BIRMINGHAM, BACH & BAMAKO

I know it’s not a particularly festive subject. But I haven’t been able to get Ozzy Osbourne out of my head after revisiting his last album “Black Rain” and finding it to be the best thing heavy metal’s self-proclaimed Prince Of Darkness has done in decades, a bone-crunching albeit catchy take on modern hard rock. And there are other reasons to be thinking about the former Black Sabbath singer. December 21 marks Frank Zappa’s birthday, and I can’t think of the maestro without being reminded of a story Ozzy told me back in 1995 to underline his belief that one should never read too much into song lyrics, least of all his own. He once congratulated Zappa on the clever drug cipher in “Montana” and earned a hard stare for his praise as Zappa made it absolutely clear that the song was really about a cowboy setting up a dental-floss farm and not as Ozzy had falsely supposed about cocaine. And that’s only the beginning: In a recent article I read recently about plagiarism (re Joe Satriani’s upcoming court case against Coldplay for supposedly filching a chord progression ), Ozzy was quoted as saying that all good bass-lines in the history of rock were first penned by Johann Sebastian Bach, a name-check one wouldn’t have expected from a man not known for straying too far from blues-derived guitar riffs. But perhaps Birmingham’s most famous son has roots that go even further than Bach: Amadou & Mariam’s recently released new album “Welcome To Mali” sent me back to “Tje Ni Mousso” from 1999, where the opening track “Chantez Chantez” sounds a lot like Black Sabbaths’ “Fairies Wear Boots” right down to the wailing vocal melody if you take away the Marshall stacks and Bill Ward’s muted drumming. Of course, as guitarist/singer Amadou Bagayoko is a big rock fan who cites Jimi Hendrix, David Gilmour and Eric Clapton as influences, you might suppose that he took some of Sabbath’s music into his own mix. But I like to think it’s the other way round and that Ozzy’s music owes as much to Bamako as it does to Bach or Birmingham-. Even the most Caucasian heavy metal has roots in Africa, a point one can in my opinion never emphasise enough.