Ian Christe

In CHIPS & BEER MAG #4, a magazine we used to publish, there was an interview with Bob Daisley (Ozzy, Rainbow, etc). Adam Ganderson, who conducted the interview, asked about lyric writing and other credits for the early Ozzy albums. Since I see that @deesnider brought it up recently, and Kelly responded, figured I'd put these excerpts out there... This is from 2012. Enjoy. AG: A lot of people know by now that you also wrote most of the lyrics on those albums. But the lyrics seem like they’re based on how people might picture Ozzy’s life to be. BD: Well I had his background in mind when I wrote the stuff. I don’t like predictable and I don’t like cliché. I wanted it to be different. And I thought, “We got Ozzy here singing.” So I wanted to make them kind of influenced or in that genre of the Black Sabbath background. The combination of the lyrics and music it all seemed to work well. I didn’t regard myself as a serious lyricist or anything, it was just nobody else could write lyrics in the band. Ozzy had never wrote lyrics and neither did Randy. Lee Kerslake had dabbled a bit. But we wanted to keep it within the camp so I said, “I’ll write lyrics.” AG: Well, I mean, these are all-time classic songs. But you can see where people would think it was Ozzy’s lyrics. BD: Yeah, well he knew. He used to say to me sometimes, even when I went back to work with him on Bark at The Moon and No Rest For The Wicked and Ultimate Sin he said, “You know how to say what I wanna say, but can’t say myself.” That’s how he described it. I knew what he was thinking and how he was and what he wanted to say. I would put it into my own words just because we were similar in that way. It’s what I wanted to say as well. They came from me and they were sort of via Ozzy, ha. Earlier in the interview: AG: And being that young, I guess you never imagined problems would arise with being properly credited and all that. You probably just wanted to rock. BD: Well that’s it. You know, that’s how musicians often get taken advantage of. They’re not accountants, they’re not bankers, they’re not lawyers, they’re musicians. And our minds were mostly focused on the music and creative side. We hoped and expected to be treated fairly, with honesty. But that didn’t happen. We were doing the job. It’s detailed pretty comprehensively in my book. How it all unfolded, what went on, how we were double-crossed with the name of the band, with the credits on the album, with the royalties, the whole bit. Sharon wasn’t even there when we formed the band. When we did the deal with Jet Records, wrote the stuff and recorded the first album, she still had nothing to do with it. She came in later. And yet she’s got the gall and the audacity in public interviews to say that Lee and I were session players. Just rubbish and blatant lies. AG: So when Diary came out and there’s that photo on the insert with the other guys who didn’t play on it, did you just see that when it came out or did you know ahead of time that would happen? BD: No, we didn’t know. That was out, released, and Lee Kerslake and I were at the Roundhouse Studios, which was Bronze Records, Uriah Heep’s label. We were recording there. And Lee and I went into the office part of the building and somebody had a copy of Diary of a Madman. And we looked at it and we just freaked. That’s the first we knew of it. We pulled out the insert and it’s got: “Tommy Aldrige: drums. Rudy Sarzo: bass.” It was really heartbreaking. It was disturbing. We’d put our guts and hearts and souls into making that album, same as the first one. Another blatant lie that’s not out of character for them. Tommy Aldridge didn’t play a beat, and Rudy Sarzo didn’t play a note. Apparently, Tommy Aldridge hit the roof. He didn’t like the idea about being credited for something that he hadn’t done and he had a big argument with Sharon. But people, for years, thought that was the line-up.