Ozzy Osbourne has paid tribute to late legend Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead in a new interview, calling him his personal “rock god”.
Speaking BBC Radio 2’s Johnny Walker, Ozzy spoke highly of the iconic rocker when asked about the artists who inspire him.
“My rock god is Lemmy Kilmister,” the Black Sabbath frontman declared.
“Lemmy was a guy – he shot from the hip every time. ‘That sucks,’ or, ‘I like that’.
“I’m good at starting lyrics, but I can’t finish them. And he’d go – he’d write a bunch of lyrics for my songs – ‘Mama, I’m Coming Home.’
“So, I’d give him a tape, and I had this book on World War II. I haven’t read it and I told him, ‘Tell me what you think. And I have a bunch of these lyrics – whenever you can…’ I’m thinking, it’s gonna be a week,” Ozzy added.
“And he says, ‘Come back in about four hours.’ So I got back, and he goes, ‘What do you think about these?’ And I go, ‘Oh, great.’ He then goes, ‘What about these?’ I go, ‘Oh, you got two…?
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“He goes, ‘No, I got another one – three.’ I go, ‘You had written three sets of lyrics?!’ He said, ‘Yeah, and that book was crap!’ I said, ‘What book?’ He says, ‘The book you gave me’.
He continued: “He was a speed-reader! He could read really fast. He was amazing! You look at people like Lemmy and you think, ‘Oh, he’s a yob [a rude, noisy, and aggressive young person].’ But he was very well-educated.”
It comes following comments made by the ‘Crazy Train’ singer and his wife Sharon earlier this year, where the pair reflected on Lemmy’s influence prior to his death from cancer in 2015.
Discussing the rumour that to have written the lyrics to ‘No More Tears’ in 15 minutes, Sharon explained: “It was done very quickly because Lemmy had done so much touring with Ozzy, and we lived in the same town, and he was a really good friend of both of us.
“And he was probably the most well-read man I’d ever met in my life. Brilliant, he had a brilliant vocabulary, and I don’t think that many people realise that.”
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Check out ‘No More Tears’ by Ozzy Osbourne:
