shit.”

Then his brother, Justin, backed him up. Posting on his YouTube channel, the singer said: “Yungblud seems to have positioned himself as a natural heir to the Ozzy legacy. Then you kind of think, ‘What the fuck does all those decades of having this incredible legacy have to do with Yungblud?’”

Now Harrison has responded. The singer was appearing as a guest on Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast. Conversation got on to the Darkness criticism, to which Yungblud said: “Sometimes people don’t believe me, and I welcome that challenge.

"It was so interesting when I spoke to Ozzy about this. He said that you cannot take that on. It's hard to understand someone who is trying to do rock music in a new way because, of course, I'm referencing the past; we all were.”

“Yungblud as a name, it almost has a negative connotation around it like, ‘Oh, I can't like that, it's for the kids,’” he says. “It was segregating the demographic. But what was beautiful about Back to the Beginning was that it was the first time an older generation of rock fans and I shared something in common, and that was our mutual adoration for our genre.”

He went further in an appearance on Jack Osbourne’s own podcast Trying Not To Die. Declaring his intentions to be honest, he said: "I think the strangest thing about that was all I was trying to do was my best for your old man, because he gave me such a gift."

Jack then stepped in, saying: "These people didn't f***ing know how involved Dom was in Ozzy's life.

"They don't know the f***ing story of it, the things we know, and I was kind of like, 'F*** you, dude'.

"Dom meant something to my dad, my dad meant something to Dom. I texted you the night of the gig and I said, 'F***ing crush it.'"

Yungblud then addressed the criticism from the Darkness, saying: "Anyone bigger than you or more emotionally evolved will never talk down on you.

"Your dad (Ozzy) would never do that, James Hetfield would never do that, Kerry King would never do that. (They) don't need to. They're just like, 'You know what? That's sick.'”

The BBC have put a trailer for their upcoming Ozzy Osbourne documentary, Coming Home, up online.

This is the programme that was originally going to be broadcast in August, just a couple of weeks after Ozzy’s death, but was postponed out of respect for the Osbourne family. It’s now scheduled for this Thursday (October 2).

As you can see, the trailer reflects the documentary’s shifting focus. Originally, it was going to be a series called Home To Roost about the Osbournes’ relocation from Los Angeles back to the UK. But as Ozzy’s health deteriorated, it became increasingly about his efforts to get fit enough to play one last gig, which of course he accomplished in July.

“I’m so looking forward to an English summer,” he announces at the start, before Sharon explains that: “I always always told Ozzy that when you’re 70 we say goodbye (to LA).”

There’s some heart-wrenching stuff in there, too. We see some of the handwritten messages the couple leave for each other around the house. "He still leaves me little notes," says Sharon. "I'll look in a drawer and there's a little note from him."

Mixed with that is some more light-hearted material though. Sharon insists, unconvincingly, that “we’re quite normal, we’re quite boring really when it comes down to it”. That is then juxtaposed with Ozzy saying: “I wouldn’t say we’re f***ing normal.”

“Do you want a quiet life now,” asks Sharon, to which her husband answers: “No... yes, but no.”

Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home is on BBC1 and iplayer on Thursday 2 October at 9pm.

Andrew Watt, producer for the Stones, Pearl Jam and of course, Ozzy Osbourne, has been talking about his relationship with the late Black Sabbath singer and, in particular, what Ozzy taught him about mixing.

You wouldn’t necessarily have Ozzy down as a production guru. But, according to Watt. “You have to understand. This man was making Paranoid when he was 21,” the producer pointed out in an interview with Rolling Stone.

“So he had a 55-year career where everything was grandiose and at the highest level. And he’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and a history buff, and a genius, a literal genius.”

High praise indeed. “His ears were reactive,” Watt went on. “You could think he wasn’t listening and he heard every single thing. There’d be times we’d be in the studio listening to something and he’s just drawing and I’m like ‘oh he’s not listening’. And then he’d just give me this one line that cuts so deep, in a positive way.”

Watt explained that when it came to heavy rock, Ozzy’s ears were operating on a higher plain to everyone else’s. “He would always say to me, ‘Listen to Led Zeppelin and tell me what the loudest thing is’. And me, having my confidence, I’d be like, ‘it’s the drums. John Bonham.’ He said, ‘Nope, not the drums. It’s the bass.’”

“He pointed out the bass is the most important thing in a rock song. You have to make sure the bass is there and pumping and cutting through and providing that sense of rhythm, because it’s the bridge between the drums and the guitars.

"It makes the song heavy, because the guitars can poke through if you have them mixed in the right way. The bass is a hard thing to really get cutting but also representing the bottom."

"He was very bass-focused mix-wise, and making sure the bass came through. If you listen to the records that we made together, there’s a lot of bass on those records. Under The Graveyard has so much low-end, if you check it out.

"He was involved in every detail of every single mix-down too. That’s how much he cared.”

Interesting stuff. Watt became close to Ozzy during the last six years of his life and says he spoke to the singer on a daily basis, including the day before he died. “Everything was normal,” Watt says of that day, “and the next day the news was just a giant shock.”

When you think of rock anthems, the roaring riffs of electric guitars often steal the spotlight. Yet, tucked away beneath the layers of distortion, many of your favourite hits have a surprising origin: they were initially crafted on the humble piano before transforming into the powerhouse, guitar-driven masterpieces we adore today.

From the haunting melodies of Fleetwood Mac to the hard-hitting nu metal tracks of Papa Roach, the piano has played a crucial role in shaping the sound of rock music. These timeless classics might even inspire you to ditch the guitar and explore the sonic possibilities of a digital piano when searching for fresh songwriting inspiration.

Today, we delve into the stories behind legendary tracks from artists like Ozzy Osbourne and George Harrison, revealing how a simple piano riff can evolve into rock magic. Get ready to view your favourite songs in an entirely new light.

1. Ozzy Osbourne – Mama, I’m Coming Home

Ozzy Osbourne's Mama, I’m Coming Home is a heartfelt ballad that has resonated deeply with metal fans since its release in 1991, and its impact has only intensified following the legendary singer's passing. The song serves as a poignant reflection on love and longing, highlighting the raw vulnerability that lies beneath Ozzy's heavy metal persona.

The powerful lyrics were written by another metal icon, Lemmy of Motörhead, while the music was created by Ozzy’s longtime collaborator, Zakk Wylde. In an interview with our sister publication, Guitar World, Zakk explained that the song initially began as a piano piece that he and Ozzy were experimenting with.

“That actually came from me and Oz jamming on the piano in my apartment in North Hollywood,” he recalls. “So it started on piano, and then when we got in the studio, I transposed it to guitar. It’s in open E, which is where I developed the guitar line that moves from E to A. My love for the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd also influenced the Albert Lee-style country bends at the beginning."

2. Papa Roach – Last Resort

When discussing nu metal anthems, Last Resort by Papa Roach stands out as one of the most enduring tracks of the decade. Released as the lead single from the band's Infest album in early 2000, the song explores struggles with mental health and the isolation that often accompanies such challenges. Its candid lyrics tackle themes of depression and suicidal thoughts, giving voice to those who face similar experiences.

At the heart of the track is an infectious, looping guitar riff that drives the entire song. Interestingly, this metal classic originated as a classical-inspired piano line crafted by bassist Tobin Esperance.

In an interview with Metal Hammer, lead vocalist Jacoby Shaddix reveals the story behind the now-iconic riff: “We were living in this infamous house in Sacramento with some other bands from the scene, and we were rehearsing in there at the time. The first time the Last Resort riff came around, Tobin was playing it on piano. It sounded like a classical music piece, but we put it on the guitar, gave it that beat, and I remember our manager heard it through the wall and he barged through, like, ‘Play that again, man! That was sick!’ I was like, ‘We need to put this on the record.’”

3. Argent – God Gave Rock and Roll to You

God Gave Rock And Roll To You is such a positive and uplifting track that it's hard to imagine its writer, Russ Ballard, going through one of the darkest periods of his life while composing this classic.

Written during a tumultuous time for Ballard, the song reflects his journey from despair to hope, showcasing the emotional depth rock music can convey. With its uplifting lyrics and infectious energy, the track celebrates the joy of creativity and the belief that music can serve as a guiding light in challenging times.

“I felt blissful when I started writing 'God Gave Rock And Roll To You,'” Ballard recalls in Classic Rock issue 0271. “That was the opposite of how I’d felt the year before. My parents had both been really ill; my dad had prostate cancer, and my mum had bowel cancer simultaneously. I had felt so low.”

However, "God Gave Rock And Roll To You" marked the end of his darkness. “It was wonderful to feel myself come out of that depression,” Ballard remembers. “I felt so uplifted. It probably only took me twenty minutes to write it. I’ve always liked gospel music. With the lyrics, I was expressing that we live on this incredible planet, and when you find a passion, everything makes sense. On the other hand, if you settle for just a job to pay the bills, that’s very sad.”

He adds, “The song was written on this heavy Eavestaff upright piano I received for my twenty-first birthday. That may seem strange for a rock song, but I also wrote Since You’ve Been Gone on a piano. As a kid, I learned classical piano, and as soon as my mum and dad left the room, I would play like Jerry Lee Lewis."

4. Fleetwood Mac – Rhiannon

Inspired by the Welsh mythological figure, the haunting Rhiannon tells the story of a woman who embodies freedom and independence. With Stevie Nicks’ ethereal vocals leading the way, andLindsey Buckingham's now legendary guitar riff providing the backing, it's difficult to imagine Nicks sitting down at the piano to write the song - and it's even more difficult to comprehend that it only took her 10 minutes!

“I just fell in love with the name, sat down, and wrote the song in about 10 minutes," Nicks says. "I found out later that the whole story is already written in Welsh mythology,” she explained. “I play piano terribly, [but I] can sit down, and 20 minutes later come up with a complete song, lyrics and all,” she mused. “Lindsey’s going, ‘I’ve been playing since I was eight years old, and I practise every day, and I have to kill myself to write a song’.”

5. George Harrison - Something

Considered one of the finest songs in Harrison’s catalogue, Something was written in 1968 during the White Album sessions. As with other Harrison tracks, such as Old Brown Shoe, he would use the piano rather than a guitar to write the song. It’s difficult to separate the song from its rather unique and very Harrison guitar tone, but we can certainly see how the song would start life as a piano-based song.

Taken from a Guitar Player interview, Harrison talks about writing the song, saying, “There was a period during that album when we were all in different studios doing different things trying to get it finished, and I used to take some time out,” he says. “So I went into an empty studio and wrote Something.”

In hindsight, Something is seen as one of the most beautiful love songs ever written, but fellow Beatles Paul McCartney and John Lennon were initially lukewarm about the track, questioning its commercial appeal and Harrison's ability as a songwriter. Despite this doubt, Something would go on to earn immense acclaim, with Frank Sinatra famously calling it “the greatest love song ever written.” Its heartfelt lyrics and enchanting melody have ultimately secured its place in music history, showcasing Harrison's exceptional talent and the complex dynamics within the band at the time.

Feeling inspired? 

If you’re feeling inspired by the stories of these piano-based songs, it might be the perfect time to ditch the guitar and jump on the piano! Check out our guide to the best beginner digital pianos to help you find the right instrument to channel your new found creativity.

Whether you're just starting out or looking for an upgrade, our guide has got you covered for your musical journey – and if you fancy getting better at playing, be sure to take a look at our guide to the best online piano lessons.

There are not one, but two Ozzy Osbourne documentaries heading towards your screens in the first week of October.

First up, there’s Paramount+’s Ozzy Osbourne: No Escape From Now. Directed by BAFTA winner Tania Alexander, it was filmed over the past six years and shows Ozzy’s fight to return to the live stage for one last show, even as he battles Parkinson’s and other injuries.

Family members, collaborators and friends all contribute, and the doc’s talking heads include many of those who played at the Back To The Beginning show in July, including Tom Morello, Billy Corgan, Duff McKagan, James Hetfield, Chad Smith, Robert Trujillo and, of course, Tony Iommi and Zakk Wylde.

A trailer has been put online, which includes a killer opening line from a visibly frail Ozzy: “I used to take pills for fun. Now I take them to stay alive”.

The doc was never meant as a posthumous tribute, though as Paramount Plus say in a press statement, that is how it has ended up: “Following his death on July 22, 2025, the documentary now stands as a testament to Ozzy’s courage, wit, determination and talent — qualities that ensure he remains a hero to millions around the world.”

Meanwhile the BBC have confirmed a new broadcast date for their doc, Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home. This was meant to have been screened in mid August but was postponed with the BBC saying that it was "respecting the family's wishes to wait a bit longer before airing this very special film".

