Tony Iommi and Ozzy Osbourne of Black Sabbath performing on stage at Rainbow Theatre, London in 1973. Photo / Getty Images
Ozzy Osbourne will always have a special place in New Zealand rock music history, and in my memory.
His band Black Sabbath headlined the Great Ngāruawāhia Music Festival in 1973, when a farm outside the small Waikato town was transformed for three hot days in early January into a Kiwi version of Woodstock.
Ozzy then was living his prince of darkness persona on stage to the full. The band’s set started at midnight on Saturday, as a large cross was lit on top of a hill overlooking the crowd of 18,000.
“We were after a menacing atmosphere,” one of the organisers told me. It was certainly that. “Only a lynch mob,” I wrote at the time, “was needed to complete the scene.” The volume was huge, knocking people back on their heels on the hill 400 metres from the stage. Ozzy was in non-stop motion throughout and the crowd rattled beer cans or clapped hands whenever he directed them to.
As well as being loud, the music was relentless and not designed to calm people from the first generation of New Zealanders to experiment with mind-altering substances. A stream of chemically befuddled punters, many looking stressed and anxious, began edging past the stage to the medical centre in a large tent backstage.
“I hope we didn’t freak you out,” yelled Ozzy. “This one should help you. It’s called PARANOID!”
The Ngāruawāhia festival came three years after the film documentary on Woodstock was screened here. Woodstock was a turning point in first world youth culture, radically departing from older generations’ attitudes to everything from drugs to nudity.
I’d been despatched to Ngāruawāhia as a reporter by the newspaper in Auckland where I was writing about everything from music to sport to shipwrecks. It was quickly clear the massive influence Woodstock had on many of the music fans who headed to our first home-grown festival.
After a restless night trying to sleep in a small tent, I was puzzled by what the material was in the bikini the topless woman from the tent next door was wearing. Then I realised she wasn’t wearing anything.
Nudity, a la Woodstock was commonplace over the next three days. The opening act, Kiwi singer Corben Simpson, sang a couple of songs and then announced it was “too hot”. He stripped naked to finish his set. Five months later he was in court where he was fined for “wilfully and obscenely exposing his person”.
Musically, Ngāruawāhia offered a stage to an amazing range of future giants in New Zealand music. The festival’s co-promoter Barry Coburn was the manager of a gifted Auckland group calling themselves Split Ends. Sadly it was the wrong place and the wrong time for a band, which was then featuring flute and violin solos. At best the audience reception could be described as cool.
The future Split Enz weren’t the only ones battling, at the very start of their careers, to win the crowd over. Dragon, with just one Hunter brother, Todd, played to a muted reception.
On the other hand, there was an ecstatic reaction to the co-headline act, the British folk band Fairport Convention. Very much the yin to Black Sabbath’s prototype heavy metal yang, the Fairports had the moshpit dancing to old Scottish and Irish reels and jigs.
But there was no question that the big-name act was Sabbath. To get them to New Zealand required a trip to Britain for tyro promoter Coburn.
In 2011, he wrote in the Herald how he had flown to Europe and saw Sabbath’s manager Don Arden, at Arden’s home in London. Coburn was greeted at the door of the luxury house in Wimbledon by Arden’s daughter, the then-teenaged Sharon. (Who would have guessed that Sharon would later marry Ozzy and become known throughout the world with the stunning success of the reality TV show The Osbournes?)
Coburn was just 22, so dealing with Arden, described by the Guardian when he died in 2007, as the “Al Capone of British music” took some backbone.
In the mid 1970s in Auckland I found myself sitting next to Arden and his Irish wife Hope at a dinner hosted for the visitors by a local record company executive. Hope, a former dancer, was a delight, rolling out anecdotes about film star Cary Grant, their next door neighbour when they were in Los Angeles.
Don was exactly what I had expected, revelling in stories that basically painted him as a semi-gangster. When he heard that rock and roll pioneer Chuck Berry had recently been in Auckland, he took special delight in recounting details of a show he had co-promoted in the 1960s in Germany with a former SS officer. Berry was refusing to go on stage until he had been paid. “The German pulled out this big Luger pistol and pointed it at Berry’s head. There were no more arguments.”
The night made it very clear that any charm Sharon Osbourne has comes from her mother.