Ozzy Osbourne, the people’s Prince of Darkness, took heavy metal into the light

"The creation myth of Black Sabbath – and therefore of heavy metal, the genre they more or less invented singlehanded – is that it was a brilliantly canny piece of branding on the part of drummer Bill Ward: if people queued up to see horror films, why not create a rock equivalent? Black Sabbath certainly arrived fully formed – every one of the musical elements that made them legendary is perfectly in place on the eponymous opening track of their eponymous 1970 debut album – but the music they came up with in response to Ward’s idea felt organic, not calculated. Black Sabbath sounded like a product of their environment: a grim, provincial, industrial world, where the drugs associated with the hippy counterculture had arrived, but not the freedoms or opportunities enjoyed by London’s bohemian elite. And they sounded like a product of their era. If one response to the end of the 60s party was to be found in the wistful, delicate morning-after melancholy of 1970’s biggest-selling album, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, then Black Sabbath provided another: music that seemed as if it was lumbering angrily around with the kind of monstrous hangover that feels more like a nervous breakdown, suffused with dark thoughts, alienation, self-hatred and paranoia."

read article by ALEXIS PETRIDIS 

Ozzy Osbourne, the people’s Prince of Darkness, took heavy metal into the light | Ozzy Osbourne | The Guardian