It is now set to go out on BBC1 and iplayer on Thursday 2 October at 9pm. The updated synposis for the doc describes it as "candid and moving portrait of one of Birmingham's favourite sons, and the remarkable relationship with Sharon".

It shows how Osbournes faced "a monumental battle, both on a professional and personal level" to defy his health problems to move home and to stage the final gig.

"But Ozzy has never been a man to take no for an answer, and with Sharon's support he sets about achieving his goals with the determination, blistering honesty and razor-sharp sense of humour that have endeared him to millions for over 50 years.

"He will stop at nothing to make his body work as well as it used to, with the film capturing remarkable levels of resolve."

The Paramount Plus doc No Escape From Now is set to drop a few days later, on Tuesday 7 October.

Justin Hawkins has added to his brother Dan’s disparaging remarks about Yungblud’s performance during the VMA Awards’ tribute to the late Ozzy Osbourne over the weekend.

The younger Hawkins had shared a clip of Ariana Grande’s astonished reaction to the performance of Yungblud, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry performing a medley of Ozzy songs. He had captioned it: “Another nail in the coffin of rock n roll. Cynical, nauseating and more importantly; shit.”

As you can imagine, the post stirred up some, ahem, ‘heated discussion’ on social media. Now, Justin has largely backed up his brother’s comments in a new video.

“We all watched (the VMAs performance) and we all found it a little bit triggering in different ways,” the Darkness singer said. “I think Dan was so triggered, that he instructed his social media manager to post something along the lines of ‘What a bunch of bellends’, which is poking just a little bit of good-natured fun at the people involved, but it was borne of the triggered state, I think.”

Hawkins criticised Yungblud’s turn on the VMAs red carpet when he threw down his jacket and posed bare-chested in a Christ-like posture. Then he got onto Yungblud’s performance: “I suppose one of the things that irks musicians of a certain age is to watch Ozzy invent heavy metal, then turn into this household name with the television series and his decades of being brilliant, and then you kind of think ‘What the fuck does all those decades of having this incredible legacy got to do with Yungblud?'”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHRhpHcxs2I&t=548s

“I feel like what irks musicians of a certain age is the fact that Yungblud seems to have positioned himself as a natural heir to the Ozzy legacy, having nothing to do with the really important stuff.”

He then cut to an old clip of Yungblud performing on the Disney channel, before accusing him of adopting rock cliches. “All of this posturing is Jim Morrison meets the bloke from Stone Temple Pilots meets everybody else who’s ever owned a pair of leather trousers. It’s 101 School of Rock stuff, you know? It’s the latest in a long line of – I’m sorry to say it – poseurs… For seven minutes, the world is looking at rock and this is what we’ve given them.”

“It’s like you’ve watched a movie about rock and metal, it’s like what a male stripper would do,” Hawkins said of Yungblud’s headbanging onstage. “It doesn’t ring authentic… It’s rock n’ roll, but not as we know it. It kind of has this Disney veneer over the top of it, like it’s rock n’ roll seen through an Instagram filter of some sort.”

Of course, it should be said that there’s a certain irony in Justin Hawkins criticising clichéd rock behaviour, posing and inauthenticity: that’s pretty much word for word what many accused The Darkness of back in the day...

You have to hand it to Roger Waters – he consistently finds new ways to annoy people.

Usually, those people are his ex-bandmates in Pink Floyd. Now it’s Jack Osbourne, who has – quite understandably – taken umbrage at some rather insensitive comments about his late father.

Waters was being interviewed on the Independent Ink podcast, when, in the midst of talking about capitalism, global politics and his usual bugbears, he suddenly veered onto the subject of the recently departed Black Sabbath frontman.

"Ozzy Osbourne, who just died, bless him in his whatever state that he was in his whole life. We'll never know. Although he was all over the TV for hundreds of years with his idiocy and nonsense. The music, I have no idea. I couldn't give a fuck."

Waters continued: "I don't care about Black Sabbath, I never did. Have no interest in biting the heads of chickens or whatever they do. I couldn't care less, you know."

Jack Osbourne has since responded on Twitter/X and, well... he doesn’t exactly mince his words.

"Hey Roger Waters, f*** you,” he began. “How pathetic and out of touch you've become. The only way you seem to get attention these days is by vomiting out bullshit in the press. My father always thought you were a c**t. Thanks for proving him right."

Oh dear.

For his part, Ozzy was always quite complimentary about Floyd. Speaking to Classic Rock about his favourite bands in 2022, Osbourne said: “The Floyd made good albums; I don’t think they ever made a bad one”.

As we know, Waters rarely has a good word to say about anyone or anything and his aversion to Black Sabbath and their music goes way back.

Reviewing their single Evil Woman for Melody Maker in 1970, he said: “Well, well, well… I’m speechless – well, almost. You keep thinking it’s going to start. You think that for the first minute, but then, if you are really perceptive, you realise it isn’t going to start, and that’s all there is.”

Bear in mind that in 1970 Waters and Floyd were established names in UK counter-culture and Sabbath merely an up-and-coming band. The review clearly stung. Indeed Tony Iommi remembered it when interviewed in 2017: “I used to read the slaggings we’d get and I’d just think ‘Why?’. There was one moment that really hurt, and that didn’t actually come from the press.

"It came from Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters. He gave it (Evil Woman) such a terrible review. I thought, ‘Blimey!’ Hearing that from a fellow musician seemed really harsh.”

The BBC documentary Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home, which should have gone out on air this evening (18 August) has been postponed to a later date. No reason has been given as yet.

In its place is an episode of Fake Or Fortune. The BBC has merely said that the film has “moved in the schedules” and that details will be shared “in due course”

All very mysterious. It may be that there has had to be some re-editing in the aftermath of Ozzy’s passing three weeks ago. Maybe the directors are having to insert some new interviews. Who knows?

Prior to this, the BBC had dropped a few titits about what to expect when it finally does go out.

The Black Sabbath singer will be shown "heroically" battling to get fit enough to perform on stage again, as the family deal with the consequences of his ill-health, the BBC had said.

There will be "love, laughter and tears", as his family come to terms with Ozzy’s condition and it’s Kelly Osbourne, who encapsulates the situation when she remarks that it shows that "Iron Man wasn't really made of iron."

Coming Home was filmed over the course of the last three years. Originally it was set to be a series titled Home To Roost, but over time has evolved into one-off doc, with the perfect denouement of the Back To The Beginning show.

Clare Sillery, the BBC head of documentary commissioning, said the team was "honoured" to film the Osbournes during this period of their lives.

She said the film showed the singer’s "enduring spirit... We hope it brings comfort and joy to Ozzy's fans and viewers as they remember and celebrate his extraordinary life.”

Ben Wicks and Colin Barr, the project’s executive producers said they thought it was an "inspiring and poignant" account of Ozzy fulfilling his dream to perform in front of his fans one last time.

They added: "Ozzy was loved by millions around the world not just for his music, but for his sense of mischief and his honesty, all of which we saw plenty of in the final years of his life. But one thing shone through even more brightly to us and that was Ozzy's intense love for his exceptional family who were by his side through it all."

It’s been just three weeks since Ozzy Osbourne’s sudden passing and his friends and colleagues are still coming to terms with their loss.

The latest to make a public statement is Andrew Watt. The esteemed producer, who worked on Ozzy’s final pair of solo albums – 2020’s Ordinary Man and Patient Number 9 from 2022 - has shared his thoughts about the man via a post on Instagram.

“Still processing saying goodbye to @ozzyosbourne,” he wrote, alongside a number of personal videos and photos of his friend.

“Someone said ‘Grief is the price of Love.’ I say that to myself everyday but at the end of the day I just miss my friend so much. There is a new hole in my heart, something I will learn to live with… The music is obvious… how lucky I was to share in a little of Ozzy’s magic, but the friendship was the greatest gift of all… I will miss laughing with you forever Boss… Do you want a kick in the balls?”

Ordinary Man was Watt’s first full production credit on an album, after which he went on to on work with some of music’s biggest names, including the Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop and Paul McCartney. He clearly made a lasting connection with the Black Sabbath singer.

“Ozzy and I have a connection that’s unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced,” he told Guitar World just a couple of months ago. “We made some music together that we really love, and we’ll continue making music together forever. More importantly than that, we talk every day and we’re really close friends.”

And yes, Watt also made an appearance at the Back To The Beginning gig at Villa Park back in early July, just like pretty much everyone who is anyone in the rock/metal world.

Yungblud launched his new venue/store/community space B.R.A.T in Denmark Street, Soho last night and has been talking about the ambitions he has for it.

In a new interview with NME, the singer, known to his mum as Dominic Harrison, said he wanted to “create a physical space in the middle of London. It’s a flagship to say thank you to the people who listen to my music.”

So the Beautifully Romanticised Accidentally Traumatized store (he copyrighted the name a few years before Charli XCX’s Brat album, it should be noted) will be somewhere fans can buy clothing, hang out, see a band and more.

“All this is a place to belong,” Harrison explained. “I don’t want to call it a shop, I want to call it a fan club. I was looking to create a place where you can come in, you can buy clothes if you want, you can come for a coffee, you can have a beer after work.”

Locating it in Denmark Street – Britain’s Tin Pan Alley and a place soaked in music history – was crucial. “The community has fought so hard to keep music present here, because we were about to lose this street to gentrification about five years ago! When I first met my manager, we had a shoebox office above Hank’s guitar store. I remember saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be wild if one day we had a building on Denmark Street’… and I’ve had that dream since I was 17!

“So yeah, I wanted to bring a new generation to this iconic street. It’s been so integral to British music since the ‘40s. Elton [John] met Bernie [Taupin] here. The Sex Pistols lived across the street and formed the band. The Rolling Stones have roots here too, and so did The Beatles!”

The 28-year-old also talked about Ozzy Osbourne and how much playing the Back To The Beginning show and singing Changes meant to him.

“Ozzy was always my north star," he said. "Ozzy Osborne and David Bowie meant everything to me. Ozzy was a character in my life who was a reflection of everything I went through. I was always a bit over the top. I was always seen to be a bit loud, but when some people saw that as a negative, Ozzy would provide me with the hope that there was an avenue for someone like me in the world.

“Then, to know him as a friend towards the end, to know his heart, and to know Sharon Osbourne… I really started to understand that they did things their way. It’s always been inspirational because, for me, the biggest enemy to any artist is the phrase, ‘This is just how it’s done’. That’s a cop out. ‘This is how it’s done’ was once an innovative idea that got stale.”

It’s that attitude that continues to drive him on, he says. “I don’t really listen to naysayers anymore. I’ve outgrown that. I’m 28 now. When you first start, it’s easy to get affected by that, but I find it funny now, and I just use it as fuel.”

Lars Ulrich has been giving his thoughts about the passing of Ozzy Osbourne and the icon’s last gig at the Back To The Beginning show.

The Metallica drummer appeared on Howard Stern’s Sirius XM show this week and was asked how Ozzy seemed in the run-up to the gig. "He was very eloquent and very sharp in his answer,” Ulrich explained.

“We were just sitting doing small talk, but it was so warm and he was very present, coherent. It was just his body that was not in good shape, but his mind … he was eloquent and talking and in the moment."

Ulrich, was one of the few who had seen Black Sabbath soundcheck and knew then that the reunited band would do a great job. "All the rest of us were just losing our f***ing minds and then they started playing War Pigs with the lights on and the show and air raid sirens and then we were obviously, as fans - and I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn here or being disrespectful - as fans I think there was a sense from all the other musicians and friends of Black Sabbath who were there.

"We were hoping for the best. We wanted it to be the best. We wanted it to be a grand slam, but we didn’t know, because ultimately none of us knew what kind of shape they were in ...

"Then Ozzy came in singing and sounded great, hit all the notes and the lyrics and the timings and everybody was like: 'This is gonna be fine, they’re gonna f***ing kill it'."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BTBQj5foVM

Meanwhile Sharon Osbourne has said that Ozzy was deeply moved by the outpouring of love at the Back To The Beginning gig. In fact, just days before he died, he apparently admitted as much to her.

“He turned around and he said to me that night, ‘I had no idea that so many people liked me’. Ozzy’s always been in his own bubble.”

Sharon was speaking to the online platform Pollstar and said of the Villa Park gig: “It was a huge success, because it was a phenomenal event. It was the first time, I think, that anybody’s gone into retirement and done it, where the show is streamed and it goes to charity. So it’s the first time anybody has said goodnight like that, it’s the perfect way, when you’ve had such a long career, to end it.”

