Ozzy Osbourne News

Black Sabbath world tour reduced to 15 dates under new name, although band will still play Download festival

Black Sabbath’s reunion tour has been downgraded to a string of Ozzy Osbourne concerts. As Tony Iommi continues his battle with cancer and Bill Ward continues his dispute with Black Sabbath, the group have replaced their world tour with a 15-date jaunt under the name Ozzy and Friends.

For the moment, only one Black Sabbath concert is going ahead: Osbourne will play with Iommi and Geezer Butler, although not Bill Ward, at June’s Download festival. While five gigs were cancelled, 14 more, including performances at Norway’s Bergen Calling and Italy’s Gods of Metal festival, are now billed to Ozzy and Friends. The singer’s friends will allegedly include musicians such as Butler, Zakk Wylde and Slash.

Iommi, who was recently diagnosed with early-stage lymphoma, is making “excellent progress”, according to the Black Sabbath website, “and is looking forward to getting back out on the road”. He, Butler and Osbourne are still working on a new Black Sabbath album – their first in 33 years – but show no sign of reaching out to Ward, the group’s original drummer. Despite his initial involvement in the reunion, Ward withdrew earlier this month, complaining of an “disrespectful” contract.

“I have not declined to participate in the Sabbath album and tour,” Ward wrote on Friday. “At the earliest opportunity, I am prepared to go to the UK and record, and later tour with the band … I remain hopeful for a ’signable’ contract and a positive outcome.”

View full post on Music: Ozzy Osbourne | guardian.co.uk

Metal legends dismiss drummer’s complaints over ‘unsignable’ contract, saying their comeback will carry on without him

Black Sabbath’s comeback will take place without Bill Ward. The metal legends have announced they are moving on without their original drummer, dismissing his complaints about the terms of their reunion.

In a statement on their website, Ozzy Osbourne, Geezer Butler and Tony Iommi hardly seemed sympathetic to Ward’s grievances. “We were saddened to hear via Facebook that Bill declined publicly to participate in our current [plans],” they wrote. “We have no choice but to continue recording without him although our door is always open.”

Though the specifics of the dispute have not been revealed, Ward has emphasised his interest in and commitment to the group – he simply has issues with the contract. “My position is not greed-driven,” Ward wrote on Thursday. “I’m not holding out for a ‘big piece’ of the action (money) like some kind of blackmail deal … [just] a signable contract … that reflects some dignity and respect toward me as an original member of the band.”

Fans have been vocal in their respect for Ward’s decision. “Your support from across the world has given me further strength and hope for a positive resolve,” Ward wrote on Saturday . “I have been moved and overwhelmed by the thousands of messages. I love you all.”

Meanwhile, Osbourne, Butler and Iommi have begun writing and recording their first album in 34 years. They are currently based in England, where Iommi is receiving treatment for cancer. Black Sabbath still plan to launch a world tour in May, including an appearance at June’s Download festival. But it seems they will do so without Ward – who played on 10 of the band’s first 11 albums.

View full post on Music: Ozzy Osbourne | guardian.co.uk

Drummer says he will not continue with comeback album and tour unless he receives a ’signable’ contract

Bill Ward has threatened to pull out of the Black Sabbath reunion. In an open letter on his website, the drummer said he will not continue with the planned album and tour unless he receives a “signable contract … that reflects some dignity and respect toward me as an original member of the band”.

Ward’s announcement throws the reunion into question. Despite Black Sabbath’s confidence in November, with the promise of a world tour and their first album in 33 years, doubts emerged last month after Tony Iommi was diagnosed with early-stage lymphoma. “[Tony is] determined to make a full and successful recovery,” the band said at the time, explaining they would continue recording in England, where Iommi is receiving treatment.

“Since the news of Tony’s illness, and the understanding that the band would move production to the UK, I’ve spent every day getting to or living in a place of readiness to leave,” Ward wrote on on Thursday. “As I’ve tried to find out what’s going on with the UK sessions, I’ve realised that I’ve been getting ‘the cold shoulder’ (and, I might add, not for the first time).”

