‘In 1968, John Osbourne was an up-and-coming rock ’n’ roll star,’ I would say in this fake movie-announcer voice as I wandered around the house. ‘In 1969, he was an up-and-coming garbageman.’
Ozzy OsbourneI remember taking my entire wardrobe with me on that trip.
It consisted of one shirt on a wire hanger, and one pair of underpants in a carrier bag.
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.
Ozzy OsbourneAs far as we were concerned, we were just a blues band that had decided to write some scary music.
Ozzy OsbourneI 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.
Ozzy OsbourneWe set up our gear for the tune-up and Tony [Iommi] 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 f**king 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 Dream-in’”.’
‘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.
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.’
I’m a lunatic by nature, and lunatics don’t need training – they just are.
Ozzy OsbourneDay one, the van broke down. It was so cold the accelerator cable froze, so when Tony [Iommi] put his foot down it snapped in half. Which meant we were stranded in the middle of f**king nowhere, halfway to Copenhagen. There was a blizzard outside, but Tony said it was my job – as the band’s ‘public representative’ – to go and find some help. So out I walked into this field, snow blowing into my face, two icicles of snot hanging out of my nose, until finally I saw the lights of a farmhouse up ahead. Then I fell into a trench. After finally pulling myself out of the f**king thing, I waded through the snow until I reached the front door, then knocked loudly.
‘Halløj?’ said the big, red-faced Eskimo bloke who opened the door.
‘Oh, thank f**k,’ I said.
[...]
‘Halløj?’
I didn’t know any Danish, so I pointed towards the road, and said, ‘Van. El kaputski. Ya?'
‘The world doesn’t revolve around Tony [Iommi],’ he said. ‘There’ll be other guitarists.’
He was a good guy, my old man. But this time he was wrong. There were no other guitarists.
Not like Tony.
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