Digital Bitch

The late-seventies Mod revival had looked in the first place like a tawdry exercise in self-conscious nostalgia for a dying age of Empire, and by the mid eighties the mockneyed tones of a host of Wellerbees were as irritating as the sound of a hysterically revved Lambretta. Who’d want to go back to a pre-Pepper Britain anyway?

Well, several Second Year boys for a start. They were particularly enamoured of The Who, The Jam, The Merton Parkas, Time UK and so on, as well as British sixties TV shows like The Prisoner and The Avengers. The boys all dreamed of riding down to Carnaby Street on pompous little Italian scooters, festooned with rear view mirrors so they could spend the entire journey looking back wistfully, before buying fitted suits, impractical shoes, flick-knives and gobfulls of Dexedrine. Then on to Brighton, for massed fights with bloodied hordes of imaginary rockers and teddy boys for pride of place on the front page of The Daily Herald.

Impressionable boys? Had they seen If they’d have been busy developing camouflage fetishes and demanding to be caned by prefects, if they’d read Sillitoe they’d have developed Northern accents and pretended to be the product of tram-stop knee-tremblers between inarticulate lathe operators and married typists smashed on cherry brandy and grimy hopelessness. But Mods they had become, and thus all history was to be rewritten to fit the newly-formed facts.

All those Modernised boys had been metalheads in their First year, and all of them needed funds for their inkie music papers and fashion magazines. So they sold off all the tapes and lps they had amassed between them in their immature formatory year. A couple of their fellow Second Year boys got the good stuff, such as the early Van Halen albums and the Di’Anno era Maiden, but there was enough left for me to get tremendously excited about, specifically two Priest albums, Stained Class and Screaming For Vengeance, and the cream of the crop; Ozzy’s Blizzard Of Ozz.

It’s probably a struggle for youngsters in this day and age to visualise Ozzy Osbourne as being a contemporary concern, but he was, in the mid ‘80’s, one of the biggest rock stars in the world. His behaviour at this time, a matter of public record, seems to have eclipsed his musical legacy in retrospect. Indeed one would be forgiven for stumbling to the conclusion that Ozzy Osbourne is frequently, dependably, his own worst enemy.

All this would be true if it were not for the sheer brilliance of his first solo album. The first track, I Don’t Know, marries classic riffage to a fist-pumping rhythm and features a flowery middle eight where Ozzy wistfully gives the benefit of his amassed wisdom. Next up is Crazy Train. This is a masterclass in lead guitar from Randy Rhoads, and is indisputably one of the greatest rock songs of all time. There’s the ballads to skip, then on to the undeservedly controversial Suicide Solution. This song was, like the aforementioned Stained Class, subject to a silly lawsuit. If you’re going to be successful at suing Ozzy your best bet is to claim his 80's fashion sense has irreparably damaged your eyesight. Going to court over a song that basically says ‘drinking is very bad for you’ then you’re going to look like a fuckwit and you’ll still have all that grieving to do. Mr Crowley is far more sinister in content, and is possibly Ozzy’s best song of his solo career.

It’s a stone-clad fact that bassist Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake on drums are the understated heroes of this album, laying down rhythms that pulse, pump, drive and punctuate these songs. Well, as long as you have the original album that is. If you have the remastered reissues then you’re listening to a dirty pair of scabs who should have known better.

Daisley and Kerslake had to sue Ozzy to get royalties to this album, (and to the follow up Diary Of A Madman). The Osbournes later had their revenge though, and got ex Faith No More drummer Mike Bordin and current Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo to overdub the original parts played by the original rhythm section. One wonders if Trujillo expects to do the same for Master Of Puppets? If I am ever allowed near the masters of Angel Dust or Lights… Camera… Revolution then I’ll quite happily return the insult with a human beat-box and farting noises for the former and a rubber band for the latter.

But then that’s the whole story of Ozzy in a nutshell, unwitting genius tempered by monstrous ego and flatulent greed, shadowed by his blisteringly corrosive economy-sized Lady Macbeth of a wife.

A pity that heavy metal needs its own Posh N Becks, but if this is the case then Blizzard Of Ozz is the equivalent of a last minute free kick to send England to the World Cup finals, and this from a man who is more famous for scoring spectacular own-goals on a regular basis. These are songs that will be heard long after Sharon is dead; Ozzy himself will, thanks mainly to this album as well as his work with Sabbath, live forever…


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