The problem, Ward said, is he has not signed Black Sabbath’s new contract. While he doesn’t detail the issues, the current terms are “unsignable”: “I stand to lose my rights, dignity and respectability as a rock musician,” he wrote. “My position is not greed-driven. I’m not holding out for a ‘big piece’ of the action (money) like some kind of blackmail deal … I want a contract that shows some respect to me and my family, a contract that will honour all that I’ve brought to Black Sabbath since its beginning.”

Meanwhile, the rest of Black Sabbath are continuing with new material. According to an official update on 24 January, writing sessions are underway in Birmingham. “It’s just been amazing,” they said.

Ward said he is prepared to be replaced. “I hope you will not hold me responsible for the failure of an original Black Sabbath lineup as promoted,” he wrote. And yet if a suitable contract is put before him, the 63-year-old says he is “good to go”. “I grew up in a hard rock/metal band,” he explained. “We stood for something then, and we played from the heart with honesty and sincerity. I am in the spirit of integrity, far from the corporate malady.”

For the moment, Black Sabbath’s comeback tour is scheduled to begin on 18 May in Moscow. Their only UK date so far is the Download festival in June.

View full post on Music: Ozzy Osbourne | guardian.co.uk

Guitarist reveals he has early-stage lymphoma but intends to proceed with band’s long-awaited comeback

Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi has cancer. The 63-year-old musician is “upbeat and determined” after being diagnosed with early-stage lymphoma, and intends to proceed with his band’s comeback album and tour.

Black Sabbath announced Iommi’s illness on Facebook, explaining he is “working with his doctors to establish the best treatment plan”. “[Tony's] bandmates would like everyone to send positive vibes to the guitarist at this time,” they wrote. “[He is] determined to make a full and successful recovery.”

The lymphoma diagnosis comes about two months after Black Sabbath announced the reformation of their original lineup, featuring Iommi, Ozzy Osbourne, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward. The heavy-metal legends still plan to complete a new album – their first in 33 years – with producer Rick Rubin. But they will relocate recording sessions from Los Angeles to England, allowing Iommi to participate while he undergoes medical treatment.

There remains the question of Black Sabbath’s forthcoming tour, which begins in May. For now, the gigs are still on, although Iommi may not be well enough to perform. “Further information will be released as it becomes available,” the band said.

Many of Iommi’s fans and friends offered support over Twitter. “Best wishes for a full recovery,” wrote Slash. “FUCK YOU, cancer!” declared Sebastian Bach. Or as Anthrax put it: “This really does suck. GET WELL SOON TONY!”

View full post on Music: Ozzy Osbourne | guardian.co.uk

Following our latest visit to the archives of Rock’s Backpages – the world’s leading collection of vintage music journalism – we bring you a classic interview with Black Sabbath. Originally titled A Dorito and 7-Up Picnic with Black Sabbath, the piece first appeared in Circular in September 1972

Some people might want to meet Bob Dylan. Others, if asked which rock idols they’d most like to rub elbows with, might spout off names like John Lennon, Pete Townshend, Keith Richard, Ray Davies. Feh.

Me, I was whizzing over to Griffith Park in my 1966 Chevy II to say hi to the greatest rock group in the world, the true keepers of the faith, the absolute Number One group of the ’70s so far.

You know who I’m talking about as well as I do: Black Sabbath.

A Flashback: Jan. 12, 1972

How it all came about was, I won the recent What Black Sabbath Means to Me Contest. This, as I later found out, was a special offer included in but 500 lucky copies of Master Of Reality pressed during December, 1971.

Fate as it were, upon acquiring my fifth new copy of Master Of Reality, the aforementioned contest blank popped out. The instructions were a model of conciseness: “In 10 words or less, explain why you love Black Sabbath’s music.” So, as the strains of Into The Void rumbled on, I strained my faculties for some glimmer of imagination.

I scratched my chin, looked up at my poster of lggy Stooge, hummed a few Kinks’ tunes, even tried conjuring up the beloved Ferocious Flintlings (better known to the world as Grand Funk) for inspiration.

