The Tapes Archive

Marc Allan: Hi, how are you?

Ozzy Osbourne: I’m fine.

Marc Allan: Good, well first thing, thanks for talking to me, it’s been a long time. And I also wanna say, every time I’ve seen you perform over the last five, six years or so you seem genuinely surprised and pleases by the fan adoration, they just love you. Pleased I can understand, but why are you surprised?

Ozzy Osbourne: Well, every time I go out, I mean I’ve been doing it a long time, you know. And I’ve lasted a hell of a long run. I mean, I’m just absolutely thrilled just to be on stage and playing for people that wanna see me, because I’ve never really rated myself as a great singer, but I’ve got such a love for them people. It’s like a love affair, it’s like when you wait for a girlfriend, and you’re all bubbly and all excited to see her, and then when you see her you get all that nice feeling inside, when you see the person you really want to be with and that’s how I feel about my audience. I really, genuinely do have a love affair with my audience. It’s really amazing for you, it’s better than any drug, anything I’ve ever had, the audience feeling I get.

Marc Allan: So that’s why retirement sucked.

Ozzy Osbourne:  Absolutely, I missed my girlfriend.

Marc Allan: This tour, I mean it seems to me, and I don’t know if you have the same success in other cities that you do in Indianapolis but every time you come here there’s 15,000 or so people and this tour seems like, man, really piling it on. You could go out solo and get the same number of people. Why are you doing this whole huge tour?

Ozzy Osbourne:  Well the reason why is because eventually the inevitable thing is going to happen whereas I do retire, eventually everything comes to an end. But I’d like to leave my mark, and I’d like the Ozzfest to go on with or without me, as long as I’m involved to some capacity, to be there for a long time. I mean, I wanna be involved to some capacity whether I’m playing or not, so it’s my way to say, “I’m still here, I haven’t quite gone away.” I’m figuring the long-term thing.

Marc Allan: You’re not going away any time soon, are you? I mean, you’re not stopping, are you?

Ozzy Osbourne:  No way.

Marc Allan: No, okay, I didn’t think so.

Ozzy Osbourne:  The reason why the, sorry? Excuse me one second.

Marc Allan: Okay, sure,

Ozzy Osbourne:  Four number fours. [Ozzy ordering food]. What was I saying?

Marc Allan: You were just saying that you were gonna be sticking with the tour a while, I think.

Ozzy Osbourne:  As Murphy’s law goes, anything can happen at any given moment, so when my wife came up with the suggestion in the middle of last year, it’s about the Ozzfest, I said, “Do you think we’re gonna “bite off more than we can chew?” And I know I could do it on my own. I could sell these places around, but I’ve always been a kind of a pioneer throughout my career and I love to give people the benefit of the doubt. I love the shock value like Marilyn Manson, it’s great.

Marc Allan: Okay, I was gonna ask you about that later, but do you have a sense of why people have stuck with you over the years, I mean aside from the fact that they like your music, is there something about you?

Ozzy Osbourne:  I don’t know, and I don’t really wanna know. I mean, I’m one of these people that if I’m not for you, I’ll fall to pieces.

Marc Allan: Yeah, how did the Sabbath reunion idea come to pass?

Ozzy Osbourne:  Well I’ve been asked time and time, and every time I walk out my bloody door somebody’s saying, “Will there ever be a chance of seeing you?” Unfortunately it’s not quite Black Sabbath because Billy’s not there. He’s the best part, he’s a good part of Black Sabbath and we’ll be able to play the old stuff with the guitar, but Michael Bordin, my drummer, is gonna be playing drums it looks like. But we’re just gonna play the best we can, and the rest of it nobody plays guitar like Iommi in the Sabbath songs. Geezer’s a great, great bass player, and so is Mike Bordin a good drummer, you know. But I’m rehearsing, I haven’t played with them for a long, long time, and I know everybody calls it rehearsing but we just played.

Marc Allan: And how does it sound? Is it like you never left, or is it a whole different feeling?

Ozzy Osbourne: Well, it’s not like I never left because clearly I’ve been solo longer than I ever was in Sabbath, but we grew up together. We went to the same village, we were in a two-mile radius of each other and it’s like going back to see your family, it’s like a family reunion, so we just talked about how each other’s moms and dads were and unfortunately Tony’s mother just passed away last year, which is very sad. We’ve spent most of the time just reflecting on the old times, and when we did this crazy stunt and I did that crazy stunt, and the first time we’d come to the States, and it was just great to talk our war stories and remember when we did this, and I did that, and you did this.

