Tara Murtha from
Philadelphiaweekly.com spent "15 minutes with
OZZY OSBOURNE" recently, chatting about his new book, I Am Ozzy, among other topics.
Here are a few excerpts from the chat:
www.Philadelphiaweekly.com: You wrote at length about how the Satanists never fucked off and never stopped bothering you because they believed
BLACK SABBATH was all about Satanism. What I don’t understand, is that you listen to a song like
'After Forever', and it’s practically Christian propaganda.
Osbourne: "Once you call it
Black Sabbath or
Ozzy Osbourne or
Tony Iommi whatever, people go heavy metal! Satan! But where it all started was that way back when we first started, we used to rehearse in a community center across the road from a movie theater when we lived in Aston, Birmingham
. Tony one day said, isn’t it weird how people pay money to get frightened? Why don’t we start writing scary music? And it came from that really; you can’t write a scary song about Jesus."
www.Philadelphiaweekly.com: So you’re performing soon.
Osbourne: "The album comes out, I’m doing Ozzfest, then I’m doing an arena tour, then I’m doing a world tour, then I’ll do a fucking stint in a lunatic asylum I think."
On getting Geezer to learn the bass so he could be in Black Sabbath: “How hard can that be, eh? There’s only four fucking strings.”
On prog rock: “If you don’t have a sense of humor when you’re in a band, you end up like
EMERSON, LAKE & PALMER, making eight-disc LPS so you can all have you own three-hour fucking solos. And who wants to listen to that bullocks?”
On studio time: “I don’t care if you’re making the next Bridge Over Troubled Water—taking five or ten or fifteen years to make an album, like
GUNS N' ROSES did, is just fucking ridiculous, end of story.”
On public relations: “Look mate, the only evil spirits I’m interested in are called whiskey, vodka and gin … The good thing about all the Satanic stuff was that it gave us endless free publicity.”
Read the entire chat
here.