Cocaine, weed and booze: the story behind Post Malone and Ozzy Osbourne’s ‘It’s a Raid’
Ozzy Osbourne’s battle with substance abuse was no secret. He was addicted throughout his solo career and Black Sabbath days, eventually leading him to be fired from the band in 1979. Guitarist Tony Iommi got rid of Osbourne when working with the Prince of Darkness became increasingly complex. This abuse was at its highest in the early ’70s, and inspired a song he released with Post Malone 50 years later.
Sabbath released their fourth studio album, Vol. 4, in 1972. Recorded at Record Plant in Los Angeles, it was the band’s first project not produced by Rodger Bain. During the recording sessions, Osbourne took many drugs, including cocaine and marijuana, and felt on top of the world.
“We were recording Vol. 4, and we’d rented this house in Bel Air to record this album,” he told SiriusXM. “We had a pile of coke, a pile of pot on this fucking table. And I’m sitting there, great, Bel Air, sun shining, cocaine, booze, the fucking works. I’m thinking, ‘Fuck me, I’ve made it here!'”
All was well until he accidentally touched a silent alarm and several police officers turned up at the property, causing panic. “So I’m sitting in this house, and it’s fucking boiling hot,” he recalled. “I see these buttons on the wall and I go, ‘Oh, must be the air conditioning.’ I pressed the fucking button, and [in] about five minutes, four or five cop cars come screaming down the drive. I’m shouting, ‘It’s a fucking raid!’
In the heat of the moment, Osbourne ran to the toilet and decided to take all of the cocaine instead of flushing it away. “Me and this roadie, we grab the big bowl of coke, and the pot, we go into the bathroom,” he said. “I’m going, ‘I can’t fucking throw this [away].’ I had coke coming out my fucking ears. I didn’t sleep for four days after that.”
That incident inspired Osbourne’s collaboration with Malone, ‘It’s a Raid’, which appeared on his 2020 solo album, Ordinary Man. The song was produced by Andrew Watt, known for his collaborations with Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, the Rolling Stones, and Iggy Pop. Watt, who worked across the whole album, revealed the track came about after needing a heavier song towards the end of the tracklisting.
“At the end of the album, there’s a bunch of these mid-tempo songs, ‘Eat Me’, it’s slow, ‘Holy for Tonight’, it’s slow,” Watt explained. “I’m like, ‘We need one more heater for the end of the album.’ So we put down this [guitar] thing and kinda start this vibe, and Ozzy comes in and goes, ‘It’s a raid!’ The story of the song is on there.”
‘It’s a Raid’ was a massive success with over 21 million streams on Spotify. During his Post Malone: Runaway documentary, Malone admitted, “I was nervous meeting him, not as much performing [with him]. Meeting him is terrifying, ’cause, you know, what the fuck do you say to Ozzy Osbourne, you know? – ‘I like your pants.’ You have no idea what the fuck to say to him.”