Marc Allan: Have there been any great memories unearthed? I mean, can you tell me one story of the old days that you’ve been talking about?

Ozzy Osbourne:  I remember when we first came to the States and we all got on the plane from Heathrow airport and we were freaked out that the fucking plane was in the air for seven hours without stopping for gas. We we fucking freaked over it, and we thought, this fucker is the size of a house, it’s gotta stop for petrol somewhere.

Marc Allan: Yeah, no place to stop, really.

Ozzy Osbourne:  The length of the flight was seven hours. It was like forever.

Marc Allan: Why isn’t Bill Ward with you?

Ozzy Osbourne:  Oh to be honest, it’s not my decision. I just, Sharon said to me, “What do you think about getting back to Sabbath?” I said, “Well, it’s family, I’ve always been game.” It’s the old story, we’ve all got individual managers. It wasn’t so much the band, but the band managers. I’m not saying my wife, but my wife’s always the only one that’s up to par with the present situation where I’m not putting anybody down here, but there’s a communication breakdown that was going on in the bus, and I said to Sharon, “If you can pull it off, pull it off,” and I said, “I’m here, and I’m willing to give it a shot.” And I spoke to Tony and Billy and I said, “Well after the last time, they went out with Billy and it just didn’t work because. I said, it’s nothing personal I have against Bill Ward. It’s that when I go onstage, no matter what I’m feeling, I have to give the best show I’ve got and leave my petty, or whatever–I call them petty, but it might be pretty serious to the people who are involved. I said, “Leave all your problems in the dressing room and pick them up when you are off stage and start going crazy, but you don’t take your problems on stage with you.” But it’s professionally not acceptable in my opinion, because the audience don’t want to know what you do with your life. All they wanna do is bang their heads and reflect on the past.

Marc Allan: Can you, are you willing to elaborate on what Bill Ward’s problems are?

Ozzy Osbourne:  I don’t really know, but I don’t know. It’s Tony and Geezer, they have to play the music. I mean, it would’ve been great for me to go with Bill and everybody, but it’s unfortunate. I’m not gonna start slugging Bill, and I don’t have anything bad to say about the man, but Tony and Geezer had played with him as soon as I’d left, and they said some things about why wouldn’t it work and I said, “Why wouldn’t it work?” and they’re telling me why and I don’t wanna repeat what they said to me because it’s not my place to, just to be real. I’m not being sarcastic here, but if you really wanna find out I suggest you ask them about it, because I just can’t be bothered to take any fucking body’s dirty laundry on here, it’s not fair on Bill and it’s not fair on me.

Marc Allan: Okay.

Ozzy Osbourne:  And another thing, it’s certainly not fair on the people that want to see it, because all they wanna see is see something on stage and play the music. So for such a long time I’ve been not always been playing during that time. All this personal shit, it’s nothing to do with anybody else, to be honest with you but the four of us, and maybe one day. One day it may happen, but I’ve sort of been saying, “Yes, it’s gonna happen,” and then at the starting post something happens and a firework goes up and it all runs away again. I said, “I’m willing, I’m here. You get it together one way or the other and just give me a call and tell me where and when you wanna do it, and I’ll be there.” The last time I ended up in the lion’s mouth and I ended up with a big tooth mark in my neck and I didn’t like it. And now all of a sudden it was all my fucking fault and I said I didn’t want to get involved in that so as far as the Bill Ward situation I really don’t have that much to say to anybody ’cause I don’t really know, but all I got from Tony and Geezer was it really wouldn’t work because they’ve tried it and you guys deal with it then.

Marc Allan: Okay, fair enough. It’s been advertised that you’re playing a whole solo set and a whole Sabbath set, is that correct?

Ozzy Osbourne:  How long do you call a set?

Marc Allan: You usually play 90 minutes to an hour and three-quarters, I think.

Ozzy Osbourne:  It would be something like that, yeah.

Marc Allan: Okay, and Sabbath too?