Then my brother Kevin, age 16, looked up from his copy of Teenage Wasteland Gazette and said: “Black Sabbath have discovered the secret of sound.”

That was it.

The Myth of Downer Rock Exploded

So anyway, as I made my way to Black Sabbath’s picnic table, it was obvious that these guys were not what they were cracked up to be. There were no sacrificial victims on the table. No black cats either. Only two of the group were wearing their silver crosses. Not a single member had fangs. I mentioned this to Ozzy Osbourne.

“Well, you know, people describe us sometimes as if we ran around fields with pitchforks in our hands. I think they expected flames to shoot out of the cover of our second album. Want some Doritos?”

This isn’t the only respect in which Black Sabbath have been misinterpreted. Their first album, which for a long time gave the group the stigma of a Black Magic tag, consisted largely of tracks that were a warning against black magic – “old business tycoons going to black magic rituals to get themselves involved with young chicks… things like that, they’re sick.”

Likewise the deplorable misinterpretations of Hand Of Doom, which in actuality is a grisly anti-heroin song:

Take your little dose
You join the other fools
Turn to something new
Now it’s killing you…
Stick the needle in.

Humble Beginnings

Black Sabbath’s first LP was recorded in two days, an amazing fact in these days of $500,000 Stones albums. The second, Paranoid, took all of a week, with the title cut written in the studio in five minutes. Tony Iommi’s description of Sabbath’s music is just as concise: “We play it mainly because we like it, you know. We like what we’re doing – the heavy thing. We found it was exciting and really got into it and that was it. We’re pretty quick at writing; I think of a riff or melody, and the others write around it usually.”

The reason for the short studio time allotted Sabbath’s first album was that no one gives an unknown group much money to make an album with. And they were pretty unknown, as far as the media were concerned. With naïve innocence, Black Sabbath all rushed out to buy the English trade papers the week their debut was released, only to find that it had been savagely attacked by all the critics.

“It really threw us,” remembers Tony. “What had gone wrong? Were we really as bad as they said? One review of our first album must have been the worst rating ever, and we thought, ‘Oh, Christ. This is it.’ We were worried if everyone else would think the same.”

Then, the group’s spirits at their lowest, the album made its surprise appearance on the charts. The rest of the Sabbath story is history, and the group hasn’t paid much attention to reviews since.

7-Up and Doritos with the Dark Princes of Heavy Metal

Back to the business at hand, the beer was ok, Doritos a bit stale. Ozzy delighted in mugging with a 7-Up can for photographs, all in the line of maintaining his image as the face of the group.

One thing people have rarely picked up on is just where Black Sabbath’s music comes from; the group is often seen as a faceless four-piece entity. Such is hardly the case. Tony Iommi is a former school bully, these days reformed, with the result that the aggro, as the English would call it, comes out in his guitar work (power chords at their ultimate) and songwriting.

The words, on the other hand, come from bassist Geezer Butler, as Tony emphasizes: “Geezer writes most of the lyrics. Some of them are very doomy, but they vary from that to drugs and the bad things that happen sometimes with the band.”

I asked Geezer for comment on this…

“People feel evil things, but nobody ever sings about what’s frightening and evil. I mean the world is a right fucking shambles. Anyway, everybody has sung about all the good things.”

So there’s an element of catharsis in your music?

“Yes. We try to relieve all the tension in the people who listen to us. To get everything out of their bodies – all the evil and everything.”

Trivia Time

One fact I wanted to check on was Tony Iommi’s short-lived alliance with Jethro Tull in early 1969. What happened?

“I only stayed with Jethro Tull for three weeks. It was just like doing a 9 to 5 job. The group would meet, play a gig and then split. Whereas with our group we are all good friends; we not only work as a group, but we all lived together for a long time.”

Of Demons, Wizards, Iron Men and War Pigs

As my talk with reigning kings of Heavy Metal rock continued, the whole moral here became quite clear; Black Sabbath are just a bunch of rock ‘n’ roll kids who happen to make music that, along with Grand Funk, is louder than anything ever created, and which, not incidentally, sends our older brothers off into shrieks of anguish and condescension concerning that viperous noise we’ve got on the record player.