She also revealed that she has been working on a BBC documentary about the gig and Ozzy’s final chapter. Entitled Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home, it was filmed over the last three years of his life and will be screened on BBC1 on August 18.

The relatives of two of the dead pop stars featured in Rod Stewart’s AI-generated ‘tribute’ to Ozzy Osbourne have come forward and said that, actually, they don’t mind after all.

Talking to TMZ, Tupac Shakur’s stepbrother Mopreme Shakur said: “I’m pretty sure we all love Rod Stewart. I’m not sure about the legalities of it, but I have no problem with him memorialising the greats. Personally, I’m good with it.”

Meanwhile Cleopatra Barnard, the mother of murdered ‘cloud’ rapper XXXTentacion, has said that she was glad that her son had made enough of an impact to be included in the montage.

The AI-generated footage showed Ozzy taking selfies with various iconic musicians, all of whom are now dead; the implication being that they’re all ‘enjoying’ each others’ company and having a wonderful time up there in heaven.

The blogger who first alerted the world to Stewart’s ‘tribute’ has also backtracked and said that she now regrets making such an issue of it.

On her Substack, the brilliantly-named Sloane Steel has written: “I shouldn’t have posted this video making fun of an old man trying to pay tribute to some of his friends. I’m sure he had no ill intent behind this. But AI is an insidious beast. And this kind of soulless maudlin slop is the most offensive form of AI ‘art'.”

However, she added, wryly: “I can’t imagine why Ozzy would be visiting any of these people when a lot of his close friends like Randy Rhoads and Lemmy would presumably be waiting down below in the pits of hell ready to snap a quick selfie with him.”

She did point out that one of those featured icons, Prince, was bitterly opposed to virtual reality, holograms and the like, while he was still with us. “’That whole virtual reality thing… is demonic,’” he once said. “And I am not a demon.”

Steel concluded on an, er, happier note, though: “I’m sure Rod will recover from this debacle and he’ll go on to make millions of dollars with a sweaty summer crotch in amphitheaters all over the world.” Lovely.

Oh dear. Where do we start with Rod Stewart’s AI-generated ‘tribute’ to Ozzy Osbourne?

The 80-year-old singer is currently on tour in the States and has been dedicating his 1988 song Forever Young to the Black Sabbath frontman who sadly left us two weeks ago. Nothing unusual in that, of course – Oasis have been dedicating Rock N’ Roll Star to Ozzy at their gigs over the last week or so too.

Unfortunately, Forever Young has been accompanied on the big screens with AI-derived ‘footage’ of Osbourne posing for selfies with an array of other departed stars, including Bob Marley, Tina Turner, Prince, Freddie Mercury, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston and XXXTentacion.

(The latter, in case you were unaware, was a ‘cloud’ rapper who was murdered in 2018, aged just 20. It’s highly likely that Ozzy Osbourne, whilst living, had no idea of his existence.)

Anyway, the footage is in dubious taste. Not to mention that the notion that, well, if there’s a heaven all the dead pop stars residing up there are slapping each other’s backs and duetting with each other, is somewhat simple, verging on imbecilic.

And besides, would they have physical accoutrements such as selfie sticks and cameras in heaven? Clearly, Stewart’s team hadn’t thought that one through...

The video of Stewart’s ‘tribute’ has been viewed more than three million times on Twitter/X alone and has stirred up some controversy, as you can imagine. One user posted: “This is the craziest, most disrespectful sh** I ever saw in my LIFE.” Whilst another remarked: “I’ve seen some sh**y AI visuals in concerts but this is a new low.”

Not everyone hates it, mind you. One user asked: “Why on earth is this disrespectful??? Meeting with all those stars in Heaven is a good thing to wish!!! Stop being soooo sensitive!!!”

We’ll leave the last word to the person who said pithily: “There was I thinking his saying that we should give Nigel Farage a chance would be the worst thing ol’ Rod would do this summer.”

More proof, if it were needed, that heavy rock and metal will always be with us, comes with new stats from Live Nation that show that the genre is booming.

The group’s official Instagram account has stated that, “heavy rock and metal are bigger than ever in live music,” and shared key statistics that backs up that assertion.

Apparently heavy rock shows are up 14% this year, whilst metal now accounts for 13% of the total number of stadium and arena shows.

Live Nation cite names such as Bring Me The Horizon, Bad Omens, Pierce The Veil, Sleep Token, Ghost and Turnstile as new names that are 'blowing up in streams, tickets sales and fans snapping up arena tickets'.

Then there is the older generation - they mention Korn, Deftones, Linkin Park, Evanescence and Iron Maiden as 'anchoring festival line ups' as well as System Of a Down, probably a bigger live draw than they’ve ever been, who have added stadium dates, “after instant sellouts in New Jersey, Chicago and Toronto.”

Looking at the festival scene, they note that metal festivals such as Rockville, Aftershock and Inkarceration are, “bigger every year, fuelled by diverse line ups catering to even more fans.”

And lest us forget the genre has just witnessed its most unforgettable gathering of the tribes at Villa Park on July 5 when the rock and metal world said goodbye to Ozzy Osbourne.

The Live Nation post honours Ozzy, saying that he “didn’t just front Black Sabbath, he changed music forever. His legacy will live on in every riff.”

Live Nation don’t speculate on what has caused this upswing of interest in hard rock - but then they’re not sociologists.

But the streaming stats seem to back up what is happening in the live market. According to the data tracker Luminate hard rock streaming has gone up 12% in the US this year, compared to the 5% rise overall - this means it’s outpacing even growing genres such as Latin and country music.

Interestingly, a quote by Ghost frontman Tobias Forge in a Wall Street Journal article may provide a clue to the current metal boom.

The 44 year-old vocalist explained that when he started going to death metal shows in the 1990s the audience was almost exclusively young men in their 20s.

“Over the decades that have followed, that base has almost exclusively expanded,” he said. “Now you have people who are 70 years old down to seven years old, who are interested in this music, which I find really amazing.”

Zakk Wylde, Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist and close friend for decades, has spoken for the first time since the Sabbath frontman’s sudden passing last week.

In a new interview with Guitar World, Wylde, who first played with Ozzy on his 1988 album No Rest For The Wicked and stayed with him on and off right until the very end, at Villa Park earlier this month, revealed that, like so many people, that night was the last time he saw him.

“Everybody and their mother were in the backstage dressing room and I just wanted to give him a break,” he told the magazine. “I figured we’d see him later on – the next day or whatever. But no. The last text I got from Oz was saying, ‘Zakky, sorry, it was like a madhouse back there. I didn’t see you.’ He goes, ‘Thanks for everything.’ It was just us talking, saying, ‘I love you, buddy.’ That was it.”

“Oz was just the best,” the guitarist said, reflecting on their relationship. “I have my father, who was a World War II veteran; and then Ozzy, who was almost like an older brother. There was almost a 20-year age gap between us. With our relationship, there was the fun drinking – but if I ever needed advice, I could talk to him.”

“There were issues on how to drink and how not to drink; you know, the important factors in life!”

Asked why he thought Ozzy chose him as a guitarist, Wylde suggested that personal chemistry was the most important factor: “Forget the guitar playing; the way I made ham sandwiches was amazing… my ham sandwiches with Coleman’s are on par with Randy (Rhoads) and Jake’s (Lee’s) greatness on guitar!”

“But with anything, if it works, and it’s easy, that’s how it should be with bands. And relationships in general. Your wife, your friends, anyone – if they don’t bring you peace, why are you with these people? Who needs to be sticking their hand in a boiling pot of water?”

Like most of his friends, whilst Wylde knew Ozzy was ill he had no idea he would leave us so soon. But he reflects: “I’m blessed and grateful, man. Anything other than that would be selfish.”

“And on top of it, to go out with what’s the biggest-grossing charity event of all? That’s unbelievable. He helped a whole lot of people instead of making a profit. My God, what an incredible master. What an incredible life.”

Ozzy Osbourne hiring a then-unknown 19-year-old by the name of Zakk Wylde might have seemed risky but 1988’s No Rest For The Wicked soon proved they had chemistry together. This coltish firebrand had a flair for the electric guitar – and he proved he had the temperament to handle the gig.

When it was time to record its follow-up, No More Tears, Ozzy, Wylde et al were on a roll.

Speaking to MusicRadar in 2021, Wylde says he explicitly gamed out his approach. We had just lived through the ‘80s. There was a lot of guitar. Everything had been done to death. Three note per string diatonic phrases? Passé. He’d just be another imitator.

“I was wondering how I could sound like me and no-one else. I made a grocery list,” he said. “If you don’t want to sound like Yngwie, who was still at the height of his dominance, don’t do any harmonic minor or classical arpeggios and sweeps. Cross that off the list. If you don’t wanna sound like Eddie, don’t do any taps, harmonics, divebombs or whammy bar stuff.”

Pentatonic scales were all that was left. Wylde decided he was going to rip them like no one had ripped them before.

No More Tears found Ozzy reaching out to Lemmy of Motörhead for help with the lyrics. But the band itself needed little direction. There was Wylde on guitar, the redoubtable Randy Castillo on drums, and John Sinclair on keyboards. Mike Inez had joined on bass guitar, but Bob Daisley was to handle bass on the record.

Left to their own devices they were doing just fine. I Don’t Want To Change The World came together as a joke when they were messing about and goofing off. The songs were coming together nicely. But as they began pre-production, they still didn’t have a title for the record.

They found it from an unexpected source. Inez plugged in and started playing. No More Tears just fell into place. Wylde says it was Inez’s track.

““He pretty much wrote the whole song! Mike instigated that whole thing,” said Wylde. “We were in rehearsals and he just started playing that bass line and we all knew it was killer. Randy started playing drums just like how you hear it in on the record and then John Sinclair came in with that keyboard line. And I did a slide thing based on my love for the Allman Brothers and Skynyrd.”

The Allman Brothers Band would be a leitmotif of Wylde’s playing on No More Tears. Mama I’m Coming Home’s modulation between major and minor is a nod to the Allmans and Dickey Betts. On No More Tears, Wylde was leaning more towards Gary Rossington.

“The part I play is like an ode to Freebird; it’s not too different to the Freebird intro,” said Wylde. “Then we stopped for a bit and wondering what to do next. Ozzy suggested doing something like War Pigs and Black Dog, where the vocal line is followed by guitar – that whole call and answer thing.”

The verse riff owes its shape and form to Tony Iommi. When it came time for a solo, Wylde finally found a use for all those pentatonic runs he had been practising. He let it rip. One take, in and out.

“Yeah, what you hear on the record is just one pass! I constructed it to fit the keyboard part and then go into something else,” he said. “There’s a lot of pentatonic licks in the beginning and then for the big ascend at the end, that’s just me fitting along to the chords going up. So I knew what I was going to be playing and had it ready to nail in one take.”

Pretty cool. But No More Tears, it’s all about that bassline

There have been many, many tributes from the great and good to Ozzy Osbourne in the 48 hours since the metal icon’s death was announced on Tuesday. Now drummer Zak Starkey has offered his own, and it includes a somewhat eye-opening disclosure.

The (probably) ex Who and Oasis drummer has revealed that he was once approached by Sharon Osbourne to join Black Sabbath. This was at a time when Bill Ward was not part of the line-up and, needing a drummer to play Lollapalooza, they emailed Starkey, who yesterday screen-shotted the 2013 message.

It reads: “Zak, Black Sabbath is headlining Download on June 10 and then Lollapalooza in August. The guys need a drummer for their album, which will be recorded in September with Rick Rubin producing. We would probably need you for 2-3 weeks for the album. Also, they need a drummer to play at Lollapalooza which is on August 3 in Chicago.”

Osbourne then added, jokingly: “Also, Ozzy wants to have sex with you while he is singing ‘Iron Man’. Big Kiss, Sharon”.

Starkey would turn down the offer – he had prior commitments at the time with The Who and the role went instead to ex-Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave sticksman Brad Wilk, who played on the band’s final studio album, 13. But Starkey claims to have rued that decision, captioning the email: “Regrets I’ve had a few – this is one – (not the sex part!)”

“Ozzy will always be one of the greatest, natural, brilliant singers of all time,” he wrote. “I send much love and strength to his family at this sad sad time. If u aren’t familiar with the Never Say Die record – get into it – it’s so far out.”

Meanwhile, it’s been confirmed that a concert film of the Back To The Beginning gig will hit cinemas next year. It’s already in production and, according to makers Mercury Studios, will be “a love letter to Ozzy and the pioneering sound of Black Sabbath.” More details will doubtless be revealed nearer the time.

