The legendary bassist Bob Daisley, that worked with many famous rockstars, including Ozzy Osbourne talked with The Metal Voice about the recordings he made with the Madman. He revealed that he was the responsible to write the classic “Suicide Solution” and was inspired by Ozzy Osbourne himself. Old statements says that the song was written by Ozzy to pay tribute to the late Bon Scott.
Read what Bob Daisley said:
“He’s dreaming [that it’s about Bon Scott]. [Laughs] I knew Bon Scott. Bon Scott died after I’d written the lyrics for ‘Suicide Solution.’
“It was my title and it was about Ozzy. It was inspired by Ozzy’s drinking, because he was drinking himself into oblivion lots of days and it was affecting him. I even had a talk with him about it one day. He was getting drunk during the day.
“I said, ‘What happens if we find a drummer that we really like and we want him in the band and he thinks, ‘No, fuck this!’?’ Ozzy’s drunk all the time. The band was unknown and has just been signed and Ozzy didn’t have the best reputation in the world after being fired from Black Sabbath of being professional or reliable.
“But ‘Suicide Solution’ – it was inspired by how Ozzy was with his drinking and that. I wrote those lyrics about his drinking, or as a warning to anybody that’s drinking themselves into an early grave. How he’s got the audacity to say that he wrote the lyrics about Bon Scott when he didn’t write any of the lyrics?!”
Focusing on the 1986 lawsuit filed against Ozzy by parents of John McCollum, a depressed teenager who committed suicide allegedly after listening to “Suicide Solution,” Daisley added:
About the 1986 lawsuit against Ozzy by parents of a kid who suicide after listening to the song, Daisley said:
“They were being sued by that young lad’s family that killed himself. Because he had that record on his turntable when they came home when he shot himself. And in those days it was vinyl, and the side that had been playing was the side that had ‘Suicide Solution’ on it. ‘Suicide Solution’ wasn’t about advising anybody to kill themselves, it was about advising people against killing themselves with alcohol.
“I remember I had to talk to their lawyers at the time. If I hadn’t written the lyrics, they wouldn’t have come to me. But their lawyers came to me to get a statement about what the song was about, because I’ve written the lyrics.
“So I did a statement for them and that must have been read out in court. And I told them it’s not advising anybody to kill themselves, I wrote that as a warning against killing yourself with alcohol and that’s all the song was about.”