We wanted somebody who was different, we didn’t want to bring somebody in who was gonna sound similar to Ozz. Ozzy was great, but Ronnie was a different singer altogether. “Well, yeah, we could expand a bit more because obviously we the way Ronnie approached stuff was different to Ozz. Did you see it as an opportunity to recalibrate yourselves? You’d been a band for a decade at this point and heavy music had begun to change. We had this one riff idea that we’d come up with, which was Children Of The Sea, and Ronnie started singing something, and I just thought, ‘That’s great!’ It was just such a different approach.” I said to the other guys, ‘Why don’t we try Ronnie, and see what you think?’ This was when we lived in LA, so we got him over to the rehearsal room in the house. And then when Ozzy went, the first person I got in touch with was Ronnie. I actually talked to him about doing a side-project ourselves, something a bit different with the both of us. “I met Ronnie a party probably a few weeks before that, and it was Sharon, who introduced me to Ronnie. And we had to either break up or replace him, which we didn't want to do. He was going through a lot of stuff at the time. Things weren’t happening, and Ozzy really wasn’t into it anymore. “To be honest, the way things were in the band at that point was fairly dismal, you know. When you were looking for a new singer, was Ronnie an obvious contender? Or were you looking at the vacant position thinking, ‘Christ, who do we get?’ It was a bit of a challenge, but we enjoyed it.” And it was a really exciting period for us, because it was a nine-year challenge, because we were doing something new for us, a different thing. Because obviously, when Ronnie got involved, the writing became different because of the different sort of way he's approached. “Well, I mean, the whole thing was different for us. How did the departure of Ozzy and the arrival of Ronnie change the approach? You really seemed to seize the opportunity to do something a bit different and more dramatic… It was different to how it was before, but it sounded great, and we were able to do new things.” As Tony Iommi himself remembers, “We believed in it, and that’s why it worked, I think. Now given a deluxe reissue treatment, both albums remain masterful. The success of Heaven And Hell plugged Sabbath properly back in, and its follow-up, 1981’s Mob Rules, continued the upswing. Far from being crushed by the rise of newer acts like Van Halen and Iron Maiden (who had released their self-titled debut album 11 days before, the same day that Judas Priest also helped draw a line in the sand for metal’s new age with the unambiguously HM British Steel), Sabbath Mark II had recalibrated and were not only part of the new decade, they were helping to define it. Less than a year after giving Ozzy his marching orders, on April 25, 1980, Black Sabbath re-emerged with a new singer, former Rainbow frontman Ronnie James Dio a new album, Heaven And Hell and a sharper sound that played to their leather-lunged new man’s dramatic voice and took them to somewhere less bluesy and more fantastical than in the previous decade. The writing couldn’t have been more on the wall if had come from a can of spray paint. tour saw an obviously knackered band frequently upstaged by their opening act – a young, electrifying California outfit with a devilish circus performer for a frontman and a terrifyingly good guitarist in their ranks: Van Halen. When it was released, the album struggled, and a U.S. “Oh yeah, going nicely,” he’d tell them, knowing that in the next room his bandmates were getting busy achieving fuck all. Too much booze and drugs (and in relative terms, for this to be a standout problem in late-’70s Sabbath is quite the thing), not enough focus on work, winding up the rest of the band in the studio, Ozzy had become a drag on a band already struggling.ĭuring the making of 1978’s Never Say Die! album, morale was at a low, inspiration was in even shorter supply, and Tony Iommi would be forced to lie to the faces of record company people asking for updates. He’d already actually quit once, and returned soon after, but this time it was for good. On April 27, 1979, Black Sabbath kicked Ozzy Osbourne out of the band.
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