Ozzy Osbourne knew how to pick a guitar player. It was one of his many gifts. He had the uncanny knack of sniffing out talent. Whenever his career was in need of uplift, shocked back to life with electric guitar, he somehow found the right man for the job.

It would be no exaggeration to say that Randy Rhoads saved him. In 1979, Ozzy was on the skids, out of Black Sabbath, out of luck. Enter this diminutive, book-smart maverick from Santa Monica. Everything changed.

Ozzy launched his solo career with the hottest player in hard rock and metal since Eddie Van Halen. Rhoads’ death in 1982, aged 25, in a plane crash in Florida, was devastating.

Those who stepped up in the aftermath, such as Bernie Tormé, who had just left Gillan, then Brad Gillis of Night Ranger, did their bit. Theirs may have been a cameo turn in the Ozzy Osbourne story but they kept the wheels moving, and before Gillis’ time with the Prince of Darkness was over, he at least got to record the live album Speak Of The Devil.

When it came to replace Rhoads on a studio album, Jake E Lee stepped up. He was reportedly a toss-up between Lee and George Lynch of Dokken, with Ozzy preferring the latter.

That makes an interesting alternate history; Lynch would have been ideal for the Ozzy gig. But Lee proved he had the stuff. His work on Bark Of The Moon was total box-office ‘80s metal, a Friday night thrill fest. Ron Nevison’s production on its follow-up, The Ultimate Sin, might have disappointed Ozzy but Lee’s playing was unimpeachable.

It didn’t save him. Ozzy’s wife and manager, Sharon, fired Lee. And by 1987, auditions were open again, and this time Ozzy would find his longest-serving six-string lieutenant, Zakk Wylde.

Hiring Wylde, then just a coltish 19-year-old, set the wheels in motion for Ozzy’s hitherto most successful solo album, No More Tears, and a collaboration that lasted until Black Sabbath and Ozzy’s final bow at Villa Park, Birmingham, for the Back To The Beginning all-dayer.

Wylde made his debut on 1988’s No Rest For The Wicked. Speaking to MusicRadar in 2021 for No More Tears' 30th anniversary, Wylde recalled how he drew upon Randy Rhoads’ influence for how he approached his solos.

“It was a very composed solo, like a lot of my Ozzy stuff. That’s what came out of the Randy Rhoads school of soloing, where everything had a beginning, a middle and an end,” said Wylde. “The solos were composed to be part of the song, as opposed to just improv and shredding over the whole thing. It’s the chord progressions that accommodate the solos… and I still do that today. I’ll sit there with my practice amp listening to a homework CD or playlist of backing tracks, coming out with different ideas until I find something I’m happy with.”

Wylde scarcely had time to think. But for its follow-up, he had settled upon a style. He was going to forego the neoclassical stuff that was all very much of the day. Play arpeggios and you would sound like Yngwie, he reasoned. Similarly, two-handed tapping, natural harmonics, all that stuff could see you written off as just another EVH clone – and there were many.

“At the time, three note per-string diatonic scales were super popular and everybody was playing in the vein,” said Wylde. “I was looking at the list and figured the only thing left would be pentatonic scales. So it was like taking all the crayons out of the box, leaving myself just four to play with and seeing what I could draw with that. It forces you to come up with something, when you are working with less.”

It worked. Wylde’s hydrocarbon tone – fuelled by the one/two punch of his Les Paul’s active EMG81/85 humbucker pairing, a JCM800 with a Boss SD-1 overdrive pedal in front – was just the thing to set those pentatonics alight. And he hit those strings hard. Wylde was off to the races.

But one of the break-out hits from No More Tears was not the product of careful consideration. Far from it. When I Don’t Want To Change The World came together, Wylde says it was all a big joke.

Ozzy was not in the building. The band were making their own entertainment.

“I remember when the man riff came about. We were at Joe’s Garage in Burbank, just rehearsing and writing material for the record,” recalled Wylde. “Ozzy hadn’t gotten there yet. I remember jamming that riff as a joke because we’d fill in the pauses, just talking into the mic.”

What follows is a reminder to all that you should keep a tape running in the rehearsal room. You never know what might happen, a riff that could make the cut. But back then, Wylde was just goofing off, vamping on the mic.

‘The whole premise was how we could never get a date, so I’d sing something like, ‘Hi, my name’s Zakk and I don’t have a job and live with my parents!’ before going back into the riff,” he explained. “The joke was you don’t have a home, a car or a job and you probably won’t be getting laid anytime soon. We were doing that riff and cracking up laughing the whole time.”

The laughing stopped when the boss opened the door. Ozzy heard something in it. The rest is history.

“Ozzy walked in and said, ‘What’s that riff?’ and I said, ‘Ozzy, we’re just goofing around!’ So he told us to remember it and we’ll use it for something,” said Wylde. “Later we ended up winning a Grammy with that song.”

It’s true. I Don’t Want To Change The World came out of a joke riff and a goof-off and really did take home the Grammy for Best Metal Performance – only not the recording we hear on No More Tears. It was the Live & Loud version, recorded at a 1992 Orlando, Florida Ozzy show, that took home the award. You never know where your joke riffs might take you.

Tony Iommi has spoken for the first time since news of Ozzy Osbourne’s death broke on Tuesday. In a lengthy interview with ITV, the guitarist talked, movingly, about his shock at his bandmate’s seemingly sudden passing and about what happened immediately after the Back To The Beginning gig on 5 July.

"It was a shock for us," Iommi told the broadcaster. "I mean, when I heard yesterday, it couldn’t sink in. I thought, ‘It can’t be.’ I only had a text from him the day before. It just seemed unreal, surreal. And it really didn’t sink in. And in the night, I started thinking about it: ‘God, am I dreaming all this?’ But as I said before, he’s not looked well through the rehearsals.

"I think he really just held out to do that show. I really feel – and me and Geezer were talking about it last night – that we think he held out to do it, and just after that, he’s done it and said goodbye to the fans. And that was the end of it, really.”

The show – which saw Ozzy perform five songs with his own band and then four with Sabbath – will never be forgotten. Certainly, it’s unlikely such an incredible bill of rock and metal artists will be assembled in the same place ever again. According to Iommi, the band themselves were quietly pleased after their performance.

"Well, he went to his dressing room and I went to mine and Geez went to his and so on," says Iommi. "And then he came over. He came around before he was leaving on a wheelchair that brought him in to say goodbye and have a little chat for a bit. And he seemed all right. He enjoyed it. And he said, ‘Oh, it went all right, didn’t it?’ I said, ‘Yeah, it did.’

"But as I say, when I had the text off him the day before yesterday saying he’s tired and he’s really got no energy. And I thought, ‘Oh, dear.’ ‘Cause it’s a lot for him to do that under the problems he’s got.

"And we could see it in rehearsal. We didn’t want him there every day at rehearsal, because it’s too much. He just wouldn’t be able to stand it. So they’d bring him in and he’d sit down and sing a few songs, and then we’d talk about some rubbish old times or whatever, have a laugh, and then he’d go. And that’s sort of what we did, really.”

Knowing that the band managed to do that gig before his passing has been some compensation, Iommi said. “I’m really glad we did it. It was a final thing for everybody. If we hadn’t have done it, people couldn’t have seen the band and Ozzy and it would have been a shame.”

At first glance the home looked like any other in the discreet corner of millionaire’s playground Beverly Hills: an elegant Mediterranean-style mansion partly hidden by tall palms and a high curved wall.

On closer inspection, a brass plaque was visible on the heavy, eight-foot wooden gates. In Munsters-inspired gothic text, the inscription warned: ‘NEVER MIND THE DOG. BEWARE OF THE OWNER’ – a nod to the wild past of John ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne.

The house was familiar to millions as the home of Ozzy and his foul-mouthed family – reality TV’s answer to The Simpsons.

And it was there that Ozzy entertained MOJO magazine in 2003.

On a sunny summer afternoon the place was unusually quiet. Sharon, Ozzy’s wife and manager, was in New York on business. Also absent were their kids – son Jack, 18, and daughters Kelly, 17, and Aimee, 20.

In the kitchen, where so many arguments had raged during two seasons of The Osbournes docu-soap, Tony Dennis made coffee. A slim, fair-haired Geordie, Dennis had served for 21 years as Ozzy’s assistant.

He carried the coffee pot into the adjacent sitting room, where Ozzy was fiddling with a CD player.

Clad in black t-shirt and sweatpants, Ozzy gestured for MOJO to join him on a large, wine-red velvet sofa. “Have a seat,” he said, his thick Brummie slur punctuated with a stammer. “I’ll play you some of my new stuff.”

This den, christened ‘The Bunker’ by Sharon, was filled with Ozzy’s favourite things.

On one wall was a lithograph of John’s Lennon’s handwritten lyrics to Imagine. On a shelf was a photograph of Ozzy with Paul McCartney, taken when they met at Buckingham Palace for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee concert on 1 June 2002. The picture was signed: ‘Hey Ozzy – you’re cool! Rock on! Love, Paul McCartney.’ Its solid gold frame cost $42,000.

On top of the speaker cabinets a set of Osbournes dolls quivered as the music began at deafening volume – a mini-symphony with a massed choir singing of “Mother Russia”.

“I’m writing a rock opera about the life of Rasputin,” Ozzy said.

With his eyes obscured by the blue lenses of his round Lennon specs, it was impossible to tell if he was joking.

“I've dreamed of doing this for 20 years,” he added, echoing Spinal Tap’s long-held ambition of crafting a musical based on Jack The Ripper.

Only when Ozzy began to sing along to his own guide vocals was it apparent that he was entirely serious.

Rasputin, he claimed, would be a stage production, his role not as performer but as co-writer and arranger.

One of the songs, Before The Dawn, was sung by daughter Aimee. Another featured balalaikas. At the very least, Ozzy was presenting a more rounded portrayal of Rasputin that did Boney M.

“They called him The Mad Monk,” Ozzy explained. “On one hand he was a holy man, and on the other he was having fucking orgies.”

Demonised by enemies within the Russian imperial court, Rasputin met a brutal end in 1916: drugged, poisoned, beaten and shot, he was finally drowned when thrown into the Neva river at Petrograd.

Ozzy felt a certain kinship with his subject. “He became a scapegoat,” he said. “It’s a perfect scenario for what Ozzy is about.”

He took a gulp of coffee from a mug the size of a soup bowl.

“I’m not Ozzy Lloyd-Webber,” he reasoned. “One of the songs is like something from Fiddler On The Roof, but there’s some heavy rock stuff too.

“I know in my soul that this is one of the greatest things I’ve ever done in my life. And this is the first thing I’ve done stone cold sober.

“I never thought I could do anything without a smoke of a joint or a glass of ale, and that’s bollocks.”

It was in that very room that Ozzy had quit the booze. Not for the first time, but, he hoped, the last.

“I’ve been on and off the drugs and alcohol so many times I feel like a fucking fiddler’s elbow,” he said. “But I can honestly say today that I’m done.”

For an hour or more, Ozzy talked about various elements of his life.

“I’ve been known to do some pretty nutty shit,” he said. “There’s no doubt about it – I am fucking nuts. I’m not becoming a mystical fucking guru, but if there is a God or a great creator, I believe they map your life out.”

He also talked about parenting.

“When I was a kid my mother and father never told me they loved me or that they were proud of me. So all I’m doing is what I would have liked.”

Ozzy freely admitted to his various physical and mental disorders, among them ADHD, chronic dyslexia an an hereditary tremor compounded by Parkinsonian syndrome caused by years of cocaine abuse. The latter, he said, accounted for the shaky walk and stuttering speech.

He ended the conversation on a positive note.

“I am blessed," he smiled. “If you asked how much money I’m worth, I honestly couldn’t give you an answer. I do it for Sharon and kids, anyway.

“The overriding thing that comes across [on The Osbournes] is that we all love each other. Jack asked me, ‘Dad, do you think people are laughing with you or at you?’ I said, ‘Son, as long as they’re laughing I couldn’t give a fuck!’

“I’m in the entertainment business. If they’re laughing at me, great – at least they’re not crying.”

Having been demonised for so many years – if not to the extent of his hero Rasputin – Ozzy viewed his recent audience with the Queen with bemusement.

“The Queen said to me, ‘I hear you’re quite the wild one.’ I didn’t know what to say.”

With an echo of another hero, John Lennon, he added: “I’m just Ozzy Osbourne from Aston. A working class hero.”

On that note, Ozzy rose from his seat and shuffled across to a black door in a corner of The Bunker.

“Do you know what I call the pinnacle of success?” he said, beckoning. “Come and see this.”

