To celebrate the incredible life and reassuringly heavy music of Ozzy Osbourne, we revisit a classic Black Sabbath interview from the July 2014 issue of Uncut (Take 206). Riding high on the success of their chart-topping reunion album 13, Ozzy, Tommy and Geezer took us through the formidable Sabbath cannon, album-by-album.

Ozzy Osbourne is in high spirits as he calls from Los Angeles. “I’m having the time of my life,” he says, revelling in the success that has greeted the reformation of the classic Black Sabbath lineup for a new album and tour. “We’re having a fucking blast,” he adds. “We played the Hollywood Bowl last Sunday. The last time we played there it was a fucking disaster. It was 42 years ago: we had to cut the show short because we were all going to pass out from drug overdoses.”

BLACK SABBATH
Vertigo, 1970
The black and blues. The newly christened Sabbath rock out, pretty much live.

OZZY OSBOURNE: We were made by Jim Simpson… he used to have a club, Henry’s Blues House. We used to carry our equipment around in case someone didn’t turn up, and say, “We’ll play”. We started off as a blues/jazz band like Ten Years After, or Jethro Tull: the hip crowd.
TONY IOMMI: “Black Sabbath” was the second song we’d written, so we called ourselves that.
GEEZER BUTLER: The first time we played “Black Sabbath” was in this tiny pub in Lichfield near Brum. The whole pub went mental.
OZZY: The first one was a live album with no audience. The manager said, go to this place Regent Sound… we’d never been into a studio before. We did the album in about 12 hours and then went to do a residency in Switzerland…
GEEZER: [Producer] Rodger Bain was like a fifth member of the band. We’d been to six different record companies and producers, and they’d all told us, “Come back when you can write proper music.” Rodger was the first person on the business side who understood what we were trying to do. He just said, “Play what you do live.”
OZZY: When we come back from Switzerland, Jim said, “Come in and I’ll play you your finished album.” It had a gatefold sleeve and started with all this thunder and lightning – it blew my mind.
GEEZER: I loved the cover – but I didn’t like the inverted cross on the inside. It was the first time we’d had something to take to our parents and show we were doing something constructive.

PARANOID
Vertigo, 1971
The classic second album. An apogee of Iommi riffing, a whiff of Satan, and a hit single, too…

OZZY: Paranoid went from four tracks to 16 tracks. 16 tracks! The temptation was to fuck around with effects: we thought we were Pink Floyd meets The Beatles meets acid, y’know?
TONY: There was no-one doing this sort of thing. A lot of people were honestly frightened of us in the early days. We weren’t allowed to do interviews either, which made it more interesting in some ways. The image was built up by people talking… this satanic sort of thing.
GEEZER: We’d written “War Pigs” already. It was called “Walpurgis” back then. When the label wanted to know what the next LP would be called, we said we’d got a song called “Walpurgis” and we wanted to call it that. They said, “What does that mean?” And we said, “It’s Satan’s Christmas.” They said, “No, thank you.”
TONY: You get labelled as a black magic band and all that rubbish, but it was a more about what was going on in the world. “War Pigs” came up when we were playing at this club in Zurich and we had to play seven 45-minute spots a day. We hadn’t got enough songs, so we used to just make stuff up. And “War Pigs” was one of the things I just made up. Gradually, through the six weeks we were at the club, it took shape and we ended up with the song.
GEEZER: The very last thing we did in he studio was “Paranoid” – we had three minutes to fill for it to be a legal album. Tony wrote the riff, I quickly did the lyrics. Then the record company heard it and changed the whole title to Paranoid.
TONY: The album wasn’t long enough, and that’s how “Paranoid” came about. We’d never written a two-and-a-half minute song. I started picking around, had it in a couple of minutes, we learnt it and recorded it. I didn’t think for a minute it was going to be a hit.
GEEZER: After Top Of The Pops, we were getting teenage girls coming to the gigs. They were climbing onstage and molesting us while we played. That was the good part. But we knew that if we carried on like that, we’d just be another pop band. So we said, “No more singles.”
OZZY: I could afford to have a bath and put some smelly stuff on. It was just a great period of my life. The early days are always the best. I remember being in a club in Birmingham and posing around like the new child of rock, then the manager comes up to me and says, “Your album’s going in the charts at 17 next week.” I said, “Pull the other one!”

MASTER OF REALITY
Vertigo, 1971
The band’s last with Rodger Bain. Slow, heavy – a downtuned stoner’s choice.

TONY: We had to come up with stuff on the spot – we’d been touring so much on the Paranoid album, by the time we’d got to the studio we’d not had much time to come up with stuff.
OZZY: By that time, we were all so stoned I can’t really remember it. People often say to me, what advice would you give to young bands? I always say write as much shit as you can. If you get a hit – you’ve then never got enough time to write any stuff.
GEEZER: We were all doped out of our heads by then. That’s how we formed. When I first met Tony and Bill, Bill asked me, “Do you know where I can get any dope?” and I said, “It just so happens I’ve got a big lump of it in my pocket.”
TONY: Ever since I had my finger accident, I’ve had to experiment to develop things. So downtuning was another example of that. I went through a period of trying different tunings. It was a bit of a breakthrough.
GEEZER: The third album took us about 10 days to record. I thought it was the heaviest album we’d done so far. We knew we were accepted: we were big in the States, big in the UK. It just gave us more confidence.
OZZY: We used to smoke dope before we became successful – a five-bob deal, and we’d just go behind the shed and smoke a joint. But we all tried to stay away from heroin, cocaine and all that.

VOLUME 4
Vertigo, 1972
The band set up shop in America. Contains the mighty “Supernaut” and scenes of drug use.

TONY: We’d moved out to California. We had all the gear set up in the bar and we just had a great time playing and doing lots of coke. It was very much influenced by the coke.
GEEZER: It was a bit nuts at the house. We had all these mad fights with hoses and stuff. It was the first time we’d all lived together, and the first time we’d got into cocaine.
OZZY: Drugs became a part of Sabbath. We had the Egon Ronay map of cocaine dealers.
GEEZER: It was all the top dealers we were getting, so they’d come with bodyguards, armed with machine guns. They’d come up with these soap powder boxes filled with cocaine.
OZZY: We were originally going to call that album ‘Snowblind’ – if you look in the sleeve you can see we thank the “COKE-Cola company of Los Angeles”. People think it was a spelling mistake. I look back on it, and say, “Why am I still alive?” When you write on cocaine, you think everything you write is magic, but there was so much of that shit we never used.

SABBATH BLOODY SABBATH
World Wide Artists, 1973
The band stretch scaly wings: castles, funk, riffs… Rick Wakeman!

TONY: We’d done the same thing – we went to the same house, the same studio, but it just wasn’t working out.
GEEZER: We thought it might be the end. We got to LA, and they’d changed the studio. Stevie Wonder had bought half of the studio and put a synth in there. What you do on your laptop now took a whole studio then.
TONY: We ended up starting again in England. We went to Clearwell Castle in Wales. We wanted to create a vibe, so we rehearsed in the dungeons.
OZZY: We used to play tricks on each other, and pretend the castle was haunted. We’d have a few beers and then plant a bug in someone’s room and start making noises, like fucking schoolkids.
GEEZER: Tony said, “Let’s give it one more try.” And he came out with the “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” riff, and we just went, “Yes!” We stretched ourselves a bit on that one… we needed to. We’d learned a lot more musically. Rick Wakeman’s on it.
OZZY: In my opinion we should have folded after that. By this time, we’d realised the manager was ripping us off: we had lawsuits, and people serving us. That was our last joint effort.

SABOTAGE
NEMS, 1975
A legal matter, baby. Great album, marred completely by m’learned friends.