Ironic, too, that people could glorify the Stones’ pretence at being “street fighting men,” only to cringe when the real article came along in Black Sabbath – a group from the factory job rat-race world of fists and street fights known as Birmingham, England.

But it’s all about raw, musical energy, and if Sabbath’s music happens also to be a shade more vengeful and violent than any previous rock, it’s because they mean what they say about releasing the tension in their audiences. With few of the trappings and affectations common to all too many groups, Black Sabbath deliver.

“Want a cheeseburger?” asked Geezer, in an unconscious mimic of the Beach Boys’ Bull Session With The Big Daddy classic. That about summed it all up.

Epilogue/Aftermath

My mind began to dizzy from all this. Visions dancing in my head as I drove home, Surfin’ Bird came on the radio to heighten the hallucinatory state even further. Around the corner of Pass and Verdugo in Burbank, I think I saw God…

When I got home I frenziedly began to play all the records I’d ever liked because they had the Beat – Beatles VI, The Kink Kontroversy, Out of Our Head, E Pluribus Funk, The Who Sings My Generation, Funhouse, All Summer Long, Chuck Berry’s Golden Decade, The Crystals’ Greatest Hits, Paranoid, Kick out the Jams, Beatles for Sale, Dion’s More Greatest Hits, Back in the USA, Back Door Men, Here Are the Sonics, Master Of Reality, Beach Boys Party, The Beatles’ Second Album, The Live Kinks, Demons and Wizards, Teenage Head…

*

After dancing the Locomotion for 36 consecutive hours, Mr Saunders collapsed from a case of what the doctors termed “second-degree prostate delirium” and is currently recuperating at his bedside in the Burbank Municipal Hospital.

He will be released at the end of September, in time to finish his senior year at the University of Texas in a wheelchair.

• Free this week on Rock’s Backpages: An audio interview with Black Sabbath axeman Tony Iommi from 1973.

View full post on Music: Ozzy Osbourne | guardian.co.uk

Rock band preparing comeback album, reports suggest

More than 40 years after Ozzy Osbourne first sang about Satan coming round the bend, Black Sabbath’s original lineup may be getting back together. Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward have reportedly reunited in a “secret rehearsal studio”, with plans to record a new album and tour.

Metal Talk and the Birmingham Mail have both reported Black Sabbath’s return, with the Mail quoting a June interview with Iommi. While the guitarist criticised the report on his website, calling it “speculation”, he stopped short of denying that the band had reformed. “Thanks to the internet it’s gone round the world as some sort of ‘official’ statement on my part,” he said. “To my old pals, Ozzy, Geezer and Bill, sorry about this, I should have known better.”

In the June interview, Iommi was more forthcoming. “It’s all been very hush-hush,” he said. Although Iommi was reconciled with Osbourne last year, they didn’t begin writing together until this summer.

Just a fortnight ago, Metal Talk claimed, the group booked a date in the studio, coming together for the first time since 2006. “We’re really looking forward to it and I think the stuff we’ve been writing is really good,” Iommi said. “It’s more back to the old original stuff.”

Last year, a Black Sabbath reunion looked about as likely as an audience for Osbourne at the Vatican. The singer was suing Iommi, asking him to “do the right thing” and share the Black Sabbath trademark with the rest of the band. “I don’t think there is any chance [of a reunion],” Osbourne told Rolling Stone. But in July 2010 they buried the hatchet, and plans have apparently been simmering since then. “Ozzy’s been the worst at trying to hold it back,” Iommi said. “He’s doing a lot of TV and he’s being asked stuff about a reunion and he’s going, ‘Well I never say never.’ He told me, ‘I don’t know what to say.’”

If Black Sabbath have indeed reunited, it still doesn’t mean they will necessarily release a new album; they didn’t manage it last time. But the sexagenarian band-members have high hopes. Only Ward, their drummer, is suffering with health issues. “He hasn’t been 100%,” Iommi said. “He had [a heart] operation a few months ago, so we’ll see how he is.”

