Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

‘Eh?’

We stood there and looked at each other for a second.

Then he went, ‘Undskyld, farvel,’ and shut the door in my face. I gave it a good old kick and set off back through the waist-high snow. I was so cold, my hands were turning blue.

When I reached the road I saw a car coming and almost threw myself in front of it. Turned out it was the Danish cops—friendly ones, thank God. They gave me a sip from a flask they kept in the glove box. I don’t know what was in that thing, but it warmed me up soon enough. Then they organised a tow-truck to take us to a garage in the next village.

Good guys, those Danish cops.

When they waved us off, they told us to send their regards to Bobby Charlton.

‘We’ll tell him you said hello,’ promised Geezer.

Day two, the van broke down.

This time it was due to a dodgy petrol gauge—the tank ran dry without us knowing it. So off I went to get help again. But this time I had a better idea. We’d conked out next to a little white church, and outside was what I guessed was the vicar’s car. I thought he wouldn’t mind being a good Samaritan, so I disconnected the hose from the van’s engine and used it to siphon fuel from his tank to ours. It worked brilliantly, apart from the fact that I got a mouthful of petrol when it came spurting out of the tube. I had toxic, highly flammable burps for the rest of the day.

Every time it happened I’d screw up my face and have to spit petrol and lumps of vomit out of the window.

‘Urgh,’ I’d say. ‘I fucking hate four star.’

Between gigs we started to jam out some ideas for songs. It was Tony who first suggested we do something that sounded evil. There was a cinema called the Orient outside the community centre where we rehearsed in Six Ways, and whenever it showed a horror film the queue would go all the way down the street and around the corner. ‘Isn’t it strange how people will pay money to frighten themselves?’ I remember Tony saying one day. ‘Maybe we should stop doing blues and write scary music instead.’

Me and Bill thought it was a great idea, so off we went and wrote some lyrics that ended up becoming the song ‘Black Sabbath’. It’s basically about a bloke who sees a figure in black coming to take him off to the lake of fire.

Then Tony came up with this scary-sounding riff. I moaned out a tune over the top of it, and the end result was fucking awesome—the best thing we’d ever done, by a mile. I’ve since been told that Tony’s riff is based on what’s known as the ‘Devil’s interval’, or the ‘tritone’. Apparently, churches banned it from being used in religious music during the Middle Ages because it scared the crap out of people. The organist would start to play it and everyone would run away ’cos they thought the Devil was going to pop up from behind the altar.

As for the title of the song, it was Geezer who came up with that. He got it from a Boris Karloff film that had been out for a while. I don’t think Geezer had ever seen the film, to be honest with you. I certainly hadn’t—it was years before I even knew there was a film. It’s funny, really, because in spite of our new direction we were still quite a straightforward twelve-bar blues band. If you listened closely, you could also hear a lot of jazz influences in our sound—like Bill’s swing-style intro to one of our other early numbers, ‘Wicked World’. It’s just that we played at eight hundred times the volume of a jazz band.

Today you hear people saying that we invented heavy metal with the song ‘Black Sabbath’. But I’ve always had a bee up my arse about the term ‘heavy metal’. To me, it doesn’t say anything musically, especially now that you’ve got seventies heavy metal, eighties heavy metal, nineties heavy metal and new-millennium heavy metal—which are all completely different, even though people talk about them like they’re all the same. In fact, the first time I heard the words ‘heavy’ and ‘metal’ used together was in the lyrics of ‘Born to be Wild’. The press just latched on to it after that. We certainly didn’t come up with it ourselves. As far as we were concerned, we were just a blues band that had decided to write some scary music.

But then, long after we stopped writing scary music, people would still say, ‘Oh, they’re a heavy metal band, so all they must sing about is Satan and the end of the world.’ That’s why I came to loathe the term.

I don’t remember where we first played ‘Black Sabbath’, but I can sure as hell remember the audience’s reaction: all the girls ran out of the venue, screaming. ‘Isn’t the whole point of being in a band to get a shag, not to make chicks run away?’ I complained to the others, afterwards.

‘They’ll get used to it,’ Geezer told me.

Another memorable performance of ‘Black Sabbath’ was in a town hall near Manchester.

The manager was there to greet us in a suit and tie when we climbed out of the van. You should have seen the look on his face when he saw us.

‘Is that what you’re going to wear on stage?’ he asked me, staring at my bare feet and pyjama top.

‘Oh no,’ I said, in this fake-shocked voice. ‘I always perform in gold spandex. Have you ever seen an Elvis gig? Well, I look a bit like him—but of course my tits are much smaller.’

‘Oh,’ he went.

We set up our gear for the tune-up and Tony launched into the opening riff of ‘Black Sabbath’—doh, doh, doooohnnnn—but before I’d got through the first line of lyrics the manager had run on to the stage, red in the face, and was shouting, ‘STOP, STOP, STOP! Are you fucking serious? This isn’t Top-Forty pop covers! Who are you people?’

‘Earth,’ said Tony, shrugging. ‘You booked us, remember?’

‘I didn’t book this. I thought you were going to play “Mellow Yellow” and “California Dreamin’”.’

‘Who—us?’ laughed Tony.

‘That’s what your manager told me!’

‘Jim Simpson told you that?’

‘Who the hell’s Jim Simpson?’

‘Ah,’ said Tony, finally working out what had happened. He turned to us and said, ‘Lads, I think we might not be the only band called Earth.’

He was right: there was another Earth on the C-list gig circuit. But they didn’t play satanic music. They played pop and Motown covers. The promotional flyer that Jim Simpson had printed for us had probably only added to the confusion: it made us look like a bunch of hippies, with each of our portraits hand drawn in little clouds around a big sun and ‘Earth’ spelled out in wobbly psychedelic lettering.

‘I told you it was a crap name,’ I said. ‘Can we please now think of something that doesn’t sound like—’

‘Look,’ interrupted the manger. ‘Here’s twenty quid for the trouble of comin’ all the way up ’ere. Now fuck off, eh? Oh, and the little hobo is right—you should change yer name. Although I don’t know why anyone in their right mind would ever want to listen to that shite.’

‘Dear Mum,’ I wrote, a few weeks later,

We’re off to do a gig at the Star Club in Hamburg.

That’s where the Beatles played! Am writing this on a ferry to Dunkirk. Hope you like the picture of the white cliffs (other side). That’s what I’m looking at right now. Big news: we’re going to change our name to ‘Black Sabbath’ when we get back to England. Maybe we’ll hit the big time now. Love to all,

John

PS: Will call Jean from Hamburg.

PPS: When are you getting a telephone? Tell Dad it’s almost the 1970s now!!!

It was August 9, 1969: the day of the Charles Manson murders in Los Angeles. But we weren’t looking at the news. In those days it was almost impossible to get an English paper in Europe, and even if you did find one, it would be three or four weeks old. Besides, we were too focused on our next gig to pay much attention to the outside world.