TONY: It was a funny period for us. We had a lot of legal trouble: we were switching over from being managed by Patrick Meehan. In the court in the day and at night in the studio. The frustration came out in the music: we had a track called “The Writ”.
OZZY: By Sabotage we had proof we were being ripped off. Every quid he gave us, he had 20,000 himself. I remember us doing a tour for God knows how many months and he gave us a £1000 cheque. If you’ve never had £1000, you go, “Wow! A grand!”
GEEZER: One day he said I can’t write you any cheques, there’s no money in the bank – I’ve put it all “in Jersey” for you. Then we got the tax bill for the money he’d taken. So we’d not only lost the money, we had to pay the tax on money we didn’t have. Then we found out all our houses were in his name.
OZZY: I remember him saying to me one day, “Do you know how much I’m worth, Ozzy? Eight million pounds.” That was a lot of money. I should have said, “Most of that’s ours, you cunt.”
GEEZER: Dealing with the business side of things kind of ended the band from then on. Sabotage took 10 months to record – it wasn’t any fun any more. We were all turning to drugs and getting stoned the whole time. It was horrible. Luckily the tours still did incredibly well – so we made money off that.

TECHNICAL ECSTASY
Vertigo, 1976
Recorded at Criterion in Miami, scaring the Eagles along the way.

OZZY: We tried to march forward but we didn’t know how. We’d been beaten up by our own drug abuse and alcoholism, and the music was paying off our tax demands.
GEEZER: It was getting harder and harder to come up with something new and different. It’s not like now: if you’re a heavy metal band, you put out a heavy metal album. Back then, you had to at least try to be modern and keep up. Punk was massive and we felt that our time had come and gone.
TONY: It was the first time that we asked a keyboard player to join us: Gerald Woodroffe. Then we shipped all the stuff to Florida and recorded it. The Eagles were recording next door, but we were too loud for them – it kept coming through the wall into their sessions.
GEEZER: Before we could even start recording we had to scrape all the cocaine out of the mixing board. I think they’d left about a pound of cocaine in the board. But we we had a good laugh on that album.
TONY: It was like paradise there. You’d be on the beach and you’d say, “Are you coming down the studio?” and they’d say, “In a couple of hours.”
GEEZER: The nearest pub was a strip bar: a lot of old blokes with dirty macs on hanging around outside in the 90° Florida heat. It was walking distance from the studio so we’d go down and have a beer. There’d be completely nude women dancing in front of you. It seemed quite weird to us. That’s where “Dirty Women” came from.

NEVER SAY DIE
Vertigo, 1978
Winter is coming. Ozzy returns, to a freezing reception.

GEEZER: It should have been called Say Die. Ozzy quit, we got in this other singer, Dave Walker, who wasn’t the right choice for the band. We’d booked this studio in Toronto, The Stones had just done their album there and were saying it was the best place in the world, so we thought maybe that would inspire us.
TONY: Ozzy came back but wouldn’t sing any of the songs we’d done with Dave Walker. So we had to go to Toronto with no songs. We had to hire a cinema, freezing cold in the winter, to write songs to record that night.
OZZY: We wrote the songs up where the screen was. Yeah, you really want to get into some heavy metal at nine in the morning.
GEEZER: The label had given up on us. The first night in Toronto we went into this restaurant and no-one had any cash. I’d brought $20, and paid for the food. We had one cent left and left it for the waiter. He chased us down the street.
TONY: I’m amazed we managed to pull anything out of the hat. With “Never Say Die” we ended up on Top Of The Pops, something we never thought we’d do again. But the writing was on the wall for the band. Ozzy just lost interest.
OZZY: When I was sacked, I thought I’m gonna go back to the hotel room and have the biggest party for as long as I got the dough, and go back to the real world. Then along the way Sharon comes along and says, “We want to manage you.” I said, “You want to manage me?” And she said, “We believe in you.”

13
Vertigo, 2013
It is risen! Rick Rubin reconnects Sabbath with its younger self.

GEEZER: We did have a few worries at first. But the difference between this time and the last time we tried to do an LP in 2001 was that Tony had about 80 riffs written. So it gave us a great starting point. When we met with Rick Rubin he gave us the direction.
OZZY: I’ve known Rick for many years and every time I see him, he says, “If you do a Sabbath album with the original guys, I want to be the producer.” So he says to me, “I don’t want you to think about heavy metal.” And I said, “What the fuck are you talking about? We invented it!”
TONY: Rick wanted to go back to the basics of the raw sound, with few overdubs. We were up for a go at that, but it’s hard to go back when you’ve tried to get a new sound going.
OZZY: We’d say, “We’re just warming up.” He’d say, “That’s what I’m after!” One time I wasn’t even singing words, just filling the holes – that’s what ended up on the album. He used ProTools like we used to use a four-track – he didn’t load it up with fake effects. What you get is what we played, with just a few overdubs. He captured the spirit of early Sabbath.