He opened the door to reveal his very own private loo – black urinal and washbasin, with a stuffed bat in a glass case on one wall.

Pissing contentedly, he looked back over his shoulder and grinned.

“Spend a day in my head,” he said, “and you’d realise how crazy I really am.”

Rasputin, the rock opera, never made it to the stage. But no matter.

Even back then, in 2003, Ozzy Osbourne had done enough.

In the summer of 1979, Ozzy Osbourne was at rock bottom.

Kicked out of Black Sabbath, the band he had fronted for more than a decade, he was holed up in an LA hotel room, numbing his feelings of humiliation and depression with booze and drugs. At the age of 30, he thought was finished.

But with Blizzard Of Ozz, his debut solo album – released in September 1980, five months after Sabbath’s Heaven And Hell – he pulled off a heroic comeback. And in the resurrection of Ozzy Osbourne, two figures were pivotal.

It was Sharon Arden, daughter of infamous rock manager Don Arden, who rescued Ozzy from oblivion, becoming his manager and later his wife.

And it was Randy Rhoads, a young American guitarist, whose brilliance inspired the greatest music Ozzy ever made outside of Black Sabbath.

Randy Rhoads was eight years younger than Ozzy, and a former member of Quiet Riot, the LA band who went on to have a US No.1 album in 1983 with Metal Health.

While slight in stature – “about four foot two, and a hundred pounds wet,” Ozzy said – Rhoads was the most explosive rock guitarist since Eddie Van Halen.

And with a rhythm section comprised of two veterans – bassist Bob Daisley, ex-Rainbow, and drummer Lee Kerslake, ex-Uriah Heep – Ozzy had a band with a powerful chemistry and a creative energy that set that unmistakable voice in a new, modern context.

Blizzard Of Ozz was – loudly and proudly – a heavy metal album, but different to anything he had recorded with Sabbath, the sound shaped by Rhoads’ melodic riffing and fizzing pyrotechnics.

In this album’s three deathless anthems, Ozzy’s over-the-top persona is defined: the maniac in Crazy Train, the drunkard in Suicide Solution, the Prince of Darkness in the cod-Satanic Mr. Crowley, a study of infamous occultist Aleister Crowley.

In contrast, Ozzy’s sensitive side is presented in Goodbye To Romance, a broken-hearted ballad, and Revelation (Mother Earth), an eco-conscious epic.

Blizzard Of Ozz hit No.7 in the UK, and No.21 in the US.

The follow-up, Diary Of A Madman, was another big seller, its title track a gothic masterpiece.

But in 1981, Daisley and Kerslake were fired – replaced by bassist Rudy Sarzo, also ex-Quiet Riot, and drummer Tommy Aldridge, formerly of Black Oak Arkansas.

On 19 March 1982, during a US tour, Randy Rhoads died at he age of 25 in a plane crash near Leesburg, Florida. Rhoads was one of two passengers on a light aircraft piloted by the band’s bus driver, Andrew Aycock.

Witnesses reported that Aycock twice flew low over the bus – in which Ozzy and Sharon lay sleeping – before a third pass resulted in disaster. The left wing clipped the back of the bus, and the plane crashed into the garage of a nearby house. All three occupants were killed.

“The day Randy died was the greatest tragedy of my life,” Ozzy said.

Blizzard Of Ozz and Diary Of A Madman stand as testament to the genius of the man who did so much to turn Ozzy’s life around.

Def Leppard guitarist Vivian Campbell has been looking back on his time with Ronnie James Dio and describes a complicated relationship with one of metal’s most charismatic frontmen.

There was the age gap, and all the life experience that goes with it. Dio had fronted Rainbow and Black Sabbath. He was the star. Campbell has always said it felt like he was playing in a band with his stepfather; until recently, he was unsure of his place in the Dio story. Plus, Dio could blow hot and cold.

Dio had a certain temperament. He did not look kindly on Campbell’s smiling in a band photo. Nor did he care for Campbell’s suggestion that he could sing backing vocals. But when it counted, he knew the value of his young lead guitarist.

In the early ‘80s arms race for electric guitar supremacy, Dio would stand by his man, and speaking with Mike Cass for the dopeYEAH talk YouTube channel and podcast, Campbell says it was clear that Dio was “proud” of him – and paid him what’s surely the ultimate compliment in metal guitar, when the former Sabbath frontman met the original former Sabbath frontman, Ozzy Osbourne, and they got talking about his playing.

“There were times when Ronnie and I really got along great, and there were, unfortunately, many times when we were just butting heads. But I knew that he was very proud of me,” says Campbell. “I remember one European tour, we were on a ferry – obviously in Scandinavia – going somewhere from somewhere – and we were just both standing out on the deck, wind in the hair, watching the water.

“And he said to me, ‘You know, I met Ozzy Osbourne a few weeks ago, I was talking to Ozzy and I said, you were my Randy Rhoads… That’s to me, what Randy was to you, someone I could really work with.’”

For Campbell, this was much-needed validation.

“I just remember thinking, ‘Wow!’ I just felt, at that moment, like, ‘Okay, I can work with this guy.’ I felt like I belonged,” says Campbell. “There was a foundation to build on. But then, the next day, I’m still thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m in a band with Ronnie Dio. Holy shit!’ I really never could let go of that.”

Campbell never did. He admits that it took him decades to feel like he really owned those early Dio records. It was only after Dio died in 2010 – two decades of Def Leppard – that he processed what that time had meant to him. But we have to remember, Campbell’s rise was meteoric.

He got his start in 1979, playing in hometown rock champs Sweet Savage, who were starting to build some momentum before Campbell ultimately joined up with Dio. In 1981, Sweet Savage had signed to Park, released the 7” single, Take No Prisoners, and were on tour with Thin Lizzy.

Sweet Savage played Lizzy’s legendary show at Slane Castle, in Dublin, and while Campbell was plucked from their ranks just as things were getting going, they had established their NWOBHM bona fides – Metallica would cover Take No Prisoners’ B-side, Killing Time live. In 1991, they made it official, releasing their version as the B-Side to The Unforgiven, the second single from the Black Album.

Watching how Thin Lizzy frontman, Phil Lynott, would carry himself gave Campbell a taste of what was to come. When he joined Dio, he had arrived in the big time. Dio had a similar aura about him – and he had that peerless voice.

Campbell says it was 100 per cent natural. He didn’t warm-up by running scales before the show.

“I remember saying to Ronnie, ‘You remind me of Tom Jones.’ Because he had that strength? That tonality to his voice. I didn’t mean it as an insult, but I don’t think he took it well,” says Campbell. “I said, ‘Ronnie, you’re ballsy… You’re masculine! You really remind me of Tom Jones. The look on his face. I thought, ‘Oh, maybe I shouldn’t have said that.’”

Campbell tells Cass there were a few bones of contention. His offer of backing vocals was met with a stern ticking off.

“He said, ‘No. Ritchie Blackmore didn’t sing. Tony Iommi didn’t sing. You’re not singing. Guitar players don’t sing,’” recalls Campbell. “And I went, ‘O-kay. I’m not going to ask that again.’”

Campbell tracked three studio albums with Dio – Holy Diver (1983), The Last In Line (1984), and Sacred Heart (1985) – but by 1986, he was out. That was another thing, Dio said Campbell quit. Campbell maintains he was fired, and that hurt. Their relationship might have had its issues, but when it was good, there was no question of how highly Campbell was regarded.

“I could tell he was very proud of me,” says Campbell. “He used to take me to the Rainbow Bar and Grill in LA, in Hollywood, and go there on a Friday or a Saturday night, and Ronnie would have the big table, and the whole entourage would be there, and I could tell that he was very proud, like, ‘This is my guy, my guitar player. I found him under a rock in Belfast!’”

Playing in Dio left its mark on all of Ronnie James Dio’s collaborators. In 2012, Campbell got together with fellow Dio alumni, drummer Vinny Appice, bassist Jimmy Bain and keyboardist Claude Schnell to form Last In Line. Andrew Freeman was recruited on vocals.

What started as an excuse to play these tracks live soon became a side project with three studio albums to their name. It was also a good excuse for Campbell to bring his beloved Les Paul out of storage and put it into action again.

Speaking to MusicRadar in 2019, upon the release of Last In Line’s sophomore album II, Campbell said his Les Paul was enjoying a new lease of life.

“I need one sound. I can use the pickup switch and volume knobs on my Les Paul to keep it simple and organic,” he said. “It’s a noisy rig, though… it sounds a bit like a Friday night in a Glasgow chip shop, haha! We play loud and noisy rock ’n’ roll; who said it should sound pretty?!

“My Dio-era Les Paul, #72987537, was on every track and pretty much every solo… I started out on that guitar; I got it when I was 15 and in Sweet Savage. I used it for the Holy Diver recordings and tours, then I put it away and started plating pointy headstock guitars with a wang bar just like everybody else in the ‘80s.”

He may be retiring from live performance in a couple of weeks’ time, but Ozzy Osbourne still has one musical ambition left – a duet with Paul McCartney.

This unlikely wish was revealed on Ozzy’s SiriusXM show Ozzy Speaks, which he co-hosts with Billy Morrison.

It came about when conversation turned to collaborations and Morrison asked Ozzy if there were any people he’d like to do a duet with.

“Paul McCartney,” Ozzy immediately shot back with, to which Morrison responded: “I think it’s good that we have this show so we can both say, ‘Paul, if you’re listening, it’s about time,’ with a sheepish Ozzy adding, “No, I would be honoured but I couldn’t…”

Morrison then asked why Ozzy of all people would be hesitant to do the duet, insisting, “Why not? … Put it out into the universe. You never know.”

Exactly. Although down the years Macca has been picky about who he collaborates with, when he has done one it’s usually been with a big name in a particular genre. We all remember those 1980s link ups with Stevie Wonder (Ebony And Ivory) and Michael Jackson (Say Say Say and – urgh! - The Girl Is Mine) but the ex-Beatle has also worked with artists as varied as Tony Bennett, Johnny Cash, Elvis Costello and George Michael. Within the rock/metal world, Ozzy is easily as big a name as those figures..

Later on in the podcast, Ozzy mentioned that he has met McCartney before - “He’s a really nice man,” he said. He also rated his duet with Lita Ford on Close My Eyes Forever as the best he’s ever done.

It has to be one of the most bizarre promotions of all time. Liquid Death, the makers of iced tea, have launched a limited edition run of cans that includes Ozzy Osbourne’s own DNA.

Yes, you read that correctly. It’s an ultra limited release of just 10 cans of what the brand are calling ‘Infinite Ozzy’. Each of the cans were consumed by the Black Sabbath singer before being sealed to preserve his DNA. They all come in a lab-quality display container and is hand-signed by the man himself

The drop happened yesterday (June 17) at liquiddeath.com/ozzy so if you’re reading this it’s probably already too late. But then the collectors’ items were retailing for $450 each, making them among the most expensive soft drinks of all time.

Liquid Death have stated that the goal is to preserve Osbourne’s DNA should fans want to clone him in the future, once technology and law allow. Indeed, in a teaser video to accompany the promotion, Osbourne says: “My DNA is in this can. You could clone me — but why the f**k would you want to?”

Of course, it’s all cunningly timed to tie in with the Back To The Beginning Show, which is now just two and a half weeks away. On his Sirius XM show Ozzy Speaks, the singer said he was confident he’d be able to perform at the gig. “I haven’t done any physical work for the last seven, six and a half, seven years,” he said. “By hook or by crook, I’m gonna make it (to the stage at Villa Park).”

“I’ve got this trainer guy who helps people get back to normal,” he added. “It’s hard going, but he’s convinced that he can pull it off for me. I’m giving it everything I’ve got.”

Legendary guitar hero Randy Rhoads had a unique kind of “mystical ability” — according to a musician who played alongside him in two different bands.

Bassist Rudy Sarzo performed with Rhoads in LA band Quiet Riot in the late ’70s before the pair were reunited in Ozzy Osbourne’s band in 1981.

Sarzo tells MusicRadar: “Randy was a star from the first day that I saw him play with Quiet Riot. There was a certain quality he carried in the Quiet Riot days, which carried on through the Ozzy period.

“He was always true to his musical integrity and his image. I knew that he would be a star, and so did the audience.

“But with Quiet Riot, musically, he was in a box.”

Sarzo continues: “Randy was the first musician that I ever played with who had the utmost musical integrity.

"He was born into a musical family of professors, and at a very early age, began his musical and academic education. His family owned a music school.

“All the other guys I’d ever played with before that were just picking things up by listening to records and learning on the streets by sharing riffs with each other. But not Randy. He had a musical education. He knew about music theory, sight reading, and composition.

