I used to drink beer and play snooker with John \u201cOzzy\u201d Osbourne, his father Jack and uncle Jim (also known as \u201cOzzy\u201d), plus my own father, in the late 1960\u2019s and early 70\u2019s at the Brookvale Park Social Working Men\u2019s Club in Birmingham. My father Frank had been friends with his family for years, and before the war had lodged with Jim and Violet Osbourne in Turfpits Lane, Erdington.<\/p>\n
In the mid 60\u2019s I would go and listen to his band in their earlier incarnation as the Rock\/Blues band Earth at Henry\u2019s Blues House on a Tuesday night in the upstairs room of the Crown public house in Birmingham town centre. This was a venue where individual musicians, sometimes with a group would just turn up and play the Blues. On occasions there were so many of them they overflowed the stage, and the audience was pushed back to give them space to play. I also remember bands like Clem Clemson\u2019s Bakerloo Blues Line, plus my friend Geoff Commander who would bring along his Gibson Barney Kessel guitar, worth a lot of money even then.<\/p>\n
John invited me to the first ever Black Sabbath concert at Birmingham Town Hall as his guest, which I still remember well. The other invited guests were his mother Lily and father Jack, who had paid for the venue, his uncle Jim and aunt Violet, my mother and father, my wife Kath, plus my uncle Joe. John had arranged for us to have the Dress Circle to ourselves, and because of the occasion, all the men were dressed in suits and ties. <\/p>\n
The paying public were very few in number, and initially occupied the \u201ccheap seats\u201d on the steps of the organ behind the stage, not surprising really as only those of us who had known the earlier band would have heard of them. Once Sabbath started their act and the audience realised that the dearer seats on the ground floor were empty, there was a mad rush as they climbed over the dividing barriers to occupy them. Some of the invited family \u201cGuests\u201d complained that it was a bit loud, never having heard a band like Sabbath before.<\/p>\n
I remember that part of the image of the band was due to Ozzy\u2019s father Jack, an engineer by trade, who made their original large crosses out of aluminium sheet, even though he never seemed to get around to repairing his own spectacles, which were always held together with an Elastoplast. He claimed this allowed him to adjust the frame when playing Snooker, something he was very good at, unlike John.<\/p>\n
One slightly bizarre thing I remember that happened in the early days was that Freddie Harris the Concert Secretary of the working men\u2019s club we used, asked Ozzy\u2019s dad if he could book the band for one of the Saturday night dances. As the people attending these dances expected Waltzes, Quick Steps and Tangos\u2019, not surprisingly they were never booked again! <\/p>\n
I always found Ozzy to be a fairly laid-back easy-going guy, and believe it when he says that the nearest, he ever came to Black Magic was a box of chocolates! In those days John was just a normal guy but with a wicked sense of humour who liked a pint and a game of snooker, who had an interest in heavy rock, and was nothing at all like the person he has become now due to years of drug and alcohol abuse.<\/p>\n
At the launch of the band as Black Sabbath, John gave me the first one of the first set of publicity photos that they had had taken, which he signed for me, plus a copy of their first album, which I still have.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":13986,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","class_list":["post-13966","tnc_col_1415_item","type-tnc_col_1415_item","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tnc_tax_5366-john-slatford","tnc_tax_720-heavy-metal","tnc_tax_720-rock","tnc_tax_447-birmingham-town-hall-2","tnc_tax_206-black-sabbath","tainacan-item-single-page"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/birminghammusicarchive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tnc_col_1415_item\/13966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/birminghammusicarchive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tnc_col_1415_item"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/birminghammusicarchive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/tnc_col_1415_item"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birminghammusicarchive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13966"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/birminghammusicarchive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tnc_col_1415_item\/13966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14507,"href":"https:\/\/birminghammusicarchive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tnc_col_1415_item\/13966\/revisions\/14507"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birminghammusicarchive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/birminghammusicarchive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}