Words by Riley Fitzgerald
Graphic by Epiphone.com

In an interview promoting new album Ozzy Osbourne: Ordinary Man Black Sabbath‘s Ozzy Osbourne has praised the Beatles.

“Sgt. Pepper’s was a great record,” Osbourne informed The Sun. “The Beatles are my favorites, you know. When I met Paul McCartney, it was the highlight of my life.”

“I was so surprised at how nice he was,” the 71-year-old continues, “and I also met Ringo Starr … what a great bloke. The thing about The Beatles was they always had the best melodies. All I’ve tried to do in my career is put a melody to a dark riff.”

“When I heard the Beatles,” the singer shared in another interview with Blabbermouth last year, “I knew what I wanted to do.”

“My son says to me,” he continued, “‘Dad, I like the Beatles, but why do you go so crazy?’”

“The only way I can describe it,” Ozzy explained, “is like this, ‘Imagine you go to bed today and the world is black and white and then you wake up, and everything’s in color. That’s what it was like!’ That’s the profound effect it had on me.”

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Osbourne then reflected, recalling the first time he ever heard The Fab Four during the early 1960s. “I was walking around with a transistor radio on my shoulder. And ‘She Loves You‘ came on. And, I don’t know, it just went, ‘Bang! And that’s what I want to do! Wouldn’t it be great?‘”

In his Sun interview, Osbourne laments the decline of the album format.

“Because of Spotify, nobody buys f***ing records anymore,” he declares. “People will soon forget about taking an album home, reading the sleeve and experiencing an album’s worth of music.”

Osborne has recently shared that he is suffering from Parkson’s disease and as a result, has been forced to postpone his upcoming US tour.

“I’m still alive,” he told his interviewer. “[But] I never thought in my lifetime I’d see the demise of records.”