RIP Ozzy Osbourne, that most fun-loving of dark princes. Back in our May 2010 issue (Take 156), he kindly consented to answer questions sent in by Uncut readers – and a few famous fans, including Frank Skinner, Sparks and Aston Villa legend Gordon Cowans…

Who was your musical hero growing up, and what are you getting me for my birthday?
Duff McKagan, Guns N’ Roses

What am I getting you for your birthday? Same as you got me, you cunt, which is fuck all. Ha ha! My musical heroes? Well, it’s The Beatles, obviously. That’s why I did those Lennon covers. A few people have said they’re the worst songs ever made, but they come from the heart. I fucking mean them! I can still remember first hearing The Beatles. I was walking down the street in Birmingham with this battery-operated radio, and “Please Please Me” came blaring out. It was one of those moments where the world seems to shift a bit. Nothing was the same again. I used to fantasise about meeting McCartney. Now I’ve met him several times, and every time I still can’t believe I’m talking to him. Me and bloody Paul McCartney! Bloody hell!

Sharon’s recent autobiography talks about her being terrible at gambling, but says you’re a lucky gambler, especially on the slot machines. What’s the most you’ve won or lost?
Simon, Middlesbrough

I never got the gambling bug, really. You go into a casino and you get these silly bastards taking notes, making mathematical equations, like they can guess what’s going to happen. Oh, fuck off. My one and only experience of getting hooked was in Vegas. Everyone else was going to the blackjack tables and roulette wheels. I saw the flashing lights of the fruit machines and thought, oh, I like that. I remember putting in a few dollars and the machine started belching out all these chips. I thought, hello. Then I put in all my winnings and I won even more. It was fuckloads. Tens of thousands of dollars. And I actually thought, this is good. Instead of pumping all the chips back into the machine, I decided to cash them in, have a few drinks, and keep the rest of the money. It was the most sensible decision I’ve made in years.

If you could watch any two celebrities having sex, who would it be?
Frank Skinner

Fucking hell. What kind of question is that, Frank? Two celebrities? I suppose it’d have to be Frank Skinner and… Dawn French. There you go, Frank. You happy with that?

Has it really taken you 35 years to pass your driving test?
Nicky Reid, Brisbane

Seriously, it fucking has. I took it in California, which was a fucking joke. You barely have to reverse a few yards and they pass you. You also have to do this written test, which is piss easy. But I never managed to pass one in England. There was one time when I passed out during the test, slumped over the steering wheel. I woke up and the instructor had left a note on the dashboard saying: “You have failed your test. Do not attempt to move this car. Please contact someone to pick you up.” I get very nervous. I needed a drink. Mind you, Sharon’s not much better. She pranged some car in Beaconsfield the other day. We’re a disaster when it comes to cars.

What made you want to wear a tap round your neck as an item of jewellery?
Shaun Turner, Cardiff

I was a fucking idiot, that’s why. It was just the top of a hot tap, you know, the cross shape, with an “H” in the middle, and the four hands coming out. I tied a chain around one of the arms and wore it around my neck like a crucifix. Ha ha! I used to wear all sorts of rubbish. I wore a blue-and-white striped pyjama top as a shirt. I walked around Birmingham barefoot for years.

Both Ron and I are getting antsy: would you recommend solo careers, as you’ve done? PS from Ron: Do you need a keyboard player? Have own equipment, nice van, and no bad habits?
Russell and Ron Mael, Sparks

Sparks, eh? They’re nice fellas. I’ve met them a few times. You’re all right with the keyboards, Ron, I think I’m all right there. Going solo – well, it worked for me, I guess. I was up shit creek when Black Sabbath sacked me. I was angry about it. Still am, sometimes. But I was lucky. I had Sharon, who took care of everything. Without her, I’d be sitting in a pool of me own piss, smoking a joint. If it wasn’t for Sharon, who got me in touch with guys like Randy Rhoads, going solo would have been a very, very bad idea.

