The first song Black Sabbath wrote without Ozzy Osbourne: “Ozzy was still in the band”
Until the day he dies, Ozzy Osbourne will probably always be associated with the term ‘heavy metal’. He may not have been the first one to coin the phrase or even the first person to play hard rock music, but his work with Black Sabbath paved the way for what metal would become, alongside his antics, which mostly made him look superhuman whenever he took to the stage. It’s hard to replace a metal god like that, but after Osbourne started falling out of favour with the band, ‘Children of the Sea’ was their second chance at life.
Because for the first Sabbath shows of the 1980s, it looked like the blues-infused hard rock band had collapsed. They were starting to get outplayed onstage by acts like Van Halen, and while Never Say Die was a decent record from them, it wasn’t exactly lighting the world on fire like they did in their early years.
If the band liked to have a good time in their glory years, though, Osbourne was coming close to being a walking casualty. The man was almost drinking himself to death, and his lack of stage presence during the show left Tony Iommi to take centre stage, which doesn’t always bode well for someone who claimed to be a heavy metal madman.
Though Osbourne wasn’t fully out of the picture, the rest of Sabbath reconvened with former Rainbow singer Ronnie James Dio for a few jam sessions. They may not have been looking to put a band together, but ‘Children of the Sea’ spontaneously emerged from those sessions in just a few hours.
As Dio recalled, he thought it was just a collaboration among friends before they asked him to join the group, saying, “As far as I knew, Ozzy was still in the band. During the conversation, Tony asked me if I’d like to see the studio they were doing their things in. He, Geezer and Bill picked up their instruments and started to play [what became] ‘Children of the Sea’ and I liked it very much. Tony asked me if I could do anything with it.”
For the first time, this was a song far removed from their bluesy roots. There may have still been Iommi’s thunderous riffs, but with a much grander scope thanks to Dio’s voice, sounding like something that would have come out of a soundtrack to a pretty kickass Dungeons and Dragons movie.
While it only took a few more months for Osbourne to go on sabbatical, Dio would become the new leader of Black Sabbath, building off of ‘Children of the Sea’ on the album Heaven and Hell with songs like the title track and ‘Neon Knights’. It may not have sounded like ‘The Prince of Darkness’, but that didn’t really matter.
Considering how well Osbourne was known, getting someone who sounded exactly like him would have been one step backwards for the band. Sabbath were always about pushing their music into different areas, and with Dio at the mic, they were about to reintroduce themselves to the next generation of metalheads.