Ozzy Osbourne: “Tony Iommi is a lamppost with a guitar”
In 1986 Ozzy Osbourne released his fourth solo album “The Ultimate Sin” and was at the height of success. The British magazine Smash Hits interviewed him in Tokyo at a time when the former singer of Black Sabbath it had been reported by the parents of John McCollum, an American boy who committed suicide in October 1984 after listening to the song “Suicide Solution”included on his 1980 solo debut “Blizzard of Ozz”.
These are Ozzy’s statements: “The fact of the matter is that there was a very sick boy, that poor boy was very sick before he even listened to an Ozzy Osbourne record. I am sincerely sorry for both the parents and the boy. Also “I am a parent and if my child always locked himself in his bedroom and behaved abnormally, as a parent I would feel distressed. I would try to find out what the problem was and make sure he got professional help from a psychiatrist or something like that. But they’re just trying to shift the blame onto someone else: me! It’s absurd to blame me. The poor boy shot himself in the head with his father’s gun. Instead of reporting me, why don’t they report Who sold him the gun?”
Ozzy’s unfiltered statements then moved on
Black Sabbath
who had kicked him out a few years earlier: “I’m not a singer. There are a million better singers than me. Ronnie James Dio is a much better singer than me but he has no charisma. Tony Iommi has no charisma, it’s like looking at a street lamp with a guitar. I have charisma and you can’t take that away from me.”
Ozzy Osbourne
he closed that 1986 interview with dignity by telling the journalist: “I don’t care what you write about me. You can say: ‘Ozzy is a big idiot and has a big nose and a wart on the side of his head’. I don’t care because I’m larger than life.”