Barely able to hear himself speak above the noise of the crowd, Chevy Chase asks for quiet. “We’ve got another group coming up that I think is gonna excite everybody,” the comedian-turned-Hollywood-star promises.
It’s July 13, 1985, and not yet 10am on the US’s eastern seaboard. But the day has dawned brightly for the 89,484 ticket holders gathered inside Philadelphia’s John F Kennedy Stadium for the US leg of the history-making ‘global jukebox’ famine relief concert Live Aid. They’ve already seen performances from folk legend Joan Baez, Motown greats the Four Tops, The Hooters, Billy Ocean, and Bernard Watson, an unsigned and completely unknown 18-year-old singer/ songwriter from Florida, who somehow charmed legendary promoter Bill Graham into letting him open the show, after sleeping outside the stadium for an entire week.
Later, this audience will be treated to short sets from some of the most iconic artists in rock history, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers, Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and a reunited Led Zeppelin among them. Before that, Chevy Chase informs the Philadelphia crowd – and the billion-plus music fans watching the live TV broadcast from the City Of Brotherly Love – that they’re going to see “one of the most visible heavy metal bands of the seventies, considered by many fans to be the standard-setting band of heavy metal”. “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Black Sabbath featuring Ozzy Osbourne.”
“Come on, clap your fucking hands!” Ozzy urges, the profanity bleeped out for television viewers worldwide. Not that anyone anywhere would expect good behaviour from rock’s most notorious wild man, heavy metal’s outrageous Prince Of Darkness, reunited on stage now with the band who unceremoniously sacked him six years earlier, which sent him spiralling into an abyss of self-loathing, self-destruction and severe depression.
Ozzy Osbourne and Tony Iommi with Black Sabbath at Live Aid in Philadelphia, July 13, 1985. (Image credit: Paul Natkin/Getty Images)
A lot has changed since 1979. Since firing the singer who fronted the band on their first eight albums, Black Sabbath have hired and parted company with three more vocalists – Ronnie James Dio, Ian Gillan and previously unknown American singer David Donato – and now exist in name only, with original bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward having exited stage left too.
Meanwhile, having been dragged out of the darkness by his wife and manager Sharon, daughter of Sabbath’s hard-nosed manager Don Arden, Ozzy Osbourne is now a major star, his most recent solo record, 1983’s Bark At The Moon, already certified as his third successive multi-platinum US release.
Tony Iommi will later admit that he viewed Black Sabbath’s three-song Live Aid performance as a potential first step towards a full reunion for the Birmingham band. Ozzy Osbourne was harbouring no such thoughts.
“Deep down,” he wrote in his 2009 autobiography I Am Ozzy, “part of me wanted to say to them, you fired me, and now I don’t need you, so fuck you.”
In truth though, for all his success and notoriety, Osbourne was facing issues of his own. When the 36-year-old singer graced the cover of the July 1985 issue of American rock magazine Hit Parader, the magazine’s editor Andy Secher told readers: “With the release of his latest album, The Ultimate Sin, Ozzy Osbourne has once again proven that he remains the true master of the heavy metal form”, adding, “Osbourne has emerged with an album that has silenced those who questioned his continued viability”.
Powerful words, but utter nonsense, since no record shop in the world yet stocked said album. Because, contrary to Secher’s bold claim that Osbourne was “ready to take on the world”, the singer was fucked-up, fragile, and about to face some of the biggest and more serious challenges of his life.
The previous year had been a rollercoaster for him. On January 12, 1984, two nights into the North American leg of his Bark At The Moon world tour, Ozzy had told his friend Doc McGhee, manager of support act Mötley Crüe, that “someone’s gonna die before this is over”. That someone, Sharon Osbourne feared as the tour progressed, would be her beloved husband.
“Every night,” Ozzy recalled, “bottles would be thrown, knives would be pulled, chair legs would be smashed, noses would be broken, property would be destroyed. It was like bedlam and pandemonium rolled into one, then multiplied by chaos.”
