The Strange, Forgotten Saga of Ozzy’s Pre-‘Blizzard’ Solo Band

Do you know about the rock band that Ozzy Osbourne initially wanted to hire for his post-Black Sabbath band Blizzard Of Ozz? It was before the release of his first solo record with the now famous lineup that included Randy Rhoads.

Here is the strange, forgotten saga of the band Necromandus.

Necromandus Were First Connected to Black Sabbath

Picture it: Britain, early 1970s. You’re a young band playing a potentially pioneering blend of heavy metal and prog, earning plenty of local praise, and you catch the ear of Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi, who not only wants to represent you, but helps get you signed to his label and agrees to produce your first record. This is your ticket to the big time, right?

It probably seems like a safe assumption, and in many cases, it probably would be. But where the guys in Necromandus were concerned, it failed to pan out — not once, but twice.

Their story started in the late ’60s, when drummer Frank Hall and bassist Dennis McCarten met up in a band called Heaven. When Heaven split, they joined up with singer Bill Branch and guitarist Baz Dunnery — who’d just left another recently defunct group, called Jug — and decided to start their own four-piece.

After a few gigs played under the humorously provocative but likely career-limiting name Urinal, they settled on Necromandus. The name had the double benefit of being less offensive while also being more reflective of the type of music they were playing. As Hall later admitted, the new name came courtesy of a bit of a goof-up.

“I got mixed up with Nostradamus,” he told the Cumberland News & Star in a 2010 interview. “But it sounded good, so we kept it.”

It wasn’t just the name that sounded good. The band members also boasted some serious musical chops — particularly Dunnery, whose dexterous playing set the tone for their complex arrangements, as well as Hall, who was reportedly in the running to replace Phil Collins behind the kit as Genesis‘ touring drummer when Collins took over for Peter Gabriel on lead vocals.

With McCarten holding down the pocket with Hall, and Branch’s soulful singing topping off the whole blend, Necromandus marched toward local legend status, counting Iommi among their most ardent early supporters.

As Hall later told Classic Rock Magazine, the mutual admiration between the members of Necromandus and Sabbath went way back. Recalling a night spent watching Iommi and drummer Bill Ward playing with their pre-Sabbath group Mythology, he said, “I’d never seen anything like it. I’d never seen a left-handed guitarist before. And Bill was knocking seven bells out of John Bonham.”

As Sabbath’s star rose, Iommi saw an opportunity to support his friends while expanding his own side hustle as co-owner of Tramp Entertainment, a management company whose roster eventually grew to also include Judas Priest and Budgie. With Tramp in the band’s corner, Necromandus inked a deal with Sabbath’s label, Vertigo — and if that wasn’t enough, Iommi also agreed to supervise the recording sessions for their first album.

And that’s when things started going wrong.

Trouble for Necromandus

The sessions for Necromandus’ debut LP, recorded with producer Mike Butcher behind the boards, went well enough, and Iommi added extra star power by contributing some guitar fills to the tracks. But when it came time for the group to hit the road — opening for Sabbath, no less — Dunnery quit the group, leaving them without the remarkable guitarist who’d elevated their sound with his jazz-influenced licks.

“Baz wouldn’t do the tour. He couldn’t fly. Just couldn’t get on a plane,” Hall recalled during his interview with Classic Rock Magazine. “He didn’t tell anybody. He just left. Never came back. But I knew there was something wrong. Maybe he was in a deep depression at the time. We were living hand-to-mouth, nicking potatoes from restaurants to eat. Baz kept saying: ‘I can’t live like this.’ It wasn’t if he was going to leave, it was when.”

Part of the issue, as alluded to in Hall’s summary of Dunnery’s departure, was that after Necromandus handed their album in to Vertigo, the label slow-walked its release for the better part of a year. With very little money coming in and no sign of a release date on the horizon, it’s easy to understand the band members’ frustration; after all, what’s the point of flying halfway across the world and winning over audiences when they can’t buy your record?

For Iommi, though, the situation came down to an impossible demand: Either find another guitarist who could fill Dunnery’s shoes, or the deal was off. With no suitable replacements in the offing, Necromandus parted ways, leaving their album to gather dust in the Vertigo vaults.

