OZZY OSBOURNE's 'Mr. Crowley' live EP was recorded today 43 years ago, October 2nd

Published October 2 2023 at 12:10

Today marks the 43rd anniversary of the live recording for the OZZY OSBOURNE 'Mr Crowley Live EP'. It's the band's only official live recording featuring the late guitarist Randy Rhoads prior to 'Tribute', which was released in 1987 posthumously.

The EP contains the songs "Mr. Crowley", "Suicide Solution" and "You Said It All", recorded at the Gaumont in Southampton, U.K. on October 2nd 1980.

Or were they? Well, the 2 first mentioned definitely were recorded there, but the track "You Said It All" has always been a bit of an enigma to Ozzy fans, as this single was the only time the song was released on a physical format.

After a little digging into the facts, it becomes quite obvious that "You Said It All" was in fact NOT recorded live at that gig.

This is the actual story:

Record label Jet Records wanted to release "Goodbye To Romance" as the first single off the debut album, released earlier that month. After playing a gig in Birmingham on September 28th, the band quickly returned to the Ridge Farm studio to remix "Goodbye To Romance" for that single release. However, the next morning they were informed that Jet Records had changed their mind and instead wanted to release a brand new song as a single.

Randy Rhoads, Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake quickly composed the song "You Said It All," with Kerslake performing the temporary cue vocals, while a drunken Ozzy slept under the drum riser. Luckily they did manage to revive him enough to get a decent vocal performance out of him later that day.

As it turns out, plans to release "You Said It All" as a single were eventually thwarted for unknown reasons, so the single was never released.

Instead "You Said It All" showed up in a 'live' format on the 'Mr. Crowley EP', which was released in November of 1980.

To this day it is a little unclear where the actual recording of that track stems from. Either is it taken from the recording at Ridge Farm in September, or it was performed and recorded during the soundcheck for the Gaumont Theatre gig, with some crowd-noise subsequently added.

Either way, the song was not performed live anywhere on the September/October 1980 tour, and certainly not at the Gaumont Theatre (which is easy to verify as an audience recording of that full gig is circulating among collectors).

Tracklisting:

A1        Mr Crowley    5:04
B2        You Said It All    4:07
B3        Suicide Solution    4:36

Recording Line-up:
Vocals - Ozzy Osbourne
Bass Guitar - Bob Daisley
Drums - Lee Kerslake
Guitar - Randy Rhoads