As the 1960s took their final bow and The Beatles waved adios, a new age dawned for rock ‘n’ roll. The brief yet emphatic psychedelic rock era subsided into an age of heightened complexity under prog-rock titans like Yes, Genesis and Pink Floyd. Meanwhile, David Bowie and Marc Bolan led the glam-rock charge, and Black Sabbath popularised heavy metal with hard-hitting riffs and gloomy lyricism.
Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin prospered alongside Black Sabbath with a similarly heavy sound, leading to some describing the three as the ‘Unholy Trinity’. While all three are respected within their fields, Ozzy Osbourne and his Black Sabbath bandmates are generally considered the quintessential metal group. Led Zeppelin may have reached greater heights of popularity, but their complex sound also invited prog-rock comparisons.
Like Led Zeppelin, Osbourne is also surprisingly uncomfortable with the heavy metal label. While he undoubtedly welcomes reverence in his field, the term appears too broad. “I hate that terminology,” he told Rolling Stone in 2016, “Because it goes from Poison to fucking Black Sabbath, and there is quite a fucking difference.”
Osbourne also considers heavy metal too broad a term for his tastes. As an ongoing proponent of metal, he has endorsed bands like Metallica, Motörhead, Mötley Crüe, Slipknot, Tool, Pantera, and Slayer over the years with support slots and invites to his influential Ozzfest. However, his tastes roam far beyond metal.
In the 1960s, Osbourne first fell in love with music to the sound of British invasion bands like The Who, The Beatles and The Kinks. One might expect Osbourne to hold The Beatles’ proto-metal anthem ‘Helter Skelter’ or John Lennon’s downbeat ‘Yer Blues’ in the highest regard, but in his favourites, he shows a soft spot for the softer stuff.
Long after his heyday with Black Sabbath, Osbourne maintained a strong taste in metal, but his allegiance to The Beatles never let up. When listing his ten favourite songs of all time for a Rolling Stone feature, he listed three Beatles songs as well as one from each of Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s solo careers.
Paul McCartney’s 1968 Beatles single, ‘Hey Jude’, seems to surface as Osbourne’s overall favourite by the band. He described the lengthy singalong as “hands down one of the greatest songs ever written.” The song winds on with an arm-swaying refrain that seems to connect all music lovers at concerts and football matches, distracting one from the fact that McCartney wrote it with just one person in mind: Julian Lennon.
Elsewhere in Osbourne’s selections was another nod to McCartney for his Help! ballad ‘Yesterday’ and to both Lennon and McCartney for their joint effort in the Sgt. Pepper finisher ‘A Day in the Life’.
In 2022, Osbourne also revealed his adoration for the early Beatles hit ‘She Loves You’, claiming that the song changed his life more than any other. “I owe my career to them because they gave me the desire to want to be in the music game,” he said.
Ozzy Osbourne’s favourite The Beatles songs:
‘Hey Jude’
‘Yesterday’
‘She Loves You’
‘A Day In The Life’
