(Credits: Far Out / Sony Music Entertainment)
Fri 14 November 2025 13:30, UK
The amount of guitarists Ozzy Osbourne had over the years practically reads like an all-star list of the greatest players of their generation.
Even though he may have been mocked for his behaviour back in the day, you couldn’t deny that ‘The Prince of Darkness’ knew what he was doing when picking the right person behind the six-string, whether that was finding Randy Rhoads and being blown away or giving Zakk Wylde his first shot at the big time. But judging by his first picks, his choice in rock and roll legends could have been far more vast had he got his way the first time around.
Granted, there were always going to be limits on where Osbourne could go. Even though Eddie Van Halen was having trouble in his own band at the beginning of their career, he wasn’t going to jump ship and join the former Black Sabbath frontman. And while it’s interesting to hear someone like Jeff Beck contributing to one of Osbourne’s albums later on in their lives, the idea of him working with ‘The Prince of Darkness’ on a permanent basis was never going to happen.
Then again, any guitarist that Osbourne ever played with was forever cursed to be compared to Rhoads. Like it or not, he was one of a kind, and while everyone from Brad Gillis to Bernie Torme to Jake E Lee made their way through the material perfectly, there’s no way they would hold a candle to the polka-dotted classical genius that started the ball rolling for all of them back in the day.
If you look at the metal scene around the time that Osbourne was starting his own band, things had already begun to pick up steam. The new wave of British heavy metal was in full swing, but whereas Osbourne never really identified with the term ‘heavy metal’, he could definitely hear when a band was on fire when first hearing Michael Schenker play with UFO for the first time.
Schenker was the perfect example of a master technician, but when Osbourne asked him to join, the German guitarist ended up turning him down multiple times, saying, “I was tempted to do it. I said: ‘How can I get away from this? Then Cozy (Powell) was saying ‘You can’t do this, we just got Graham Bonnet. I thought (I should) just ask him for the impossible and he maybe would say no. That’s what I did. I asked for the impossible with the hope he would say no. Then I was off the hook.”
Admittedly, it is a shame that we were robbed of whatever Schenker could have done with ‘The Prince of Darkness’, but that did give Lee a chance to shine behind the scenes. Rhoads left some huge shoes to fill, but given that hair metal was quickly becoming the biggest genre in the world, songs like ‘Bark at the Moon’ took the same approach as classic Osbourne material with the slightest dash of Motley Crue-style bombast in the mix.
And since Lee is part of the snowball effect that led Osbourne to Wylde, his career would have been very different had Schenker stayed. He had the technical flash to make the guitar sing in the way he wanted to, but there are few people on this planet that have the same muscle that Wylde has whenever he goes for a pinch harmonic.
So while Schenker needed to focus on his own band, it’s not like he didn’t have some magic in his arsenal as well. If you listen to UFO’s Strangers in the Night, he was clearly good enough to be a member of Osbourne’s band, but it’s probably for the best that we got to hear both ‘Shot in the Dark’ and ‘Armed and Ready’ than smushing them up against each other.
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