What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?
Ian Gough, Newcastle Upon Tyne

I had lots of shit ones back in Birmingham. There was the car factory, the loudest place I’ve ever been in – noisier than the loudest metal gig you’ve ever heard. There was this old fella next to me, driven deaf by spending nearly 20 years in the factory. He said if he stayed there another few months he’d get his gold watch. I said, if you want a gold watch that much you should put a fucking brick through a jeweller’s window. If he got caught, he’d get less than 20 years. Looking back on it, working in an abattoir was pretty awful, although I grew to enjoy that. I had to slice open the cow carcasses and get all the gunk out of their stomachs. I used to vomit every day; the smell was something else. It didn’t put me off meat, though, but I do think every meat eater should spend a few days in an abattoir. Meat doesn’t come in little sealed packets, cut into dinosaur-shaped nuggets. It’s fucking brutal work.

How come you mumble words in interviews, but at shows and on record you speak clearly?
Stephen Gwynne, London

I fucked myself up pretty badly when I had that accident on me quad bike [in December 2003]. What did I break? What didn’t I break? A collarbone, a bunch of ribs and one of the vertebrae in my neck. Still, it did mean that I missed Christmas, which was a fucking relief. But that injury has affected lots of things. I can’t remember things so well, I can’t talk so quickly. And my hearing’s not so good. And I was diagnosed with another thing not long before that, a bit like Parkinson’s. So I’m fucked. Ha ha! Thing is, when I get on stage and sing, it must use a different part of the brain. I’m much more confident. Well, I’m terrified before I go on stage, but once I’m there it’s fine. No mumbling, no hesitation, nothing.

Why did you agree to invite cameras into your house to follow your every move? Are you mad?
Smokey Robinson

Well, the whole thing started after we did this one-off show for Channel Five. That won an award and got repeated every bloody week. Then MTV did an episode of Cribs at our house in Beverley Hills, which went down better than any other episode they’d made. They thought it would be good to turn it into a series. It hadn’t really been done at that point. I said yes because I didn’t think it would ever happen. Maybe I was fucking mad. But then it did bloody happen. Thing is, I genuinely didn’t notice the cameras being there. But when the show was broadcast and became a hit, I suddenly became more famous than I’d ever been. Was it scripted? No! If you film anyone’s home for long enough, you will come across lots of crazy shit. You have five cameras following you around all day; soon enough they’ll catch you slipping on dogshit, or falling off a chair, or getting confused with a remote control. You realise that it’s all in the editing. With those reality TV shows, I watch how it’s been edited and I think, ‘Hmm, I can see what you’ve done there…’

What was your scariest drug-related experience?
Marcus Mendes, Brazil

Jesus, there’s been a few. Heroin was fucking horrible. I only did it a few times – too much vomiting. But the worst was Rohypnol. I was offered it as a sleeping pill. I’d heard about it as a date-rape drug, but I thought it was all bollocks. So I took it – I wasn’t likely to rape myself. So I tried it with a bit of brandy, waited a while, thought, ‘What a load of crap’, and then suddenly it kicked in. Fucking hell – I was totally paralysed. All my muscles seized up, and I ended up rolling off the bed and banging my head on the bedside table. It hurt like fucking hell. You can still feel everything, it’s just that you’re paralysed. It was like being dead and haunting yourself, some hellish out-of-body experience. I was trapped there for four or five hours before it wore off. Never again.

What is the most memorable game or experience you’ve had at Villa Park?
Gordon Cowans, Aston Villa FC legend

Me and my mates used to hang around Villa Park on match days. We’d look after cars for a few bob, make sure no-one nicked or scratched them. I remember standing on the Holte End a few times. It was always fucking great fun. I had some favourite players – Peter McParland, Jimmy MacEwan, Alan Deakin – I had posters of them on me wall as a kid. But I was never as big a fan as [Black Sabbath bassist] Geezer Butler. Whenever Villa lost, he’d lock himself in his fucking room for a day, turn out the lights and draw down the blinds. He’d be in a depression for ages. I never got that carried away about it.