Ozzy Osbourne:  I don’t really know. I did do some rehearsals, but then it went crazy, and I went all around and around the world, a trip on my own to get away from it, so I did play, I did go so I went to Europe for a while, just trekked around Europe for about a month or so, so I’ll let you know. Do you wanna give me a call back next Wednesday, I’ll let you know more. Well we try rehearsing, ’cause Sharon said, “Well why don’t you just have a jam with them, see if you can still play together.” And I’m not being cocksure here, but I smiled to myself, I said, “We haven’t gotta fucking rehearse. “We just gotta see each other. “Just turn around and fucking play.” So when we were around, we did maybe before I went on this European trek of mine. We played a couple of tunes, and it was all, “How’re you going, Tony? What’s going on with you? I haven’t seen you for so long, good to see you,” and we just ended up sitting on the couch talking about old days.

Marc Allan: Okay, so at this point you don’t even know how deep into the catalog you’re gonna go, or what songs.

Ozzy Osbourne:  We’re gonna do, what I did remember saying we’re gonna do the platinum songs but I would like, because there’s some of the songs that we’ve never really played live on stage. Songs, I’m not gonna tell you what we’re gonna play because I want it to be a surprise. There’ll be the “Iron Man” and the “War Pigs” and the “Paranoid” but there’s gonna be some other stuff that was so interesting to us to play, that we’ve never really played live on stage, ever.

Marc Allan: Oh, that’ll be great, okay.

Ozzy Osbourne:  What’s that?

Marc Allan: That’ll be great, that’ll be incredible.

Ozzy Osbourne:  We’ve managed to find the old stuff. It’s off the old albums. When we wrote them songs we used to play them live on the stage before we recorded them but when we used to record them we virtually recorded them live anyway.

Marc Allan: There’s an internet chat that you participated in, and you said, “So much of what’s out there these days, I don’t listen to, it’s so angry.”

Ozzy Osbourne:  It’s true, it’s like, when I say it’s so angry, nobody sings a song with any kind of a melody. I mean, everybody sounds pissed off and I like to semi-understand what I’m listening to, there’s somebody going, somebody yelling down the fucking thing. I mean, there’s many ways to deliver a hard line without screaming.

Marc Allan: Okay, so you weren’t necessarily talking about people expressing painful thoughts.

Ozzy Osbourne:  No, no, no, the approach that these people have but that’s the next generation from me so when we started, people were saying the same about us. They couldn’t understand what the fuck we were singing because they were so used to listening to lollipop music.

Marc Allan: How does Marilyn Manson fit into that statement about angry?

Ozzy Osbourne:  I like Marilyn Manson because they’ve got a shock value and I can’t really speak on their music because I haven’t really, I’ve heard the one song. I saw the video, I thought it was very dark. It made me go, “Mmm, this looks interesting.” I like them because you take them or you fucking don’t. There’s no bullshit about them. They just are what they are, and apparently they wear their makeup and stuff all the time. So they can’t say, well, get into a three-piece suit and get into a fucking sports car and drive off with a blonde chick with big tits sitting by the side of them. They’re playing for real.

Marc Allan: And a few people have tried to ban you and censor you over the years.

Ozzy Osbourne:  It’s like I’m passing the torch and obviously I’ll probably pass the torch. I mean, we started Black Sabbath and then it went to KISS, then it went to, it still was with Sabbath, and it’s from that to this, it’s all the same fucking, it’s all the same jacket with a different star.

Marc Allan: Is it amazing to you that 25 years later they’re still trying to stop people like this?

Ozzy Osbourne:  I mean, I was waiting for somebody like Marilyn Manson to come and wake these fucking dormant punks up again.

Marc Allan: Okay, you’re starting your own record label?

Ozzy Osbourne:  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Marc Allan: What is it called?

Ozzy Osbourne:  Ozz Records.

Marc Allan: Ozz Records, and it’s–

Ozzy Osbourne:  And I’d have to say that it’s not primarily a metal label, the mistake I made was calling it Ozz Records, because everybody thinks it’s a metal label, and it’s not. I mean, whatever we think is suitable, we’ll go for. I mean, it’s got a crossover from jazz, rock, blues, folk, all kinds of different stuff. So I mean, don’t just think it’s a primarily metal label because that’s far from the truth, I mean we just opened some new offices in Los Angeles and it’s a really funky vibe there.

Marc Allan: And when’s your first release coming out?

Ozzy Osbourne:  We’re just gonna put the live album from the last Ozzfest, it’s really good, it’s very good.

