In 1980, Ozzy Osbourne recorded his first post-Black Sabbath album, Blizzard of Ozz. The comeback album featured the songs “Crazy Train” and “Goodbye to Romance,” as well as the standout single “Mr. Crowley.”
Written by Osbourne, Randy Rhoads and Bob Daisley, “Mr. Crowley” features a theatrical keyboard intro performed by Don Airey and an iconic guitar solo by Rhoads, as well as a lengthy outro. Osbourne’s vocals highlight the life of English occultist Aleister Crowley.
Daisley, the song’s lyricist, was careful with the dark subject matter.
“Because he was a satanist and into dark stuff and all that, I didn’t want to make a negative song,” he told Rolling Stone in 2021. “I wanted to make it a little bit like talking to Mr. Crowley and going, ‘What the f–k were you thinking? What were you doing? What went on in your head?’ He used to sign his autograph ‘Polemically Aleister Crowley.’ ‘Polemic’ just means ‘controversial.’ That’s why, at the end, I wrote, ‘polemically sent.’”
When “Mr. Crowley” was first released as a single in the early 1980s, it didn’t chart in the U.S., per American Songwriter. It finally began to climb the charts in 2025, reaching No. 22 on Billboard’s Hot Rock & Alternative Songs on August 3, 2025—45 years after its release. The song’s revival came just after the death of Osbourne in July 2026.
Rhoads’ guitar work on “Mr. Crowley” was once ranked among Guitar World’s Top 50 greatest guitar solos of all time.
“I’d have to say that ‘Mr. Crowley’ is my most memorable solo,” Rhoads said shortly before his death in 1982. “I had spent hours trying to figure out a solo for the song but wasn’t getting anywhere. I finally put something down. Then Ozzy came in and said, ‘It’s crap—everything you’re playing is crap.’ He told me to get in there and just play how I felt. He made me really nervous, so I just played anything. When I came back to listen to it, he said it was great, and I had to agree.”
Guitar legend Tom Morello also agreed, once telling the outlet of Rhoads’ “Mr. Crowley” solos, “You could teach those on a college-level musicology course or bang your head [to them] in a heavy metal parking lot.”
Related: 44 Years Ago Today, ’80s Rock Legend Died Tragically at Age 25
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