Somewhere there's a recording of Ozzy Osbourne duetting with Madonna

In an age when musicians regularly plunder their studio archives for material to pad out expanded versions of albums you already own, seemingly happy for the recordings they never wanted you to hear first time round to be used as musical ballast in "deluxe edition" versions of the same thing, it's rare to hear about unreleased material that demands to be heard.

Don Was has just such a track. Back in 1983, when his band Was (Not Was) were recording their second album, Born To Laugh At Tornadoes, they brought in a couple of musicians to record vocals on the track Shake Your Head. The first was Ozzy Osbourne, then gearing up for the release of his third solo album, Bark At The Moon. The second was a young session singer by the name of Madonna.

"She did a great job," Was tells Rolling Stone. "But it didn’t sound like Was (Not Was) to me anymore."

In 1992, Was (Not Was) rerecorded Shake Your Head for the compilation album Hello Dad... I'm in Jail, and Ozzy rerecorded his vocal part. Unfortunately, Madonna refused permission for her contributions to be used, so actress Kim Basinger – who had appeared on Prince's 1989 single Scandalous! and recorded a (thus-far unreleased) solo album the following year – was approached, and the rest is history. Shake Your Head became Was (Not Was)'s biggest international hit, reaching the top five in the UK. But it could have been so different.

"We realised about eight years later that we had Ozzy and Madonna on parallel tracks,” says Was. "So we gave it to a remixer… and he turned it into a Ozzy/Madonna duet."

Time for a deluxe edition of Born to Laugh at Tornadoes, perhaps?

Elsewhere in the interview, Was reveals that the first time he met Ozzy was in 1974, when Was was playing bass for cult Detroit folk musician Ted Lucas. They supported Black Sabbath at a show, and a tape later uncovered by Third Man Records tells the story of the performance.

"There’s a bunch of 14-year-olds on amphetamines, and a folk group was not what they came to hear," says Was. "You can hear the beer bottles breaking as we were just pelted with debris from song number one.  We didn’t make it through the set because the drummer was bleeding so bad that we had to flee the stage. We actually lasted longer in the ring than I thought we did. I thought we didn’t make it through the first song – we did three or four songs."

Was Not Was - Shake Your Head 1992 (Let's Go To Bed) Remastered (Official Music Video) - YouTube

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