Marc Allan: Oh okay, so that’s gonna be the first release and have you signed acts? Are you going out and doing the A&R?

Ozzy Osbourne:  No.

Marc Allan: Oh, okay.

Ozzy Osbourne:  I’ve enough with this Ozzfest now.

Marc Allan: Okay. So have you heard some of the young acts?

Ozzy Osbourne:  It’s really hard to imagine. There’s a lot of bands, I just did a record for the Howard Stern thing with Type O Negative. They’re on the album, and they’re really good. It’s a very good album, I’m really pleased with it.

Marc Allan: Okay, Best Buy is sponsoring this tour, right?

Ozzy Osbourne:  Yeah, yeah.

Marc Allan: Any feeling about that? I mean, here’s a company where you can’t buy a stickered album if you’re under 18.

Ozzy Osbourne:  That’s purely my wife, my wife runs the business side of it, so I mean finally I’ve got somebody that’s been interested in the event, rather than any backlash. Other than somewhat, I mean I’m glad in one way that we’re the rock and roll tour that everybody loves to hate, because I like that kind of a publicity angle on it. People think it’s nasty, but it’s nice.

Marc Allan: But how about Best Buy? Do you have a feeling about that? I mean–

Ozzy Osbourne:  I don’t, actually. Best Buy, my wife got this deal worked out and I don’t really know what the implications are with the deal, I mean-

Marc Allan: Okay.

Ozzy Osbourne:  It’s just all part and parcel with the business. I must confess, I’m not a very good businessman. I’m not business-minded at all. I wanna give people a fair crack. With Best Buy, they seemed to have been okay with us. They haven’t put any restrictions on us at all.

Marc Allan: Yeah, I know they’re not putting restrictions on you, I just think it’s ironic, you’ve got Marilyn Manson who have stickers on their album and a kid who’s under 18 can’t–

Ozzy Osbourne:  So there’s a sticker on the album. It flies out of the box quicker, because anything with a sticker, it’s gotta have some controversies so they wanna buy the controversy.

Marc Allan: Right.

Ozzy Osbourne:  That’s why you’ve got an album with a fucking sticker on it.

Marc Allan: Okay, one of the best parts of your last tour was the movie at the beginning of the night.

Ozzy Osbourne:  It’s not the same video, we’re gonna do. I think my wife is working on a new one. We’re gonna put it all on video, put it on a Ozz Records video thing. It’s really funny, it’s a good spoof.

Marc Allan: Yeah, it was very, very funny, yeah. It was a great opening.

Ozzy Osbourne:  A lot of it never got played. There’s a shitload we’re going to be putting out in the video, anytime now. All the stuff we never brought out in the show is coming out, it’s really a fucking funny thing. It’s very funny.

Marc Allan: I’m looking forward to that, that should be great. Two quick other things and I’ll let you go. One is, in the Howard Stern movie, you’re in the movie, but when the actual event happened, were you actually backstage at the MTV awards when he did that thing?

Ozzy Osbourne:  No, no, no, no.

Marc Allan: Okay. So you just happened to be in the movie, that’s all.

Ozzy Osbourne:  Yeah, I mean, Howard’s a very good friend. He’s a very good, close friend of mine. He’s another one that’s very misunderstood. He’s a very sweet man, very caring man.

Marc Allan: Okay, and finally the other question I wanted to ask you was for another story I’m working on. I’ve been asking everybody I interview. If you became the overlord of pop music what would be the first thing that you would change?

Ozzy Osbourne:  Censorship.

Marc Allan: Yeah, there just wouldn’t be any?

Ozzy Osbourne:  Pardon?

Marc Allan: There wouldn’t be any, is that what you’re saying?

Ozzy Osbourne:  There wouldn’t be any because it’s freedom of the arts. I mean, because censorship is ludicrous but when you’ve got censorship, you got people for the shock value write about killing people and harming people. I just want to ask you one other thing. Do you think that, has there ever been anything to fear from rock and roll music? The only thing to fear is fear itself.

Marc Allan: Right, okay. All right, that’s great. Anything else you want me to tell people, Ozzy?

Ozzy Osbourne:  Just come to the show and have the best time of your life.

Marc Allan: Okay, that’s great, I really appreciate it. I’ll talk to you again.

Ozzy Osbourne:  All right, take care.

Marc Allan: Take care, bye bye.

Ozzy Osbourne:  Bye.