Sharon Osbourne has urged Black Sabbath’s first manager not to release an album of their first recordings.
The matriarch’s late husband, Ozzy Osbourne, and bandmates Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward recorded a number of songs in Birmingham’s Zella Studios under the name Earth back in 1969, and in June, Jim Simpson, their manager at the time, announced Earth: The Legendary Lost Tapes compilation would be released the following month.
The release never happened and now Sharon has spoken out to condemn the project, disputing the legal ownership of the recordings and insisted the band didn’t want them released.
She wrote in part on Instagram: “Simpson also states that he is “….in the process of relaunching Big Bear Records in a new distribution partnership with Trapeze Music Entertainment Ltd (director being John Cooper), a well-established company with a huge catalogue including the likes of Johnny Cash, Buddy Holly, Marlene Dietrich, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Digby Fairweather and hundreds of other artists. I seriously doubt that the artists he mentions, or their estates, would have authorized them to be sold in the USA.
“Let it be known that Trapeze Music is an “out-of-copyright” UK based label that is in debt for £539,000 and the entertainment division is in debt for £1.442 million. A previous entity under the Trapeze banner, with the director, (being John Cooper), was Discovery Records Limited, which went into liquidation in 2018 with an estimated deficiency of £1,407,388. These artist recordings he mentions appear NOT to be out of copyright in the USA, but Trapeze sells through a us domestic import distributor called MVD who they claim inadvertently put the BLACK SABBATH recordings online digitally in the USA and then quickly withdraw them when Simpson’s lawyers were told the Black Sabbath material is not out of copyright, despite the fact they had agreed not to release them to the public without giving us 14 days prior notice.(sic)”
Sharon also shared the emails she had sent to Jim raising objections about the project, which her correspondence to him suggested he had failed to reply to her.
She wrote in an email in July: “As you know, the Band do not want these tapes released, not least as they haven’t heard them despite you saying you would provide copies long ago.
“You know that, as a band, Black Sabbath don’t take things lying down and you can be assured that if you go ahead with this against the Band’s wishes we will take any action [when and] where their rights are infringed, both here and in America.
“We will also be making it clear to all Black Sabbath fans that this is not material the band ever wanted released, that they should not buy it, and that you are going against the band’s wishes in releasing demo recordings that were never intended for release.”