Ozzy Osbourne admitted that reuniting with Black Sabbath was hardly ever clear sailing for him. While chatting with Apple Music's Zane Lowe to promote his new album, Patient Number 9 — on which Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi appears — Ozzy admitted that being in a band again with Iommi was tough: “The tours were like stepping back for me. It was the same old thing. . . Tony would say, 'It's not an Ozzy show, it's not your band.' And (there was) a lot of unsettlement. I didn't enjoy (it), y'know?”
He went on to explain, “When I left Sabbath, I did okay, I did good. The difference was, I was a singer with Black Sabbath; it was my own band now. If somebody got up my nose, I'd just get rid of them. . . If I don't like a certain sound, I'll say I don't like a certain sound. But you couldn't say that to f***ing them. Oh yeah? Well, f*** off!”
Ozzy felt constrained being back in a band situation where he didn't have the final say: “That's what I meant when I said it was like reverting back. . . It was like, you have a relationship, and you go back to it, and it's like starting the same again.”
Ozzy told us not long ago that he was glad Sabbath seemed to be closing things out in a good place: “Black Sabbath has been through the mill over the years, but to come back and be friends with my buddies who I started off with all those years ago, it's a closure for me, a chapter of my life which I can say, 'Well, we came, we saw, we had a good time and now it's over.' I'm glad we ended up happy. Whatever axes we had to grind between us over the years, we got rid of all that and we're friends again.”