Credit: Paramount Plus
Sat 15 August 2026 17:30, UK
Ozzy Osbourne didn’t really market himself as the sentimental type all the time.
Although everyone knows him nowadays for being the lovable dad on The Osbournes, his legacy for a long time was being the incarnation of everything evil about humanity, down to the striking dark imagery that he would use on most of his album covers. He seemed like the embodiment of evil for a lot of concerned parents, but it’s easy to forget that there was a lot of beauty scattered throughout his discography as well.
As far back as Black Sabbath’s first few records, it’s not like they were interested in making scary music every single time they performed. Tony Iommi wrote some truly menacing riffs, but he was also interested in making some pretty music as well, like the different interludes that he would play halfway through their records, like the gorgeous acoustic ditty ‘Orchid’ in the middle of Master of Reality.
And whether you like it or not, some of that beauty also comes down to how Osbourne was singing. ‘The Prince of Darkness’ wasn’t called that for no reason, but he could also possess a broader vocal range than anyone would have thought, like the ethereal sounds on ‘Planet Caravan’ or the moment on ‘Solitude’ where he sounds like a folk singer telling a lovelorn fable. Yes, it’s pretty for what it is, and yet it happens to be the same guy who breathed life into a song like ‘Iron Man’.
But when he was given the boot from Sabbath, Randy Rhoads was the next in line to steer ‘The Ozzman’ in the right direction. Rhoads was the kind of guitar hero that anyone else would have killed to have among their ranks back in the day, but a lot of what he was doing revolved around classical compositions. That was a bit above heavy metal’s pay grade, but that didn’t matter to Osbourne as long as it sounded good.
Throughout Rhoads’s two albums with him, the most musical pieces of Osbourne’s career came from his fretboard. The title track to Diary of a Madman has some of the strangest jazz chords to ever turn up on a rock song, but when listening back to many of his classic albums, Osbourne always had a special place in his heart for the song ‘Dee’ from Blizzard of Ozz.
Rhoads had written the tune as a tribute to his mother, and despite not singing a single note on it, Osbourne considered it a foundational piece of his career, saying, “Randy absolutely loved his mum. He’d written an acoustic piece for her, ‘Dee’, that we put on Blizzard. It’s the most beautiful thing. I can’t listen to it without tearing up.” But that’s far from the only time that Rhoads managed to sprinkle in some of his fretboard fireworks over everything.
Further reading: From The Vault
Every one of those early solos he played for Osbourne did have that same kind of classical bent, which made it sound completely different from Sabbath. Rhoads wasn’t a bluesy player by any stretch, but he could manage to throw in some licks that would have made anyone want to either headbang or take up a course in classical composition, depending on what stuck out to them first.
Osbourne did have his fair share of ballads that tugged on everyone’s heartstrings, but it’s a testament to Rhoads’s playing that he felt that his finest ballad was one that he didn’t even show up for. Because when you have something that sounds this gorgeous when being played on its own, you don’t really need much else.