Having gotten so tantalizingly close to their breakthrough, only to see it fall apart, the band members weren’t exactly quick to go lunging for another brass ring. In fact, by 1977, Hall and Dunnery were playing together again as members of a cover band, trading artistic ambition for steady pay.

Necromandus, “Judy Green Rocket” (Live in 1973)

How Necromandus Almost Became Ozzy Osbourne’s First Solo Band

Dreams are hard to kill, though, as they realized when a former Necromandus roadie, now working for Sabbath, showed up at Hall’s house to tell him Ozzy Osbourne had been fired by the band and was looking to start his own group — one whose lineup would consist of Hall, Dunnery, and McCarten. (Branch, for obvious reasons, found himself rendered redundant; with Ozzy on lead vocals, there wasn’t any need for a second singer.)

Dubbing the group Blizzard of Ozz, Osbourne welcomed his new bandmates to his home, where it quickly became apparent that the dangerously indulgent behavior that had gotten Ozzy booted from Sabbath would also make it almost impossible to get anything done.

Recalling that their new bandleader typically tended to show up at the studio in the middle of the afternoon, already inebriated, Hall told Classic Rock, “You’d shove him in the shower, he’d come out wrapped in towels and collapse on the floor… then he’d go up to the Hand & Cleaver [pub] and come back at 9 o’clock, out of it, and go, ‘Right, let’s start.'”

Beyond Ozzy’s inability to focus on the music, there was another fundamental problem — specifically, that as much as he admired the guys in Necromandus, they weren’t really coming from compatible musical backgrounds.

Although they certainly had a heavier side to their stuff, they leaned far further into prog than Osbourne could and/or was willing to follow. It didn’t take long for Hall to predict the whole thing would fall apart, and not much longer than that for his prediction to come true. Osbourne returned to Sabbath, bringing that band’s brief Dave Walker-led era to a quick conclusion, and leaving his short-lived solo group once again at loose ends.

The aborted Blizzard of Ozz sessions served as a disappointing end to the story of Necromandus’ original lineup. When Ozzy left Sabbath again following the release of 1978’s Never Say Die! LP, he put together a different group for his 1980 solo debut, which he ended up titling Blizzard of Ozz.

Branch, Dunnery, Hall, and McCarten scattered to different projects, probably assuming that their Sabbath association was destined to forever remain a footnote in rock ‘n’ roll history.

In many respects, that assumption proved accurate; aside from Sabbath diehards, few people have heard of Necromandus, let alone sampled their forward-thinking blend of metal and prog.

But for a select group, the band’s work long remained a sort of secret holy grail, a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been if they’d gotten another lucky break or two. Over time, a cult fandom developed around those sessions, which were bootlegged for years before finally seeing official release in 1999 as Orexis of Death; a little over a decade later, Rise Above Records reissued the seven-track LP as an expanded edition that bundled those cuts with eight vintage live performances.

Necromandus, “Nightjar”

That reissue helped spur a very unlikely second act for Necromandus.

Although any hope of the original lineup ever reuniting was wiped out by the deaths of Branch (1995), Dunnery (2008), and McCarten (2010), Hall had long hoped to put a new version of the group together — and in 2016, he did just that, assembling a lineup that includes Branch’s son John on lead vocals.

“It couldn’t be anyone else, really,” Hall told Progressive Music Planet. “I bumped into John in the street one day and asked him straight out – ‘Would you like to be Necromandus’ lead singer?’ He laughed, but when he realized I was being serious, he decided to give it a try. I knew he had sung his father’s Necromandus parts for years and his first moments in the studio sent shivers up our spines.”

Those moments eventually added up to a brand new Necromandus album, a self-titled effort that saw release in 2017. Aside from the sheer satisfaction of getting out and playing to enthusiastic crowds again, Hall admitted that the group’s revival helped soothe some of the long-festering wounds left behind when the original lineup saw their dreams dashed.

“All my life I’m frustrated,” he told the News & Star. “What it could have been. Where it could have gone. Sometimes I feel cheated. I feel robbed. But I always think about them with fond memories. It was a great time. It was like Disneyland every day.”