“He was an academically schooled musician. So to find a rock ‘n’ roll musician with that level of credibility and mystical ability was almost virtually impossible because those guys usually leaned toward jazz or classical.”

Randy Rhoads was aged just 25 when he was killed in a plane crash on 19 March 1982 while on tour with Osbourne.

He had made two studio albums with Ozzy — 1980’s Blizzard Of Ozz and 1981’s Diary Of A Madman. Rhoads co-wrote classic songs such as Crazy Train, Revelation (Mother Earth), You Can’t Kill Rock And Roll and Diary Of A Madman itself.

It is often stated that Rhoads was at his creative peak with Ozzy, but Sarzo disagrees.

“No, no, no — that’s not true at all,” Sarzo insists. “In my opinion, as someone who was there, Randy never reached his peak.

“He was just getting started. I’m laughing at the thought of Randy reaching his peak with just two albums!

“He had so much more to explore and to create. But unfortunately, he passed too soon.

“To the people who never got to see Randy play live, all you have are the records, you know? But I’ve got to tell you, on the road, Randy would take what he’d already recorded and take it to new levels of intensity.

“From being there, and listening to him playing, the portion of [Ozzy’s] set which was at the end of the show, where we would do three Black Sabbath songs, Paranoid, Iron Man and Children Of The Grave, that’s where Randy would be the most experimental — during the solos.

“Playing those Black Sabbath songs was new territory for Randy,” Sarzo says. “And in his solos he found a way to make the Sabbath songs more interesting for himself.

“He needed some kind of outlet. He would come in, throw in new ideas, though not too much — just enough to feed his creativity.

“The thing was that Randy was not really wired to play the same thing every night. He was too creative for that.”

Bassist Rudy Sarzo was a member of Ozzy Osbourne’s backing band in the early ’80s — and says he was always treated with “kindness” and “generosity” by the so-called Prince of Darkness.

Sarzo will be one of many special guests at Ozzy and Black Sabbath’s farewell show at Birmingham’s Villa Park on 5 July.

He tells MusicRadar: “We’re at this stage where we’re celebrating the fact that we survived this. What remains is the true essence of what this music is about.

“It’s about the music, not the mayhem or the mistakes. The music brings us all together, along with the memories and experiences that we still deliver.

“There’s so much camaraderie among us all, because we have all grown up, you know?”

He continues: “I’m one of the special guests who will be performing alongside other special guests — Sammy Hagar, Jake E. Lee, Papa Perpetua [Tobias Forge] from Ghost, and others who will be performing. And Steven Tyler has just been added.”

Sarzo says that he can’t give too much away ahead of the show.

“Tom Morello, who will also be performing and is the director of the event, has a full plate,” he says. “It’s a huge operation.

“I only get the necessary information, like the songs that I’m going to be playing, which I can’t say just yet, but that’s all I need. I have all my credentials. My travel arrangements and everything else are ready to go.”

Sarzo credits guitar legend Randy Rhoads for helping him get the job with Osbourne in the '80s. Sarzo and Rhoads had played together in LA band Quiet Riot before Rhoads joined Ozzy’s band.

“I joined Ozzy in 1981 when they were looking for a bass player,” he recalls. “Randy Rhoads is the one who brought me to their attention because I had no resume.

“I came out of nowhere. My resume was basically, ‘Here’s Rudy, who I used to play with in Quiet Riot — he’s the guy you’re looking for.

“So I became part of the family, a very small circle.

“I remember one time Ozzy came in and said, ‘Man, you look like shit! You need some rock star clothes.’ And he gets a suitcase, throws it open, and puts all the clothes on a pool table, saying, ‘Here, grab whatever you want.’

“Nobody had done that for me before. Immediately, when I joined the band, I was welcomed with kindness and generosity. It was such a blessing.”

Sarzo hooked up with Ozzy at a time when the singer’s drunken antics included urinating on the Alamo and biting the head off a live bat on stage.

He recalls: “There was a lot of craziness going on back in the day with a lot of bands, you know? It was a specific time, and completely different from what it is now.

“I mean, there were certain things that if you do them on the road now, they will eventually kill you. But back then, it was before the AIDS epidemic, and we didn’t have drugs like fentanyl that could kill you like that.

He smiles: “It was a little bit lighter and not as dangerous as it is now.”

Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi admits that he is worried about the band's upcoming performance at singer Ozzy Osbourne’s farewell show in Birmingham on 5 July.

In a new interview with Music Week, Iommi says of the event at Villa Park: “This would be a big, monumental thing if it all comes good. The worrying thing for me is the unknown. We don’t know what’s going to happen.

“Normally, when we’d tour, we’d rehearse and run through the thing for a while, and it’s just us. But with this event there are so many other moving parts.”

This show, under the banner ‘Back To The Beginning’, will feature performances from a host of guest stars including Metallica, Guns N’ Roses and Tool.

Ozzy Osbourne is scheduled to perform a set of solo material before reuniting with Black Sabbath alongside Iommi and fellow founding members Geezer Butler and Bill Ward.

But with Osbourne in poor health, Iommi says that fans should not expect too much from the singer.

“You’re used to Ozzy running around,” Iommi says, “but he certainly won’t be doing that for this show. I don’t know if he’s going to be standing or sitting on a throne or what.”

Iommi says he is approaching this show with “excitement mixed with fear”.
He clarifies: “Once we start playing, then we’ll know we’re doing it. It’s always a worry, even when we did tours before, there’s always that build-up, and then it gets to the point that we do it and it’s OK.”

He also states that this show is definitely the final performance from Ozzy and from Black Sabbath.

“It’s absolutely the end,” he insists. “This show has come up because of the situation [with Osbourne’s illness] and because it’s a charity thing. But there’s no way we could go out and do a tour.

"Everybody in the band is looking forward to doing it, though it’s a nerve-wracking thing, as we’ll be touching on some stuff that we haven’t done for a long time.”

We’re just a month away now from Back To The Beginning, the final Black Sabbath performance and the woman who conceptualised the whole thing – Sharon Osbourne, of course – has given a fascinating interview to Music Business UK.

It touches all aspects of her managerial career, from learning what (and what not to do) from her father, Don Arden, to starting out managing Gary Moore before she guided Ozzy through to a successful solo career.

She also dishes out some sage wisdom gleaned from her five decades in the music business. “Never let your publishing go,” she says. “Until you get to the stage where you think you want to bail, and then you sell it all for a fortune.

"You look at where your songs could end up; you could get a couple of million each time your song is used in an advertisement.

“Other people could cover your song and have a hit with a song that wasn’t a hit for you. It’s something which, now, I know a lot of artists, they go in, and they want deals, (and the) record companies want their publishing. It’s like, ‘Fuck you, no way.’”

Osbourne also doesn’t think much of the long term development of artists in the modern music industry: “There is no development currently at record labels. They take everything. Record labels developing (artists) doesn’t exist. A&R departments just go on the internet. That’s it. They’ll take your publishing, your merchandise and everything else, and all they do is press and distribute and stream you.

“Most of the record companies own the streaming anyway and all of this about, ‘Oh, I’ve got a billion streams, it’s amazing.’ Well, you’re getting less than a fucking penny for a stream. It’s absolutely bastardising an artist’s music.”

She also revealed that the creation of Ozzfest – a huge festival success of the 1990s/2000s - was a direct result of her husband getting turned down by Lollapalooza.

“They were like, ‘No, not at all. Not for us.’ It gave me the idea of, ‘Fuck it (then) we’ll do our own metal festival’, because it didn’t exist. There were no touring metal festivals. It was the beginning; all the rest followed. And I’m so proud of that.

"We did it first, and it was an opportunity for so many younger bands to play in front of a huge crowd.”

There’s much more, of course. Click here to read the whole interview.

When Ozzy Osbourne was kicked out of Black Sabbath in 1979, fans were stunned. But as guitarist Tony Iommi insisted, the only other option the band had was to split up.

In an interview with Classic Rock, Iommi recalled how the problem with Osbourne came to a head in Los Angeles during sessions for Sabbath’s ninth album.

“We had some chats with Ozzy," Iommi said. "Whether he’d remember them or not, I don’t know.

“I was in a terrible position, because I was the one who used to go to meetings with the record company. I’d go over to Warner Brothers and they’d say: ‘How’s the album coming along?’ ‘Oh, alright.’ ‘When can we hear some tracks?’ ‘Um, soon…’

“I was lying. It just wasn’t happening. We were coming up with riffs, but Ozzy just wasn’t into it anymore.

“He’d done too much of everything. A lot of times when we were working, he’d be asleep on a couch.”

Osbourne would later claim that being sacked by Black Sabbath for drinking too much and doing too many drugs was akin to being “hung by a jury of murderers”.

Iommi maintained that the band’s bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward were in agreement that Osbourne had to go.

“It wasn’t just my decision to fire him,” the guitarist said. “It was a decision made by all three of us.

“It was Bill who told Ozzy. Ozzy probably thought I was behind it all, but it was a band decision. It was either we break up or we carry on without him.”

Iommi also admitted that he had contacted another singer, Ronnie James Dio, before the decision to fire Osbourne was made — and that the contact was made via Ozzy’s future wife and manager Sharon Arden.

“I got in touch with Ronnie through Sharon,” Iommi said. “I met Ronnie at a party.

“I really didn’t feel happy with the way things were going with Ozzy. I thought about doing something with Ronnie. And then when we split with Ozzy, I said to the others, ‘Well, why don’t we try Ronnie?’

“We’d heard the Rainbow albums with Ronnie singing. I thought we had to try to see what we could do with him.”

American singer Ronnie James Dio had made four albums with Rainbow, the band led by ex-Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore.

The second of these albums, Rising, was released in 1976 and featured the classic track Stargazer.

In 1978, however, Ritchie Blackmore decided to pursue a more commercial hard rock direction with Rainbow — a move which resulted in Dio being replaced by British vocalist Graham Bonnet.

Dio was therefore available when Iommi made his approach.

Iommi knew that it was a gamble. But this was one gamble that really paid off.

“Ronnie had so much against him,” Iommi said. “It was so hard for him to walk into a band as established as we were, and he wasn’t a big chap, just a little guy.

“But I just looked at the size of the talent. He sang so well.

“As soon as we heard Ronnie sing with us, we knew he was the right man. It was different to what we’d done, but there wasn’t much else we could do.

“We started writing completely differently, because Ronnie was such a different kind of singer. If we had got another singer who sounded like Ozzy, I think that would have been worse. It had to be something different. The music we wrote with him was a different approach.

“It was like we were starting over again. But it made us fight again. We’d lost that fight — you get too comfortable. It made us have to work again, it kicked us up the arse, and that was good for the band.”

With Dio in place of Ozzy, a rejuvenated Black Sabbath created one of the greatest albums of their career — Heaven And Hell.

Released in March 1980, the album included a monumental title track and others destined to become classics — Neon Knights, Children Of The Sea and Die Young.

In September of that year, Ozzy Osbourne bounced back with his first post-Sabbath album, Blizzard Of Ozz, featuring a new guitar hero in Randy Rhoads.

Over time, Heaven And Hell would be acclaimed as a true Sabbath classic and arguably the crowning glory of Ronnie James Dio’s career.

Back in 1980, what this album represented for Tony Iommi was a new beginning and a complete validation.

“I had an excitement about the band again,” Iommi said. “I had to keep this band going. I’ve never been one to give up. I had to fight and to try and make it work.

“It would have been so easy to have turned my back on it and just said, ‘That’s it.’ But I couldn’t do that. I had to go with it and make it work. And it did.

“Heaven And Hell turned out to be great album. Black Sabbath hadn’t died. We were back out there with Ronnie and the band was great again.”

Black Sabbath’s 1975 album Sabotage is one of the band’s very best - but it also includes some of their weirdest music.

Guitarist Tony Iommi recalled in an interview with Classic Rock: “We wanted to do a rock album.” And certainly there are songs on Sabotage to rank among the heaviest that Sabbath ever recorded - songs such as Hole In The Sky and Symptom Of The Universe.

But this album also features what is surely the most bizarre track ever to feature on a Black Sabbath album - Supertzar, an ambient piece featuring the English Chamber Choir, and described by drummer Bill Ward as “a demonic chant”. And the weirdness on Sabotage doesn’t end there...

On their previous album Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, the band had experimented with synthesisers, played by a guest star, Rick Wakeman of progressive rock pioneers Yes.

On Sabotage, those experiments continued with Am I Going Insane (Radio), which was essentially a pop song, written by singer Ozzy Osbourne on a Moog synthesiser, which he played on the finished track.

