Yungblud has opened up about working with Ozzy Osbourne on the video for his latest single ‘Funeral’, in which the Black Sabbath star and wife Sharon made a cameo.
The Doncaster rock star was talking to NME for this week’s Big Read cover story, ahead of the release of his self-titled third album, which will be released in September.
In between live clips, the ‘Funeral’ video featured footage of the musician – whose real name is Dominic Harrison – digging his own grave, while Osbourne watches on. During the video shoot, Harrison said he had confided in the legend about some of the hate he had received online, particularly some social media users calling him “disrespectful” for spitting beer in the crowd at his gigs.
“I was speaking to him about what happened on Twitter, and he said, ‘If you want to spit beer on the audience, do it, as long as you do it with love’,” Harrison told NME.
He continued to discuss Osbourne’s current condition and the advice the metal icon had given him. “People think [Ozzy] is kind of… gone, but he’s not,” he said. “He’s so intelligent and so fucking beautiful. People are scared of him until they hear him speak. He said that he saw a lot of himself in me. He said, ‘Never apologise for anything. They will understand you later. Time always tells.’”
Check out the full Big Read cover interview with Yungblud here, where he talks about working with WILLOW, auditioning for Danny Boyle’s Pistol, the misconceptions people have about him, and shares insight into his new album.
Yungblud announced his third record last month (May 17) and explained he had named it after his stage moniker “because nothing in my life has ever made more sense”. “Everything up to this moment has been a complete explosion of uncensored expression, where I just told the truth and sang about what I felt in that exact moment,” he wrote on Instagram.
“The difference here is that I have thought and felt this record so deeply. I went to a part of myself that I didn’t know was there. I studied it, I bathed in the emotion, tried to solve the equation and come up with an answer (at least for now) from love to pain, adoration to abandonment, laughter to betrayal.”
Meanwhile, the artist received praise from another musical icon earlier this year when The Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger credited him and Machine Gun Kelly with bringing “life” to modern rock. “In rock music you need energy and there have not been a lot of new rock singers around. Now there are a few,” Jagger said in a recent interview on Swedish radio.
“You have Yungblud and Machine Gun Kelly. That kind of post-punk vibe makes me think there is still a bit of life in rock and roll.”