Black Sabbath is considered the most influential heavy metal group of all time – if not the founders of the genre – but singer Ozzy Osbourne says he’s never really felt connected to the term “heavy metal” itself.
Speaking with CNN, Ozzy said, “I have never ever ever been able to attach myself to the word ‘heavy metal’ — it has no musical connotations. If it was heavy rock, I could get that, but the ’70s was kind of like a bluesy thing, the ’80s was kind of bubblegum-frosted hair, multicolored clothes and the ’90s was kind of grungy. People come up to me and say, ‘Your Sabbath work was a big influence on me.’ I could go, ‘Oh, yeah, I can see that,’ but other bands — what part of that is inspired by us? Some of it is just angry people screaming down a microphone!”
Sabbath originally started out as a blues-rock act called Earth and Ozzy told us that some of that influence made its way into the first Sabbath album: “We were originally a six-piece blues band. We had a saxophone player, bottleneck guitar player but they left, they fell to the way, and then we just started writing our own stuff and it came off blues. And so I suppose when we went and we did the first album, we still had that blues flavor with us, you know.”