“Oz drove us all nuts with that Moog thing,” Ward recalled, “but the song was great. And in hindsight, it was kind of a precursor for his solo career. His personality was blooming on this song.”

Strangest of all, at the very end of the album, after the last notes of the closing track The Writ, there is a 31-second snippet of music that was recorded by producer Mike Butcher without the band’s knowledge - and added during the mixing process.

“Microphones were plugged in all around the studio,” Butcher explained. “So one night, when Ozzy and Bill were messing around on the piano, I pushed the record button.”

What he captured was a joke song they named Blow On The Jug.

“This stupid fucking thing,” Ward said. “A drunken song that Ozzy and me would sing together in a van or on a plane.

“That’s me on piano, and Ozzy blowing on one of those brown cider jugs, playing it like a tuba.”

Tom Morello has shared some intel about Black Sabbath’s upcoming Villa Park gig, which is already shaping up to be the metal show of the century.

The Rage Against The Machine/Audioslave guitarist was asked to be musical director of the day by Sharon Osbourne and in an interview with The Independent, Morello described how between himself, Ozzy and Sharon, the three have gone about shaping the event.

“The North Star from the first conversation was to make this the greatest day in the history of heavy metal,” he said.

“Black Sabbath invented the genre… it’s a tribute to (them) but unlike other tributes, Black Sabbath’s going to play at the end of the night, and so it’s a chance for artists of all ages and branches of the heavy metal tree to pay respects by playing some of our own music that owes a debt to Black Sabbath, and then also have 14 to 16 of the greatest Black Sabbath cover bands that ever graced the stage.”

As we already know, the line-up that they’ve put together is simply astonishing: Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, Slayer, Tool, Pantera, Alice In Chains, Anthrax, Mastodon and Rival Sons. Then there is the ‘supergroup’ that is likely to include Billy Corgan, Sammy Hagar, Chad Smith and Andrew Watt, as well as Slash and Duff McKagan from Guns N’ Roses.

And there are likely to be more names added, according to Morello: “Some of the biggest artists who are performing have not been announced,” he revealed. “There’ll be some surprises during the day.”

Asked what fans should expect, Morello advised them to “get there early”.

He added: “I think it’ll be very emotional for Black Sabbath fans in the room and around the world on that day, to really give that band their due.”

Meanwhile, Zakk Wylde has been suggesting that 5 July may not be the end of the road for Ozzy after all. Speaking to the Birmingham Mail, the guitarist said: “The game plan is, let’s hope this is what happens, I mean, you always gotta stay on the bright side of life, because Oz was singing at the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame thing.

“Ozzy was just sitting on the chair and he was singing Mama, I’m Coming Home, and it sounded great. So hopefully we’ll just do this and then Oz will go ‘let’s fire up the machine again and we’ll do another tour.”

We’ll see. Tickets for 5 July? You’ll be lucky. When the Osbournes donated a pair of tickets to a charity auction in aid of a Birmingham children’s hospice that took place this week, one anonymous bidder pledged £16,700.

The world is not exactly short of TV content about Ozzy Osbourne, but there’s a new documentary in the pipeline that sounds like it will delve a bit deeper than most of what we've already seen.

It’s called Ozzy Osbourne: No Escape From Now and is set to be aired on Paramount+ by the end of the year. It deals in particular with the singer’s last six years and the health problems he’s encountered, including his fall in 2019 and Parkinson’s diagnosis.

“This is Ozzy Osbourne like you’ve never seen before: an honest, warm and deeply personal portrait of one of the greatest rock stars of all-time,” a synopsis says, “detailing how the singer’s world shuddered to a halt six years ago, forcing him to contemplate who he really is, confront his own mortality and question whether or not he can ever perform on stage for one last time. Addressing his health issues and the impact of his Parkinson’s diagnosis, the film showcases the central role music continues to play in Ozzy’s life.”

Ozzy himself has said: “The last six years have been full of some of the worst times I’ve been through. There’s been times when I thought my number was up. But making music and making two albums saved me. I’d have gone nuts without music.”

It’s directed by the BAFTA award winner Tania Alexander, who’s best known for being one of the co-creators of the Channel 4 show Gogglebox. Filming began way back in early 2022 whilst Ozzy was working on his Patient Number 9 album. And it’s still in production so filming will continue into the summer, including the final Black Sabbath gig at Villa Park on July 5. I think we can already envisage what the redemptive feelgood ending is going to be, can’t we?

Contributors include Tony Iommi, Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses, Billy Idol, Chad Smith of the Chili Peppers, Robert Trujillo of Metallica and, of course, his wife Sharon.

The latter has described the doc as an “honest account” of what has happened to her husband since 2019. “It shows how hard things have been for him and the courage he has shown while dealing with a number of serious health issues, including Parkinson’s,” she said.

“It’s about the reality of his life now. We have worked with a production team we trust and have allowed them the freedom to tell the story openly. We hope that story will inspire people that are facing similar issues to Ozzy.”

Ozzy Osbourne has warned fans not to expect him to be the singer he once was at what is being billed as his final show this summer.

On his Sirius XM radio show, Ozzy Speaks, the veteran frontman said he would only be partially on stage during the show. "I'm not planning on doing a set with Black Sabbath but I am doing little bits and pieces with them,” he said. “I am doing what I can, where I feel comfortable."

It’s no secret that the singer hasn’t been in the best of health these past few years. In 2022 he revealed that he has been battling Parkinson’s Disease for two decades. He was unable to perform at his induction into the Rock N’ Roll Hall Of Fame last October. In fact he gave his acceptance speech at ceremony whilst seated

He said he was trying to get as fit as he can be. "I am trying to get back on my feet. When you get up in the morning, you just jump out of bed. I have to balance myself, but I'm not dead. I'm still actively doing things."

This, of course, raises the question of who exactly will be singing the bulk of Black Sabbath’s set, if not Ozzy? There have been periods in the band’s long history when they have used other singers, most notable Ronnie James Dio and during the late '80s and '90s, Tony Martin. But Dio is sadly no longer with us and a reunion with Martin would seem unlikely given the bad blood between him and the band after his departure in the late '90s.

There is, of course, the option of using a selection of guest singers and given the line up of rock and metal royalty that will be on display at Villa Park on July 5, surely a viable one? No doubt all will be revealed in the coming weeks…

In February 1975, exactly 50 years ago, Black Sabbath were working on their sixth studio album Sabotage. It would become one of the greatest and most influential albums in rock history.

It was also the last classic album that Sabbath would make with singer Ozzy Osbourne.

The album was recorded at Morgan Studios in Willesden, north-west London, a state-of-the-art facility where Sabbath had made their previous album, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. The band worked at Morgan for a total of four months, split into three-week sessions.

Mike Butcher had been the engineer on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, and he was charged with producing Sabotage.

In an interview withy Classic Rock, Butcher recalled that the sessions ran to a loose schedule. “I’d arrive at two in the afternoon, but the band wouldn’t start showing up until four. And because Morgan had a bar, that’s where the guys would wait for the others to arrive. So most days, we’d start work at nine and go through till one or two the next morning.”

Guitarist Tony Iommi – identified by Mike Butcher as Black Sabbath’s “unofficial leader” – stated that Sabotage was in part a reaction to the complex style of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, on which the band had combined their signature heavy metal with elements of progressive rock, aided by Yes keyboard player Rick Wakeman and even an orchestra.

“We could’ve continued getting more technical,” Iommi said, “using orchestras and everything else. But we wanted to do a rock album.”

Iommi said of Sabotage. “The sound was a bit harder than Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. My guitar sound was harder.”

Iommi’s heavy riffing is the dominant tone on Sabotage, not least on the song chosen as the album’s opening track, Hole In The Sky, which begins with the hum of amplifiers set at maximum volume and a scream of “Attack!”

The scream was an in-joke, delivered by Mike Butcher, who explained:“Sabbath had a supporting act who had a manager who would stand behind them on stage shouting, ‘Attack! Attack!’” says the producer. “So that’s what I shouted from the control room through the Tannoy.”

Even heavier was the album’s most famous and influential song, Symptom Of The Universe. Its bludgeoning, staccato riff would provide the template for Metallica and countless other metal bands, but it was more than a one-note head-banger. It ended in a funky coda, created by the band jamming while recording the track and subsequently overdubbed with acoustic guitar.

There were more left turns throughout the album. Iommi may have set out to make a more straightforward rock record, but Sabbath continued the experimentation they started on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. And, ironically, it was Iommi who created the most bizarre and unorthodox song ever to feature on a Black Sabbath album: Supertzar.

More atmospheric even than the song that gave the band its name, Supertzar was a dark, dreamlike piece featuring the English Chamber Choir, and described by drummer Bill Ward as “a demonic chant”. Tubular bells, played by Ward, carried an echo of the 1973 movie chiller The Exorcist.

On this track, the only connection to conventional rock music was Iommi’s slow guitar riff, played like a death march.

Ozzy had no part to play on Supertzar, but what he heard as he observed the song being recorded was, in his words, “a noise like God conducting the soundtrack to the end of the world”.

Iommi said, with characteristic reserve, that “it sounded really different and really great”.

In stark contrast was Am I Going Insane (Radio), essentially a pop song written by Ozzy on a Moog synthesiser, which he played on the finished track.

“Oz drove us all nuts with that Moog thing,” Ward recalled, “but the song was great. And in hindsight, it was kind of a precursor for his solo career. His personality was blooming on this song.”

The ‘Radio’ in the title was British rhyming slang: Radio Rental – mental.

As bassist Geezer Butler said, Ozzy’s lyrics were “definitely autobiographical”.

Sabotage is essentially the connoisseurs’ Black Sabbath album.

A retrospective review in Rolling Stone stated: “Sabotage continues the theme of themeless epic suites with twisted stoner-prog anthems that rock as hard as the early days, but also hyperextend themselves in unexpected ways.

“It might be the most underrated of their albums, and was certainly the original band's last stab at greatness together.”

If there is one album, above all others, which defines heavy metal, it is Paranoid, Black Sabbath’s masterpiece.

The colossal power in classic songs such as War Pigs, Iron Man and the title track was the template for generations of heavy bands to follow.

It was also the album that confirmed Sabbath as major stars, hitting No.1 in the UK and No.12 in the US.

Paranoid was released in 1970 just seven months after the band’s self-titled debut.

The whole album was completed within four days, according to guitarist Tony Iommi. And it was at the very last moment that the title track was written and recorded, after producer Rodger Bain insisted that the album needed one more song.

Iommi wrote the speedy, fuzz-toned riff. Bassist Geezer Butler already had a rough draft of lyrics and the title. And once singer Ozzy Osbourne had worked out a vocal melody, the song was complete. Written and recorded within an hour, it is the essence of Black Sabbath distilled into less than three minutes.

At first, Ozzy disliked the song. As he later explained: “I thought it was too pop. I rebelled against it.”

Despite the singer’s protests, Paranoid was issued as a single on July 17, 1970 – two months ahead of the album.

By August, it had reached No.4 on the UK chart.

In the wake of this success, the album – originally titled War Pigs – was hastily renamed Paranoid. But there was no time to change the album artwork, a somewhat bizarre visual interpretation of War Pigs, featuring a blurry, wild-eyed warrior figure in a motorcycle crash helmet, brandishing a sword and shield.

Paranoid is an album full of bad vibes. War Pigs is the thunderous opening salvo, a furious anti-war tirade that resonated powerfully at a time when the US was still embroiled in the Vietnam conflict. There is also an echo of Vietnam in Butler’s lyrics for the heroin blues Hand Of Doom, while Iron Man is a sci-fi horror fantasy, beginning with Iommi bending notes to fearsome effect before a leaden riff kicks in.

There is a brief moment of calm in Planet Caravan, a tale of astral travel with a trippy, spaced-out ambience. There is also a touch of humour in the album’s final track, Fairies Wear Boots, a heavy number named in reference to a gang of skinheads with whom the band had a punch-up during a British tour.

But on an album in which the central themes are death, destruction and insanity, Black Sabbath laid down a marker as the heaviest band on Earth.

Paranoid is arguably the most influential heavy metal album of them all.

In its dark power are the roots of bands such as Judas Priest and Slayer, and various sub-genres including black metal, doom, and stoner rock.

Two of the most significant bands of later years covered songs from this album – Faith No More with War Pigs, Pantera with Planet Caravan.

As for the song that Ozzy originally dismissed as “too pop”, he has sung it ever since, with Sabbath and without. As he said: “I couldn’t go onstage and not do Paranoid.”

