(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sat 25 October 2025 13:00, UK
By the time Ozzy Osbourne became a solo star, there was no room for filler anymore.
He had sleepwalked his way through the last few Black Sabbath albums, but even if he had a great track record with his old band, he didn’t need another decent record under his belt when he struck out on his own. He needed to knock it out of the park right out of the gate, but that didn’t necessarily mean that every single note that made it onto the tape was going to be an absolute smash hit.
When looking at the Dio-fronted Sabbath and Osbourne’s solo career back to back, though, their debut records are a pretty even match with each other. There was no way that Sabbath would be the same band when making tracks like ‘Neon Knights’, but there was a certain lightness to Blizzard of Ozz that you didn’t find in Tony Iommi’s riffs. And that lightness had a very specific name: Randy Rhoads.
Although Rhoads wasn’t the biggest Sabbath fan in the world, hearing him bring a brighter edge to Osbourne’s music is a lot more interesting than having him serve up the same bluesy darkness. ‘Crazy Train’ could practically pass for a disco song with that drum groove, and with all of Rhoads’s love of classical music, there was a more sophisticated side to tunes like ‘Mr Crowley’ as well.
And despite Osbourne continuing on past Rhoads’s death in a plane crash, Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman are both going to go down as his greatest works. They were completely different from anything that he had previously done, but whereas the singles hit like a sledgehammer, Diary of a Madman was always going to come in second next to his debut.
It’s a pretty respectable second place and even has a few strong deep cuts, but it’s not like it doesn’t have its fair share of problems. As much as Rhoads is a guitar legend, the tone of his guitar on tracks like ‘Over the Mountain’ is definitely lacking in a few places, and even on the writing front, Osbourne remembered getting too caught up in the business side of things to really care about a song like ‘S.A.T.O.’.
While the track itself is an acronym for his wife, Sharon, and his ex-wife, Thelma Osbourne, ‘The Prince of Darkness’ singled out the track as one of the tunes that he never bothered to go back to, saying, “’S.A.T.O.’ was one. I always remember that. I was in the studio, and Sharon wanted to go somewhere and I went, ‘That’ll do!’ And in the back of my mind, I knew I let something go. But you know what? The amount of people that come up to me and go, ‘Why don’t you ever play that live?’”
And given the backing track, it’s not hard to call it one of the weaker songs on the record as well. It’s hard to really say that about an album that’s only eight tracks and has great tunes like ‘Flying High Again’ on it, but if the title track took the most chances and created the perfect hybrid between metal, jazz, and classical music, the one that’s going to stick out in the wrong way is the one that was thrown together.
Then again, the fact that Osbourne could hold people’s attention with this kind of song is actually impressive, given where he was at the time. No one was exactly looking for him to make the sequel to ‘Crazy Train’ or anything, but if this is what the lacklustre tunes from this era sounded like, most metal fans didn’t know how good they had it with someone like Rhoads in the band.
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