Born in Sydney, Australia back in 1950, Bob Daisley was part of many incredible bands during his career like Rainbow, Uriah Heep, Gary Moore, Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne. But besides being an incredible bass player, he also is a really fantastic lyricist and he showed that by writing the lyrics for most of the best-selling Ozzy Osbourne albums. In an interview with Johnny Beane (Transcribed by Ultimate Guitar), Daisley recalled how bad Ozzy and the late guitarist Randy Rhoads were bad when it came to writing lyrics.
Bob Daisley recalls how Ozzy and Rhoads were bad at writing lyrics
“I first got into it really was that Ozzy wasn’t a lyricist and neither was Randy. It was only the three of us to start with. And we were auditioning drummers and writing songs at the time. I remember, we were at a rehearsal place called TransAm Trucking in a place called Ilketshall in Suffolk in England. And I came down, it was a live-in situation, and we were auditioning drummers and writing, and I came down one morning, and Ozzy and Randy had tried their hand at writing and lyrics with one of the songs.”
“And I thought, ‘God, this is awful.’ (Laughs) It was like Spinal Tap, but worse. (Laughs) So I thought, ‘I’m gonna have to wear the lyricist hat.’ And I just thought — we wanted to be self-sufficient, we don’t want to get writers outside of the band and we want to keep it under our roof. So I took on the role of lyricist and lyrics for the songs. There was a couple where Ozzy had had a line or a title or something like that. But, you know, 99% of it was me,” Bob Daisley said.
During the same conversation he compared being a lyricist for Ozzy and for the other groups he was part of. According to him, in Rainbow, for example, Ronnie James Dio was an amazing songwriter, so he didn’t need to help that much. Daisley was part of Ozzy’s band from 1979 to 1981, 1983 to 1985, 1988 (As a session musician), 1990 to 1991 (As a session musician) and from 1995 to 1995.