Black Sabbath have sold more than 100m albums worldwide. They were admitted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006.

View full post on Music: Ozzy Osbourne | guardian.co.uk

Despite no official confirmation by guitarist Tony Iommi, the Midlands metallers are reportedly working together again

More than forty years after Ozzy Osbourne first sang about Satan coming ’round the bend, Black Sabbath’s original lineup may be getting back together. Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward have reportedly reunited in a “secret rehearsal studio”, with plans to record a new album and tour.

Metal Talk and the Birmingham Mail have both reported Black Sabbath’s return, with the Mail quoting a June interview with Iommi. While the guitarist criticised the report on his website, calling it “speculation”, he stopped short of denying that the band had re-formed. “Thanks to the internet it’s gone round the world as some sort of ‘official’ statement on my part,” he said. “To my old pals, Ozzy, Geezer and Bill, sorry about this, I should have known better.”

In the June interview, Iommi was more forthcoming. “It’s all been very hush-hush,” he said. Although Iommi was reconciled with Osbourne last year, they didn’t begin writing together until this summer.

Just a fortnight ago, Metal Talk claimed, the group booked a date in the studio, coming together for the first time since 2006. “We’re really looking forward to it and I think the stuff we’ve been writing is really good,” Iommi said. “It’s more back to the old original stuff.”

Last year, a Black Sabbath reunion looked about as likely as an audience for Osbourne at the Vatican. The singer was suing Iommi, asking him to “do the right thing” and share the Black Sabbath trademark with the rest of the band. “I don’t think there is any chance [of a reunion],” Osbourne told Rolling Stone. But in July 2010 they buried the hatchet, and plans have apparently been simmering since then. “Ozzy’s been the worst at trying to hold it back,” Iommi said. “He’s doing a lot of TV and he’s being asked stuff about a reunion and he’s going, ‘Well I never say never.’ He told me, ‘I don’t know what to say.’”

If Black Sabbath have indeed reunited, it still doesn’t mean they will necessarily release a new album; they didn’t manage it last time. But the sexagenarian band-members have high hopes. Only Ward, their drummer, is suffering with health issues. “He hasn’t been 100%,” Iommi said. “He had an operation a [heart] few months ago, so we’ll see how he is.”

Black Sabbath have sold more than 100m albums worldwide. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006.

View full post on Music: Ozzy Osbourne | guardian.co.uk

August 1969: Number 17 in our series of the 50 key events in the history of rock music

If there’s one single event that pinpoints the birth of heavy metal’s satanic image, it would be when a Birmingham band called Earth renamed themselves Black Sabbath. Guitarist Tony Iommi had already developed a down-tuned way of playing, to cope with the loss of fingertips in an industrial injury, and the combination of his doomy riffing and that name gave us the first true metal band.

View full post on Music: Ozzy Osbourne | guardian.co.uk

Directorial debut from Ozzy Osbourne’s son will be an original horror film featuring his father’s band’s music

Jack Osbourne is to direct his first feature film, Black Sabbath, according to reports.

Not to be confused with Mario Bava’s 1963 Italian portmanteau, from which the band fronted by Jack’s father, Ozzy, took their name, Black Sabbath will be an original horror film featuring the group’s music.

While this will be Osbourne’s first directing job, it is not his first foray into the world of film; he co-produced concert documentary God Bless Ozzy Osbourne, which premiered at the Tribeca film festival last weekend. Osbourne Jr is again joining forces with producer Marc Weingarten, who co-produced the recent documentary. Shooting is to begin by the end of the year.

Plot details have yet to be released but it is thought the film may be the same project that Sabbath’s lead guitarist, Tony Iommi, was linked to a few years ago, along with Texas Chainsaw Massacre producer Mike Fleiss, who directed God Bless Ozzy Osbourne. Whether Iommi is involved this time is not clear, though he was to score the original project and was the only member of Black Sabbath to be present throughout all of the band’s personnel changes.

View full post on Music: Ozzy Osbourne | guardian.co.uk

Black Sabbath – Paranoid (Live in Paris 1970)