Ozzy Osbourne was in discussions about joining Van Halen at the start of the millennium, and the unlikely hard rock supergroup might have come together if MTV's The Osbournes series hadn't proved so successful.
In a major new interview with Rolling Stone, Alex Van Halen reveals that, circa 2001, he and his brother Eddie sat down with Sharon Osbourne and seriously discussed the idea of an Ozzy-fronted Van Halen album.
“When you get a dog, you don’t expect it to be a cat,” the drummer says. “When you get an Ozzy, you get Ozzy. Play the music, he’ll sing, and it’s gonna be great.”
Around the same time, however, Sharon and Ozzy also had meetings with MTV about launching a new reality show based around their family. The Osbournes subsequently launched on MTV in March 2002, and was a massive success, making the proposed union with Van Halen a logistical impossibility.
In an email to Rolling Stone, Ozzy Osbourne confirms that the story is genuine, and says that he believes an album with the Van Halen brothers would have been “phenomenal”.
“Yes, we were discussing it,” he writes. “It is something that if it had come to fruition, would have been phenomenal. Eddie and Alex were great friends of mine for a very long time and it’s a regret of mine that we never got it together. The Osbournes got in the way of creating new music at that time, unfortunately.”
Osbourne and the Van Halen brothers have known one another since 1978, when the Californian band were booked to support Black Sabbath on the UK and European legs of the Never Say Die! tour.
With Sabbath in a weakened state due to inter-personal conflicts and escalating substance abuse issues, the effervescent young Californian quartet stole the show on more than one night of the tour, a situation which didn’t escape Geezer Butler and Tony Iommi’s attention, as the pair told this writer for the Eddie Van Halen biography, Eruption.
“They watched us almost every night from the side of the stage,” the guitarist said, “and obviously they’d pick things up from us, seeing what worked, and what got the crowd going. But it was just a bit awkward when we’d come onstage and it felt like we were just doing what they were doing. One night I said to Eddie, Hey, Eddie, are you gonna play a couple of tracks off our new album tomorrow?” [Laughs]
“They were all really good blokes,” Geezer Butler added, “so we weren’t really that bothered about it, but Tony had to have a few words with Eddie, in a ‘Behave yourself’ kind of way.”
Alex Van Halen's memoir Brothers is set for publication on October 24.
The book is described by its publishers Harper Collins as “nothing like any rock-and-roll memoir you’ve ever read”, with a synopsis for Brothers stating, “Alex Van Halen shares his personal story of family, friendship, music and brotherly love in a remarkable tribute to his beloved brother and band mate.”
