“As soon as I heard it, I thought, Yes, that's us, that’s Ozzy's voice." Listen to Ozzy Osbourne, Randy Rhoads and Bob Daisley play the blues on a rehearsal tape lost for 46 years

(Image credit: Fin Costello/Redferns)

A cassette featuring a recording of an Ozzy Osbourne rehearsal from 1980 has been discovered in an attic after 46 years.

The tape, which features Osbourne, guitarist Randy Rhoads and bassist Bob DaIsley jamming on a blues song ahead of the recruitment of drummer Lee Kerslake, which completed the line-up who later recorded the Blizzard Of Ozz album, was discovered in an attic in Suffolk, England by David 'Chabby' Jolly, who was friends with the singer at the time.

"Although he has the reputation of being wild, I found him to be a very unassuming guy and not as the picture painted," Jolly tells Sky News.

The cassette features 12 minutes of Osbourne, Rhoads and Daisley rehearsing in Iketshall in Suffolk. Daisley tells Sky News that the trio were there for a few weeks in January 1980, prior to Kerslake joining.

"As soon as I heard it, I thought, Yes, that’s us, that’s Ozzy’s voice," he says. "I don’t know if we were auditioning a drummer and just loosening up a bit, or we’re just clowning about… but it wasn’t a song we were working on because we had definite songs by then, we had several songs."

"I think we had a small audience one night, we went down to the local pub and just invited a few people… to try out our writing and our songs to see what the reaction would be. When we did play the songs that we'd had up to that point, it felt good and we thought, Yep, yeah, this is working."

Ozzy Osbourne tape found after 46 years - YouTube

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Daisley admitted last year that he had been warned off joining Ozzy's band in 1980.

“Ozzy has just come back from L.A. and been fired from Black Sabbath,” he recalled. “People warned me against working with Ozzy because he didn’t have the best reputation. He’d been getting out of it, being drunk, unprofessional, unreliable, and all the rest of it.”

Daisley, Osbourne, Rhoads and Kerslake began recording Blizzard Of Ozz on March 22, 1980 at Ridge Farm Studios in rural Surrey. The album was released in the UK on Jet Records on September 20, 1980 and peaked at number 7 on the UK charts.

Daisley was later involved in long-running legal battles with Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne over disputes about song credits and royalties, but the bassist admits to Sky that he "shed tears" when he heard of his old friend's death.

"What came flooding back," he says, "was all the good memories and the good times and the creativity, what we did achieve, and how many people we reached by being together."

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A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne's private jet, played Angus Young's Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

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