This will probably strike you as a bit of a stretch for a nature blog, a brief nod to the music of Ozzy Osbourne, the wildest of heavy rock front men, who sadly passed away yesterday.
Let's get the lows over with first: there was a bat, there were doves, they may or may not have been dead at the time their heads entered Ozzy's mouth...
Moving swiftly on, here are some thoughts on the few occasions where the Prince of Darkness came to the notice of this blogger.
When Black Sabbath formed in 1968, a very young NaHaL was still in primary school, so I probably didn't hear the 1970's single Paranoid before encountering everyone else's tastes on the record player in the sixth form common room in 1978. That machine was guilty for so, so much.
When Ozzy was chucked out of Black Sabbath for redefining the word 'excess', he went solo and recorded the Blizzard of Ozz album which, at some point, was a fixture in my music collection. I also recall a juke box of a pub in the town square in Thirsk, where Crazy Train had frequent cider-fuelled airings. Fast forward several decades to a work colleague who had the explosive opening shout to that particular track as his ringtone. At that time, I had the misfortune to be sitting next to him in a quiet office and regularly leapt out of my skin at every unexpected "All aboard!!"
But for all Ozzy's dark, demonic and occult stuff, there was always one track which stood out to me, and was all the more poignant for its subject matter, Revelation (Mother Earth). Written by the band's bassist Bob Daisley, who happened to be reading The Book of Revelation in The Bible at the time.
Revelation (Mother Earth) 1980
Mother please forgive them
For they know not what they do
Looking back in history's books
It seems it's nothing new
Oh, let my mother live
Heaven is for heroes
And hell is full of fools
Stupidity, no will to live
They're breaking God's own rules
Please let my mother live
Father of all creation
I think we're all going wrong
The path they're taking
Seems to be breaking
And it won't take too long
Children of the future
Watching empires fall
Madness, the cup they drink from
Self destruction, the toll
I had a vision, I saw the world burn
And the seas had turned red
The sun had fallen, the final curtain
In the land of the dead.
Mother, please show the children
Before it's too late
To fight each other, there's no one winning
We must fight all the hate
It's ok, you don't have to listen to the video, but you'd be missing some excellent guitar work by the wonderful (and equally missed) Randy Rhoads. Oh, and the piano bridge, I'd forgotten about that.
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