Ozzy Osbourne will play his last ever show this summer in Birmingham on 5 July, reuniting the original Black Sabbath for the occasion.

But Ozzy might not have made it this far - as he admitted when he discussed his wild life in an interview with Q magazine.

“I was plain out-and-out crazy,” Ozzy said of his days as an alcoholic. “I’ve been arrested numerous times and I don’t remember much about any of them.

“It’s like when somebody told me they’d read the Mötley Crüe book [The Dirt] and they asked me, ‘Is it true that you snorted a line of ants?’ How do I fucking know?”

Ozzy talked about one incident when he might have died…

“There’s a girl who used to work for me and she was getting married in Hawaii and she asked me to give her away at the wedding. We were driving along the coast and she said to me, ‘Remember that cliff there - when you dived off it?’ I’d never believed in blackouts, but this made me think again.

“She said there was a forty-foot cliff and I’d dived off it into the ocean. Apparently I’d said it was a good day to fly!

“I couldn’t believe what she was saying. For one thing, I’m scared of heights. But she said it was true, and I had no recollection of it. That’s crazy shit.”

Ozzy reckoned that his alcoholism and drug use peaked after he was fired from Black Sabbath in 1979.

“When you get kicked out of a band like Black Sabbath and you make it on your own, you end up with a massive ego,” he said. “You really do think that your shit doesn’t stink. When the booze ands drugs really kicked in, my ego was out of control.”

He admitted that this was a low point in his life.

“I’d look in the mirror and I’d feel so pathetic,” he said. “So ashamed of myself. I couldn’t enjoy my success. I’d have to get fucked up.

“I’m from a working class family, and working class people, when they’ve done something worth celebrating, they go to the pub. And that’s what I did.”

He also praised his wife and manager Sharon for making him see sense.

“Drugs were making me miserable,” he said. “I’d get high and come straight back down again. Then do it all over again.

“Sharon said to me, ‘You see a kid in his twenties getting fucked up and you understand it, but when you see a guy in his fifties doing it, it’s pathetic.’

“That’s when it hit me,” Ozzy said. “That’s when I realised: this stuff isn’t working…”

Black Sabbath are to play live for the final time in Birmingham on 5 July.

The band’s original line-up - singer Ozzy Osbourne, guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward - will reunite for the first time in 20 years to headline an all-day concert at Villa Park.

The bill will also feature Metallica, Pantera, Slayer, Gojira, Anthrax Alice In Chains, Halestorm, Lamb Of God and Mastodon.

The event will be directed by Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello, who claims it will be "the greatest heavy metal show ever”.

Morello will also perform on the day as part of a loose supergroup featuring Slash, Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst and The Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan.

Proceeds from the show will support Cure Parkinson's, the Birmingham Children's Hospital and Acorn Children's Hospice, the latter supported by Aston Villa Football Club.

Tickets go on sale at 10am GMT on 14 February at LiveNation.co.uk.

Heavy metal fans got an early Christmas present this week when rare concert footage of Black Sabbath was posted online.

The 30-minute clip was filmed at Sabbath’s show at the 10,000-capacity Selland Arena in Fresno, California on 9 November 1976.

This show was part of Sabbath’s Technical Ecstasy tour and features the original and classic line-up of the band: Ozzy Osbourne (vocals), Tony Iommi (guitar), Geezer Butler (bass) and Bill Ward (drums).

The six songs featured are Symptom Of The Universe, Snowblind, All Moving Parts (Stand Still), War Pigs, Gypsy and Children Of The Grave.

Technical Ecstasy was Black Sabbath’s seventh studio album. It was after the following album, 1978’s Never Say Die!, that Ozzy Osbourne was fired from the band in a move that shocked rock fans.

But in this footage from the Technical Ecstasy tour the band are a tight unit and Ozzy commands the stage brilliantly - especially during Snowblind, when he yells at the audience: “Everybody clap your hands and boogie!”

It’s classic stuff!

On 15 October it was reported that Jake E. Lee, former guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne, had been shot multiple times in an apparently random incident in Las Vegas. His management stated: “Lee is fully conscious and doing well in an intensive care unit at a Las Vegas hospital. He is expected to fully recover. Las Vegas authorities believe the shooting was completely random and occurred while Lee took his dog out for a walk in the early morning hours.”

Ozzy issued his own statement via TMZ: “It’s been 37 years since I’ve seen Jake E. Lee, but that still doesn’t take away from the shock of hearing what happened to him today. It’s just another senseless act of gun violence. I send my thoughts to him and his beautiful daughter, Jade. I just hope he’ll be ok.”

Jake was a member of Ozzy’s band between 1982 and 1987, and played on two multi-platinum albums, Bark At The Moon (1983) and The Ultimate Sin (1986).

He was hired by Ozzy in the aftermath of a tragedy. On 19 March 1982, Ozzy’s guitarist Randy Rhoads was killed in a plane crash in Florida during a US tour. That tour was completed with two guitarists: first, Bernie Torme (ex-Gillan) and then Brad Gillis of Night Ranger. But in late ’82 Ozzy sought a permanent replacement for Rhoads, and as Jake recalled in an interview with Classic Rock, he got the job in a surprising turn of events.

At this stage, Jake was well known on the LA rock circuit, having played briefly in Ratt and Rough Cutt. He’d also been approached by Mötley Crüe (he claimed that they wanted him as either a replacement for guitarist Mick Mars or to make them a two-guitar band). And he’d been in an early line-up of Dio, led by Ronnie James Dio, the singer who had replaced Ozzy in Black Sabbath in 1979.

Jake sent a tape and a photo to Ozzy’s wife and manager, Sharon. He then heard on the LA grapevine that George Lynch, the guitarist for Dokken, had joined Ozzy on tour to rehearse during soundchecks. “George had got the gig,” Jake recalled. “Everybody knew it.”

But when Ozzy’s tour reached LA, an audition for Jake was held at a rehearsal studio. As soon as it was done, Ozzy offered him the gig. Jake, incredulous, said yes. A minute later, George Lynch breezed into the room, oblivious to what had just gone down. According to Jake, Ozzy simply turned to Lynch and said flatly: “It’s gone. You’ve lost it.” Pointing to Jake, he announced: “He’s the new guitar player.” And with that he walked away.

“I did feel bad,” Jake admitted, “but not as bad as I felt good. And at least I had an early experience of how Ozzy fires people.”

Jake was eventually fired in 1987, to be replaced by Zakk Wylde. But as Jake told Classic Rock, he remained grateful for the time he had with Ozzy. “It was amazing,” he said.

And most of all, he felt that following in the footsteps of Randy Rhoads had made him raise his own game. “I realised that those were big shoes to fill,” he said. “Randy was the best guitar player since Eddie Van Halen. But I was a good player. I just became a better player because I had to follow Randy.”

It has been a long time coming, but MXR has finally launched its Randy Rhoads Distortion+, a limited edition signature pedal that has been meticulously engineered from the very same pedal that was on the late Ozzy Osbourne guitarist’s pedalboard. And it looks very much worth the wait.

Just look at it. Even before we consider the flurry of Blizzard Of Ozz tones contained within, this is a treat for Rhoads fans. Finished in black-and-white polka dots, an enclosure finish to match Rhoads’ iconic Sandoval V-style electric guitar, it has the double RR painted in gold at the bottom of the pedal, and “Randy Rhoads Special Edition” emblazoned on the top. You will find a certificate of authenticity and a commemorative booklet inside the box – a box that you should definitely keep.

The Randy Rhoads Distortion+ was designed in collaboration with Rhoads’ sister, Kathy. MXR’s design team were welcomed to the Rhoads’ family’s Los Angeles music school,the Musonia School of Music, whereupon they had access to his “chip pan” pedalboard and the Distortion+ that was such a crucial component in driving his amps.

“Randy harnessed its raw energy to slam his high-gain amplifier with a torrent of harmonics to create the sonic signature that would etch an indelible mark on music history,” says MXR, and you can’t argue with that.

The Rhoads family have given this special edition distortion pedal their sign of approval. 

“We are very proud of and honoured by this special signature pedal,” reads their statement. “It is a true tribute to Randy’s musical legacy.”

Others, such as fellow MXR signature artist Zakk Wylde, Metallica's Kirk Hammett and Phil Demmel – who all appear in MXR’s introductory video, paying tribute to Rhoads – would be of a mind to agree. And with just two knobs to play with there is something straightforward about its design that makes it so appealing. Oh, for a Les Paul Custom and a Marshall stack right now…

So yes, those knobs are as simple as can be. You have got Output controlling output volume and Distortion for dialling in your dirt. The Distortion+ is voiced for the sort of “overdriven tube-like tones” you will hear on Rhoads’ work with Ozzy. It is not the whole story, of course. 

You might also wish to spend some time browsing the MXR catalogue. Its 10-band EQ, M134 Stereo Chorus and Analog Delay pedals would be welcome on any Rhoads acolyte’s 'board. Completists could always spring for an M117R Flanger too, though it’s not essential. 

What is essential is chops, and lots of them. That, as ever, was the secret sauce to Rhoads’ tone. He always played right on the edge of his abilities. That brought an energy to his Ozzy recordings that few, if any, could match.

For a time it was Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen on the frontier. Players such as Paul Gilbert were listening. Speaking to MusicRadar in 2019, Gilbert said Rhoads sounded like “he was battling a dragon”.

“He had the best rock guitar tone I ever heard live and it was huge,” said Gilbert. “I couldn’t believe it. How could this happen!? It sounded hi-fi. It didn’t sound small or harsh; it was good, and big. His playing to me sounded like he was battling a dragon. And he was a little guy, so the guitar was big on him.

“Technically, he was always just one step away from it falling apart, but what we would play would have so much intention, and his compositions were so cool, and his note choice was so cool that technical, barely making it added such a nice drama to it all.”

For more all-star testimony on the greatest of Randy Rhoads, check out MXR’s video above. 

And for some of Rhoads’ gnarly tones on your ‘board, check out the Randy Rhoads MXR Distortion+, which is out now, priced $169 street. See Jim Dunlop for more details.

The new football season is just a few weeks away (I know...) ‘Tis the season then for Premier League clubs to launch their new kit, which in the 21st Century tends to be conducted via social media. Aston Villa though have chosen to do theirs with the help of a pair of bona fide rock legends.

Black Sabbath’s Ozzy Osbourne and Geezer Butler feature prominently in the one minute-long Youtube clip. The two can be seen chatting on the phone, with Ozzy suggesting they play Villa Park. “As long as I’m left wing,” Geezer replies. And then we’re into a montage featuring Villa fans, staff, manager Unai Emery, all soundtracked by Paranoid.

At one point goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez can be seen in the dressing room and says ‘who’s that?’ pointing at Butler, who’s stripped down, ready to play and asking ‘do you want me through the middle, or on the left?’ 

Seconds later Geezer can be seen, eyes closed, listening to the Champions League theme on his stereo (Villa will play in the prestigious European competition this season for the first time since the early 1980s).

Then there’s an announcement on the tannoy: ‘Number Eleven: The Prince Of Darkness’. ‘Who’s that?’ asks a disbelieving John McGinn. ‘The biggest frontman to ever come out of Birmingham,’ answers Ozzy, not unreasonably.

It goes without saying that Osbourne and Butler are lifelong fans of the club. And that comment about the band playing Villa Park isn’t there for show either. Earlier this year Sharon Osbourne revealed that whilst her husband is done with touring, he’d like to play two final shows at Villa Park to “say goodbye” to fans.

In other Sabbath news Geezer Butler has been opening up about his battles with clinical depression. In an interview with NPR’s Bullseye With Jesse Thorn, the bassist talked about how he used to hide it out of fear: “Back then nobody ever said anything about depression or anything like that, and people were terrified to mention that you might be depressed 'cause you automatically thought you were gonna be taken away to a mental hospital and be locked away forever. So you couldn't talk about it to people in case that happened.”

Things changed in the 1990s after he suffered a nervous breakdown. “And I went to this doctor, the usual doctor, and I just explained everything to him and he told me that I was clinically depressed and he put me on Prozac. And after six weeks, I finally came out of the depression. And I thought, 'Oh, yeah. This is what I'm supposed to feel like.' And ever since that, I've been okay."

Paranoid, of course, was originally inspired by these feelings of mental anguish, which the success of that album did little to alleviate. "I enjoyed the success of the album, absolutely,” Butler explained. “People would say, 'You've got all this money coming in. You've got a No 1 album. What have you got to be depressed about?' But it's like a disease. There's nothing you can do about it, no matter how much money you've got or how happy you are with your job.”