Steve Vai sitting on a full album recorded with Ozzy Osbourne
Steve Vai has revealed that he has enough material recorded with Ozzy Osbourne for a full album.
In an interview with eonmusic, the guitarist said that he was “sitting on a whole Ozzy record”, adding that he couldn’t do anything with the material because he didn’t have any rights to it.
“We did record some pretty good stuff,” Vai said. “The interesting thing about that stuff we recorded from a guitar perspective is all of my rhythm guitar parts, I use an octave divider, and that record doesn’t sound like anything else.”
He continued: “Ozzy had recorded about half of his record for the record company, and Sharon and the label wanted to get him together with some different songwriters to just get some more songs.
“So I was one of the ones that they wanted to get together with. It was really just to write some songs for Ozzy’s record that he would then take and go use for his record and whoever he was working with on the record would record it.”
Vai noted that they “ended up recording a lot of stuff. And then we started scheming”, adding that the label then intervened and insisted that Osbourne was only due one song from Vai.
The guitarist contributed the track ‘My Little Man’ to Osbourne’s 1995 album ‘Ozzmosis’, though there were other tracks under consideration.
He said: “One of the songs was ‘Danger Zone,’ I had already written it, and it was already done – it was a Gash track – and I thought, ‘Well, maybe he’d like this,’ and I reworked it a bit, but it’s on the shelf.
“There was some real, real heavy stuff because, as I mentioned, I used an octave divider on everything, and that’s was a conscious effort. I thought, ‘OK, you’re going to work with Ozzy, and all these incredible guitar players have played with Ozzy; what are you going to do?’ I was not going to be conventional.”
Last year, Vai appeared in Studio 666, a film starring members of Foo Fighters as fictional versions of themselves. “The movie is just off the charts gory and funny”, Vai said of his experience shooting the movie. “It was a glorious blast of demonic shred pleasure and when I saw it in the theatre”.
Elsewhere, a ballet featuring music by Black Sabbath is set to open in Birmingham in September. The ballet will arrive at the Birmingham Hippodrome from September 23 to 30, before moving on to Plymouth’s Theatre Royal and Sadler’s Wells in London. Tickets can be booked here.
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Arusa Qureshi
NME