When the tour ended, and the Osbournes learned that Sharon was pregnant with the couple’s second child, Kelly, Ozzy was informed by his wife that he had been booked into rehab facility the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs, California, for a six-week stay, beginning the week after his new daughter was due.
“I think you’ll have a good time there,” Sharon promised Ozzy, explaining that among other things the facility would teach him “how to drink like a gentleman”.
Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne in Brazil for Rock In Rio in 1985 (Image credit: Dave Hogan/Hulton Archive)
Reflecting on the experience in 2009, Ozzy wrote: “In my head, I imagined this beautiful oasis of a hotel out in the middle of the Californian desert, with a shimmering swimming pool outside, a golf course, lots of hot chicks in bikinis everywhere, and all these Hugh Hefner types in velvet smoking jackets and bow ties, leaning against an outdoor bar.”
The reality, as he was to discover, to his horror, was somewhat different.
“I walk in and I’ve got pockets full of Valium, Quaaludes, coke,” he told US ‘shock jock’ Howard Stern in 1996. “They go: ‘Empty your pockets.’ I go: No! Why?… They’re itemising syringes, bottle openers, crates of beer…”
“My stay in Camp Betty was the longest I’d been without drink or drugs in my adult life,” he wrote in I Am Ozzy, “and the comedown was horrendous.”
Post-rehab, and before beginning work on his fourth studio album, in January 1985 Osbourne visited South America for the first time, for the inaugural staging of the Rock In Rio festival – a 10-day event drawing 1.4 million music fans to a purpose-built ‘City Of Rock’, where Queen, AC/DC, Yes and Rod Stewart were booked among the headline attractions. Upon boarding his Riobound flight, the singer told me in 2018 that he proceeded to get “fucking loaded”. “I woke up with my wife stabbing me in the chest with a fucking dinner fork,” he said, laughing.
Back in Los Angeles after the festival, Ozzy set aside time to write with guitarist Jake E Lee. But that schedule was immediately disrupted when Lee informed his boss: “I’m not doing anything until I get a contract.”
A great partnership on stage, not always great off stage: Ozzy and guitarist Jake E Lee (Image credit: Richard E. Aaron/Redferns)
A former member of LA rock glam-metal act Rough Cutt, Lee was a relative unknown, aged 25, when he joined Osbourne’s band. While his predecessor, the late, legendary Randy Rhoads, received a songwriting credit for every song on Blizzard Of Ozz and Diary Of A Madman, Lee wasn’t credited for a single song contribution on Bark At The Moon, with every song on the album, for the first time in his career, credited solely to Osbourne. Asked about this by Hit Parader, the singer stated: “He didn’t deserve any writing credits, all the ideas on that album were mine.”
Lee said nothing at the time, but in 2014, during an appearance on US DJ Eddie Trunk’s Sirius XM show, he presented an entirely different perspective on the subject.
“I was told from the get-go: ‘You write part of the songs, you’ll get writing credit, you’ll get publishing. That’s part of your deal,’” he said. “Finally, once I lay down the final track of my guitar playing, they said: ‘Ah! We have the contract for you.’ And in it, it says, specifically, Ozzy Osbourne wrote all the songs. You had nothing to do with any of the writing, you have no claim to publishing, and you cannot say so publicly.’
“I’m looking at Sharon, and I said: This is not what you told me before. And she says: ‘No, it isn’t.’ [I said]: Why do you think I’m gonna sign it? And she says: ‘Because if you don’t, we’ll give you a plane ticket, you go back home and you stand in line and you sue us. In the meantime, we have all your tracks, we’ll get another guitar player, he’ll redo your tracks, and you’ll have nothing.’
“They realised they got away with something on Bark At The Moon,” Lee told Guitar World earlier this year. “They knew it was something that would never happen again.” “While Ozzy was in rehab, I came up with everything that’s on The Ultimate Sin except for Shot In The Dark. Before I gave him my demos, I said I want a contract that says exactly what I’m gonna get out of this record. I need songwriting credit. I want the publishing I deserve. I said give me a contract that says that, and we can move forward. There weren’t any problems.”
