Former Ozzy Osbourne bassist Phil Soussan discussed leaving Ozzy in a new “The Five Count” radio show interview. Ozzy Osbourne ‘Imitated’ The Beatles On Hit Song.
“Let me clear this up once and for all. There wasn’t that much weirdness that was going on. I think what happened was I was in a position where I was not able to cut the deal that I wanted. I wanted to do certain things; I wanted to cut a certain type of deal. And kudos to Sharon [Ozzy’s wife and manager]. Listen, she basically presented this to us in a very simple way. We were there, and we were being hired to do our best work — the best work that we could possibly do to make Ozzy sound and look as good as he possibly could. And we also knew that if we were not okay with that situation, there’s probably three dozen people waiting in the wings that would gladly come along and do what we were doing.”
“It got to a point where I was being expected to write more songs, and I wanted to kind of boost up my publishing and what have you, and for whatever reason, I was not able to cut a deal that was acceptable with Sharon, and I couldn’t really get the same deal that I wanted. And at the moment, I just said, ‘It’s time for me to move on.’ And it was a difficult decision — you leave the biggest band in the country. But I said, ‘You know what? I’ve done it all once. I did one round, one tour, one this, one that, and let me move on and see what happens.’ And I left. And I think she might have been a little upset about that, about the fact that I left. But for whatever reason, we had some accounting issues.
So all of a sudden, I was having a hard time getting paid, and my accountants went back and forth a few times. And all of this got resolved eventually. It was just a payment thing — it was, like, late payments and stuff. And I don’t know what the motivation was, or whatever it was, or if there was even a motivation — maybe it was just ‘out of sight, out of mind’ — but once I wasn’t in the band, people weren’t jumping to take my call about things like that. So it got resolved, and it got resolved in probably 1992 or 1993. And ever since then, everything’s just been fine.”
Soussan said he didn’t leave over unpaid royalties, “I was asked to join a lawsuit that [former Ozzy bassist] Bob Daisley had, but I never joined that lawsuit; I didn’t have anything to sue anybody about. I think Bob and Lee [Kerslake, former Ozzy drummer] had some issues that were going on, but when they called me, I just said the same thing I just said to you. I said, ‘Why would I wanna do this?’ So that was it. But all of a sudden, you hear these stories that we were in court. We never went to court. I never sued anybody.”
