Yeah, so this is tough. 

Really fucking tough. 

We all knew it was coming at some point. There might have been a whispered inevitability to it all, but that doesn’t make it any easier. 

The news broke less than two hours ago, and I’m sitting at my computer with a glass of JD and Coke, just wanting to put something – anything – into words. This could get messy. 

Two weeks ago I was stood at  singing “Mama, I’m Coming Home” along with 40,000 other people lucky enough to get their claws on a ticket. So when anyone in attendance tells you there wasn’t a dry in the house at that moment, you had better believe it. The worst part is that the reason for such high levels of outward emotion was because, deep down, a part of everyone just sort of knew. Nobody wanted to admit it, but among the tears of joy and the overwhelming feeling of euphoria throughout their brief set, there was also a looming, and unfortunately well-founded, fearfulness.

It’s been forty-one years since I found Metal (or it found me) and Black Sabbath was one of my first three major discoveries. AC/DC and Iron Maiden being the other two. A quick trip into town a couple of days after hearing just a handful of songs resulted in a trip to my local library and heading straight to the vinyl section. The very first record of any note I came across was Paranoid. I mean, what an album cover. A blurred, repeated image of a bearded bloke (yes, I’m English) in a crash helmet and what looked to be a pair of blue underpants, holding a shield and waving a sword around. Twelve-year-old me was entranced. But mainly just fucking confused.

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I didn’t have a record player, but my old man did. So to keep me quiet, he plugged a pair of stupidly expensive headphones into his equally stupidly expensive hi-fi unit and I was away. Apart from him having to get up and change sides every twenty minutes (I wasn’t allowed to touch his stereo for obvious twelve-year-old reasons), the riffs flowed and did not stop. I must have listened to Paranoid seven times in a row that evening. 

From the apocalyptic warning of “War Pigs” to the heavier-than-a-sack-of-spanners “Iron Man” to the chilled-out stoner balladry of “Planet Caravan,” I was in a world of my own. The crushing heaviness of “Electric Funeral,” that part of “Hand of Doom” which still gets me now in exactly the same way it did back then, and the hilariously fucked up “Fairies Wear Boots.” Seriously, a song so completely off its face that Ozzy couldn’t even be bothered to finish his last line, opting instead for a brilliantly lazy and totally baked, “yeeeeeeeaaaaahh” instead. 100% pure, stoned genius. “Paranoid” might have been the album’s big hit, but it was always one of the lesser tracks for me. A great song for sure, no question, but just look at the company it was keeping.

The worst part of all this was having to take the record back the following week. So to stop this particularly tearful parting, my father chose evil and taped it for me. Strictly against the law, of course, but it basically meant I wouldn’t be hogging his stereo anymore, as I had a cheap tape recorder up in my room. Of course, when I dug around the library further and found they also had a copy of Sabbath’s debut album, No Remorse (in a faux leather jacket, no less) by Motörhead, The Number of the Beast by Iron Maiden, and Van Halen‘s 1984, that was that. My parents got me a cheap second-hand record player, and all the illegal taping in the world happened in my bedroom for the next few years. And a lot of it was Sabbath.

It’s kind of scary to think that Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath have been a part of my musical life for over forty years now. With any luck, it will continue to be that way for another forty. Ozzy may be gone, but his voice will live on. It will in my house anyway.

So now, as I sat here at my computer blasting “War Pigs” from my own grown-up fancy stereo, I raise a(nother) Jack and Coke to the memory of one of the four men who unwittingly pioneered an entire musical genre and changed so many lives forever.

Cheers, Ozzy.
R.I.P.

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GARY ALCOCK
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