(Image credit: Ross Halfin/Idols)
Originally, Lee worked on the music for The Ultimate Sin with bassist Bob Daisley and drummer Jimmy De Grasso, but both men were gone by the time the album sessions commenced with producer Ron Nevision, who’d previously worked as an engineer on Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti and The Who’s Quadrophenia, and also produced records for Thin Lizzy, UFO and Survivor.
From the outset, Lee recalled, the new-look band – completed by bassist Phil Soussan and drummer Randy Castillo – were “butting heads” with the producer, over everything from guitar sounds, to what time the daily recording sessions should start, from the temperature of the rooms used at Townhouse Studios and AIR Studios in London, to the mix, which Nevison was forced to completely redo when Lee and Osbourne decided his initial attempt featured “too many fucking keyboards”.
“He wasn’t the most pleasant of men to work with,” Osbourne admitted to Kerrang!, “but he got the job done. I was there to make an album, not to make friends… In the end, his treating me like a bastard really worked. I think there’s some good songs on there, and I hope it’ll do well on the streets. It’s better than any Sabbath album I made.”
“Let me see your hands!” Ozzy and his band at the Poplar Creek Music Theater in Chicago, July 13, 1986: (l-r) Phil Soussan, Ozzy Osbourne, Randy Castillo, Jake E Lee (Image credit: Paul Natkin/Getty Images)
Ahead of the album’s scheduled release – January 27, 1986 in the US, and two weeks later in the UK – Osbourne was confronted with matters more concerning than a hard-ass producer.
In late 1985, shortly after the birth of his son Jack, Ozzy had a one-night stand with a woman he met at West Hollywood’s Sunset Marquis hotel. Worried that he might have contracted a sexually transmitted disease as a result of the encounter, he had a check-up with a doctor.
“Well, Mister Osbourne, the good news is that you don’t have herpes, the clap or syphilis,” he was informed.
“What’s the bad news?” Ozzy enquired.
“Well, I’m afraid there’s no easy way to tell you this,” his doctor admitted. “You’re HIV positive.”
“I couldn’t even look at Sharon, I felt so fucking terrible,” Ozzy recalled in his memoir. “She must have hated me at that moment. But she didn’t say anything. I suppose the shock of it must have been as bad for her as it was for me.”
The couple underwent tests again, and this time, to the immense relief of both parties, there was no trace of the virus. But that news didn’t mean he’d got the all-clear.
“Basically, your immune system currently isn’t functioning,” Ozzy was told. “Your blood contains near-fatal quantities of alcohol and cocaine, Mr Osbourne, not to mention a number of other controlled substances. You might not be HIV positive, but your life is still in grave danger if you don’t take it easier.”
Ozzy and Jake E Lee headlining the 1986 Monsters Of Rock at Donington Park (Image credit: Ross Halfin/Idols)
The Osbournes scarcely had time to process the news before they were hit by another bombshell. On November 1, 1985, the parents of John Daniel McCollum, a 19-yearold Californian who had died by suicide in October ’84, filed a lawsuit against Osbourne and CBS Records, alleging that their son’s death was triggered by listening to the song Suicide Solution on Blizzard Of Ozz.
Osbourne always claimed that the song, which opened with the lyrics: ‘Wine is fine but whisky’s quicker, suicide is slow with liquor’ was about the death of AC/DC frontman Bon Scott. But Bob Daisley, who wrote the majority of its lyrics, later confessed that they were aimed at Ozzy himself. Whatever the truth, the lawsuit made Osbourne infamous once more.
“I became public enemy number one in America,” he recalled. “I started to get death threats wherever I went.”
“The fact of the matter,” he told Smash Hits, “is there was a boy who was very sick – that poor kid was well sick before he even listened to an Ozzy Osbourne record. I genuinely feel very sorry for both the parents and the child. But I’m a parent myself, and if my kid locked himself in his bedroom all the time and acted abnormally, then I’d feel distress and as a parent, I’d try to find out what the problem was, and I’d make sure he had some professional help from a psychiatrist or whatever. But they are just trying to pass the buck onto someone else – me!”
