(Credits: Tony Iommi)
Tue 21 April 2026 12:30, UK
There would never have been a Black Sabbath without Ozzy Osbourne, no matter how much Tony Iommi wanted to admit it.
He didn’t think that the obnoxious kid he used to pick on in school would be the key to success when they were making their demonic riffs, but that bluesy register that ‘The Prince of Darkness’ had was half the reason why people latched onto their music. He genuinely sounded like he was putting himself through torture when talking about demons, but there were limits on where Sabbath could go with him at the helm.
Or at least, that’s what they found out over time. When looking through their first run of albums with Osbourne, it seemed like nothing was going to slow them down. Master of Reality was the first time they had started switching their usual way of writing, and even though Iommi was starting to tune things way down, it didn’t take long before Osbourne matched that kind of intensity when singing tunes like ‘Children of the Grave’.
‘The Ozzman’ wasn’t the greatest songwriter in the world by any stretch, but he more than made up for that in how hard he could push his voice. He wasn’t the same kind of singer that would work around key changes, and while Iommi kept tuning lower and lower, Osbourne ended up reaching even higher, to the point where he sounded like a 1970s version of Chris Cornell when he sang tunes like ‘Hole in the Sky’.
But by the time that Osbourne started not turning up for studio sessions and wasting their time, it wasn’t like they were in love with his sound anymore. The honeymoon period for them had faded some time after Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, and while Osbourne was a great force when he was there, Ronnie James Dio gave them the kind of range they didn’t even know was possible when working on Heaven and Hell.
They weren’t the same band singing tunes like ‘Iron Man’ anymore, and while there wasn’t the same kind of brooding tone that Osbourne had, that was only a good thing in the band’s mind. They needed a total reinvention to show everyone they could survive Osbourne’s leaving, and a song like ‘Neon Knights’ was practically the sound of them dismantling their old albums and moulding them into something completely new.
Osbourne was more than welcome to carry on with his solo career, but Iommi felt that it would have been hell trying to get the frontman to work on those kinds of songs at that stage in their career, saying, “We were working on what turned out to be the Heaven and Hell album, and it just really wasn’t happening. I don’t think any of us were in a good state at the time, but he was probably the worst. It just wasn’t working at the time with Ozzy, and we just had to make a decision.”
But even if there was a lot of bad blood between both camps at the time, Osbourne’s dismissal from the group was really a case of everybody winning out in the end. No one would have imagined that Osbourne had the kind of drive in him to make tunes like ‘Crazy Train’ or ‘Mr Crowley’, but if he hadn’t been able to work with Randy Rhoads at the time, that would have been the real tragedy than trying to slave away in Sabbath all over again.
So while Osbourne couldn’t do justice to a song like ‘Heaven and Hell’, he was never supposed to, either. He was a blues singer through and through, and while he did smack-talk Sabbath’s records at the time for not being ‘authentic’, it’s not like he was the be-all-end-all for the group. Because at the end of the day, the sound of Sabbath belonged to Iommi, and whatever singer they had was going to end up sounding sinister thanks to those riffs.
