For a man whose most famous off-stage antics are biting the head off a live bat, you’d think Ozzy Osbourne‘s barometer for creepiness is completely warped.
‘The Prince of Darkness’ made a career out of being an enigmatic front man for sure, but there was no delineation between performance and real life – Osbourne allowed the chaos that infused his vocal takes to bleed into reality and lived a musical life, at full throttle. So when it came to truly striking his heart with the sort of fear his own performances inspired, Osbourne had to go the other way.
Rather than allow gritty riffs and unrelenting drum parts to frighten him into a paralysed state, it was the more delicate sounds of fairground instruments that gave him the heebie-jeebies. It’s largely why those instruments were never really heard on an original Sabbath song and why it was so jarring for Osbourne when The Cardigans introduced them.
On their 1994 record Emmerdale, the band covered Black Sabbath’s ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath‘, completely inverting the heavy riff that Tommy Iommi had laid down and instead, replacing it with hypnotic fairground keys that spiralled the song into a childlike state of delirium.
Ripping up the foundations of a heavy rock classic was a bold move from the band, but one that The Cardigans front woman Nina Persson recalled got Ozzy’s twisted seal of approval: “[Ozzy] brought his whole family – Kelly, Jack, and Sharon – backstage as guests,” she recalled, of a show in the 1990s. Before adding, “He was into it. He said our cover was the creepiest thing he ever heard. High praise from him!”
It made the lines “No more tomorrow, life is killing you / Dreams turn to nightmares, heaven turns to hell” feel arguably even more tormenting than they did coming from Ozzy, as the reduced pace allowed the warp sentiment of them to really sink in. But perhaps more intriguing for Persson was the inversion her performance gave from a gender perspective. She recalled that performing a song originally delivered by what she described as “very manly men” gave it a sort of haunting duality that allowed society to question what they deemed traditionally intimidating.
A perfect contrast to that original riff laid down in ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’. The raucous line played by Iommi is what made the band a force to be reckoned with, but similarly, the sort of riff that many would align with masculinity.
Nevertheless, it became a statement piece for the band. Iommi remembered, “The riff of ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ was the benchmark for that album, it was a heavy riff, then the song went into a light bit in the middle, and then back to the riff again: the light and shade I’m always looking for… Ozzy sang very well on it, actually, on all of the songs on the album, very high!”
Which version is more intimidating is entirely up to you, but if ‘The Prince of Darkness’ himself is calling The Cardigans’ version the creepiest thing he’s ever heard, I would be inclined to agree.