(Credits: Sony Music UK)
Fri 10 April 2026 13:00, UK
There’s never going to be anyone on this planet with half the amount of charisma that Ozzy Osbourne had.
Even though a lot of his greatest performances could be a bit more chemically impaired than others back in his prime, the reason why people loved having him around was that he was genuinely a massive music fan who seemed to love every second he had onstage. But even if ‘The Prince of Darkness’ was dubbed one of the founders of all things metal, he wasn’t as interested in being one of the most sinister figures every single time he went onstage.
Granted, it’s a little hard to consider yourself one of the most wholesome characters of all time when you’re in a band called Black Sabbath. The whole premise behind the band was about making the scariest music that anyone had ever heard, and since Osbourne was trying his best to get the most out of his voice, that often meant sounding like someone who was on the verge of losing their mind every single time he got onstage to sing their namesake track or working on their more haunting material.
No one was going to tell you that ‘Children of the Grave’ was a positive rock and roll song by any stretch, but the concept of heavy metal was still relatively new when Osbourne was first coming out. The public hadn’t really had a name for the kind of wild genre that was being created by people like Led Zeppelin and The Who when they had first started, but even when looking at the biggest names in heavy music, Osbourne couldn’t really be asked to pay attention to what the heavy hitters of metal were doing.
He was proud to have started a genre, but the biggest names in metal weren’t something that he listened to on a daily basis by any stretch, saying, “I don’t know [when heavy metal was first said] but I love to meet them so I could strangle the git. To be honest, I don’t really listen to that much metal. I listen to Peter Gabriel. I do like Guns N’ Roses. I mean, everything’s under the roof of being metal, and the way they perceive it now is if you have long hair and spandex pants, you’re metal, and that’s not the case.”
That said, it’s not like Osbourne was completely averse to metal bands on principle or anything. The biggest names in the genre like Motley Crue to Metallica have war stories about touring with Osbourne as one of their first major tours across the country, and even if Osbourne listened to more mainstream music, there was no way that he could turn away from a band that had tunes as sturdy as ‘Master of Puppets’.
But if you look through Osbourne’s record collection, you’ll tend to find a lot more Beatles and not a whole lot of Slipknot. He was much more interested in melody above anything else, and even when looking at some of the darker moments throughout Sabbath’s discography, you could still hear him reaching up as high as he possibly could to get the fire in his voice for a track like ‘Hole in the Sky’.
If anything, the kind of bands that seemed most indebted to what Sabbath were doing were those that were coming out of the Seattle scene years later. Osbourne was as far away from grunge as you could get fashion-wise at the time, but if you look at the riffs to a lot of Alice in Chains records or Soundgarden records, it’s not that hard to imagine his voice soaring over top of all of those songs.
So while ‘The Prince of Darkness’ didn’t exactly understand his place among the greatest metal bands of all time, that’s not to say that he couldn’t stand tall as one of the titans of the genre. Sabbath were never meant to be one of the biggest bands in the world when they started, but no one could deny that they managed to transcend any genre labels after they killed the Summer of Love.
