Ozzy Osbourne - the soundtrack to so many wonder years

RTÉ News​

27-07-2025

I went on holiday once with Ozzy Osbourne. And Black Sabbath. To Portugal, when I was 15. It was late June 1988, and I was never the same again.
I had just finished the Inter Cert and the first week of a summer job. Before I left, I asked a twentysomething co-worker who had already become a pal - we're still in touch 37 years later, as the super glue of music did its thing in minutes - about tapes I should buy for the trip. With no hesitation, he said: "The Black Sabbath compilation We Sold Our Soul for Rock 'n' Roll."
It was in to Golden Discs in the ILAC that Saturday at 9am. I bought the tape and sold my soul too. A bargain at £6.99.
Fast forward 48 hours to baking in the back of a hatchback on the motorways of Portugal. Strauss was on the car's tape deck, but I had the headphones on and the AIWA walkman in the lap, doing a crammer to rival anything for the Inter Cert - this time on Ozzy Osbourne's first six albums with Black Sabbath.
I was all in from the first time I heard Paranoid. If ever a riff and an opening lyric - "Finished with my woman 'cause she couldn't help me with my mind" - told the novice everything they needed to know about a band and, indeed, a singer, it was that one-two. And the best was yet to come as I flipped Side A to Side B and back again.
You cannot overstate the importance of Black Sabbath's first six records: their self-titled debut (1970), Paranoid (1970), Master of Reality (1971), Vol 4 (1972), Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973), and Sabotage (1975). They're the blueprints of heavy metal. They blew the minds of a generation. They still do, half a century later. By the age of 26, Ozzy Osbourne had secured his place in music history alongside guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Terence 'Geezer' Butler, and drummer Bill Ward because of not one but half a dozen records. Think about it: six classics in a row.
We Sold Our Soul for Rock 'n' Roll saw as much winding action on that holiday as the sunroof in the rental car. I joined the dots and discovered how much of what I'd been listening to for the previous year and a half owed to Ozzy and co. I can still remember the exact moment on that holiday when I realised that the outro of Black Sabbath's Fairies Wear Boots was the start of Metallica's For Whom the Bell Tolls. You don't know what you don't know at that age, but you sense when you're on to something.
Thanks to Black Sabbath, I came back from that trip a changed teenager. The penny dropped that getting into music was not all about the latest overhyped albums and that the old stuff from 15 years previously - a lifetime when you're only 15 - could be way better. And cheaper.
Despite all the time that's gone by, two things never changed from that summer. I still regard those first six albums as the pinnacle of Ozzy Osbourne's career. Sure, he made some special solo stuff and Sabbath did sublime work with other singers, but 'The Six' have a life force all their own, and I know they're where most people went when they learned of his passing.
The other constant is that the stories of excess and terrible behaviour never held any interest. I thought they were sad at the time, and now I think they're the tragedy of someone being their own worst enemy. As awful as they were, they never eclipsed what Ozzy Osbourne accomplished on those early records. And never will.
It's no exaggeration to say every metal/hard rock band and fan that's out there today has their own version of the hatchback story above and what those albums did for/to their young minds. We've all been following a musical through line ever since we heard them for the first time. My own went a few months later to the Masters of Reality album The Blue Garden (they had me from their name alone) to Faith No More's The Real Thing (featuring a cover of Black Sabbath's War Pigs) the following summer to Nirvana's Bleach (it wouldn't sound like it sounds without you know who) in the summer of 1990 and on and on right up to the here and now and a Queens of the Stone Age gig in August.
Watch: Ozzy Osbourne at Black Sabbath's farewell show at Villa Park in Birmingham on 5 July
And on the subject of gigs, I didn't try to get tickets to Ozzy's farewell show in Birmingham last month because I'd already seen him with Black Sabbath at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark in July 2005. It was fine that summer night, but it felt after the fact. Put simply, it wasn't the back of the car in the summer of 1988. That was as good as it could ever be.
I did go away the weekend of the gig, however, and arrived back into Dublin Airport on the Sunday night. There were loads of fans coming home with the t-shirt of the concert - some were older than me! Hand on heart, I was delighted they were there to see the curtain come down after all those years. There was no jealousy.
No, no jealousy at all - but I wish I could be as Zen about another related matter. The kid who's hearing Ozzy Osbourne for the first time this week or next week or the week after? You bet your life that I wish I was them.