“It’s absurd to blame me,” Ozzy continued. “The poor kid shot himself through the head with his father’s gun. Instead of suing me, why don’t they sue the people who sold the gun?”
Ultimately, the case was thrown out, with the trial judge ruling that song lyrics were protected by the right to free speech.
“He said that although I was ‘totally objectionable and repulsive, trash can be given First Amendment protection too,’” Ozzy wrote in his autobiography. “I had to read that sentence about five times before I realised that the bloke had actually ruled in our favour.”
“I’m so used to being called Satan and having fingers at me, that I’m pretty used to the controversy,” he told Hit Parader with a sigh. “I just try to ignore it.”
The global release of The Ultimate Sin was preceded, on January 20, 1986, by the release as a single of the album’s most obviously commercial track, Shot In The Dark.
“That started as almost a disco song, from one of Phil Soussan’s other bands, and me and Jake transformed it into a metal thing,” Ozzy told me in 2018. “We completely stripped it down and rewrote the fucking thing. And then he said we stole it from him!”
In a typically mischievous move, Kerrang! decided to review The Ultimate Sin on a double-page spread alongside Black Sabbath’s Seventh Star, originally intended as a Tony Iommi solo album, which had its US release the week after Ozzy’s album. Ozzy had already made his feelings on the new Sabbath album clear.
“It’s a fucking disgrace,” he told Hit Parader. “To me, the whole notion of Black Sabbath has become a fucking joke.”
The British magazine, however, took a more generous view. Iommi’s album was awarded a maximum five out of five rating (“Seventh Star is a monstrous work that, in terms of recent output, gives Iommi a definite edge on old colleagues Ozzy and Dio,” wrote Malcolm Dome), while Ozzy’s new record received three out of five, with writer Dave Dickson stating his belief that the album “plumbed new depths of ordinariness”.
Twisting the knife, he shared his opinion that Ozzy’s “contribution to rock music has at best been negligible, at worst non-existent”, but conceded that “even if this was a pile of dingo’s kidneys, it would still shift in enormous quantities, so whatever I say isn’t going to make much difference.”
On the latter matter, at least, Dickson was correct. The Ultimate Sin reached No.6 on the Billboard 200 album chart, and peaked at No.8 in the UK. It would go on to sell more than two million copies in the US alone.
In 2022, Ozzy declared the record his least favourite solo album. “The songs weren’t bad, they were just put down weird,” he told Rolling Stone. “Everything felt and sounded the fucking same. There was no imagination.”
But 40 years on from its release, it stands up rather well. The title track, ushered in by a martial drum beat and a killer Jake E Lee riff, is an excellent opener, and Thank God For The Bomb, one of several mid-80s metal songs concerning the threat of nuclear armageddon, is another powerful highlight of the LP’s first side. (“Thank God For The Bomb doesn’t mean ‘thank God for the bomb,” Ozzy clarified. “All I’m saying is, if it’s the only way to keep the peace, then thank God for it. Does that make sense?”) Jake E Lee sparkles on the musically sophisticated Never and the superb Killer Of Giants, originally mooted as the album’s title track, and album closer Shot In The Dark is an inarguable classic. If this is Ozzy at his worst…
Whatever Ozzy’s take on the record, The Ultimate Sin sold more copies than any of his previous solo records, making him the biggest name in mid-80s metal. In the UK, his superstar status was confirmed when he was booked to headline the Monsters of Rock festival at Donington Park for the first time, on August 16, 1986, topping a bill that also included Scorpions, Def Leppard, Motörhead, comedy metallers Bad News and Warlock. That Black Sabbath reunion, and his former bully Mr Iommi, could wait.
“My ego loved it,” a smiling Ozzy admitted to me in 2014. “It was like: ‘Fuck you, I told you I was right!’ It was fucking unbelievable. Success is the best revenge.”
