Corey Taylor has recalled the moment he first met Ozzy Osbourne, when the Black Sabbath frontman asked if he could be the tenth member in Slipknot.
The Slipknot and Stone Sour frontman, who recently released his second solo album ‘CMF2‘, was reflecting on how his band got on the line-up at Ozzfest in 1999.
“The reason Slipknot got onto Ozzfest [in 1999] is because we were [Ozzy’s son] Jack’s favourite band,” Taylor shared in a new interview with Classic Rock magazine (via Louder Sound). “Sharon gave us a little more leeway because of that. We did some crazy shit, but she’d be, ‘It’s fine, it’s Slipknot’”.
He went on to recall his first meeting with The Prince Of Darkness. “I was sitting at a table with Jack and Kelly and Sharon,” he said. “All of sudden, Ozzy comes bounding up: ‘Sharon, can you help me with my earrings?’ And Sharon goes, ‘Ozzy, this is one of the members of Slipknot, it’s Corey, he’s the singer.’
“He looks at me and goes, “You’re the guys with nine members? I wanna be number ten!” I was like, ‘Dude, you’re Ozzy, anything you want!’ It was like meeting Superman.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Taylor reflected on meeting his various musical heroes, including Metallica.
“I’ve met them in so many phases of their career,” he said “The first time was when they headlined over Slipknot at a show in the early 2000s. James [Hetfield] and Jason [Newsted] invited us into their dressing room to hang out, and we were in such awe of them that the only thing we could do was raid their food and drink.
“We were like these Dickensian street rats, drinking all their beer and stuffing our pockets. Those guys were watching us, rolling their eyes and laughing.
“When we hung out with the next time, James was sober. I had gotten sober myself, and he said: ‘If you ever need a talk, if you ever need anything, just call me.’ He’s a gracious dude.”
In a recent interview with NME, Taylor also made the revelation that he’s a hardcore Kaiser Chiefs fan.
“Especially that first album, man,” Taylor said of 2005’s ‘Employment’. “It’s really rad and super legit. The more I got into that album, the more it inspired me to write. To this day, I listen to it and really get down with it. I’ve been threatening to do a cover of ‘Modern Way’ for a long time. I’d do a really cool acoustic version of it, which would be really rad.”
In other news, Taylor recently revealed that he began releasing solo music as he felt he wasn’t getting the credit he deserved for writing with his two bands.
In a three-star review of ‘CMF2’, NME said the record was a “fascinating insight into the dichotomy that drives one of the greatest bands of the 21st Century”.
Osbourne, meanwhile, has undergone what he says will be his “final” neck surgery.